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Sometimes a Trauma isn’t something that happens to you. Sometimes a Trauma is something you see happen to someone else. Children are affected and the younger the child, the more affected that child will be.
In the Domestic Violence course, I learned that the youngest child is more likely to develop PTSD than the older child or children.
How a violent event will affect a child depends on how old the child is or if the child had any other traumatic experiences. The child’s temperament and personality also contribute to how an event will affect them.
In this story, I speak of one of those events. In fact, the next two stories are violent events that little Tina Witnessed. The sad thing is that for little Tina, these forms of abuse were commonplace in her life in this Narcissistic Family Cult.
Trigger Warning!
It was a nice hot summer day. Tina was playing in the living room when dad started yelling at her older brother Mark. Mark was a teenager. His response to the abuse was different than little Tina’s. He was older and a real boy. He fought back.
The fight ensued. Mom shoved Tina and Mary out the front door of that duplex and locked it. We heard crashes and yelling and hitting. Daddy was beating Mark up. I pounded on the door with my fist. Let me in, I screamed.
The police came and mommy threw Mark under the bus by blaming him for the assault. Mommy and daddy never took responsibility for their own behaviors and lack of personal control of themselves.
Mark was arrested. Tina was outside. Wise for a 7-year-old. In front of the policeman, she asked Mark why he doesn’t tell the police. Mark never told them that day that their parents were at fault. He never told them about his own abuse. He took responsibility for it instead.
He didn’t tell them that the abuse was a regular part of life in their house. And the children were silenced. What would be the point in telling? Who would believe Mark? He is just trouble. A problem child. Mommy said Mark was incorrigible. Mommy said no one would believe them if they told.
The problem was, it was true. There was no adult who would ever believe them because their parents lied about them and made them out to be liars to cover their own acts of violence against their children.
Mark needed a loving family just like little Tina. While Mark was sitting on the curb, Tina noticed that he had a cut on the bridge of his nose. No one told and no one helped. The police took Mark away in handcuffs when they should have been taking Daddy instead because he abused Mark, a child.
What effect does domestic violence have on a child?
In my household growing up, that type of violence happened a lot to us kids. We were all abused differently but still, we were all abused. Even Mary was abused. Sometimes these fights between my brother and father happened in the car with me between them. My brother fighting for his life and my father fighting for control. Control over himself that he didn’t have.
I had a full-blown flashback in a therapy session with a therapist who didn’t understand PTSD. It was my father and my brother fighting in the car in the front seat with me between them. I got hit and elbowed and everything during these fights.
My therapist dismissed the flashback and labeled me bipolar. I don’t have bipolar or the other one that often gets misdiagnosed by professionals who don’t understand Complex PTSD.
Not only do I have flashbacks from all the fighting between my dad and my brother or my dad and my mom that when anyone gets even a little upset I get nervous, but I also start shaking and become hypervigilant ready to run or fight for my life.
I grew up feeling helpless and fearful that tomorrow may never come. That at any time I could die. I recognized my mortality as a 7-year-old. I knew every day was a blessing and I could die today. That my brother, I, or Brenda could die at any time. Today could be our last day.
I grew up believing that abuse is normal and that the world is just a dangerous place with monsters who live in your house. It wasn’t safe for me to sleep. I was afraid of the monsters who were in my closet or in the corner or under my bed.
That’s normal people say. Not when the monster under the bed is Daddy. Not when the monster in the closet is Daddy. Not when the monster comes into the room at night while I was sleeping to do bad things to me that hurt me.
Witnessing the abuse made life that much more uncertain. Death was something I thought a lot about as a 7-year-old and older. I would plan for the events in the future when someone tried to kill me this way or that. How I would survive the attack in such an unsafe world.
“It wasn’t safe inside my home or on the outside of my home.”
I grew up afraid for my life and the lives of those around me. I became Hypervigilant about danger. All danger, not just people danger. I prayed for protection a lot as a child and throughout my adulthood.
Because I saw horrible things happen in my household, I imagined all the horrible things that could happen. I became a contingency planner as I grew up so I could survive.
I survived because I did this. I would sit in thought as a small child and just think of all the ways that I could thwart someone else from killing me.
Not only did I start asking questions at age 7 but I started speaking up. People don’t like it when others speak up. Especially when they are criminals doing something they know is unacceptable behavior.
They want to hide it while people like me call it out.
People like me, out them and thwart them and so they attack us the most. You can see it play out in politics as the left attacks people speaking out about the leftist lies and deception like Candace Owens does.
She speaks out against the atrocities the left have done against themselves, their own group of people, and what they want to do to everyone around them. They are the Evil in America and they are destroying life here with promises of a utopia that will never exist.
You can’t have a utopia of oppressed people. It is never a utopia. It is just abuse.
But it leaves the left as nothing but a facade. A lie posing as something great. A fraud. Just like my parents were frauds. Just like Mary and her minions are frauds in their false narrative about my family. It is what it is, no matter what you call it.
Abuse, violence, manipulation, smear campaigns, and all of it. Just like my abusive family, the world reflects the abuse in their current political views. They are my Narcissistic cult family all over again, only on a larger scale outside my home. The difference for me is that NOW, I’m not living in a narcissistic household, just a narcissistic country.
As I heal my many traumatic experiences, I learn how my view of the world has been influenced in such a way that I subconsciously and actively look for the dangers in the world. In being able to recognize the abuse and the causes of my PTSD symptoms, the reason for my odd behaviors, I’m able to recognize it in the world too.
What I can’t seem to recognize is the good in the world. I may see it but I can’t believe it because narcissists use love bombing. It feels and looks real when they are doing it to you but it’s a lie. A facade. They never do anything nice simply because they are nice.
I learned that people must earn trust but not many people want to earn that trust. They just want to manipulate you into trusting them without intentions of honoring that trust. I see the world through the lens of the harsh realities of this world of monsters that we live in.
You never know what someone has experienced. Let go of judgment of others and start using discernment instead.
