Do survivors of severe child abuse ever get "normal"?

In My Humble Opinion
1

Here’s a little context.

In this thread from a month ago, I discussed a story I was planning to write about a young girl who had suffered physical and sexual abuse. For various reasons I won’t go into I wrote the story earlier than I planned. Last night, at book group, a friend of mine asked to see it.

Reading it, she cried and smiled at the appropriate times, so I judged that I’d accomplished my aim. Afterwards, she asked me if I planned to write a sequel; she’d be interested to see what became of the protagonist in her twenties.

What my friend didn’t know is that this story is, in a sense, a prequel to another tale of mine; that is, when I started work on the story, I imported the protagonist from a story in which she was in her twenties and a supporting character. I didn’t mention this to my friend, though, because in the original story, the character is, shall we say, mildly fucked up: a heavy smoker and drinker with serious trust and relationship issues. Thinking about it, I realized that I tend to operate from an unconscious assumption that victims of severe child abuse, particularly starting from a young age, never get completely right. They can get functional, they can even prosper, but some wounds never heal.

That’s just my take on it, of course. Anybody think otherwise? Opinions based on research and those based on personal experience are equally welcome.

2

One book recommendation I would make is The Boy Who Was Raised as a Dog, which is about cases of abuse/neglect that a child psychiatrist treated. It’s disturbing to read at times, but I think it would give you some good insights.

3

I’ve read that book.

Honestly, I’m not trying to be a jerk (fairly difficult for me, as some people consider me the Platonic Ideal of Jerkdom), but I wasn’t looking for book recommendations. I was starting a poll; asking for humble and not-so-humble opinions. Hence the forum.

4

I think each kid handles it in their own way. Some people grow up to be kind, loving parents; others grow up to be serial killers. I don’t think any forget, and I think there is some level of abuse hangover in all victims. Sometimes it is just an internal sadness and for others it’s a firestorm that poisons nearly every aspect of their lives.

5

I am 30 and as much as I have tried to prosper, my self esteem sucks. I’d like to say that my glass is have full, but FourPaws tells me that my glass doesn’t have shit in it. I am always negative. I find negative in everything.

I am constantly second guessing what people tell because I believe there is unhidden truth. “Real Truth” or what they really want. They may say that I am pretty, but during my down times I take that as they want to get laid. Yet if I meet someone new and they don’t tell me that they think I am pretty or whatever, I automatically assumed that they aren’t attracted to me at all. Ask me to say something nice about myself and I will stare off into space for 10 minutes trying to think of something. Ask me about something negative and I can give you a laundry list in a minutes time.

I’m a negative person. It sucks because I hate being like that. I hate not having faith in myself and that as much as I know I have the power to change, I have already destine myself to fail. It boils down to; I would rather expect the bad outcome and be prepared for that then to expect or wish for the great or wonderful and be disappointed.

While being sexual abused is something I don’t like to talk about, it isn’t something that entirely remember. I’ve blocked most of that out, though with help from an older sister (and I say that sarcastically) who likes to talk about it and tries to get me to remember parts of it, I rather not. What did more damage was the “hands on” approach of my father and the constant down talking about me and what I was or am capable of. I remember every minute of that.

It’s hard to learn to believe in yourself when the people that are suppose to teach you or guide you… lead you by the hand to self destruction.

6

I guess, like everything else in life, that depens on what you mean by “normal.”

Am I functionable? Yes, I do function in society. Do I did it well? Not really.

I do work, pay my bills, stay within the law, and take care of myself. If that makes me fit into society, so be it.

7

Probably normal by your own definition, or by the definition of people whose good opinion you covet.

I wasn’t the victim long-term or systematic abuse, but there was some; I used to get strapped for wetting the bed, for example. I’m mostly functional, but I have some rage issues I work very hard to keep under control, and I’m always worried about losing that control. I’m better now than I was in college though; I had a friend back then who once told me that when we first met I scared the shit out of her, but after a few years I just made her nervous.

8

I think **Kalhoun ** hit the nail on the head. There are as many different end results as there are types of abuse inflicted on kids. I won’t go into my childhood, but I will say that some of the things I went through count as “severe abuse” – I think I have turned out fairly normal considering.

I have a few issues that very few people ever know about – such as being exceedingly claustrophobic. Most people will never realise that unless I tell them, because it only manifests in situations similar to that in which it was created. I also can’t stand night time lightning storms. Thunderstorms are fine. Lightning during the day is fine, lightning at night = me in a foul mood.

