Oh, yes! Every staff member that works in a school is, by law, a “Mandated Reporter”. Not reporting definitive signs of abuse/neglect is actually a violation of the law and can result in the loss of the credentials needed to work in an educational environment. I think it’s a great thing!
It can be hard to do though. I once had a young boy in a Sunday school class of mine tell me his Dad would hit him. We were alone in the room at the time and that days’ story was to be about Abraham preparing to sacrifice his son. I made a comment on how being scared of one’s father would be hard, and this kid told me his dad would beat him.
I struggled in my mind on what to do but made an appointment with the rector and told him. I don’t know what was done but the kid was never in class again. His dad wasn’t a memember. I missed the boy, he was bright and fun and well behaved.
Damaged children become damaged adults. The only way to break the cycle is to help these children as soon as possible and as best we can.
To be very clear. Mandatory reporting does not require “definite sign of”, just suspicion of. There are certain injuries that are by definition suspicious, or explanations that are insufficient … nothing definitive but suspicious enough to mandate reporting even if as reporters we think likely not.
When I have reported interestingly enough the ones I was already pretty sure were not actually abuse were all very understanding of the need to report; the ones I thought were abuse were all highly upset.
My friend got reported one time. He had a joke with his then eight year old daughter where he would chase her around pantomiming like he had a knife in a slasher movie. Around Halloween the teacher asked the kids to tell what scared them and she said, “it scares me when my daddy chases me with a knife”. That sent CPS over in the evening and it was very quickly explained to their satisfaction. It was a running joke between them ever since and she’s over 40 now.
That just makes sense though. If there is nothing going on, people won’t mind an investigation that will just clear up whatever misunderstanding led to the suspicions. (He really did fall out of a tree, he and his friends even filmed themselves goofing around when it happened.)
If there is something going on, then that risks making a bad situation more volatile, at least that is the fear for the people involved. Whatever abuse is occurring could escalate, the abuser could get in trouble, the family could be torn apart, embarrassing details can be revealed of both abuser and the abused, etc. These are just some of the reasons why people keep quiet about it in the first place. So it’s absolutely no wonder that they are upset. It’s probably not the norm that a person’s first response is that they’re finally going to get help (even if ultimately they do), the first response is probably a fear that everything is going to get worse now.
I can completely relate to what you said and I’m sorry. Children shouldn’t have to be subject to that.
We had severe abuse in our family, physical, mental, emotional and sexual. A couple of my siblings wound up with lasting mental illness from the abuse or perhaps the bad DNA, or both.
For people who didn’t grow up in dysfunctional families, the problem is that stories like that are only the tips of the iceberg. Kids need emotional support and not getting that causes large problems even without any abuse.
Stories like the ones in the OP demonstrate that there just wasn’t the necessary emotional support, in addition to the other abuse and neglect.
Something I found from years and years of therapy is that talk therapy isn’t necessarily designed for severe problems. It’s better for middle levels of problems and many counselors just don’t have the experience to help.
[quote=“DSeid, post:42, topic:1012857”]
I am hoping I can ask this in an acceptable manner and obviously no one is obligated to share anything. There is also clear no best answer for all … maybe just individual least bad ones? [/quote]
My dad died back in my 20s and he wasn’t ever able to comprehend what he did. My mother is still alive and while we have a relationship of sorts, she’s too narcissistic to really understand the problem from our point of view.
My WAG is that anyone who is capable of that degree of abuse or neglect to their own children just isn’t going to be able to take responsibility for the actions or lack of actions unless something extraordinary happens in their life. For example, if someone is an alcoholic or a drug addict and then successfully recovers in a 12-step for similar program, or someone who has undergone rigorous therapy and has spent a lot of time and effort to change their fundamental self, something which is not easy.
I understand my parents had their own problems which they weren’t or aren’t able to overcome. I’m no longer bitter about that. However, there is a difference between letting go of the angry and bitterness and welcoming that person into your life.
