I Had To Learn What Abuse Is

From young, as I think is the case for most people, I instinctively understood injustice.

I understood it enough that when my mother gave me an ultimatum at 13, demanding that I choose between her and my father, I walked away from her, even though in many respects I knew she was the better parent (clothing, shoes, opportunities with respect to education and extra curricular’s – these were never lacking in my mother’s home).

Although there had been many other abusive events in my childhood too, these hadn’t factored into my decision to walk away though.

I did not, for example, take into account the many beatings that had been inflicted across my childhood — with a belt, wooden spoon or hair brush.

I knew that when my mother ripped my sister’s hair from her head while brushing it and broke a hairbrush over her bum, that it was grossly unfair, but I didn’t have the word ‘abuse’ to describe it.

When I was 12, and my mother attempted to beat an answer out of my sister and I after one of her rings went missing, however damaging and dystopian the event was to my interior life, I knew I simply had to get on with things.

I of course resented her abuse of power, but I didn’t have the words to describe her actions for what they were, or the power, knowledge or resources to do very much at all about my situation.

These things were of course highly damaging to my childhood self though — I didn’t understand why the person meant to protect me, would behave like this.

When I reflect on my being a top performer at the start of school and the deterioration in my capacities around events like this, I feel sad for that little girl who had to integrate these betrayals into her identity on her own — betrayals perpetrated by a core attachment figure — and without the emotional support needed to manage the traumas for what they were.

My mother wasn’t someone I could go to for hugs or love either — emotional neglect was part of the package.

Still, she was my mother. And while my father liked his role as “Sunday dad” (something my mother was accurate in her derision on), I instinctively understood that he wasn’t a serious option for refuge either.

The injustice of being told to choose between my parents was a striking act of abuse though – one that even at 13, I understood I couldn’t simply move on from.

I couldn’t disassociate from the act or integrate it into my identity and understanding of the world, as I did with other acts of abuse, because it meant losing one of my other crucial attachment figures if I did.

The injustice of it was too clear.

My mothers perspective is that she was “at her wits end” trying to parent my sister and I with my father’s continued influence undermining her ability to do so effectively.

As a mum of four myself now, and one who has endured parenting with someone far more toxic, I call rubbish.

Sacrifice is what motherhood is.

Interfering in attachment relationships for anything short of abuse, is never okay, and is abuse itself.

Most of my mother’s other abusive actions were able to go under the rug because she was a core attachment figure too— one I needed, however harmful her behaviours were.

That’s the insidious thing about child abuse at the hands of a parent too — as vulnerable children, most of us still love those who abuse us, or at least need them.

My sister suffered the most

My younger sister suffered the most from the estrangement that followed my mother’s ultimatum.

She began self harming, and at 13, attempted to kill herself.

They’re simple words on paper, but the details and horror of those events haunted me into adulthood.

Even as my sister destroyed a hospital room while in a psychotic state, my mother wrote off her actions as mere ‘hysterics’ and ‘attention seeking’.

Perhaps this was an attempt to guard against harm to her own psyche, but it was deplorable conduct.

When a child suffers, their parent should be there with empathy and understanding. It’s not a complicated thing — when I look to my own children, I can’t imagine not being there in the ways my sister desperately needed, whatever else might be going on in my own life.

My mother’s failures were again highly neglectful and abusive and likely perpetuated the mental health issues that followed my sister into adulthood.

Accountability is not something my mother can cope with though.

I suspect that’s a consequence of the psychological abuse and related trauma that she likely suffered herself as a child — although never discussed with me directly, the grandmother that I loved (her mother), could be very cruel too.

Normalisation of abuse

Until the ultimatum, acts of abuse were just a normal part of my childhood — one I had no power to redress, by virtue of my lack of power as a child.

I did confront my mother about my step father’s behaviours more than once though.

His kicking and screaming at us when my mother wasn’t there, chucking a remote at my sisters head, and pulling my sister backwards off her bed by her hair, were things I believed I could complain about — perhaps because he wasn’t my father.

My mother normalised these behaviours though, later telling us that she “dealt with things” after we were in bed, so as to present a united parenting front – this is a means of hiding abuse through mechanisms of authority and control, that I now know is common.