Funny enough, my sister, who went through maybe 1/10th what I did became a porn star, had a raging meth addiction and is a total nutbag. We all react differently.

I think my answer to your question is this: the people who go on to be “normal” tend to not talk much about the abuse, so you really never know who has gone through it unless they do turn out totally fucked up.

9

Much as **Litoris **posted, I won’t go into details except to say the awful stuff started before I was two years old and lasted until elementary school. I did have a fairly significant three year period in my early thirties where I sort of did a Humpty Dumpty imitation, only in my case all the King’s horses and all the King’s men did put this Humpty together again.

And much as Litoris said, most people don’t even notice where I might struggle. I intensely dislike confined spaces, and I absolutely cannot wear ear plugs at night (which would be great to block out my husband’s snoring)–there are others but you’d probably never notice them.

One area I’m pretty open about is I’m a recovering anorexic. I worked hard to identify my triggers and have been in remission so to speak for over 10 years. I’m very proud of the work I’ve done there–I choose to be open because I believe a lot more people have issues with food beyond food as fuel so when appropriate, I’ll share in the hope that others can see it’s very possible to have healthier relationships with both their bodies and their food.

10

Yes, I know what you were asking. It was just My Humble Opinion :wink: that that the book would be helpful if you hadn’t already read it, since it’s from a source a bit more authoritative than anecdotes from strangers on a messageboard (who may even make up stories just to mess with you for all you know).

11

But there are many, many people who have extremely low confidence in themselves and others who were not abused in childhood. You have no idea how you might have turned out otherwise. You might very well have been pretty much the same kind of person you are now.

A lot of it has to do with the individual, and even more to do with societal norms. For example, in a society where, say, there is on-going war and rape is very common, I think women are more likely to react to rape less tragically than in places like here, where rape is quite uncommon. If you think of something as just one of those shitty things that happens pretty frequently to people, you’re less likely to be affected long-term by it.

So it probably was when children’s discipline was much stricter and more physical, perhaps by today’s standards even considered abusive. Or when young teenaged boys had adult men as lovers. These people grew up pretty much like us, as far as we can tell from the writing, architecture, and art that has survived. So much of attitude depends on expectation.

Note: I am not therefore saying that the ill effects of abuse is all in your head!!! I am saying that in part it is a problem created by improved societal expectations.

12

This is completely anecdotal.

I had suffered physical abuse and emotional abuse myself, and as a teenager I ran away from home and was part of a community of street kids, many who had suffered far more than I had, and even more horrors than you would wish to imagine.

I had friends with addicted, abusive, alcoholic, mentally ill, cruel and/or sexually abusive parents and foster parents. I had friends who went through dozens of abusive foster homes, I knew people who never knew what love was and people who have never even had a family. On top of the childhood abuse, there was also the life of the streets, with all of the pitfalls, and potential trauma and victimization in that world.

My view is, yes!

Most everyone ended up normal, although some people take longer than most. Although it takes time to recover from both the abuse at home and/or trauma of a street life (drug addiction, rape, violence, prostitution, are just some of the potential problems), most of the friends I knew from then have completely normal lives.

When we talk about our childhood’s, and teen years, most of us consider it a rough time, and are definitely aware of how wrong the suffering we endured in our home lives was, and how messed up our parents were, as well as being very aware of the horrors we saw on the streets, but I don’t see any of of us dwell on it in day to day life, and I don’t see any of us assigning blame, or living in anger. Not one friend of mine ever wants their own children, if they have them, to go through anything even remotely like what they did, and I have never seen any behaviour from a friend to their own children that even is remotely abusive. I don’t know a single female or male friend who is currently with a partner who abuses them either (although some friends, and myself too, had at least one toxic relationship in our early 20’s).

Just like everyone else, your twenties is a time of learning how to become an adult, and my friends and I did the same thing.

Twenty years has passed now. We are now in our mid to late 30’s. Some people died, some people had/and a few still have addiction issues, some people drink too much, some have depression issues, but I would say no more of these issues than in the rest of the population. Some old friends took longer to grow up, mainly due to needed to straighten up, and quit drugs & drinking, as well as go back to school, in order to be on an even footing educationally with the rest of society. Some longer to learn to trust and learn how how love, and some took longer to get a career, but although it took time, they did it.

