- Moderator
- #13
Sideways
VIP Member
One of my difficulties here is that when I was being abused as a kid, it wasn't all bad. In the movies, the villian is bad - they're all bad. There isn't anything that they do that might be okay, or normal.
As a kid, it's not like that. Your abuser might tell you that you can treat yourself to a cup of orange juice in the morning (good), tell you to put on your shoes (ok), then tell you to sit in the cupboard until they let you out (bad). The good/neutral/bad things don't have a nice clean line for you to distinguish between them - it all gets mixed up together, so that it becomes really quite impossible to be able to identify that the person is bad (because they're not all bad), or that the things they're telling you to do are bad, because it all gets mixed in together.
Even as an adult, that can make it really hard to isolate the parts of a person's behaviour that are ok, and the parts where you need to draw the line and say "No, not okay". It's a whole lot easier with the benefit of hindsight, particularly if they're not in your life any more. You can then isolate particular events, and see more easily which are the events that were "all bad".
But at the time, the events that were "all bad", happened mixed in with events that were probably fairly normal, and sometimes even events that were good.
It's asking the impossible of a child, who is still working out what is acceptable and what isn't, to identify "bad events" when they're happening mixed in with not-bad events.
Either way, that child survived. So they did a damn good job in the circumstances.
As a kid, it's not like that. Your abuser might tell you that you can treat yourself to a cup of orange juice in the morning (good), tell you to put on your shoes (ok), then tell you to sit in the cupboard until they let you out (bad). The good/neutral/bad things don't have a nice clean line for you to distinguish between them - it all gets mixed up together, so that it becomes really quite impossible to be able to identify that the person is bad (because they're not all bad), or that the things they're telling you to do are bad, because it all gets mixed in together.
Even as an adult, that can make it really hard to isolate the parts of a person's behaviour that are ok, and the parts where you need to draw the line and say "No, not okay". It's a whole lot easier with the benefit of hindsight, particularly if they're not in your life any more. You can then isolate particular events, and see more easily which are the events that were "all bad".
But at the time, the events that were "all bad", happened mixed in with events that were probably fairly normal, and sometimes even events that were good.
It's asking the impossible of a child, who is still working out what is acceptable and what isn't, to identify "bad events" when they're happening mixed in with not-bad events.
Either way, that child survived. So they did a damn good job in the circumstances.
