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For those who don’t know, my primary—but far from singular—abuser and trauma was being sexually and otherwise abused by my elder brother of 6 years when I was between around the ages of 3-6 years old. It was regular and persistent, and his emotionally abusive grasp on me lasted well after my disclosure of abuse and his confession when I was 14 (he was 20 and lived with me until I threatened to become an emancipated minor when I was 16 after having a complete breakdown).
The only time I spoke to my father about the abuse was when I was probably about 15, during which all I remember being said was, “Aren’t you angry?” and his response: “Why should I be angry? It’s water under the bridge now.”
Since then, a lot has changed in my family. I spent several years roundly disengaging from my family, mostly because almost every single one of them villainized me for “tearing apart the family.” My brother confessed to everything, and when I was 15, in the short time he was in therapy (I’m really not sure what strings my parents pulled, but somehow they were able to keep CPS out of this, even though two mandatory reporters knew about both my disclosure and his confession) as a slap on the wrist or some bullshit, I was given the opportunity to meet with his therapist to ask questions about whatever I wanted to know. Would that I had that chance when I was 20... but the playing field was always tilted, and I was always the victimized child who was too precocious and proud to point out that I was the child. In any case, my abuse by my brother implicated several other older boys who I estimated numbered 5: his therapist said 12.
In any case, like I said, things have changed since then. I moved away to college at 17, and after spending the most destructive summer of my life at home the following year, having been completely blindsided by learning that my (then 24-year-old) brother moved (out of the apartment my parents financed along with all of his other needs when I gave them an ultimatum two years prior and) right back into my parents’ house, I never went back. I visited under the condition that he would be gone every 3-5 years or so, which continues today, but not before I busted ass to demonstrate that I would never have to come “home,” never again crawl to them for help—that I didn’t even need to speak to them in a year, and there was nothing they could do about it.
In that time, I noticed things began to rapidly change. By the time I was about 22, the people who had mercilessly berated me for supposedly ruining our family suddenly began to vent—oh yes, vent—to me that my brother was, in fact, a total piece of shit human incapable of remorse, empathy, compassion... anything but totalistic selfishness. As I recently told my fiancé, it was bittersweet. It felt like I had been holding a pile of shit in my hand, up to a light, and telling them, “Look at this shit,” and being completely ignored for 6 years, then having those same people come back with the exact same piece of shit in their hand and saying, “Simon, did you know this is shit?”
I say all this to paint a rough picture of what I was asking when I asked about my father’s anger and to illustrate my abiding bitterness and resentment for how I was treated by the adults around me. All of these people who harangued me are at least 13 years my senior.
I’m listening to the podcast Believed, which I am trying very hard to take in bites instead of swallowing it whole, a show about the serial child rapist (Doctor) Larry Nassar. In the second to last episode, “Finale: the Reckoning,” Kyle Stephens, whose family was ludicrously close with the Nassars and who was abused from the ages of 6-12 and who disclosed her abuse to disbelieving parents—one a very angry father who interrogated her about her “lies”—tells about what happened when her father finally believed her story around 10 years later.
It occurs to me, and I genuinely never forget, that I am lucky in the sense that my brother never denied my story, which first trickled out in very vague statements. In spite of his confession, my mother once accused me of lying, even though she was a social worker who knew I had been sexually abused (all of the signs were there) and had been raging at me for at least a year, wildly pointing her finger at every convenient suspect. When it was her son, her head went straight in the sand, and I later learned that she and my father took my broad strokes initial disclosure to mean that the abuse was somehow “not so bad.” After I figured this out, my breakdown began, finally culminating into a full fledged shit-hitting-every-fan, a process which included my writing extraordinarily detailed first person accounts of memories that I honestly wrote while blacked out as if having some cross between a flashback and a possessed trance writing experience.
In that episode of Believed, Kyle Stephens talks about when her father changed. He believed her, and he constantly offered her the space to say whatever it was that she needed, as angrily and candidly as she liked, while he simply listened and validated her.
