When everything you considered normal becomes absurd
Like many children, I thought my upbringing was normal. It was normal for mum and dad to be separated, and to be pulled from your friends every weekend to see the other part of your family. It was normal to be used as ammunition in a divorce. It was normal to have your pants pulled down so you could get your naked ass spanked in public and to get a slap across the face for the crime of ‘answering back’. It was normal to be threatened with an autism tests, just as much as it was normal to not be trusted, to be scapegoated, to not have boundaries, to be intimately kissed and fondled…There was always an “I love you,” around the corner and occasionally a placating reward (with the implicit threat of being called ungrateful if I ever ‘answered back’ or complained).
You don’t really see this day-to-day stuff in other families so you don’t have anything to compare it to, if anything you assume that’s how other families do it too and they don’t talk about it either, and you’re a fucking kid so you want to play outside and play games and enjoy your friends’ company, because it’s actually fun and you don’t have to worry. Even if your best friend punches you in the face, it’s not the same as your step dad doing it because you cried and woke him up. You’ll be best friends again before the day is over.
With that said, there’s a long list of things that I considered ‘normal’ and subsequently forgot about (or more realistically, repressed) during my childhood that I imagine any compassionate observer would consider downright abusive. Memories would come back and therapists would find a new label for my suffering or otherwise hint at them: clinical anxiety, clinical depression, bipolar disorder, PTSD, attachment issues, abandonment, trauma, closet homosexuality (…seriously). By and large the therapy was helpful despite being occasionally too eager to give a name for what was essentially a shitty childhood, or becoming too hung up on one perceived diagnosis when the underlying issue was elsewhere.
This is an incredible difficulty with mental health and therapeutic processes. You can identify a broken leg or a particular virus or infection quite easily based on the symptoms you observe, without needing to give your doctor any more info besides what you did for that to happen and what kind of pain you’re feeling. When it comes to mental health the conclusion your therapist will arrive at depends entirely on what you choose to share, and there is such an overlap between the various symptoms you present that you can’t really trust that suicidal thinking automatically means depression, or mood swings automatically mean a personality disorder.
You might never know for sure what it really is when it comes to your mind, and the root cause will rarely be as simple as falling off a bicycle or eating an undercooked chicken. Generally you will have to dig through all kinds of things you don’t seem to remember, all the way back to your childhood, to find the source of your problems, and it will likely take more than one skilled professional to help you get there without reliving it all over again.
This is kind of what it was like to spend five years with various therapists to process the fact I was adopted at birth, realising that after an amazing spurt of progress my condition actually started to get worse in the latter two years. Nobody knew, not even me, that I might have dealt with that well enough but actually had something different on my plate, because you can’t imagine a rootier cause than being born and losing your mother. So it was that my own awareness was leading my therapist down the wrong path and, despite talking about how it felt like to be a growing child and how I remembered being treated, it still fit the same adoption narrative.
Imagine the feeling when someone with a fresh approach and perspective turns that theory upside down and presents you a new and, to your surprise, completely obvious alternative and that, maybe, that childhood upbringing wasn’t so normal at all. The therapist looks in horror at those moments you describe in a kind of detached state, almost laughing at the absurdity of being undressed and spanked in a supermarket café or scared to death by the sound of someone stomping up the stairs and to your bedroom door, because you grew out of crying over it decades before and it never registered as being fucked up. To call this frightening is an understatement; it calls your entire life so far into question and while it’s ultimately reassuring to see that there is actually a way to move forward from this point, to get over that original obstacle on your path, it is not a happy moment.
They’re terrified as you make excuses to justify that abuse, to deny that it actually was abuse — like that abuse is still the reason you are where you are, and they did bring you up in relative comfort, and they weren’t perfect either, other kids probably had it worse, etc. So you had to be grateful for that to the point where you couldn’t raise the abuse as a problem.
And then, the realisation that all your trust issues, your neediness, your shame, your sadness, your fears… all of those things that you thought were depression or autism or some kind of disorder…it wasn’t that you were born with them, or that it’s ‘who you are’ and you’re screwed for life. It was that you had only just begun to process what actually happened all those years ago. It’s overwhelming.
I’m not sure what motivated me to share something like this, except for the sad fact that I am definitely not in any sort of minority when it comes to childhood abuse in all the forms it takes, and that there are certainly many others out there still convinced that they’re mentally ill, that it’s a part of their identity, and not just a consequence of their past experiences. And for me this is doubly important to help avoid a sort of victimhood, where your authentic self gets pushed aside so all of the labels can take the stage and perpetuate a tragic myth: that your life isn’t yours to take control of, it’s your mental illness’.
