October is Domestic Violence Awareness Month. For many, you may initially think of the partners who endured & survived or lost their lives to domestic violence. But we also need to remember that children are unseen victims here, too. And many of us are now grown.
If you grew up as a child in a household of domestic violence, you probably developed a lot of superpowers. Maybe it was being able to hear footsteps while others couldn't sense anything. Maybe you could hear the truck driving two streets away before it even arrived in your driveway. Maybe you could feel violence impending in the air long before anyone moved or spoke a word. Maybe you mastered being a people pleaser who excelled in all areas academically while feeling painfully lonely in your own home.
Maybe you mastered being invisible.
There is no magic behind a child being able to be so incredibly in tune to hearing a slight change in voice or in your parent's face that you brace yourself for weeks of chaos. Slamming doors. Sleeping by the door to make sure your parent wasn't murdered in the night. Not sleeping at all. Nightmares. Screaming. Threats.
And no where to go.
No one to tell.
No one to protect you.
For some of us, understanding that home is synonymous with a "safe place" is a very foreign concept. You grow up knowing that home isn't safe.
And you were forced to grow up long before you were ready.
Your brain understands this as your normal.
When you grow up and enter your own relationships, your brain has minimal ability to understand what love looks like. When does your partner raising their voice indicate they are going to hurt you, and when does it not? Shouldn't we all just be avoiding confrontation? What about constantly apologizing? Fear of making mistakes? Or the notorious "are you mad at me?" when your partner is just quietly washing dishes.
Something about your partner quietly washing the dishes must mean you did something terribly wrong and they are going to punish you. That maybe they stopped loving you. Even them sitting on the couch reading or watching TV quietly. You question yourself. What did you do wrong?
Sometimes even if our partner expresses being upset at us, this bursts into "fight or flight" and we automatically either completely avoid the confrontation or get extremely defensive. Our nervous systems tell us that we are in danger, and maybe we get angry back. It's not rational, but it was survival once.
You develop this lifelong ability to read other's faces, emotions, and predict what they will feel or do next. You predict what may trigger them. This "superpower" allowed many of us to move into working in mental health. And we became very good at what we do -- because we had to learn decades before we should have.
It doesn't get easier in your own relationships. And it certainly doesn't get easier to remember the things that happened. Maybe you completely avoid the thought - and if it pops up - you promptly push it back into the dark, dreary hole it came from.
Remembering means feeling the guilt and shame that comes with it. Why your little human body couldn't have protected your parent. Why couldn't you stop it? Why couldn't life be different? Why did life have to be so hard for that parent -- and why were they so cursed that they never were able to feel what it was like to be safely loved?
Maybe there's the guilt of maintaining an adult relationship to the person in the household who was violent.
There are so many things. And it can feel overwhelming. It can be better to push everything away. Dissociate from that person. Your life started when you left. You were not the little helpless child who watched it happen. That couldn't have been real life.
What is childhood? People wish they could go back to being little again because "things were so much simpler."
But for you, it wasn't. It was terrifying. You lived without control. There was nothing simple, and there was nothing that was a childhood. It took years of quietly reassuring yourself that you are safe now in your adult home.
Looking at photos of yourself when you were a baby feels vague and distant.
Who was that baby smiling on the swing? How could that be you when the only things you can remember are hiding in dark corners, the weight of the air and eggshells cracking as your clumsy body tried to walk on them?
You can clearly trace the moments from your birth into the photos that the light died in your eyes.
Please know if this is you, therapy can be a resource to help. Medications can be a way to take the edge off of things.
Your experience was valid.
You are the unseen survivors of domestic violence.
And you don't need to be invisible anymore.
While it feels lonely because people don't talk about it, there are more of us in the dark corner with you than you realize.
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