Living With The Effects Of An Abusive Family
Part 1
I was raised in a home where there was abuse on many different levels. There were different dynamics among both my parents and both played different roles in the abuse.
I grew up in a small town under 500 people. We lived in a hardworking, farming community tucked away on my grandparents farm. Both sides of my grandparents lived less than a few miles from each other and everybody knew everybody. I had a great grandfather that lived less than a mile down the road from one set of grandparents and 1 great-grandmother that lived with my other set of grandparents. We had a close-knit association of people that shared the same values. If you asked them, most would say the simple ways of life were the preferred way to live… and I agreed.
I loved the rolling hills filled with cattle, the crop land full of growth, the shelter of the trees being lush and green, the creeks running through the bottoms, and the simplicity of all that those things meant to me. In everything that I loved about the countryside, there lurked very dark and sinister secrets. Not only was it a hostile time in my life, but vulgar, calculated, and oppressive. Those secrets would change the way I would approach relationships forever.
Those secrets caused me to build walls. It was hard to trust what I didn’t understand. I learned survival skills to things no child should ever be faced with. I feared things I should have never been exposed to. I had food insecurities, housing insecurities, and the basics of needs went unnoticed. I was faced with triggers in my adult years that hindered healthy emotional growth. I had to deal with fears of the unknown and became defensive because of my need to survive trauma. I experienced great anxiety in relationships outside my family because I worried they would hurt me too. I could smell things that were familiar to my childhood and weep. I experienced sounds familiar to my childhood and I would leave the room. Sensing any volatile anger from another person caused a lot of grief in my spirit, and I quickly became fearful of all adults. Still to this day when my husband takes his belt off before he showers at night, I leave the room so not to experience flooding thoughts of when I watched my brothers get brutally whipped from my dad, or him coming at me with his fist. The sound of ice jiggling in a cup reminds me too much of my dad. My thoughts can overwhelm me of being a little girl again… and that little girl just wanted her dad to be happy. Abuse affects all 5 senses to the point that if I am not aware of capturing my thought-life, I can lose the battle of the mind pretty quickly.
My responses of fight, flight, or freeze affected my verbal communication that was delayed well into adulthood. Any child that goes through trauma or abusive relationships, it changes their brain chemistry and delays brain development. It delays how they show affection to others. It affects their compassion for humanity and can potentially affect their nurturing skills when they become a parent themselves. I was not aware of how affected I had become from the choices my parents made and the devastating consequences that followed. No child should ever have to endure such things, but they do and it goes unnoticed much too often.
I am a survivor of physical, psychological, and emotional abuse from the two people that were supposed to rear, care for, and unconditionally love me. I write this with a heaviness to become free of what I have had to overcome with God’s grace, love, and mercy in my life. Anyone who has gone through a great deal of pain or wounds from a broken spirit knows how heavy the burden is to carry when someone knowingly hands you their immoral acts and forces you to swallow them whole.
I am also writing this from a delivered heart. God has provided a way of escape for me. He has taken my brokenness and has been able to use my story to help others. I continue to be open and as transparent as possible, when appropriate. It has been a slow process as psychological wounds can be very crippling. I have lived through much abuse from the physical aspect of things, but the emotional brainwashing has been a lot more difficult and has taken a great deal of time to heal from.
The psychological manipulation that continues to be played on me and my family, the attack on my character, that others believe an inaccurate view of me based on lies and embellishments, and the slander that continues to happen is just a small portion of why I sought out Truth and healing. These lies and accusations have greatly affected my relationships, all of which forced my hand into silence. The dearest people to me were family members, and those are the ones whom have been heavily manipulated and lied to, and ultimately caved into the pressure of believing what they heard one sided. Until today, I have never come forth publicly and stated the Truth or defended myself toward any lie spoken about me or curse spoken over me.
The sickness that came with my mother’s psychological abuse was horrendous and despicable. When I was in junior high, she started working for a small mental health facility. The facility provided counseling for clients who had either alcohol abuse or a mental diagnosis. In her first year of working there, she attended a training on the roles of children in an abusive family. My mother has always been one to educate herself and has read more self-help books than you could shake a stick at, so this training was no surprise to her. I note this in particular because it was alarming when I realized her lack of empathy toward our family’s on-going abuse as she sat describing this in detail to us. She was knowingly allowing these things to happen on a daily basis and she used the technique “gaslighting” to cover it up. She labeled herself as the enabler, me as the hero (or sometimes known as the golden child) and my two younger brothers as the scapegoat and lost child. I will never forget that conversation as long as I live.