13

Yes, we can. More or less for varying values of “normal”.

But let me say that, from personal observation, having viewed myself as being well outside “normal” because of my personal experience and problems: “Normal” is pretty fucked up. Scratch the surface of any so-called normal person and you’ll see some pretty messed up shit. Seeing that has helped me to be a lot less critical about my own failings.

QFT. Some people are fond of saying “get over it” and responding with great force of anger to the problems of the injured. But speaking as a 46 year old man who went through hell as a child, I have to point out that to me, this kind of thing was the worst of it. I have had life-long issues with Authority Figures because the greatest authority figure in my life - my father - was my abuser. Because I never had the approval we all need as children, because I was always treated as if I was damaged (see my comments in norinew’s threads about making sure no one tells her kid that she’s “damaged”), because I was never the son my father wanted. “Get over it” is the most damned stupid thing anyone could ever say to me about it. I’m “over” it. But I will probably always have issues with others because of how I was programmed as a child.

14

It’s hard to answer this question without minimizing the real effect that repeated abuse can have on a child – there has been research done on the way that traumatic memory is sometimes chemically encoded in the brain differently than episodic memory, or the way, for PTSD-sufferers who were exposed as children to repeated traumatic events, that the identity and sense of bodily integrity is never really fully formed and basically has to be reconstructed from scratch. Someone who witnessed my situation growing up commented that I probably just grew up wired, pure adrenaline racing through my veins, every moment a survival situation. That’s pretty much it. And once you physiologically have that going, it’s hard to undo, even when your circumstances become safe.

So having said that…

Yes. Some survivors of severe child abuse are never even abnormal – fully functioning, no major emotional issues to speak of. I find that these people tend to minimize what happened–which we’re all taught is a big no-no in therapy, but it really seems to work for them a lot better than focusing on it all the time. It just depends on the person.

I came from a really fucked up childhood and emancipated at 17. I was not normal, by even the loosest definition of the term, for a long, long time. To be frank, I wasn’t even normal last year. At 18, my first semester of college, I was diagnosed with Complex-PTSD, which sucks. It took me a long time to stop focusing all the time on myself and my past and just live the life and seize all the opportunities going on around me. Personally I think I was doing really well until I started therapy and meds. That really screwed me up and kept me unnaturally focused on my condition all of the time. I had to leave school for nearly 2 years to get things back on track.

Now, nearly 9 years after the benevolent court set me free, I’m pretty normal. Not medicated, occasionally depressed and anxious, but fully functioning, thriving, and quite happy and positive. I freak out sometimes, usually things seem a lot closer and more real during certain times of the year (during the month I emancipated, for instance, I have a difficult time functioning–last fall I had a nervous breakdown and quit my job on Friday, but was back at work on Monday. That is the smallest life interruption I’ve ever had in November, so there is definitely improvement each year. I don’t know how to justify it, it’s just a hard time. There are so many flashbacks and so much grief, it’s just all suddenly there, materializing out of nowhere, in October and November. I emancipated October 17th and then… really, really bad things happened on Thanksgiving Day.)

But other than these occasional days of feeling like I’m losing my mind, I’m a very normal person. I have a full-time job and a degree, I’m applying for graduate school, I exercise regularly, and I am extremely, deliriously happy with my life. My aquaintances have no idea the issues I’ve dealt with and if you met me on the street you’d probably never guess.

I worked my everloving ass off to get here though – none of that ‘‘naturally normal’’ shit for me. It required something a lot of people tend to avoid-- taking responsibility for your own happiness. So personally I think a lot more abuse survivors would be able to find normality if they were willing to work, and also if they weren’t brainwashed by well-meaning therapists into believing their experiences make normality impossible. I in no way intend to imply that anyone who suffers from an abuse history suffers because they aren’t working hard enough – I’m just saying personally I’ve witnessed, in myself and in other situations, therapeutic trends and communities and so-forth that do much more harm than good. This is the victim culture, and it’s very hard to extract myself from at times–but it’s also very dangerous, so ultimately I mistrust it.

If I could give you one piece of advice on your writing, don’t let your character be a static victim. I’m writing a piece myself about a character making this transition from victim to active orchestrator of his own happiness, and I think that’s a compelling arc. That moment when you realize you have way more control than you ever realized you do is so totally liberating. My childhood has jack shit to do with my current life circumstances. I am surrounded by wonder. Sometimes I wonder if god (if god exists) just had things start out that way so I’d appreciate the rest of my life more.

