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Because of the community violence along with the abuse in the home, I developed symptoms of PTSD and More specifically Complex PTSD.
Through the process, I developed symptoms such as hypervigilance, nightmares, emotional reactiveness, a distorted sense of self in the negative as opposed to grandiose, and part of that reactiveness is violence.
How does one survive violence? By taking aggressive stances. Becoming intimidating and continuing the cycle of violence. Sometimes this looks like a cornered animal.
Trigger Warning!
It was almost Summer in 1994. In a few days, summer will be officially here. It is Tina’s seventh birthday. She got a new bathing suit. She had grown out of the old one that she got when she turned five. Living in California, the weather was warm and would only get hotter.
There was a place across the street that had all kinds of things. It was some sort of park. There was a building where they had basketball courts and art classes and exercise classes.
In this park, there was a playground and there was a baseball stadium too. It was huge. You could buy tickets to the games that went on at night. The park also had a giant sectioned off grassy area that they opened up for the community easter egg hunt.
This Park was a huge place with a community center in it and everything. The Park had a children’s wading pool. It looked like a fountain really. This day was the first day the wading pool is open. Robin took Tina to the park to play in the wading pool with other kids.
She was waiting to play in the wading pool when this big boy with red hair came to her. He seemed really nice. He said he had something for her then took her by the hand and led her to the bathroom.
Little Tina stopped at the bathroom door. It was the men’s bathroom. He sweetly told her that what he had for her was inside. He lured her along the way to what he had planned. He had another boy with him who was clueless as to what was happening. He was just sort of in the background.
The Boy had red hair and freckles. The other boy had light brown hair. The Boy with the red hair put Tina on the floor and He started to rape her. Before anything could really happen, the Park custodian walked into the men’s bathroom and stopped them.
The boy with the red hair got in trouble but not for long.
Time had passed. Little Tina felt safe to go to the park again. The Park was finally open again. It was closed for a while. Tina went back to the Park to play on the playground. The boy with the red hair and his sidekick were at the park. They chased little Tina into the baseball stadium.
She made a mad dash under the turn style. The boys followed her. The boy with the red hair had a knife. It looked like a big knife to Tina. She was small and could fit so she dove under the seats. Going from row to row, back and forth, zig and zag.
The custodian caught them again. He got on the speaker and told the kids to get out of the stadium. The boys left the stadium but Tina stayed under the seats until the man came and got her. He told her he wouldn’t let anything happen to her.
Tina and the Custodian walked out of the stadium together and there were the boys, waiting for her. The Custodian stood up to the boy with the knife. The Boy with the red hair, holding the knife, told the Custodian that all they wanted was the girl.
The Custodian said no. They can’t have the girl. So the boy Stabbed the man. Tina screamed. She shouted, “you killed him!” The boys ran away. The custodian told little Tina to go get help. To run as fast as she can. So, she did.
By the time she reached the parking lot, she could barely speak. She ran up to the first people she came to. She spoke between gasps. She told the couple who had just parked that the man had been stabbed and where he was laying.
The man told the woman to wait with little Tina while he checked it out. In just a few minutes he was back. He told the woman to call the police. She did. The lady sent her home but she wouldn’t go home until she saw the ambulance men put him in the ambulance.
Tina ran home. She tried to tell her mom all about what happened. Her mom was cleaning the table when she looked at little Tina and said, “Are you telling me that you got a man stabbed?”.
Tina knew it wasn’t her fault but somehow her mother’s accusation made her feel guilty. Of course, there was still the regular abuse going on in the background. Mommy didn’t allow Tina to talk to the police with the first incident and the boy got away. That’s why he came after her with the knife.
The effects of the violence
Tina experienced a violent trauma and her mother shifted the blame onto her. A little seven-year-old child survivor of community violence.
Because violence has been a regular part of my life, I have come to realize that the reason they call it community violence is that it’s the community itself that is violent. The very people who live there and complain about violence are the very same people who are creating the violence.
For me, the community violence was just an expansion of what was happening in the home as it is for many people in violent ghetto communities like I grew up in.
It is a cycle. It is an endless cycle that has to be broken. It has to be broken as a child or young adult or it will wreak havoc on these lives and everyone around them.
There are mental health issues in these communities. I have faced as a child, many rapists, sociopaths, and psychopaths in these communities. This is where they can get away with more.
It’s too violent for the police to get under control. With the abuse inside my home, the community violence just reinforced the notion that my life, that I didn’t matter.
Something violent that was a matter of life and death happens in the ghetto, it’s normal, get on with your life. Ain’t nothing or no one going to come to help or save any victim, adult or child, in the violent communities in the ghettos.
