literally everything in Adam’s pov makes my heart ache all the time but something that really struck me as the most Relatable Abuse Survivor Feeling were these passages, the first one being right after Adam pressed charges against his father and left the trailer at the end of TRB:
Logically, Adam knew that he had nothing to miss, that he effectively had Stockholm syndrome, identifying with his captors, considering it a kindness when his father didn’t hit him. Objectively, he knew that he was abused. He knew the damage went deeper than any bruise he’d ever worn to school. He could endlessly dissect his reactions, doubt his emotions, wonder if he, too, would grow up to hit his own kid.
But lying in the black of the night, all he could think was, My mother will never speak to me again. I’m homeless.
And then you have this in TRK when Adam accidentally ends up back at the trailer and reflects on the trial results:
What Ronan didn’t realize was that the victory hadn’t been in the punishment. Adam didn’t need his father to go to jail. He had merely needed someone outside the situation to look at it and confirm that yes, a crime had been committed. Adam had not invented it, spurred it, deserved it. It said so on the court paperwork. Robert Parrish, guilty. Adam Parrish, free.
It was perplexing to Adam how he had regarded this as normal for so long. He remembered how the neighbors used to turn away from his bruised face; he used to think, stupidly, that they said nothing because they thought he had somehow deserved it.
Because it doesn’t matter what Adam knows objectively about his abuse, it doesn’t matter what logic and rational thinking are telling him. He knew all the way back in TRB that he was abused and what the effects of that would be, but even in TRK, when he has developed and healed so much and come so far compared to where he was in TRB and TDT, he needed that outside validation. Because abuse survivors are constantly doubting those seemingly objective facts, constantly believing that they’re making it all up in their head and that it’s ridiculous to call it abuse because really, it’s not that bad, and they probably deserved it anyways (in fact that’s something that Robert Parrish uses against Adam in BLLB and probably many times before that - “You think they’re really gonna look at you and see an abused kid? Do you even know what abuse is? That judge will’ve heard enough stories to know a whopper. He’s not gonna blink an eye.”), and that’s why other people’s opinions matter.
They matter to the point that Adam literally did not care whether or not his father went to jail, he only needed some sort of acknowledgement that what he went through was real, that he hadn’t invented it or deserved it. And that part of the reason Adam regarded abuse as something normal for so long and that contributed to him blaming himself for it, was the silence and the inaction and the victim blaming from the people around him who clearly saw that he was being abused. And from the results of the court case he receives the acknowledgement he needed so badly, and in the epilogue, a whole year after he moved out of his abusive household, he’s finally able to fully realize that it was all his father’s fault, that he wasn’t the one who “made it ugly,” he’s able to forgive his past self for being afraid and recognize that he saved himself.
Also tbh he relates very heavily to this text post which like, same.
tangentwithtanner
kianamaiart
origamiaround
snowghoul