When I was 14, she actually tricked me into a meeting too (after we’d been estranged for a year), where she threatened to take my sister on an overseas beach holiday without me, if I didn’t recant allegations against my stepfather.

Similarly, when I told my grandmother about these events, my grandmother would make dismissive comments about his not being our stepfather (he wasn’t technically married to my mother), rather than engaging with the complaint, and make it clear I was fussing over nothing.

Much as I loved my grandmother, I again suspect this was a reflection of how her own children were likely raised, with not dissimilar conditions— to acknowledge my step fathers behaviours might mean she’d need to acknowledge her own.

My mother also told us that if it came to a choice between our step father and us, she’d pick him, because he was going to be around long after we left. Apparently that weighed in as more important than her relationships with the people she’d brought into this world (and should have recognised she had a duty to above all else). Ironically, they separated when I was 17.

In many respects, the physical abuse did the least of the harm. The nasty comments (like that above), screaming, lack of emotional support and coercive and controlling behaviours, were far more harmful in the longer run.

Inflicted on to my sister’s and my developing identities, was a sense of chaos, insecurity and anxiety, which (at least for me), has never really left – no matter the coping mechanisms my sister and I also developed to survive.

With the benefit of hindsight, again I suspect this was inter-generational, with my mother, like many abusers, simply reenacting traumas that had been inflicted in her own childhood

Events in my fathers home — where we spent less time and where his role in our upbringing was less substantial — were less severe, but had similar elements.

Abuse was therefore normalised in my childhood.

This meant that I accepted other awful things that happened to me in my teens as “normal” too, even as I instinctively sought to escape them.

I knew that when my mother sought to gain custodial rights to my daughter, when I was 19, that I damn-well was not going to take that lying down (we haven’t had a relationship since), but I also did not know that the appropriate labels for this behaviour were coercive control and abuse too.

Re-enacting childhood trauma in adult relationships

When I was 19, and like many survivors of childhood trauma, I also met someone worse than my mother — a man in his mid 30s, whom I married just a year later.

Even as I was leaving that relationship, at age 23, I didn’t have a grasp on the abusive nature of his actions, or the language to articulate it in those terms.

I knew I wasn’t prepared to accept being pushed into walls and screamed at, and eventually worked out that I wasn’t prepared to have my life limited by someone who clearly wanted excessive control over it.

In the years after we separated, as he stalked me, broke into my apartment, and made violent threats, I continued to offer empathy for his obvious hurt over the loss of our relationship.

When he attempted to push me down some stairs, two years after I left, I knew it was appropriate to threaten to call the police if he didn’t get some help for his “violent impulses” — but it was only years later that I learnt the language needed to actually describe his behaviours for what they were.

Throughout most of my 20s, and even as I qualified as a barrister (court-room lawyer), although I generally learned to set good boundaries in my life (warding off behaviours I considered to be unacceptable), I didn’t wholly or fully understand the earlier harms inflicted on me or how they were continuing to trouble my life and decision making.

When I sought a protection order against my ex husband, in 2014, because of how scary his behaviour had become, I was only just beginning to grasp what ‘psychological abuse’ was — in spite of my education.

I was 28 by then and beginning to confront the demons of my past.

My new and supportive husband, who I’d been with for a few years by then, was willing to just let me talk. From there, I was able to begin making sense of all that had occurred across my life.

While I knew what had happened to me was wrong, I hadn’t realised the extent of the shame and anxiety I’d been carrying around.

A decision by my mother and grandmother (who’d hated my ex husband until they teamed up after our divorce) to give evidence against me in the protection order proceedings, was a final awakening in many respects.

Forever losing those relationships (although I did write to my grandmother seeking accountability and reconciliation first) meant I had to face the traumas of my past, or risk losing my sense of identity.

Many people I know, only manage such steps with the help of therapy.

For others, I know it is simply easier to accept the abuse and coercive controlling behaviour, rather than confront it.

For others again, I know they shut down a part of themselves, with that suppression then often causal to problems in other relationships.

My process (at least by that time) was to confront things — I was only able to do so though, because I had the right support in my new relationship.

