Should I Tell the Brother Who Was There?

    The brother just younger than me is currently really struggling with a lot of aspects to his life and I have felt very worried about him for several months.  We haven't interacted a lot, especially over the past year and a half or so since the family started freezing me out, but I've had the recurring thought that something is wrong.  I think he may be dealing with really severe depression; the signs are all over the place.

    Sometimes I have the thought that maybe I should write him a letter and tell him what happened to me, minus details he doesn't need to know, and let him know that he was there when it happened.  It's very possible that besides sensing something was wrong, he may have seen the rape because his crib was next to the bed.  It's also possible that he was molested.   If I did this, I wouldn't tell him I thought he may have been abused this way as well, because I know how hard it is to get to the point where you are willing to look at that possibility; even when the signs are staring you in the face. There is also a deeper impact for males, I believe--or maybe just a different impact, because as a society this kind of abuse is associated with happening to females. Also there is a very strong stereotype where men are supposed to be the strong sex and so they should be impervious to this kind of violation. Therefore, being a victim of something like this and admitting it might seem, to the victim, to be an admission of being weak or that something is inherently wrong with them. This, of course, is utterly false, but because of this stereotype many males who do know it happened stay quiet about it and don't get the help they need. A lot of times they think they should just be able to handle it and move on.  I think that's the case for all victims, but it seems to me that that dynamic must be a lot stronger for males. My husband is also a survivor and it took him a lot longer to decide he needed help than I did, so to an extent I've seen how that process works with men.

    As we were talking one evening, I expressed to my daughter that I have been worried about him and it's crossed my mind more than once that he may have been sexually abused, too, and she said, "That would explain a lot because you and he have a similar energy about you that the rest of your siblings don't have." He and I have always been treated as outcasts compared to the way the rest of my siblings interact.  Part of that could be the "oldest" role that we both play--I'm the oldest child, but he is the oldest of four boys.  My dad would have put a lot more pressure on him than the rest of the boys, and there are resentments there on the part of some of the younger sibs towards us, I think.  I'm sure part of that comes from being jealous at the older ones getting to do certain things first, and as the oldest I was put in charge of the other kids All. The. Time. My brother would have been Choice #2 for that role if I was at my dance lessons or otherwise not around to be the substitute parent.

    The only way he and I could hope to have the approval of our parents was to try and measure up to the kinds of pressure that were put on us, hoping we would get a pat on the back and nod of approval. Add to that the abuse issues and you have no idea how intense the pressure is. It literally is like something is pressing down on you all the time, and you have to push against it just to stay upright. For some reason, from Brother #2 down, the rules changed. It's so weird to me.

Tired and Triggered

    Rough couple of days; I attended a funeral yesterday for one of my uncles, who was a good man.  I wasn't really close to him but in the very large family on my father's side we had family reunions once or twice a year, and many baby and bridal showers for cousins as we grew up.  He was a quiet, softhearted person and his children spoke of him with great love.  It was very evident that he guided his family with love.  During the viewing beforehand I became aware that an uncle who lives in another state was there, and he is the first one I connected to being sexually abused.  My mother and a couple of my brothers were there at that time and she acted like absolutely nothing was wrong and was smiley and huggy with me--consistent with how she changes in public.  I think I handled myself well; my husband asked me at one point if I was okay and I said I was. Afterwards we went to lunch and I felt like I was kind of in shock and was very tired when we went home.  He told me he was worried about me being triggered being around my siblings and mother when I told him I wanted to go and honestly I hadn't really thought about it.  I just didn't want to be in a position where I was reliant on any of them for a ride there or back.  I wanted to pay my respects to a good man and show support for my aunt and cousins. It didn't dawn on me for a minute that this other uncle would be there, so that threw me a little. I will post more about my reflections from the funeral tomorrow.

