We live at a time when the world as we know it is changing very fast. So fast that even what happened 50 years ago can seem ancient history, and certainly what happened 100 years ago is on the other side of the horizon for most of our thoughts.
Prior to the 1960’s few thought about child abuse, let alone about child abuse prevention. Now we have resources at our finger tips to help us, like the following as it describes the efforts of Child Abuse Prevention America:
http://www.preventchildabuse.org/help/reach_out.shtml
The first federal legislation designed to address the problems of child abuse and prevention wasn’t enacted until 1974:
The following site describes the history of child abuse prevention in our country:
http://parenthood.library.wisc.edu/Melli/Melli.html
We can go back to the history of the case of the young girl, Mary Ellen Wilson, as her abuser was tried and sentenced in 1874 for an early example of the struggle by the public to protect maltreated children:
http://www.americanhumane.org/about-us/who-we-are/history/mary-ellen.html
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There remains a ripple effect in our country from child abuse that has traveled down the generations and can be traced among people who are alive today. In our efforts to come to terms with severe abuse that was done to us individually we need to try to understand the history of ‘our people’.
Often time stories remain in families that we have taken for granted. We need to listen to them in new and different ways. Even if the people who told us these stories are dead, we can remember what they told us, and then try to add this information to form the context that surrounded our own experiences of child abuse.
I believe that what we will find is that our families’ past histories of abuse contain information about how we are transforming as a society. Looking backwards prior to the 1960s was a time when the overriding social mind was that children were still seen as having no rights. These beliefs came from a long human history that believed both women and children were simply objects that could be possessed.
We believed socially that what went on in an individual family’s life was nobody’s business but their own. Today we still experience those same struggles as we attempt to protect women and children from abuse. Where do we draw the line between public and private? More importantly, how do we both define and identify child abuse?
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Any of us who were of the generations that reached adulthood prior to the 1970s are left trying to answer these questions by ourselves. We are like children of the ‘half light’, raised during a time when society around us was launching their new, enlightened approach to child rearing though it was too soon for these efforts to help us. We try to take the available new information and attitudes and apply it to our own experiences of severe child abuse.
Meanwhile, because we did survive into our adulthood and are obviously not still children currently experiencing abuse, we find little support for our inner reality of what truly happened to us and how the remaining effects of that severe abuse means that even our brains and our bodies were changed as a consequence — and therefore the quality of our lives — for the rest of our lifespan.
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I want to give you an example from a conversation I had recently with a woman who used to be my work supervisor. I will call her Joyce, and she is 68 years old.
Joyce’s mother recently died at age 93 after suffering nearly ten years of serious dementia that had been caused by the heavy sedation that was necessary for the major heart surgery she had been given at 83. The family was never told at the time that the level of anesthesia required for this extensive surgery might mean permanent damage to her brain.
As Joyce’s mother’s mental functioning deteriorated she slipped further and further back into her past until at the end she remained in her childhood, in a continual state of anxiety and concern as she asked over and over again, “Where are the boys? Where are my brothers? They need to come right away and get the mules out of the cornfield! They are ruining the corn!”
Joyce told me what she knows of her mother’s experience growing up with Joyce’s grandmother, Sarah. Sarah was Cherokee, born in 1867. She married a German man who owned a small piece of land in Oklahoma and made his living as a blacksmith. The family raised all their own food. When her husband died of the flu in 1919 Sarah was pregnant with her twelfth child and left without an income. She began to farm the land with the team of mules alone, selling produce and eggs to the townspeople for what money the family needed. All of the children grew up working very hard from the earliest possible age they could do so.
She was also a midwife and delivered hundreds of babies during her lifetime, including twins and even triplets, and never lost an infant or a mother. She not only bore these twelve children, but she kept them healthy and alive. One time her youngest, a son, suffered a mangled arm in a farm equipment accident. Sarah successfully amputated her son’s arm. She used many plants and herbs for remedies, though none of her knowledge of healing was passed down to any of her twelve children.
There were no modern conveniences available to this family. Sarah and her older children made all of the family’s clothing from flour sacks. The comforters and mattresses were also made from flour sack remains when the clothing wore out, and were stuffed with goose down from the geese that they raised. The entire family loaded onto the wagon and went into town for Sunday church and never missed a sermon.
The main thing Joyce remembers about what her mother, her aunts and uncles ever said about their mother other than that she bore and raised them by working extremely hard, was that she was mean, mean, mean, mean. She yelled at them, she hit them, and she showed them no outward affection. She did not single out any one of the children for her distemper. She treated them all the same, and this treatment was mean.