The violence and the way it was handled for me, the child me, I was left believing that I’m bad and I don’t matter. The nightmares got worse. I was plagued with nightmares pretty much every night.
That was pretty normal for my life too. The lack of sleep from all the nightmares since I could remember made life miserable. The loss of sleep from the sexual abuse didn’t help things either.
Dreams became important to me because my mother would ask me to tell her about my dreams every night. I suppose she was waiting for the abuse to blatantly appear in my nightmares. That’s not always how the nightmares work.
Family Abuse Intensifies Community Violence
There was a lot of abuse that sent me broken messages about myself and the world around me that the outside violence just reinforced my beliefs that the world is a bad, ugly place to live.
There were so many family secrets to protect that the kids in the family were completely unprotected against the monsters who were also their providers. The monsters were the very people in control of their young lives. There was no way that anyone was going to talk to the police.
I wasn’t allowed near the police alone. If I started to tell like always, I was blocked by the rest of them. My older siblings and my parents didn’t want me to tell the truth to the police. The police were at our house a lot and a lot of lies were told.
Sometimes I wonder if my brother subconsciously did things to put himself in prison to get away from the abuse only to find more abuse. Him and Brenda ran away more than once.
After the stabbing, my nightmares increased. One night, in particular, I recall being so freaked out that I was screaming at the top of my lungs. I was so scared. My screams were blood-curdling and the neighbors came banging on the door.
The whole family was awake along with the neighbors. It took a while to calm me down. I’ve had nightmares all my life. since I can remember anyway. My mom would always ask me about my dreams. Especially if they were bad dreams.
They were so frequent that I had to have a nightlight from then on. I slept with a nightlight until I got married and my first husband refused to let me have one. I sleep with a nightlight to this day.
I’ve gone brief moments without a nightlight, but I’ve resigned to the fact, I just need one.
The violence wasn’t the only key part here. It was how my mother responded to my attempt to explain an unusual violent trauma that doesn’t just happen to everyone.
Instead of her helping me process the event and put it in its proper perspective, she shifted the blame onto me with one single question. She didn’t care that her seven-year-old daughter was almost murdered.
She didn’t care that a stranger saved her child’s life. It always felt like I, This child, was the scapegoat and only got the blame, never compassion.
Does Community Violence Permanently Damage the Child?
This event taught me that I don’t deserve compassion and for the majority of my life, I never had compassion for myself. I was so hard on myself.
Unreasonably hard on myself. Being hard on myself, I became hard on others. Very strict and rigid in my expectations of others that were the same as the rigid expectations of myself.
I tend to be rigid to this day. Not so hard on myself or others but I still tend to be rigid in my expectations but they are at least more reasonable. I’m trying to eliminate the need for any expectation.
Expectations lead to frustration and disappointment. I’m capable of compassion today but it feels overwhelming at times when really bad things are happening to people.
In this stage of my healing development, I’m allowing myself to feel the compassion that I locked away all those years ago. I locked it away to survive in a really bad world.
This world is still really bad and seems to be only going to get worse when they make us Socialists like Hitler and his Nazi Regime.
But now, I’m feeling it and it’s a powerful emotion. I’m told to allow myself to cry when it comes up. Feel the feelings and let them pass. It feels like when my foot falls asleep.
It hurts a lot more than it should but only for a short time. Then the nerves go back to normal and the feeling of falling asleep goes away.
That’s what it feels like right now. You know how when your foot falls asleep and you stand up and stomp on your foot a little and the tingling hurts. That’s what it feels like. I’m very compassionate and I’m reactive to that compassion.
I’m working for the day when my emotional reactiveness will be more under control and instead of reacting, I will respond. I’m already starting to recognize when I’m being reactive. The next step is preventing the reaction and replacing it with a response instead.
How Do We Solve This Community Problem?
I don’t know how to resolve the issues of community violence. I do however, know that violence begets violence and it starts in the home. It starts with perspective.
If everyone in the ghetto wasn’t being manipulated and controlled by their pain and generational wounds by the government and other organizations. If focus was placed on the development of children. the psychological development I’m talking about.
We could start by talking to families. Each person would have to face their monsters within. Heal their pain and their wounds. but an environment to host the healing process is necessary. How is that environment created? What would it look like?
People will have to learn to hold space for the Anger filled communities. People will need to learn how to hold space for the hurt filled communities. Stop the oppression by changing the perspective of the people. It’s the people themselves that need the help.
One thing that needs to be done is identify mental health issues and help them get treatment. But How?
How do you do that for a whole community?