(Ok, seriously, did I just imply I was normal? Well that’s a lie. Functioning yes, but average, typical, regular, etc? I’ve NEVER been that – given a better childhood, that was still never an option. I was born with the weird gene and I flaunt it with pride. A thousand squid kisses if you can prove me wrong! :D)

15

Sorry, but I had to add this, to clarify:

When I say I wish people were willing to work harder, I specifically mean work harder at undoing destructive behaviors and cognitive patterns. And here I blame the mental health industry more than the individuals suffering. I spent lots of years talking about my past with therapists, believing I was ‘‘working’’ (it was stressful and painful, so it must have been work!) But no, that wasn’t really the work that had anything to do with how I got better.

That work involved tedious, boring, repetitive tasks like identifying negative cognitions and correcting them with rational thought. It was systematic and task-focused, and completely undramatic. I didn’t really get a lot of sympathetic feedback, which is disappointing because naturally all humans crave attention, and I wager I crave it more than the average person. So there is nothing comforting, or emotional, or profound about CBT. No sudden flashes of insight into the deepest part of your psyche, nothing like the addictive emotional high of recounting your horror story and getting that long sought-for validation. No, it’s just work. Boring, tedious, repetitive work.

For someone with trauma, I think that it is seems counterintuitive to create so much structure and regiment your activity, because the inside of your head is emotional chaos and that’s what feels comfortable. So I can definitely see why someone wouldn’t want to do it. I also note that my psychodynamic therapist looked at me like I had sprouted an extra head when I told her that’s what I wanted to do. ‘‘Oh,’’ she said, ‘‘We don’t really know how to do that with trauma.’’

But that’s really what worked for me. It might not work for everyone, but if you’ve been in talk therapy for years and you’re still banging your head against the wall, why not give it a shot?

/PSA/hijack

16

I agree completely. Telling people that they’re damaged and can never be normal is far more damaging than anything that has ever happened to those people. It is not only counter-productive, but I hope that one day we come to regard it as actionable malpractice.

“I hurt”
“That’s OK. We’ll work together to heal you”

or

“I hurt”
“You should. You’ll never heal this wound.”

Which is more likely to have a positive outcome?

17

I’d say someone continues to suffer the effects of the abuse to the degree and frequency to which he or she “buys into” the attitude behind it: “I deserve this.”

But don’t discount their oversteering against it. No matter how bad the abuse is, and even though there isn’t a thing the victim can do about it (which, BTW, is often its worst aspect), a voice inside is always saying “this is wrong.”

So that the abuse survivor will always have a contentious, often irrational contrarian impulse.

(a knee-jerk contrarian? You could make your character a 9,000-post Doper)

18

How would you (or others) feel about a combination of the two?

“I hurt.”
“You should. You went through an extraordinarily difficult experience. Your feelings of pain and betrayal are valid, but you don’t have to stay there if you don’t wish to. We’ll work together to heal you.”

Would something like that be helpful, or harmful, in your opinion? I am thinking only to perhaps validate the person’s reality while at the same time offering the possibility of a new one.

19

I think it has to do with resilience. I’ve been rereading Frank McCourt’s Angela’s Ashes lately. I have no idea what made McCourt so resilient. I don’t know if the extreme neglect and near-starvation her grew up with counts as abuse, since I don’t know that his parents set out to abuse him, but one can say he grew up to be a successful adult.

20

I think what you’ve said is just an extended version of ‘‘Let’s work together to heal you.’’ The implication must be that what was done was wrong and that the person who suffered the abuse did nothing to deserve it. I didn’t mean (and I doubt Chimera meant, though he can correct if necessary) to imply otherwise. Even in CBT there is no denial of the truth, the reality or the pain of abuse. It’s just a different process. Where talk therapy is, ‘‘This is exactly what happened to me, this is how I felt and this is why I’m still hurting about it,’’ CBT is more, ‘‘This is where I hurt now, and it’s this thought/action that’s making me feel this way, therefore I will change the way I’m thinking/behaving so that I will feel better.’’ So while it validates the past, it focuses on the present and what’s getting in the way of happiness in the present. Validation is a necessary part of the process, but in my personal experience, talk therapy does too much validating and not enough problem-solving.

Does that make sense?