I was a very quiet child and did not talk much about my feelings. There wasn’t safety in any conversion with either parent. I mostly listened, deposited a whole lot of information, and absorbed what was going on around me. My mother went on to explain what each role meant and justified the roles she labeled us with. As most dysfunctional families do, we filled them differently the older we became. About 11 or 12 years of age, I became the scapegoat in our family and my middle brother became the hero. My youngest brother, in my opinion, has always filled the role of the lost child, and at times, was the mascot. He literally was overlooked, undervalued by my parents, and called names like, “You’re a zero and won’t amount to much of anything.” He later on began to be the class clown, and typically this was his way to distract himself of what was happening to our family.
To stay on topic, this conversation my mother was having with us opened my eyes to grasp why she was so emotionally removed from us. I didn’t know how to formulate these words at the time, nor did I have the capacity or verbal skills to understand the dynamics happening around me. None the less, what I did take note of in that conversation was she had a matter-of-fact smirk on her face the entire time she was laying out this idea of how we all fit perfectly into these roles, how she needed us to understand “this” is our lives, and to accept it. So we did. I was a people-pleaser, especially to my parents, and I wanted to make them happy. That age was significant to me because my role as the hero was quickly changing.
Although I was drowning in school, I was flourishing in sports. One sport carried over into the next and my dad’s love for it drove me to please him even more in that area. The more I flourished in sports, the more push I got to be even better than the day before. The physical abuse with my dad started happening around that time, and I started to withdraw even more. Not only had I had years of the physiological shaping and emotional neglect from my mother, I now was becoming the brunt of my father’s wrath. Not one time did my mother ever step in, tell me he was in the wrong, or tell us it was not our fault; she did the very opposite. When we were young, she would make excuses about his drinking and anger to justify what he was doing to us. She would manipulate him by filing for divorce multiple times throughout their marriage and he would conform for a little while.
As I approached high school, I got brave enough to ask her why she never followed through with any of her divorce proceedings. Her excuses started to shift blame stating I was causing fights between her and my dad. She later admitted to me that she needed my dad’s money to pay half of the bills. I knew the fault did not lie with me, but at the time, I felt the weight that I should bear the burden of parental responsibilities. From then on, whenever my dad assaulted me, she would express the reason for wanting me to “be gone” was because my dad and I were “fighting” and she couldn’t have me living there. Her reasons for my brothers to leave were the same, but she threatened a boys home and the military for them… essentially making us believe all of the abuse that occurred was somehow our doing. She would tell me these things at a young enough age that I was not legally old enough to have a job of my own or able to pay bills myself… and she knew that.
She also created instability by having us move into different houses over 18 times between the ages of 12 to 19! Among all of those rentals, my dad rarely lived with us consistently. Breeding fear in me was the tactic to get me to conform to the demands she barked, and the relationship she had created between us became push-pull and passive-aggressive. It was very confusing living like that. She had blamed and shamed me, using slander, and lying so that all the abuse in the home was scapegoated onto me or my middle brother. Mothers that create narratives like that are manipulative, dark, and narcissistic and can only think about how to manage the impressions they give others about what happens within the family. The oppression and control that my mother needed was too much and it felt like a weight that I couldn’t hold for much longer. This had a snowball effect and set me on a course for failure in future relationships.
The last time my dad physically assaulted me, he broke my face. My cheek bones were bruised, my nose was broken, and my eyes were swollen and black and blue. I finally had to face the fact that things were never going to change in my family. I remember it like it was yesterday.
He came in late that night, and we all assumed he had been drinking heavily. He said something in a low, intimidating tone, and I said, “We are watching the news.” At that moment, my 9 month old baby had fallen and she whimpered a bit. (My dad becomes easily irritated with any whining or crying.) As I went to pick her up, he snatched her from me. I asked to hold her and immediately I was knocked to the floor. I knew all too well what was ultimately going to happen and in not knowing what to do, I quickly stood up. I was convinced he had been drinking so I carefully took my words and my demeanor into consideration as not to upset him. He was still holding my child! I said, “Dad, please give me my baby.” Without a word, he took his fist and hit me straight in my nose, and I was knocked to the floor again.
I remember seeing the lights above me in the kitchen flash (probably my eyes focusing) and the back of my head was throbbing because I had hit the tile. No sooner did I stand up, I was hit again in the face.
Again, all I felt was a lot of pain, my head started to pound, and I saw blood all over the kitchen floor. I rolled over to get out of the way, and before I stood on both feet, I was punched again straight into my face. I laid there for just a second before I realized there was blood all over my face and shirt. I scooted away from him, he picked me up, and threw me. Already down, I thought if I take my time to get up, maybe he will go away, but he didn’t. This went on for another round of beatings to my face until I couldn’t move and just laid there cringing. Of course my mother is standing there the entire time watching this unfold. As I laid there, all I could see was the amount of blood splattered all over the kitchen floor and all over my arms and shirt. I could feel my face soaked in blood. I felt like dying. I felt like running, but I knew he would catch me if I did. It looked like the scene of a crime.
Click the link here to continue to Part 2- Living With The Effects Of An Abusive Family
Natalie