TRIGGER WARNING: This is a frank discussion of domestic violence and abuse which makes references to child abuse, serious mental illness, complex trauma, and self-harm. Please use your discretion wisely.
According to Refuge, incidents of domestic male violence and femicide during this lockdown have increased from an average of 2 per week to 1 every 36 hours, or over 4 per week. If you can, please consider donating whatever you’re able to their services to assist women and children fleeing male pattern violence, and others suffering at the hands of their partners.
I will be donating £36. One pound for every hour that a woman has left to live as you read this. For many women, that time has already passed, and still more have even less time left. Your donation could help a woman and her children to #StopTheClock.
90% of the violence that occurs is witnessed by very young children. Between 1997 and 2001, between the ages of 7 and 11, I was trapped in my childhood home with an abusive male, and I both witnessed, and was the victim of, domestic male violence. This is both a stream of consciousness exercise in processing my feelings about that – which I will likely be engaged in for the rest of my life – and a testimony of the lifelong impact that witnessing and experiencing domestic violence has on very young children.
I hope it helps.
UK GOVERNMENT GUIDELINES ON SEEKING SUPPORT: https://www.gov.uk/guidance/domestic-abuse-how-to-get-help
REFUGE CHARITY: https://donate.refuge.org.uk/page/51133/donate
WOMEN'S AID: https://www.womensaid.org.uk/
If you are in the UK and need to contact the police without otherwise being able to communicate, press 5 twice on your keypad and leave the line open. The operators are trained to recognise this as a distress call, and will trace it to send officers to support you.
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It happened between the ages of probably no earlier than 8 and no later than 11. It was physical. Emotional. Psychological. Obviously, when you’re a child, you’re completely trapped. There’s nowhere else to go, so that compounds everything, really. You’re a prisoner in your own home. Quite a lot of the time, it came down to just not being allowed to be a child, because children doing silly, childish things embarrassed or humiliated him, and then, of course, any negative emotion was translated into uncontrolled, violent rage. Crying about it made me gay, clearly. Heads he won, tails I lost.
Over a long enough time period, all of your self-esteem is destroyed. It’s lost on a lot of people that being allowed to be a child is an essential part of actually becoming a functioning adult, and if that gets denied to you, then you lose all sense of self. More to the point, you fail to develop properly at all. You learn to live in fear. To never say no, to never talk back, or defend yourself. You develop the worst coping mechanisms; assuming that it’s your fault, that you did something wrong. You learn that anything that is not deliberate, clear affection must be some sort of anger or resentment towards you. You have no ability to recognise or set boundaries, your social competency suffers, and you wind up with terrible, debilitating social anxieties. Panic attacks. Depression. Anxiety. Emotional instability. Personality disorders. Attachment disorders. Deep, complex, lifelong psychiatric trauma in general. All of which I do have, and have to deal with now.
You so often develop complexes that come out in the most debilitating ways – this man was a heavy drinker, so alcohol became this horrifying taboo that paralysed me with fear. I once had a panic attack because somebody offered me a beer at a house party when I was young. Making friends or socialising during university was a struggle. I ended up very isolated amongst people my own age, even before university, simply because they had been allowed to grow up where I hadn’t. I very quickly developed a bad reputation as disturbed weirdo, frankly. It didn’t help that I shut myself away on purpose, out of fear that if anybody ever discovered “the truth” about me, they would hate me and abandon me. Of course, I was also pathologically desperate for approval at the same time, and as we all know, desperation and neediness is very attractive to everybody. That certainly helped with making friends. Altogether, not ideal in my small town university, or anywhere, really.
Quite apart from that, I’ve pissed away years meaning to get around to doing things I still haven’t done. Projects never started. Piles of books unread, games unplayed, films unwatched. It sounds banal, but between a spending addiction that arose as a coping mechanism to give me temporary mood boosts that relieved my depressive states, there is a part of me that is still left waiting for the permission to do anything by myself, to be given leave to spend my time as I please, which will never come. I’m often kicked out of short-term crisis counselling services because they don’t feel equipped to cope with the complexity of my mental health needs. Come to that, neither do long-term secondary services, which shunted me off to art therapy I never went to, I thought it’d be fucking useless – some drunken asshole spent years shouting in my face for every perceived slight and once beat me for not wearing pyjamas when it was fucking boiling at night, the first time I ever self-harmed I was 9 years old, because of that man, I only started talking to myself in the first place because the lack of anyone else to talk to drove me completely ‘round the twist, and you want me to paint shit still life? You’d get better paintings out of Hitler, and he’s dead- but…whatever, I guess.
