My Dear Classmates,
I want to write this letter to you for several reasons. I want to share my story with you because I think you deserve to hear it and because I have a perspective that I hope will be helpful to you. This comes from our class discussion following the movie we watched Wednesday. In the discussion I said that if you hadn't lived in a domestically violent relationship you wouldn't be able to understand what it is like to try and survive every day. I want you to know that I understand your anger at the father in the film, I truly do, but as social workers we have to rise above our anger to see the picture in its entirety and I hope my story will help you do that.
After my divorce I was in an emotionally abusive relationship for eight years and my son lived with me. It didn't start out that way, but it didn't take too long before the red flags started to show and I ignored them. It's difficult to describe how warped your thinking becomes in an abusive relationship because it happens slowly and insidiously. If you enter into a relationship with an abuser your thinking is already warped, I know mine was. It's common for people like me to have had abusive childhoods, which I did. I had little self-worth, no self love, and I desperately wanted to be loved by someone because I had never been consistently loved in my life and that's the only love I knew how to get.
The person I fell in love with made me feel beautiful and amazing in a way I had never felt before. He seemed to understand me and take me into consideration like no one else. He was kind and patient with my son, in the beginning, and kind and patient with me and I became addicted to that love in a very real sense; I lived for it. It's not an over-statement to say I was addicted. I would have done anything to experience that love, just like a drug addict would do anything for a fix, because I felt that I needed it like I needed air to breathe.
Eventually little things started to cause fights, like where I was standing in the grocery store aisle, how I was driving, if I woke up grumpy; little things. The fights became consistently out of proportion to the situation and I thought if I could just make the changes he wanted everything would be okay. The cycle of abuse began. We had our honeymoon periods, then tension would start to build, and then there would be the explosion. Afterwards he would be remorseful, apologetic, affectionate and kind, and the honeymoon period would start all over again.
As time went on the explosions became more violent and more frequent. He started targeting my son, indirectly. The last two years we fought almost constantly and my son could hear it and was sometimes the target of his anger. I kept trying to do everything he wanted, the way he wanted and tried to make my son behave the way he wanted because I believed if we just did everything right the fighting would stop and everything would go back to that honeymoon period; but the things that would set him off were unpredictable and changed constantly. There was no way I could do anything right in his eyes because the problem wasn't with me, but I couldn't see it.
There were times when I thought about leaving, but I didn't feel that I could because I didn't have the money and moving in with my parents would have been an equally abusive relationship. Things got really bad. He became paranoid and messed with the locks so that there was only one way in and out of the house so he could hear if I left or when I came home. I went almost nowhere alone, if I spoke to my family he would get angry and going to see my brother who lived just down the street from me caused huge explosions.
I became very depressed and I found out later that my son had contemplated running away and committing suicide. I knew it was bad but I still couldn't leave. I thought that by trying to make him happy I was protecting my son. See, that's the warped thinking I was talking about. You become afraid that doing anything that might make the abuser mad will only make the abuse worse, so you keep trying and keep trying and it never stops. I had no dignity, no self-respect, and by that point I figured no one would ever love me. All of the value I could see in myself was dependent on him seeing it in me. If we broke up I felt that I would disappear, that I would be nothing and so I stayed.
It's true that I failed my son, just like that father failed his children. I can say that openly because I have owned it and I continue to work daily to repair my relationship with my son and to atone for not protecting him. I thought I was protecting him and I was afraid if we left that things would just get worse. That's the thing about having children in an abusive household. The non-abusing parent does all of these crazy things to try and placate the abuser because they think if they do that they will protect their children. What we don't know is that there is no way we can protect our children or ourselves because we never know what is going to set off the abuse. We aren't thinking clearly.
That's the point our speaker was trying to make Wednesday with the story he shared about that lady. Why did she leave her kids? Because at that point she had hit survival mode and she wasn't capable of making rational decisions. That's what survival mode does to you when you live in it day after day. I compare it to trying to run through a minefield without a map and with live ammunition flying over your head. You keep your head low, you try not to set off any mines, all the while knowing that the odds are you're going to get hit with a bullet or step on a mine and set off an explosion. That's what every single day is like; it never ends. You don't have the ability to think about anything else, because it's survival at that point. That's what it was like for me.
I guarantee you that the mother from the movie was abusing the father; abusers rarely discriminate between victims. In this case the kids got the brunt of the abuse and in mine I got the brunt of the abuse, but everyone ends up trying to survive a really horrible situation. That doesn't make what the father did right or okay, but when we start judging a parent about what they are doing or aren't doing we are judging them by our standards and we aren't looking at the whole picture systematically.
When you look at a non-abusing parent who has failed to protect their children I hope you will look at them with the eyes of a social worker. The eyes that are open wide enough to take the whole picture in. Those kids are really going to need your help because the non-abusing parent just isn't capable of helping them at that point; that's why we're there. But if we really want to help this family we have to help the parents too; the whole system has to be fixed.
That non-abusing parent is going to need your help because they are going to have to make the journey from self-loathing to self-love if they're ever going to be a functional parent, and it's a long, hard walk; they can't do it alone. They'll need a lot of therapy so recommend a good therapist for them because they are going to have to rebuild themselves from the ground up and the only thing they're going to have left are the tattered remnants of dignity and hope, which you might have to show them.
We can hate the horrible things that parents do to their children, but let's hate those things in an educated way that understands that the family is a system and when a system is sick, everyone is a victim to it. Everyone needs help to fix it and that is a big part of our job; giving not just the children, but the parents resources to fix the situation. Hopefully they can, but if they can't it's important that we understand that maybe they are just too broken down, have too little left, have no hope left and only despair.
I've been there. I know how hard it is to get back up from that point and start moving forward. Even feeding the cat seems impossible. I would not be the person I am today if everyone who knew my story judged me as a failure and walked away. I was lucky to have and find people who cared enough about me to understand where I was as a person and why I did the things I did. They didn't judge me; they could have. They didn't get paid to help me, but they helped me anyway and through their eyes I began to see a person who could have self-respect, dignity and self- love and I began to build that person. Do you see why one of our core values is the dignity and respect of every person? Because if you don't have dignity and respect then it is very difficult to even continue living, much less make things better. And sometimes the only place you can find dignity and self-respect is through the eyes of another until you can see it for yourself.
We're going to get angry, I get angry but I try to make my anger an educated anger. One in which I become angry at the environmental factors that helped create the situation because when I do that, I can help. We can't change people, but maybe if we can change the environment in which they live they'll have a little more room and a few more tools to change themselves.
I'm a different person today. I still wake up every morning facing the reality that I did not protect my child; I'll never get over that. Instead of beating myself up though, what I do is remind myself that I was doing all I was capable of doing at that time and if I could have done better I would have. It's not an excuse, it's not a platitude; I know where I was then and why. I know what I was capable of doing and what I couldn't do and all I could do was survive the best way I knew how.
Those of us who have wronged our children don't need judgment. I guarantee we judge ourselves more harshly and more personally than anyone else ever could. Any external voice of judgement is drowned out by the internal monologue of self-flagellation we have going on all the time, until we begin to do our work. I don't judge myself anymore, I accept what I have done and I take responsibility for it every day but I will always be sad about it. I respect myself now, I love myself now, I smile and laugh more, and I have good people in my life. My life is better now than it has ever been but that's because I was willing to do the work and I had people to help me.
I hope you take this letter as it is intended, not as judgment over your reactions Wednesday but as a different set of eyes to look through. The more we learn the wider our eyes open; and the wider our eyes are open the more we can see.
With deepest respect,
Christi