In the past 6 years—I’m 28–my parents have radically changed, especially in the past 2 years. Our relationship has massively improved to a point that I thought it never would. But I’m still angry, and they keep saying they want to get closer. At this point, though, with nothing said between us about my trauma for the past decade, I think we’ve hit a wall. In the past, I was happy with the wall. I reinforced it. I was ice cold, always. But now that I have become substantially closer to my parents, and they have demonstrated a capacity for change well beyond any expectations, I worry about their mortality. I was adopted when they were 40 and 41; that means they are about 70 now. Particularly my father has demonstrated a full court press to build some relationship with me, as we were never close the way I was with my mother, even though I have spent the decade recognizing that she too was my abuser in many non physical ways that continue to haunt me far more than my brother.
This episode... speaks my greatest wishes. I’m getting married this year. I have always been disgusted by the idea of walking arm in arm with my father to the proverbial altar. And he has told me explicitly over the past year that he wants us to be closer. My therapist had a running joke about my story, that she would never know I grew up with a father if I hadn’t said so in the beginning, because he never made it into my narrative. There are many reasons for this, but the fact of it now is that he is mostly a ghost in my life because I have designed it that way.
I worry that they will die before I have the chance to confront them, especially my father. My mother and I at least had it out over the years in messy bouts with months or years of fallout. By the time I could even begin to address my relationship with my father as an issue, I think I was just about out of steam, worn down from years of fighting to stay gone while trying to advance both my healing and my life, my career, my relationships here and now with peers.
I want to open the door to him using this episode as the launch point, but it’s like aiming a cannon in the dark at a snow drift laden mountainside: I don’t know whether the blow will land in deafening silence or cause a catastrophic avalanche.
So here I am, writing out my story, pointing people to the podcast or dredging it up for those who have listened. I know too well how destructive it is to ask for validation, let alone to hope for it or god forbid expect it, and I’m not sure what I will do if it’s fruitless. But he’s practically begging for the chance at a real connection, and at this stage in his life, I think we’re both worried there isn’t much time left to pussyfoot around the elephant.
Any feedback or support is greatly appreciated.
The only time I spoke to my father about the abuse was when I was probably about 15, during which all I remember being said was, “Aren’t you angry?” and his response: “Why should I be angry? It’s water under the bridge now.”
Since then, a lot has changed in my family. I spent several years roundly disengaging from my family, mostly because almost every single one of them villainized me for “tearing apart the family.” My brother confessed to everything, and when I was 15, in the short time he was in therapy (I’m really not sure what strings my parents pulled, but somehow they were able to keep CPS out of this, even though two mandatory reporters knew about both my disclosure and his confession) as a slap on the wrist or some bullshit, I was given the opportunity to meet with his therapist to ask questions about whatever I wanted to know. Would that I had that chance when I was 20... but the playing field was always tilted, and I was always the victimized child who was too precocious and proud to point out that I was the child. In any case, my abuse by my brother implicated several other older boys who I estimated numbered 5: his therapist said 12.
In any case, like I said, things have changed since then. I moved away to college at 17, and after spending the most destructive summer of my life at home the following year, having been completely blindsided by learning that my (then 24-year-old) brother moved (out of the apartment my parents financed along with all of his other needs when I gave them an ultimatum two years prior and) right back into my parents’ house, I never went back. I visited under the condition that he would be gone every 3-5 years or so, which continues today, but not before I busted ass to demonstrate that I would never have to come “home,” never again crawl to them for help—that I didn’t even need to speak to them in a year, and there was nothing they could do about it.
In that time, I noticed things began to rapidly change. By the time I was about 22, the people who had mercilessly berated me for supposedly ruining our family suddenly began to vent—oh yes, vent—to me that my brother was, in fact, a total piece of shit human incapable of remorse, empathy, compassion... anything but totalistic selfishness. As I recently told my fiancé, it was bittersweet. It felt like I had been holding a pile of shit in my hand, up to a light, and telling them, “Look at this shit,” and being completely ignored for 6 years, then having those same people come back with the exact same piece of shit in their hand and saying, “Simon, did you know this is shit?”
