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Differences between Child Abuse and Neglect

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I am going to pretend this morning that I am critiquing a book.  “All things are possible under the sun,” and like performing surgery on an invisible patient I am going to express my thoughts about a book I have never read.

My sister told me about this book last night in our telephone conversation.  She first heard about it while operating her used book store in Ballard (Seattle).  Customers coming up to her seeking information asked over and over again, “Where can I find the book written by that woman who was abused when she was a girl?”

“What book is that?” my sister wondered.  So she found herself a copy and eventually read it.  Perhaps you have read it, too.

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The Glass Castle: A Memoir by Jeannette Walls

(1,311 customer reviews)

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So am I writing today about the book and its story, or am I just writing about what my sister told me about the book from her ‘take’ of it?  Well, a little of both, I guess.  Will I ever read the book?  I’m truthfully not at all sure.   I make it a polished habit not to read anything while I am engrossed in my own story hunting and writing because I do not wish to contaminate my thinking.

Perhaps I have a strange attitude, but it is born from knowing some important information about myself and about how “I” and my brain-mind operate.  Because I have suffered from dissociation ever since I was a very tiny child, and because I now know this, I understand that my brain-mind can put whole batches of information places I do not know about – most, if not all of the time.

I do not want to be writing away while I am in one dissociated state or another and have whole conglomerations of thoughts pop into my sphere of consciousness when I am not aware it is happening, or aware of where the information is coming from.

My sister assures me that because my-our story is so different from Walls’, and because my writing style is so different from hers, this should never be a problem for me even if I DO read her book.  But I lack my sister’s confidence.

So I am left today with thoughts bubbling around beneath the surface of my thoughts today coming from my sister’s description of the story printed on this book’s pages.

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I know neither me nor my siblings have anything like a corner on the market about what it is like to grow up with a crazy parent.  Walls evidently has us beat.  She grew up with two of them.  But my siblings and I can be assured that we are also closer to belonging to the eclectic group of nutty parent survivorship than we are to being a part of the ‘close to ordinary’ or ‘ordinary’ childhood survivor group even though our story, and particularly my story, is about severe child abuse rather than mostly about the kind of child neglect Walls describes.

Yet what my sister reiterated several times last night in her conversation with me about this book is that the public does not seem to understand that there is a fundamental difference between being neglected as a child growing up and being abused.  Walls’ did not seem to suffer from abuse, no matter how neglectful and nutty her parents were.  She and her siblings were obviously seriously deprived of an ‘ordinary’ childhood experience, and suffered from severe deprivation due to neglect, but these children-people were evidently not abused as children the way my sister and I understand child abuse.  Not even close.

From my sister’s description of this book, it sounds as though at one point or another one or the other of Walls’ parents were lucid.  It also sounds like Walls’ parents were able to (1) love them and (2) not commit ‘soul murder’ on them.  Because it is the very early infant and very young childhood growth windows concerned with loving secure attachment that build the foundation of the developing brain, ANYONE who has any kind of safe and secure attachment to loving early caregivers is off to a running start from the beginning of their lives.

This running start allows fundamental brain structures, patterns, and brain circuits to form themselves in an adequate way so that they will continue to operate during all the ensuing time that little person experiences the events of their ongoing childhood.  Without these relatively dependable positive early caregiver interactions the infant-child’s brain will not be based on ‘ordinary’ benevolent world information.  This fact creates a situation where the growing child is left to play an entirely different ball game, with entirely different rules, on an entirely different playing field than any relatively safe and securely attached brain-mind child will ever know.

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The quality of these very early attachments determines how a young child can bond and attach to siblings as well as to parents.  Walls and her siblings were evidently attached to one another.  It sounds as though the very youngest child was left bereft of the sustenance of the attachment to her siblings, and was also left under the care of parents whose mental illnesses caused further and further deterioration of their brain-minds.  She did not turn out so well.

Walls’ story sounds entertaining, mesmerizing, fascinating, titillating, if not entrancing.  Yet while it sounds like a story of terrible neglect and madness, of starvation and deprivation, it is not the story of terrorism that my and my siblings’ story is.  I don’t think the Walls children were raised in hostile enemy territory or brutalized by acts of parental terrorism.