With that said, I still struggled to articulate the extent of the harms done to me or to label them effectively.

If I had stayed silent — which is where most abuse thrives — my relationships might have been saved.

I wouldn’t be a whole person though and I wouldn’t have the language to know and to tell others that these kinds of actions amount to abuse and you shouldn’t tolerate them.

On the path to healing

Towards the end of 2016, I quit my legal career and went searching for more answers.

I discovered the term ‘coercive control’ and (building on knowledge garnered during my 2014 protection order proceedings), came to fully understand that psychological abuse encompasses a pattern of behaviour that includes all those small harmful acts of humiliation and intimidation, that are often so normalised in families and society more generally, and which have the effect of creating long term harm in a persons psyche.

In 2017, while doing a work training course on “consent” in sexual relationships, (for a job related to sexual violence), I had the horrific realisation that a lot of the sex between my ex-husband and I, had been coerced, with our final sexual contact — months after we’d separated — definitively amounting to rape.

The gross feelings and shame I had around admitting my vulnerability in those respects, took months to move on from.

In the meantime, my ex husband was continuing to file an endless stream of vexatious applications in the family court, which made healing doubly difficult.

The family court, made up of predominantly boomer-aged judges who have little understanding of things like ‘coercive control’ and ‘psychological abuse’, created further harm, rather than helping.

Accountability under those circumstances, was never a possibility and in many respects, the feelings of judgement and injustice I walked away with, were even more damaging than the abuse I’d experienced at the hands of either my mother or ex husband.

Heading overseas for 6 months, assisted in creating the feelings of safety I needed to continue processing things.

Unfortunately a return to my home country meant a return to stalking by my ex-husband.

Even as I returned to my old university, to further research I was doing on family violence and abuse, hiding my life and family’s address became more necessary than ever.

As the family court handed my address over to my ex once more, it was only by moving cities and taking extensive measures to protect our whereabouts, that I began to feel safer again.

It was there that I formally began therapy too and had the formal confirmation of something I already instinctively knew — I was suffering from PTSD.

Difficulty finding understanding

Like many survivors of abuse, the traumas of my life have affected my ability to communicate about the things that have happened to me.

Our societies also have a tendency to gaslight survivors, through the minimisation or denial of acts of abuse or violence, which makes it doubly difficult to raise them.

Boomers are the worst in this respect — even those most well intentioned within my circles, tend to express discomfort, rather than empathy in the first instance, where I have mentioned snippets of what has happened across my life.

I suspect (as with my earlier mentioned grandmother), that to acknowledge and offer genuine empathy for the wrongs done to me, would mean to look at the actions either of themselves or those close to them.

In contrast to the boomers, I’ve found people of my own generation and younger, are generally much more open to discussion on these issues, with empathy generally the first recourse.

A large part of this will be to do with what was and was not acceptable in the respective eras in which we were raised.

In 2020, while enrolled in a Masters of Sociology, I learned for example, that “domestic violence” was a term only created in the 1970s, following pressure from the feminist movements of the time.

That’s the era in which boomers were coming of age, but the knowledge and legal repercussions for such behaviours have taken decades to formally consolidate since.

A clear example of this is that until the 1980s, in most western countries, you could still rape and beat your wife without legal repercussion.

Into the 1990s, police rarely investigated violence within relationships, even after such behaviours had been criminalised, often referring to them as mere ‘domestics’.

Right through my childhood (and still in many states in the US today), the law also allowed for the physical “discipline” of children.

Because of how recent this history is, abuse continues to be normalised for many, perhaps most — reflected also in how boomers (in particular), tend to minimise such behaviour and generally fail to engage in or appropriately acknowledge the continuing harms of such.

Abuse also thrives in the silence it has generally been accorded — something only now truly beginning to be challenged by younger generations.

There have been glimmers of hope in more recent times though, particularly as young people have shown a greater willingness to acknowledge abuse for what it is and demand accountability.

Harry & Megan, young women who have been willing to take on high profile abusive men despite the conservative backlash, popular social media feminism, the #MeToo movement — they are all examples of a world changing for the better.

For further discussion on accountability, do take a look at another I wrote on this issue too:

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