Normalizing Abuse, or Teaching Your Children How to Breathe Water

When you grow up in an abusive family, you don't know what's normal.  You're being told every day that what you're living, how the family interacts, this is real life, this is normal.  

It's like the traditional metaphor of the frog that is dropped into boiling water versus cold water.  The frog dropped in the boiling water will jump the fuck out of there.  But if the water is cold at first, the same frog will stay while the water gets hotter and hotter.  

Being raised by abusive people raises your tolerance for hot water. Until you step out into the world, you don't even know what cool water feels like.  You never realize you've been drowning until you breathe real air for the first time.  

When I was growing up, my parents instinctively used a lot of techniques to keep us from thinking anything was wrong.  Nothing could ever be wrong with our family.  Our parents were perfect.  Our reality didn't matter.  Their mythology of our perfect, normal, non-abusive family was the only reality that existed.   

Not allowing us to complain was a huge time-saver for them.  If I had a complaint about my dad, I went to my mom, who immediately tightened up her lips and argued with me about how my complaints were invalid, my dad had a hard-knock life, and I needed to show a little appreciation for all of his hard work.  "Look at the life you have!  How dare you complain about your wonderful life!"  If I had a complaint about my mom, I was shit out of luck, because my mom was PERFECT and unassailable and my dad didn't talk about feelings, ever.  If I had a complaint about school, I had done something wrong and should be dressing better, looking better, and being more social, getting my nose out of my books.  I was bullied every day for three years of school, my parents knew all about it, and they did nothing.  My mom later said, "Oh, we should have home schooled you."  Oh great!  More time spent with my parents!  Brilliant idea!  That was one time I was retroactively grateful for their utter neglect.  

Jokes were an easy way to normalize their abuse.  If someone voiced a complaint, which was rare, because, y'know, see above, the melodramatic reply was always, "Oh you poor baby!  You're so abused!" This was always said in front of the whole family, and like a ritual, everyone would join in, poking fun until the complaining party gave in and acted out the rest of the script:  "You're right!  It's so awful being in this family!  I'll have to call the authorities!"  Then everyone could laugh and go back to pretending we were the  perfect family, and wondering inside what was wrong with them. 

If something bad actually happened, the only way to make it okay was to make a joke about it, a family story that could be told over and over until it became downright hilarious, losing all of its negativity, killing the truth in the actual experience.  

My dad yelled all the time.  He was a veteran of the Vietnam war, he was a veteran of his family's power struggles, and he drank a lot, off and on.  When he drank, he was funnier and talked more.  When he didn't drink, he was tenser and more likely to snap.  No matter what, he yelled and threatened and slammed things and scared us.  When you're a kid, no one is bigger than your dad.  Fear becomes instinctive after a few hard spankings, and you'll jump at the mere thought of him coming home.  "What is messy that needs to be cleaned up?  What do I need to fix to make him not yell?"  They're not even thoughts, they're just streams of panic running through your mind as you race through the house.  There's no veteran's payout for the PTSD you incur while you survive your dad's PTSD.  Instead, your reward is a string of abusive relationships that you have been trained to survive, suffer, and believe to be love.  If you're really lucky, you'll learn from each one, and eventually live into a better model of what love really is.  If you're not, well, you're still out there, surviving, using the skills learned on your own battlefield.

When I was 16, I was getting stronger.  I was only a year from leaving home for college, and I could not wait to be out on my own, to find my actual home, to be somewhere I was loved and happy.  I was angry a lot.  One day, my dad yelled at me, and for the very first time, I yelled back at him.  We had a brief little shouting match, and I stormed upstairs to my room.

I'm sure that to my dad, this was an Important Moment in my development, that he had been waiting for me to yell back at him because it meant I had become a Strong Person, and now qualified as his twisted idea of ready for the real world.  But to my sister, who was ten years old, this was the End of the World.  I was yelling at Dad!  In her mind, this meant war and he was going to kill me, for reals.  Terrified, she hid in the closet under the stairs until she knew I was out of the room.

For years and years, this was a Family Story, trademarked, with scripted call and response lines.  We all told this story, over and over, as though it were a hilarious anecdote.  One day I was listening to my sister tell the story, and I thought, Why is this funny?  Why do we think it's hilarious that my little sister was terrified of my dad killing me?  How is this a good thing?

I didn't tell that story again, not in my family's presence.  But it's a good example of making abuse seem normal, making it seem like it's just another quirk in an interesting family's history.  "This is how you earn your stripes around here," is the attitude.  "Don't worry about giving any respect, because you're not going to get any."  My dad always said this with hearty laughter, because it's a joke, get it?  It's funny!  We're all smart, sharp-witted, hilarious people, so take us at our word.  It's all a joke.  

There's nothing funny about being yelled at.  It's not hilarious to be terrorized.  If you build a family out of fear and terror, and pretend it's all okay and normal and perfect, it will eventually fall apart.  When a drowning person draws breath, they don't spit out the air and dive back underwater.  They take another breath and stay afloat.  Don't be surprised when they reach the shore and never look back.