I believe that because the root of my mother’s mental illness was established in a childhood dissociative disorder, and because her mental illness originated in disoriented and disorganized insecure attachment conditions, and because what grew into her brain-mind and out into the way she lived her life caused her children to be projections of my mother’s fragile imaginary friendship – and in my case her imaginary enemy – needs, none of us stood any chance of developing our self as we “grew down into the world” in any ordinary fashion.  This is created for the Lloyd children a very different reality than the one the Walls children evidently grew up in.

Walls’ story sounds like it expresses living madness, but it  does not sound like her parents were terrorists.  We as a nation now clearly know what terrorist actions are like from the experience of the events from the September 11, 2001 attack on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon.  Those acts of terrorism were different than any that might be taken in a military combat situation against trained troops sent directly into a war zone.  9/11 devastated innocent civilians.

Terrorism penetrated the boundaries of our nation and overtook the boundaries of everyone who was attacked and left dead or devastated – on every level.  This attack changed us as a nation.  How much more so does terrorism change the development of infant-children?  The experience of 9/11 was a very different one than allowing our homeless to starve to death on our nation’s streets.

My sister told me that one commentator of Walls’ book portrayed her story as being told “without self pity.”  While the ongoing endurance and positive life outcome for Walls and her older siblings sounds if not heroic, at least miraculous and amazing, let us not lose sight of the differences between stories told by people who were directly abused through acts of brutality and terrorism from very early in their life from those stories told by people who did NOT suffer from soul murder, boundary violations by their caregivers, acts of violence and torture, and deprivation of vitally required early caregiver love and attachment.

It is critical that we know the difference between child neglect and abuse.  It is not helpful for the purposes of understanding, intervening, preventing, protection of children or healing the effects of severe child abuse and/or neglect to be comparing peanut butter with a light socket.  It is important that we be able to accept the ‘pain-full’ reality that belongs to the stories severe child abuse survivors tell, and know the difference between this level of overwhelming pain and so-called ‘self pity’.

In any case, we are left needing to examine the resiliency factors that allows victims of both severe childhood neglect and abuse to endure and sometimes to thrive.  Those resiliency factors are ALWAYS there if we look, and know what we are looking for (and at).  Some might call these “the wild cards.”  I do not.  I believe there is nothing imaginary or ‘wild’ about them.  They are very real factors that exist in a child’s life that allow them to “go on being” under extremely malevolent early developmental conditions.  If and when I ever choose to read Walls’ book, these resiliency factors are what I would be looking for in the story that she tells.

To not recognize and accept that powerful resiliency factors DID exist for Walls’ and her siblings, just as they existed for myself and my siblings, is to deny the fundamental construction of our human species.  Just as identifiable and definable circumstances create miserable childhoods, so also do identifiable and definable resiliency factors allow children to survive them, and sometimes to thrive in spite of them.

Reality, folks.  Do not forget reality.  None of us are super human.  Not me, not my siblings, not Walls, not her siblings.  Turning any kind of childhood tragedy into any kind of ongoing adult triumph means that we had powerful gifts provided to us in the midst of childhood traumas of any kind – or we would not be here to tell our stories.  Pretending otherwise is just that – imagining a world where reality’s rules do not apply.

We have a word for pure imagination:  Fantasy.  It is only in the world of fantasy that we can imagine that severe child abuse is the same thing as severe deprivation through neglect — and creates the same consequences.  Reality dictates otherwise.

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In my case, my mother malevolently and maliciously controlled every aspect of my growing and developing self for 18 years so far as was possible for her to do.  She accomplished this through physical, emotional, verbal, psychological, mental and spiritual abuse.  I do not make this statement with ‘self pity’.  I make it in recognition of fact.  She did everything she could imagine to make me miserable.  That she succeeded should be no surprise to anyone, not even to me.

In the Walls’ case, those children each had a self TO rescue, and a self with which to help rescue one another.  My mother’s violating abusive intentions were always intended to destroy her enemy she thought was me.  That I came out of my childhood with any semblance of a self at all is a miracle.  As a result of extreme child abuse, everything I ever do is about trying to find and rescue my damaged self.  I do not believe this would be the case if my childhood history had been of neglect instead of abuse.

That, dear readers, amounts to a waste of what should have been a perfectly good life time.

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