On my blog entry entitled Judging Your Childish Actions Through Adult Eyes, a reader posted the following comment:
I’m right now dealing with coming to terms with the fact that what happened was a big deal. I have seen it as “no big deal” because that is what I was taught. Even now, as an adult, I have trouble seeing it as a big deal. If I hear about it happening to someone else (a child in the present day, for example), I am furious. But, I am having trouble giving myself that gift. I feel very few emotions about all of it. ~ Marie
Minimizing the abuse (seeing the abuse as “no big deal”) is a normal reaction to child abuse, and it really does make sense once you understand where it is coming from. Judith Herman’s book Trauma and Recovery explains this reaction well. I strongly recommend this book, especially if you are having trouble accepting that your own abuse was a big deal. I found this book to be very helpful because it focuses on all forms of trauma (not just child abuse), which helped me see the post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) as a disorder rather than as a collection of symptoms that were unique to me (and not a big deal).
Here are an excerpt that explains this phenomenon of seeing the child abuse as “no big deal:”
Though [the abused child] perceives herself as abandoned to a power without mercy, she must find a way to preserve hope and meaning. The alternative is utter despair, something no child can bear. To preserve her faith in her parents, she must reject the first and most obvious conclusion that something is terribly wrong with them. She will go to any lengths to construct an explanation for her fate that absolves her parents of all blame and responsibility.
All of the abused child’s psychological adaptations serve the fundamental purpose of preserving her primary attachment to her parents in the face of daily evidence of their malice, helplessness, or indifference. To accomplish this purpose, the child resorts to a wide array of psychological defenses. By virtue of these defenses, the abuse is either walled off from conscious awareness and memory, so that it did not really happen, or minimized, rationalized, and excused, so that whatever did happen was not really abuse. Unable to escape or alter the unbearable reality in fact, the child alters it in her mind. ~ pp. 101-102
There’s so much more, which is why this book is in my list of recommended book resources. If you find this helpful, I would read this book or at least the chapter devoted to child abuse.
Minimizing the abuse make perfect sense. When you are a helpless child, the alternatives are to “forget” the abuse (repress the memories), minimize it, or sink into utter despair. By minimizing the abuse, the child holds onto hope that the abuse is survivable. It is a coping mechanism that enabled us to survive the abuse.
Many of you have read my story, which I share beginning here. While there is no question that my abuse was severe by anyone’s standards, I, too, struggled with believing it was no big deal, others had it worse, etc. The bottom line is that any abuse is a big deal, and even one time is too many.
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And it doesn’t help any when I start trying to lessen the “it was no big deal” thoughts, and bring up one of the horrible times with the person who caused it, and they look at me like I’m crazy. I instantly feel bad, and go back to “it wasn’t that bad”. For a while I start thinking maybe I did make it up, or I’m overreacting…
Thanks for the great post, Faith
This is a good post.
As a child, when I would cry or be angry about something my father was doing he would patronize me, saying, “Oh, you’ve got it so bad.” This implied that I really didn’t have anything to complain about. Alternately, he would tell me about children who lived on the street and had nothing, not even a roof over their head. He once showed me an article in the paper about a child who’d been discovered chained to her bed. This was to show me that things weren’t as bad as they could have been and I was just a “complainer”.
Also, at times, he would ask me if that’s what I wanted. “Maybe you want to live on the streets” or “maybe you want to live with a family that locks you away in a closet.” I lived in terror that he would exile me from the only family I knew, and I constantly thought it was my fault. If only I wasn’t such a complainer, if only I could just take it as it was and not expect more.
In my adult life, on the few occasions when I have mentioned something from my past to my mother, she has no memory of what happened and looks at me with a very patronizing expression, indicating that I am once again stirring up trouble for no good reason. She has told me numerous times that it wasn’t my fault I was so judgmental of them – it was because they “spoiled” me so much, when I was a child. I’d come to expect too much.
It makes me furious now to think of it. How hard these messages of “this is no big deal” and “if you can’t take it, it’s your fault” were driven into me.
I know I always blamed my father for the abuse, but more and more I am coming to see that any adult in the house who is allowing this to go on is just as guilty as the perpetrator.
I sometimes feel it was not big deal and I sometimes think that I had it worse than anyone, Including the ones that died.
It seems, although fleeting, that when I know how I felt about it then how I feel about it changes. For me the how I think about it follows. Trying to change my thinking affects my actions it does not change my feelings until I know what they were.
Hey I reread that and it makes sense. Least for now.
Thanks for this, I absolutely struggle with believing what happened to me was “a big deal”
Just as an aside, I don’t like the word disorder, even when applied to PTSD. I think one can view it as a constellation of symptoms and that does not minimize what it is and what its effect is on people. I like to think of it not as “a disorder” but “dis-order”. Disorder implies it’s an entity that is the same from person to person, and it’s not. Dis-order more aptly describes things.