The thing is, any child psychologist will tell you that traumatised children often get ‘stuck’ developmentally at whatever age the trauma occurred, and that without intervention, it’s difficult to get back on track, if at all. Between the trauma-induced developmental delays, naivety, and the learned lack of boundaries, you’re wide open for even more abuse and general advantage-taking, which then compounds whatever trauma you already had. Domino effect. Complex trauma isn’t one instance of cause and effect, it’s a giant mess of interconnected, interacting, separately-occurring traumas at all points in life, feeding off of each other, including the “afterwardsness” of realising that what happened was abuse, and having that realisation in and of itself become something which traumatises you further. I can’t have been older than 11 when all the abuse stopped, and he left – I remember him crying on my nan’s shoulder and saying sorry, as if he knew he would be damned for life, and hiding under my bed from him whilst he cleared his belongings out of my room without either of us saying a word to each other, as if he knew what he did – and then, sometime after that, my uncle died very suddenly at 21, and I just…sort of… stopped. Ended up stranded on the strange seas of thought, alone, somewhere between the ages of 11 and 12. As if I’d had enough horror.
I spent years stuck there. I never got trauma therapy. Bereavement counselling, anything like that. It was all quiet whispers indoors between the adults, like I wasn’t there, no-one ever really bothered to take me to one side and say, “Christopher, what happened wasn’t normal, you’ve witnessed terrible violence, you’ve been badly abused”, like I was some sort of person who had been traumatised or anything. We do like to patronise kids, don’t we? It’s so much less hassle to just pretend they don’t understand, especially if they’re disabled. It’s an extension of that weird British masculine instinct to sweep it under the rug, keep schtum, stiff upper lip. Bizarre. I put a lot of work into my social skills over the summer after I had a good couple of complete mental breakdowns in my fresher’s year, but even with all that study and practice, I’m pretty sure I’m still way too far behind to ever fully catch up now. I’m 30, and I still feel about 23. That’s not a middle-aged Dad having a mid-life crisis joke on Facebook, I seriously mean I literally, developmentally, am probably where most 23-year-olds should be, and I’m 30. I feel like this is my life now. Perpetually falling behind everyone else, always coming off as a bit weird and needy and immature whether I want to or not. No wonder I’ve never had a girlfriend. I mean, it’s not like I’m owed one, but you know, shit is depressing.
The worst part is, and this is amongst the most difficult to admit, I’d be lying if I said that I hadn’t perpetuated abuse onto others when I was younger. That had to do with my own attachment problems and lack of boundaries. It’s long since stopped, and I’ve made a point of apologising to these people and leaving them to live their lives, but I have to live with it now, and so do they. I will regret the things I did forever. It haunts me. I keep coming back to this horrifying realisation of the destruction and damage done to so many lives, over so many years, because of what that man did to me in the first place – which he did because his father did the same to him. Sometimes, I think part of my urge to never have children is the urge to just make it all stop, forever. By the way, that doesn’t invalidate my asexuality or my decision to be childfree, there are a multitude of other reasons that are nothing to do with abuse, and if you weaponise a history of abuse to deny someone their identity, you’re a special kind of arsehole. Still, the thought does occur to me sometimes.
I hate “what do you do?” parts of conversations with new people. What am I supposed to tell them? That my psychological development is now so stunted by multiple abuses and compound traumas, and my mental health so poor, that I now can’t actually function as an adult my own age, and the DWP actually considers it a severe disability worth permanently signing me off of work over? I feel like that would thoroughly disturb most people right out of wanting to know me. Hell, *I* frighten me at the best of times.
On top of all this, I’m recently rediscovering that my *mother* is a cruel, vindictive abuser, who I haven’t spoken to since last August. So…there’s that. Frankly, I’m surprised I can even think straight most of the time.
For reference in terms of how long this has an impact, this started to happened when I was 8. I didn’t tell anybody, ever, until I ended up alone in a safe room at the age of 20. So, yeah, there…tends to be a bit a satellite delay. It will *always* have an impact from here on out, to the grave. No use denying the way of it.
..and nearly every bit of it solely from witnessing and experiencing domestic violence as a child. I have been left bereft of a huge amount of confidence or security in who I am, and it’s followed that I have led a disappointing shadow of the life that I ought to have done under better circumstances. We do, and must, talk about the women that lose their lives. We must also talk far more about how their children are robbed of so much of the lives they might have had if this had never been allowed to happen to them.
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