    Today at church was the annual children's program where the children's organization does a presentation for the rest of the congregation as our worship service.  It was beautiful and sweet.  I found myself crying during one of the songs called "Heavenly Father, Are You Really There?" and realized that my inner child was very triggered.  I felt like I was little again and desperately praying to God for help and trying to feel some sense of being cherished and special.  I'm struggling with the fact that I wasn't protected from the sexual abuse, and that my mother was so abusive in other ways.  No one rescued me from my situation.  I guess I need to focus on the fact that I made it through all of it, and maybe it was divine intervention that helped me get through, but I often wonder why I was put in those circumstances in the first place.  I was sitting on the stand to the side during the program because I am the organist for our worship service, so in a way I felt like I was one of the children in the program, remembering times when that was me and seeing my parents faces watching me.  There was always a nonverbal sense of them watching that what I said and the way I acted gave any indication made them look good.  One of the songs talks of "parents kind and dear" and that was a further trigger.  At the end of the song there is a phrase about heavenly glory being ours if we can but endure. I found myself thinking, "When is it enough?  I've been enduring all my life."  I'm tired.  I've always pushed forward through tremendous force trying to stop me from doing so and sometimes I feel like I just can't do it anymore.

    I told my husband afterward that I needed to leave rather than stay for the remaining meetings and although we don't normally do this on Sunday, he took me to a restaurant to eat and talk things out. He is so wonderful, the way he listens and doesn't judge.  He is also an abuse survivor so sometimes I worry that when I need to talk he doesn't need to hear it because he deals with his own stuff.  I will write more about today's experiences, as well, but right now I need to go to bed.

Accepting My Truth, Part I--Thank You, Oprah

Although I always felt a pervasive sense of deep sorrow as I was growing up and this continued on into my adult life, I didn't have an explanation for WHY I felt the way I did.  I didn't associate the one accurate, very descriptive word that put it in a nutshell with what much of my life experience had been--ABUSE.

When my kids were very young, back in the early '90s, Oprah Winfrey did a prime time television special called Scared Silent.  I've never been a regular talk show viewer and only caught the Oprah show once in a blue moon.  I watched the show one day and she made reference to this special that was coming up, and there were also regular commercial spots advertising it on both daytime and primetime TV.  My natural instinct was to not want to watch it, but something inside of me felt compelled to do so and for some reason I couldn't put a finger on, I knew that I had to watch that show.  For me it wasn't a feeling of  "Hey, maybe I should watch that," or "That looks like an important show for people to see."  I had the clear message, with strong urging, that I absolutely must watch it.  My kids were in bed when it came on and my husband was working late, so I was alone as I watched it, and after it ended I was completely stunned and then I started sobbing uncontrollably. It was the first time I had the stark realization that I was abused.  This show was the first time I really saw emotional abuse addressed, and as they described what it was and what the effects could be I realized that that was one of my missing links to what "my problem" was.  It validated so much of what I felt and had experienced.  I will forever be grateful that Oprah had the courage to speak out and that this show was promoted and aired.  I think, personally, that it probably has done a lot to raise public consciousness.

As I was going through school in '70s and '80s, child abuse came up a little here and there in junior high and high school, usually as a unit in health classes.  This was always accompanied by pictures of horribly bruised children and focused on physical battering.  Whenever these units would come up I usually kind of tuned them out and definitely couldn't look at the pictures.  Once I was at the age where we did research papers in English, it seemed like a lot of kids chose the subject of child abuse and that was so repulsive to me.  When the subject kind of floated around in conversation that my mother heard or was aware of, she would kind of stiffen and look at me uncomfortably.  I didn't really understand the body language at the time, but I had coped with her enough during the years to get the nonverbal message that this was a taboo subject. Sometimes she would join in conversation about it, and she was part of the "if the kid doesn't have to go to the hospital it isn't abuse" camp.  There were a few times when she would say to me, "Well, do you think YOU are being abused?" usually in a sarcastic or challenging tone.  When she uses that tone it's kind of an "I dare you" dynamic.  Yeah right, like I was going to say, "Yes, I think I am."  Way safer to agree that I wasn't than deal with the consequences of standing up to her.  A phrase I heard a lot was, "If you think that's bad, I can really give you something to cry about."  I never had visible bruises, at least that I could remember, and never went to the hospital, so in my mind from all this I wasn't abused and whenever the topic was addressed I didn't associate it with myself.  I just didn't want anything to do with the subject, the photos were always disturbing and I have always been pretty tenderhearted, and I couldn't understand for the life of me why anyone my age would choose it for a research paper.