I say all this to paint a rough picture of what I was asking when I asked about my father’s anger and to illustrate my abiding bitterness and resentment for how I was treated by the adults around me. All of these people who harangued me are at least 13 years my senior.
I’m listening to the podcast Believed, which I am trying very hard to take in bites instead of swallowing it whole, a show about the serial child rapist (Doctor) Larry Nassar. In the second to last episode, “Finale: the Reckoning,” Kyle Stephens, whose family was ludicrously close with the Nassars and who was abused from the ages of 6-12 and who disclosed her abuse to disbelieving parents—one a very angry father who interrogated her about her “lies”—tells about what happened when her father finally believed her story around 10 years later.
It occurs to me, and I genuinely never forget, that I am lucky in the sense that my brother never denied my story, which first trickled out in very vague statements. In spite of his confession, my mother once accused me of lying, even though she was a social worker who knew I had been sexually abused (all of the signs were there) and had been raging at me for at least a year, wildly pointing her finger at every convenient suspect. When it was her son, her head went straight in the sand, and I later learned that she and my father took my broad strokes initial disclosure to mean that the abuse was somehow “not so bad.” After I figured this out, my breakdown began, finally culminating into a full fledged shit-hitting-every-fan, a process which included my writing extraordinarily detailed first person accounts of memories that I honestly wrote while blacked out as if having some cross between a flashback and a possessed trance writing experience.
In that episode of Believed, Kyle Stephens talks about when her father changed. He believed her, and he constantly offered her the space to say whatever it was that she needed, as angrily and candidly as she liked, while he simply listened and validated her.
In the past 6 years—I’m 28–my parents have radically changed, especially in the past 2 years. Our relationship has massively improved to a point that I thought it never would. But I’m still angry, and they keep saying they want to get closer. At this point, though, with nothing said between us about my trauma for the past decade, I think we’ve hit a wall. In the past, I was happy with the wall. I reinforced it. I was ice cold, always. But now that I have become substantially closer to my parents, and they have demonstrated a capacity for change well beyond any expectations, I worry about their mortality. I was adopted when they were 40 and 41; that means they are about 70 now. Particularly my father has demonstrated a full court press to build some relationship with me, as we were never close the way I was with my mother, even though I have spent the decade recognizing that she too was my abuser in many non physical ways that continue to haunt me far more than my brother.
This episode... speaks my greatest wishes. I’m getting married this year. I have always been disgusted by the idea of walking arm in arm with my father to the proverbial altar. And he has told me explicitly over the past year that he wants us to be closer. My therapist had a running joke about my story, that she would never know I grew up with a father if I hadn’t said so in the beginning, because he never made it into my narrative. There are many reasons for this, but the fact of it now is that he is mostly a ghost in my life because I have designed it that way.
I worry that they will die before I have the chance to confront them, especially my father. My mother and I at least had it out over the years in messy bouts with months or years of fallout. By the time I could even begin to address my relationship with my father as an issue, I think I was just about out of steam, worn down from years of fighting to stay gone while trying to advance both my healing and my life, my career, my relationships here and now with peers.
I want to open the door to him using this episode as the launch point, but it’s like aiming a cannon in the dark at a snow drift laden mountainside: I don’t know whether the blow will land in deafening silence or cause a catastrophic avalanche.
So here I am, writing out my story, pointing people to the podcast or dredging it up for those who have listened. I know too well how destructive it is to ask for validation, let alone to hope for it or god forbid expect it, and I’m not sure what I will do if it’s fruitless. But he’s practically begging for the chance at a real connection, and at this stage in his life, I think we’re both worried there isn’t much time left to pussyfoot around the elephant.
Any feedback or support is greatly appreciated.
