child-abuse

..[The] disclosure of the incest secret initiates a profound crisis for the family usually...the abuse has been going on for a number of years and has become an integral part of family life. Disclosure disrupts whatever fragile equilibrium has been maintained, jeopardizes the functioning of all family members, increases the likelihood of violent and desperate behavior, and places everyone, but particularly the daughter, at risk for retaliation.

He said when the Lord made people He made them all the same for starters. But life marks people. If you know the way, you can read them like maps.

It doesn't matter if you come from money or you are poor: If your family has already made you feel that you are not worthy, you begin to believe it, and when someone comes along and tells you that you are beautiful/special/wonderful and showers you with attention and gifts, or offers you money when you desperately need it, you are vulnerable and ready to trust

From spending ten years in hell and coming to this regime of kindness was a shock. It was so much of a shock, it was unbelievable. I was like an untamed animal, I couldn__ accept it and I just wouldn__ accept it.

The capacity for dissociation enables the young child to exercise their innate life-sustaining need for attachment in spite of the fact that principal attachment figures are also principal abusers.

As a child you received messages from your family to keep your mouth shut and remain invisible. You also learned to become invisible in order to protect yourself. You no longer need to be invisible to survive. If people do not notice you, they may not abuse you, but they also will not love you or attend to your needs. Make yourself and your needs known.

One of the reasons a survivor finds it so difficult to see herself as a victim is that she has been blamed repeatedly for the abuse: "If you weren't such a whore, this wouldn't have to happen." Each time she is used and trashed, she becomes further convinced of her innate badness. She sees herself participating in forbidden sexual activity and may often get some sense of gratification from it even if she doesn't want to (it is, after all, a form of touch, and our bodies respond without the consent of our wills). This is seen as further proof that the abuse is her fault and well deserved. In her mind, she has become responsible for the actions of her abusers. She believes she is not a victim; she is a loathsome, despicable, worthless human being__f indeed she even qualifies as human. When the abuse has been sadistic in nature...these beliefs are futher entrenched.

The more we idealized the past, however, and refuse to acknowledge or childhood sufferings, the more we pass them on unconsciously to the next generation.

For many people, the shock of sexual abuse pales before the shock of this mother__ statement, __ wish the fuck I never had her._ So thoroughly is motherhood sentimentalized that the mother who wishes to be rid of her child is considered a monster. In reality, women have always greeted the burden of motherhood ambivalently, even in the best of circumstances, and many women bear children involuntarily. But the approbrium which attaches to any woman who willing gives up her child is so great that some mothers will keep and mistreat their children rather than admit that they cannot care for them. Sometimes, the revelation of maternal neglect constitutes a plea for outside intervention, signaling the fact that a mother wants to be relieved of the duty to care for her child.

Dissociative Identity Disorder...is initially a useful coping response to an environment which is very difficult to endure. The problem is that dissociative responses-such as switching, blanking out, or going into a trance-become automatic, and, once the original abusive environment has been left behind, are of little use in life and may be detrimental.

I dived out of the office and I was gone _ hitting these fields like a mad March hare. This wasn__ Born Free, it was RUN FREE!

From a young boy__ viewpoint this could not get any worse, especially when you were told that you belonged to the devil, and this bullying of me went on for a long time.