The subject of to spank or not to spank is one that can get pretty heated.  I think a lot of the people in my parents' generation (I was born in 1966) tend to feel very defensive along these lines when it is addressed within the context of abuse, and to me it makes sense on a lot of levels why they would feel that way.  It was common for kids my age to hear about how their parents had to cut their own switches when they were kids and being punished. This isn't unique to my parents.  Whipping as a form of discipline was the norm. Teachers and principals used it in schools.  Examples that this mindset has been part of society for a long, long time are evident as you read books like the Little House on the Prairie series and Charles Dickens. The verse in the Bible that reads "spare the rod and spoil the child" has been used to backup and justify these methods of discipline.

I think it is a good thing that as a whole, society seems to be moving away from such harsh forms of punishment.  I do, however, also see another extreme happening, and that is parents not correcting their children and requiring appropriate behavior.  Parents who placate their children by giving them what they want to make them quit whining, and parents who aren't instilling a work ethic by teaching their children to earn things they want.  Maybe this is happening partially because today's parents don't want to repeat the patterns they had growing up that were harmful, but then are at a loss to know healthy ways to discipline. This overcompensation is producing a lot of extremely entitled people who have no respect for rules and authority, and quite frankly I don't think that bodes well for our society in general.  I saw this multiple times as my children were growing up; as an example, when my daughter was in 2nd grade there was a boy in her class who carried this to such an extreme that if he didn't like something the teacher said, like "It's time to get off the computer," he would fly into a rage.  He ripped up text books and threw his desk across the room so hard that it bent the legs.  He would call his mother and tearfully tell her that they were being mean to him and she would either check him out of school or threaten lawsuit.  He was already a pretty stocky, strong kid and it was even worse when he was angry. One time, in order to get him to the principal's office, it took four adults carrying him spread-eagle.  My husband and I have both observed the entitlement issue; he sees it in the workplace with young people coming into jobs expecting to do as little as possible but to be rewarded with high pay and management positions, regardless of their experience and poor work ethic.

Anyway, I digress.  I was spanked, a LOT.  I have never  labeled my parents as abusers over that subject, though.  I can accept that part of it was the mindset of their generation and what was the norm, and I can also accept that to them, they were probably doing better than their parents had.  My dad's stepmother woke him up one morning by hitting him over the head with a shovel (not the kind you play with in a sand box).  My mother's father was a raging alcoholic and there was a lot of violence associated with that.   I do feel that some of the instances where I was whipped or spanked crossed the line, though, and these instances were usually accompanied by blind rage on the part of the person doing the whipping.  Usually this was my mother, and usually I didn't even know what I was being whipped for.  It was over the top.  When you break a wooden spoon over a child's bottom,  and then go for a heavier object out of rage at the child for "breaking" said spoon (I reflexively tightened my bottom against the blows because it didn't hurt as much), it's probably time to reconsider your methods.  And prefacing it with the phrases, "This is going to hurt me a lot more than it's going to hurt you" and "I'm doing this because I love you/If I didn't love you I wouldn't do this" makes absolutely no sense to the child whatsoever.  When your first response to misbehavior or simple mistakes on the part of the child is to beat them, there's a problem.  When you are in a blind rage and "seeing red," it's probably not the best time to dole out discipline, because you are more likely to not know your own strength (which is boosted by adrenaline) or have any sense of control once you get going and you might find yourself in a position where you have done serious damage physically or your child has died.   I don't think anyone wants to live with the kind of regret that would come with that kind of extreme.

But as I alluded to earlier in this post, the aspect of the Scared Silent show that resonated most with me was the subject of emotional abuse.  That's when the light came on.  As I sat sobbing, I said, "I was abused," and my tears weren't only tears of sorrow and grief.  They were also tears of fear, because just saying it was such a frightening thing.  That was the first time I broke my own silence.  There was no one there to hear me, so I wasn't "betraying" anyone in that sense.  No one was there to yell at me or slap me for daring to be so disrespectful.  I definitely wasn't in a place where I was ready to call it what it was to other people other than talking to my husband, but there was still fear just in acknowledging it to myself.  I think on a very deep level I knew it was just the tip of the iceberg and that there was going to be a lot to deal with in my life as a result of the things I had been through.  I also needed to accept that this level of abuse had happened in order to be able to get to a place of acceptance when traumatic memories of sexual abuse started coming up.  I did a very good job of compartmentalizing and repressing, and my sense of denial was really strong.