I received one message I wont publish because it wasn’t politely written, but the gist of it is that this person doesn’t understand how all these people can’t recognize they’re being abused, and I can offer some insight to that.
When you’re born into an abusive family, you don’t get an idea of what life is like outside that family. It’s the family that tells you who you are, what is normal, what you deserve, your interactions with your family and relatives are all you have to go on, and what makes your normal.
In abusive families, grooming to accept abuse starts pretty early – they will touch you against your consent and argue you down that it’s normal, they’ll tell you that you’re supposed to take beatings because you deserve them, and it will make you stronger, also everyone else actually has it worse and you’re lucky to have such good family.
So what are you going to do? Ask around? Your parents already have you instructed ‘not to talk about things that go on in the family to not embarrass yourself’ and a lot of traumatic things that happened to you are too painful to talk about, or you’ve completely erased them from your memory because they were too much to process. They tell you that all ‘overly cruel’ things are only happening because you caused them, you wanted it, and the parents are victims who just had to do it. Or, your parents are misunderstood and trying their best and you are the evil unconsiderate child who refuses to understand.
Some of the things you can’t tell they’re not normal, like parentification, it feels like being useful and recognized as an adult and giving emotional support to your family members, you feel needed. If your parent is telling you it’s normal to be in your bathroom while you’re naked or sleep in the same bed with you, how are you going to know it’s not? Even sexual abuse can just feel like warm physical contact that doesn’t hurt at the time, you can’t tell how bad you’re being violated, you don’t know the consequences. Nobody tells you it’s not normal.
These people decide what your life is like, they decide what the normal is. And they’re the most important people in your life, you’re bonded to them, you want to make them happy, you want them to appreciate you, you go along with whatever they want, you’re a child and you want to believe they only want the best for you and they’d never harm you for no reason.
And society backs this up, regardless of how badly you’re hurt by your parents, go tell someone you’re mad at them, you’ll hear 'oh, they didn’t mean it, they only want the best for you, don’t act like a child.’
For some of us, we’ve been told from very early on that we’re worthless, that we don’t matter, so by addition, anything done to us can’t be abuse because we don’t matter enough to be abused. We feel like we’re stupid to even consider we might be abused, because that signifies relevance that we don’t have. Some of us are told it’s only the matter of us being weak, because everyone else is treated all the same and only we are complaining and being sensitive about it. That’s the context of where the abuse happens, in our inexperienced childhood life where everything that happens is what defines the normal, you could be living in complete hell and believe 'oh thats just a normal life’.
For me personally, it was incredibly hard to recognize that everyone else wasn’t tortured like I was, wasn’t facing the same terror or judgment or pressure, I couldn’t see children being loved or safe, and I was conditioned to believe that anything more loving than what I had was 'spoiling’ and 'making them weak.’ It was a very painful hit for me to acknowledge I had led a very different life than everyone around me. Most people resist realizations that are this painful.
You also have to consider, in our minds, a lot of the more serious traumas feel far apart from each other, separated by periods of 'what we think is normal and okay’, and we try to forget the trauma, to shut it out, to believe it wasn’t real or wasn’t meant to destroy us. When a person comes to list out their most serious traumatic events to ask if it’s abuse, we’re suddenly getting a picture of the worst moments of their life, everything they’ve tried to repress for so long. It takes courage to write this out; you start sweating, your hands get shaky, you feel like you’re doing something forbidden, you’re trusting someone to help you put in context the worst experiences of your life.
Another person reading it without context can easily tell it’s abuse. But the person with the context sees a different picture, and there’s a strong bond with the abuser, grooming, pain of realization, pain of remembering, guilt for thinking it’s abuse, fear they’re over exaggerating it, fear they’ve just betrayed their loved one’s worst moments, fear of how they will look at the end of it, fear they’ll be turned away when they bravely asked for their worst experiences to be seen.
It’s really hard to tell when you’re being abused when you’re the one it’s happening to. It takes finding a place where your feelings about it might be allowed, and where you feel safe talking about it. I admire the courage of everyone who shared theirs with me, and I understand why you couldn’t see it or didn’t know it was abuse. Neither could I.
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