Of the twelve children, six grew up to beat their own children and six did not. Joyce’s mother showed adequate affection to Joyce and her siblings, though she did force them outside to cut off a thick stick to be switched with on the occasions that they had done something wrong. Joyce does not, however, feel her mother abused her children.
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In order to understand where child abuse might have occurred as we look backward at our families’ histories we need to consider the very harsh realities of the contexts those people often lived in. Where were the luxuries, and what could they have been? Was having an ‘easy’ life and a relaxed caring mother an exception rather than the rule? What about how the men treated the mothers? What can we or do we know about the conditions of their lives?
I believe there is a telling factor that enables those of us today, who are trying to understand the severe abuse of our own childhoods, to know if there was child abuse in our family’s history or not. The simple fact that we were severely abused by our own parents lets us know that history of abuse is there. Yet hitting and beating children, even severely, was an acceptable child rearing practice in the past. It is only because we are trying to change these patterns today that these practices concern us.
This means to me that the most important question we can ask in looking back at our own severe childhood abuse histories, and looking back into the past knowing that the abuse flowed forward to us from our ancestors who were also abused, is this: How receptive would our own parents have been to outside intervention. if it had occurred, that meant to stop the abuse and to teach our parents new and different parenting skills? If we ask ourselves this question and answer honestly, we will know whether or not we suffered from intentional abuse or more from old style parenting practices as they operated in our own childhoods.
I believe it is important for us to distinguish this difference because it gives us crucial information about the context of our childhood suffering. I know from my own experience there would have been absolutely nothing anybody could have done to improve my mother’s parenting skills. She lived in an altered reality that meant in order for her children, especially me, to have been protected from my mother somebody would have needed to remove us from her care.
True, some of the punishments my mother engaged in toward me had direct ties to the punishments used against her when she was young, particularly the use of isolation, of feeding me soggy crackers in milk for meals when she was enraged, and a tie to her having been held down by her older brother while her mother beat her harshly with a leather razor strap. But beyond the literal translation of some of her techniques of abuse, her mind was gone. She was seriously mentally ill.
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This brings me back to a major point of my blog: Any parent who continues to abuse a child in today’s ‘enlightened’ culture is usually mentally ill. I understand there is a difference and I distinguish between those parents who lack adequate parenting skills to deal effectively and alternatively with the stresses of raising children who can be identified and taught a better way to parent and those parents whose realities do not include this option. I automatically include any adult who sexually molests a child in any way under this second category. I do believe that there are parents who are like zebras and cannot change their stripes.
Knowing which group our own parents fit into allows those of us who experienced severe abuse as children to finally have a rock solid foundation to stand upon as we attempt to define for ourselves exactly what happened to us. If I came from a family with parents who appeared to be ‘just’ acting out old style parenting patterns that they would have been willing and able to have changed if intervention had occurred, I would not have the additional complication of trying to understand rationally and logically what happened to me.
Because my abuse occurred rather in the context of severe mental illness, and because I now know the difference clearly, I understand how much more difficult it is for me to untangle my own abuse history in any logical or rational way. There WAS no logic, no reason, no rationality to anything my mother ever did to me. And because of this fact I lived with chronic anxiety in a constant state of terror where dissociation was my only reprieve.
That fact alone is a huge piece of the puzzle of my childhood, and a critically important one for me to have. I cannot today go back and try to understand what happened by using any of the ‘known’ information I might have today about how a bad parent could have been a better one. No kind of intervention could have changed my mother’s psychosis that had ‘destroying the evil that was me’ at its center. I now also know that there was nothing I could have done as a child to change it either.
My point? There are parent-child situations without hope of improvement and there are those with hope. We have to distinguish between them. While this may not be a distinction that can be easily made, I believe it is critical to a child’s well-being, and is one that becomes of vital importance if we ever hope to effectively prevent abuse to children under the age of two. It is during these critical brain growth windows of development that severe abuse causes the worst long term damage.
It is during this stage of youngest development that we are going to have the hardest time identifying at risk mothers and infants. We have to use a laser-like focus of attention to both identify and intervene on behalf of the very young. That this abuse is most likely to occur behind the ‘sacred closed doors’ behind the walls a family has to keep the public world out that makes our job extremely difficult.
We have to know what we are looking for and looking at. Who knows this world better than anyone else? Those of us who have survived severe early abuse and are alive to tell about it. We need to speak and someone needs to listen to us. Our adult stories are the voice of the very young severely abused who do not even have the words to speak their stories.
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(Something about writing this post today put me in an heightened anxiety state, perhaps because somehow something was triggered and now I feel like I’m waiting for a bomb to fall out of the sky on my head, destroying me. What a familiar feeling from my childhood, only the bomb was real, and it was my mother.)
Stop the Storm 