Comments On How

Families and Acquaintances Adjust to Child Abuse

 

In this file I am referring to unintentional child abuse, the kind that

does not require that the abuser take therapy or go to prison.

 

The need to hide abuse:

Most people, including parents and families, find the topics of abuse and recovery to be awkward. It hints of (what they believe to be) shameful mistakes. They would rather ignore the topic and have difficulty talking about it, especially if it has happened to someone they know.

People who have been in recovery for awhile have usually run into others who have emotional problems and they get a sense that those people are for the most part quite normal. In fact, most of the people who attend support groups are safer to deal with than most other people they know.

There are two reactions you might run into in the real world. Some acquaintances, co-workers, and family members who are not enlightened, and who know very little about emotional problems may have strong reactions against you when you admit to having emotional problems or that you have had to go for help. They might suddenly see you as being abnormal, and this makes you unpredictable and irritating. When they feel irritated they may then feel you are a person to be criticized. They may see people with emotional problems as weaklings, as simply lacking self discipline. You might be surprised at how little sympathy and understanding some people have. On the other hand, there are other people who react with support because they know of someone else they respect who has lived through some tough emotional times, or they have struggled with their own emotions. They might be tolerant and understanding.

Some parents believe that abusing a child is always shameful, a sign of weakness, and an indication that the parent is mean, incompetent, mentally unbalanced, and/or belongs in jail. It can be a huge issue for them. They don't want to believe that something like this could happen in their family. These parents will have a strong desire to deny what happened.

Even when parents are knowledgeable and are accepting of abuse, there is a need to avoid telling other adults about it because it is important to maintain their reputation. Keeping quiet means you can avoid being unfairly criticized and ostracized by other adults who maintain false assumptions and misunderstandings. Also, if others find out about abuse in your family, it can effect how your entire family is treated in the neighborhood, in the community, and at school.

 

It is hard for abusers to change:

Like most people, abusers tend to deny the weaknesses in themselves and their family. Denial comes easy. It would take time and hard work in order to understand and feel things differently. Usually these parents are not in recovery and don't make use of a therapist, so they lack the tools needed to make a good adjustment.

In addition, before they could accept abuse, they would need to develop new understandings which can help them avoid self blame.

• they need to understand that they themselves have real weaknesses, and that those weaknesses in some form have been passed through the generations.
• they need to understand that most people make little mistakes (little from the adult's point of view), and that little mistakes can have a big impact on the child, and so be abusive.
• it helps if they believe and accept the idea that most people have experienced some degree of abuse. It is not something that happens to someone else.

These understandings are not easy to adopt. They are not just based on knowledge; they are tied to perceptions, experiences and values.

But if they have run across the feel positive philosophies that are currently popular, or have seen a counsellor who loves to promote a feel positive approach to living, then they find the above three points to be really negative, so would rather ignore them. My impression is that the feel positive approach believes that if a person can maintain positive feelings, then eventually the negative goes away. But this can leave a parent living in a dream world, and when there is a trigger, abusive behaviors can quickly reappear. There are a lot of reasons why it is important to deal with reality, to deal with the source of the problem. By the end of December I hope to have my position on these issues clarified.

The people I know who have probably been mildly abusive parents prefer to remain in denial about their own weaknesses, and they prefer that all of their family members keep abusive experiences a secret.

Unfortunately, this means that for the most part, important knowledge, ways of adjusting, and solutions are also kept a secret. When the children grow up in this kind of family, they become adults who don't know the seriousness of their weaknesses. They are a high risk to become abusive parents. As a result, constricting and difficult emotional problems continue to get passed down from generation to generation.

 

My solution:

After a lot of thought, I chose to tell my parents and others about the abuse I experienced which was accidental and hard to prevent. The experiences where my parents were brutal and mean (during a major crisis in their lives) were kept secret. Telling about some of my abusive experiences helped my family understand who I am and why I have limitations. It has also helped the family, and friends to more or less realize that abuse is serious and that it doesn't just happen to others.

Unfortunately, more recently, my family lost patience with my life of struggle and recovery, and came up with their own explanations to my behavior and became highly critical. How could all of them be wrong and a guy like me be right? Remember, I'm the guy with mental problems that were taking decades to resolve. It was taking so long that they lost patience and decided that it didn't matter what kind of help I was getting at that particular time, it must be wrong.

So after a lot of effort, it became apparent that explanations and confrontations would not work. My solution was to simply move. I am now living at a distance, so the contact I now have with them has become less frequent, less complicated, and less intense. The new more subdued family dynamics is leading to relative stability. However, in my new view of the world, the people who are insensitive and clueless are my siblings. Their blind actions did a lot of damage. While they think they are normal, in reality, the people who are safe, who understand, and who live decent lives are the people in the support groups.

It is true that my move did not solve the problem. But maybe this is the best I can do for my situation. It is now up to the media, schools, etc. to make changes in society. Also, life experience will eventually help my family see what is real and see that life doesn't always allow for instant and easy solutions.

If you have a specific problem that needs a specific type of treatment then you need to be aware that some people and professionals may be into a recent trend in dealing with emotional problems. They might become problematic for you if you are in need of a different treament. Many people, including some professionals, don't like negativity and don't like problems, so they develop a rigid preference for superficial treatments. They may believe that if you focus on the positive, then the negative parts of your life will have less power over you, and after a number of years tend to be forgotten. The key is to maintain positive thoughts and feelings, and have good intentions. These beliefs give rise to many exercises and tasks that can help the average person with how they feel. So these superficial treatments are probably helpful to some; but for others, especially those with serious problems, getting them to feel better has limited value. In my experience, the exercises I was given didn't have any noticeable effect on my buried emotions, on the things that were messing up my life.

Regardless of your particular problems, it is vital that you do a careful search to find the treatment that is most effective for your problems. If you have serious buried emotions which mess up your daily life, it is important that you get treated for those buried emotions. My impression is that buried emotions won't disappear simply because you ignore them, so the symptoms and problems they create in your life will continue until you get the buried emotions treated. Sometimes you need a label for your problems so you can get treated specifically for that label and not get sidetracked by people and professionals who believe that it doesn't matter what they do, it will be helpful.

[ The Associated Press, on Nov. 10, 2009 reported that when there was post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) an MRI can be used to detect bigger gaps in nerve fibers. After undergoing specific treatment for PTSD, they found that these gaps soon went away. The feel positive approach doesn't deal with this kind of trauma. ]

As society moves towards a more sensible way of living, we can hope that the changes will reach our own families and others. At some point the knowledge will filter down so each problem will get the appropriate treatment. So as we deal with reality more realistically, this will prevent future child abuse. So less children will experience pain and less adults will have to struggle.

 

 

 

Comments? Questions? Suggestions?

Contact me with E-mail at account-not-working@go.com

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