Things I Used to Get Hit For: Talking back. Being smart. Acting stupid. Not listening. Not answering the first time. Not doing what I__ told. Not doing it the second time I__ told. Running, jumping, yelling, laughing, falling down, skipping stairs, lying in the snow, rolling in the grass, playing in the dirt, walking in mud, not wiping my feet, not taking my shoes off. Sliding down the banister, acting like a wild Indian in the hallway. Making a mess and leaving it. Pissing my pants, just a little. Peeing the bed, hardly at all. Sleeping with a butter knife under my pillow.Shitting the bed because I was sick and it just ran out of me, but still my fault because I__ old enough to know better. Saying shit instead of crap or poop or number two. Not knowing better. Knowing something and doing it wrong anyway. Lying. Not confessing the truth even when I don__ know it. Telling white lies, even little ones, because fibbing isn__ fooling and not the least bit funny. Laughing at anything that__ not funny, especially cripples and retards. Covering up my white lies with more lies, black lies. Not coming the exact second I__ called. Getting out of bed too early, sometimes before the birds, and turning on the TV, which is one reason the picture tube died. Wearing out the cheap plastic hole on the channel selector by turning it so fast it sounds like a machine gun. Playing flip-and-catch with the TV__ volume button then losing it down the hole next to the radiator pipe. Vomiting. Gagging like I__ going to vomit. Saying puke instead of vomit. Throwing up anyplace but in the toilet or in a designated throw-up bucket. Using scissors on my hair. Cutting Kelly__ doll__ hair really short. Pinching Kelly. Punching Kelly even though she kicked me first. Tickling her too hard. Taking food without asking. Eating sugar from the sugar bowl. Not sharing. Not remembering to say please and thank you. Mumbling like an idiot. Using the emergency flashlight to read a comic book in bed because batteries don__ grow on trees. Splashing in puddles, even the puddles I don__ see until it__ too late. Giving my mother__ good rhinestone earrings to the teacher for Valentine__ Day. Splashing in the bathtub and getting the floor wet. Using the good towels. Leaving the good towels on the floor, though sometimes they fall all by themselves. Eating crackers in bed. Staining my shirt, tearing the knee in my pants, ruining my good clothes. Not changing into old clothes that don__ fit the minute I get home. Wasting food. Not eating everything on my plate. Hiding lumpy mashed potatoes and butternut squash and rubbery string beans or any food I don__ like under the vinyl seat cushions Mom bought for the wooden kitchen chairs. Leaving the butter dish out in summer and ruining the tablecloth. Making bubbles in my milk. Using a straw like a pee shooter. Throwing tooth picks at my sister. Wasting toothpicks and glue making junky little things that no one wants. School papers. Notes from the teacher. Report cards. Whispering in church. Sleeping in church. Notes from the assistant principal. Being late for anything. Walking out of Woolworth__ eating a candy bar I didn__ pay for. Riding my bike in the street. Leaving my bike out in the rain. Getting my bike stolen while visiting Grandpa Rudy at the hospital because I didn__ put a lock on it. Not washing my feet. Spitting. Getting a nosebleed in church. Embarrassing my mother in any way, anywhere, anytime, especially in public. Being a jerk. Acting shy. Being impolite. Forgetting what good manners are for. Being alive in all the wrong places with all the wrong people at all the wrong times.

Gazing out of the window, the gravel path roared as it was crushed into submission under the wheels of the car that was taking me towards a menacing looking medieval castle with two huge and terrifying turrets that seemingly reached out towards me. I imagined that I was the gravel and the wheels of the car were the social care system.

When a man beats his boy, he wants a son who won't buck him. He's trying to make a coward. Ninety-nine times out of a hundred, it works.And the hundredth boy?We can go either way. Kill the old man, or try to become a better one.

There are generally three parties to child abuse: the abused, the abuser and the bystander.

I ...understand how a parent might hit a child- it's because you can look into their eyes and see a reflection of yourself that you wish you hadn't.

In the 1890s, when Freud was in the dawn of his career, he was struck by how many of his female patients were revealing childhood incest victimization to him. Freud concluded that child sexual abuse was one of the major causes of emotional disturbances in adult women and wrote a brilliant and humane paper called __he Aetiology of Hysteria._ However, rather than receiving acclaim from his colleagues for his ground-breaking insights, Freud met with scorn. He was ridiculed for believing that men of excellent reputation (most of his patients came from upstanding homes) could be perpetrators of incest.Within a few years, Freud buckled under this heavy pressure and recanted his conclusions. In their place he proposed the __edipus complex,_ which became the foundation of modern psychology. According to this theory any young girl actually desires sexual contact with her father, because she wants to compete with her mother to be the most special person in his life. Freud used this construct to conclude that the episodes of incestuous abuse his clients had revealed to him had never taken place; they were simply fantasies of events the women had wished for when they were children and that the women had come to believe were real. This construct started a hundred-year history in the mental health field of blaming victims for the abuse perpetrated on them and outright discrediting of women__ and children__ reports of mistreatment by men.Once abuse was denied in this way, the stage was set for some psychologists to take the view that any violent or sexually exploitative behaviors that couldn__ be denied__ecause they were simply too obvious__hould be considered mutually caused. Psychological literature is thus full of descriptions of young children who __educe_ adults into sexual encounters and of women whose __rovocative_ behavior causes men to become violent or sexually assaultive toward them.I wish I could say that these theories have long since lost their influence, but I can__. A psychologist who is currently one of the most influential professionals nationally in the field of custody disputes writes that women provoke men__ violence by __esisting their control_ or by __ttempting to leave._ She promotes the Oedipus complex theory, including the claim that girls wish for sexual contact with their fathers. In her writing she makes the observation that young girls are often involved in __utually seductive_ relationships with their violent fathers, and it is on the basis of such __esearch_ that some courts have set their protocols. The Freudian legacy thus remains strong.