There are no one-size-fits-all answers. Talking to some of my siblings, although we all grew up in the same family with the same parents, the family dynamics and other circumstances were so different that one is right for one person may not be right for the other.
Next you’re gonna tell me there’s no ‘one weird trick’ either.
There may be one, but I’ll never know because “they” don’t want me to know about it.
I don’t really want to go into details but I’ll offer that it isn’t so much the insults, verbal humiliations, and the occasional act of physical abuse (by both parents, and in non-singular occasions, their partners) that forced that separation but the indifference, deliberate obtuseness, and abject neglect that really cemented the reality that these were just not people I could ever depend upon for anything, however trivial, if it would put them at odds with any other desire or obligation. With my mother, that was immediately apparent even before they separated, and by the time I was fourteen she would disappear for many days—sometimes weeks—at a time despite the fact that I was in her regular custody, and my father, who was never very interested in that role and only made an appearance every few months or at holidays with his mother, essentially made it clear that my job was to manage my mother and prevent her from bothering him even as I was made the go-between and bearer of often bad news for which I would absorb the anger and rage.
It was frankly a relief to be ignored and even effectively abandoned by both of them because it was less angst and drama than when I was around them (and especially my father’s wife, who never passed on an opportunity to create some kind of manufactured outrage even if it meant following me from room to room insisting that I was somehow in her way). When I was seventeen I essentially cut all ties with my mother, and maintained a distant, vaguely cordial relationship with my father mostly to assuage his mother (my grandmother). Literally at her graveside service my father’s wife screamed at me, and proceeded to make any relationship with my father so difficult for him that it wasn’t so much a matter of cutting him off as it was that he just didn’t really want to hear from me because it caused so much trouble for him (which was an issue he tacitly blamed me for and insisted that I apologize to his wife even though he couldn’t explain how I would frame such an apology or how it would satiate her when the frequent string of apologies I was compelled to offer her over the preceding years were never accepted with any grace or reduced her constant outrage directed toward me).
I went to his funeral, not so much out of a sense of obligation toward him but just because I thought it would make me the better person (he repeatedly boasted of not going to his own father’s funeral), but instead it was just one more opportunity for his wife and one of her sons (the other, who I had never met because he took pains to always live far away, was casually polite and charitable) to make a bunch of snide, passive aggressive scorn and impudent insinuations toward me, and quite frankly, I wish I had never gone. It should go without saying that he left me nothing—not even personal items—and his wife tried to compel me to pay some of the medical bills. (I had offered to pay for the funeral but that was already pre-arranged.)
So, it kind of sucks not to have family, and even more when I have explain the circumstances (about which some people, even therapists, are skeptical because they don’t think that parents would actually behave that way), but from what I’ve seen of people who cling onto abusive, neglectful, and grossly dysfunctional family in the vain hope that someday they’ll become better and more caring people, cutting these people off was the smart move. Any ‘reconciliation’ would be almost completely one-sided, indifferent, and likely parasitic, notwithstanding the potential domestic legal issues that would arise if one of their partners physically assaulted me as an adult and I responded in kind. Better to keep at a distance just as I would with an obnoxious drunk or an aggressive animal.
Stranger
I’ve gotten the impression that the last part is the key? Any hope that the others will recognize the nature of the harms they have done, and try to be better in the future, let alone express regret for the past, is typically misplaced. The decision to completely cut off or to engage has to rest on being able to accept it as one sided movement, that they are outside our control and just are?
I readily admit I am a clueless outsider on all of this, including within my own family of origin.
Hidden as it is long and not really the subject of the OP.
Summary
I’m the youngest of five and relatively a caboose. The three oldest were all girls clustered in three years, then longer stretches between my brother and finally me. My experience growing up was very different than my sisters’, which I know little of, actually. Certainly my dad was not as supportive of them achieving anything. My mother was a very interesting person. In another era she never would have married I think and would have been a Bohemian artist. Nurturing was not her forte. Many kids in the house overwhelmed her. My oldest sister was probably my biggest caregiver in early childhood and the rest of growing up was what I’d call “benign neglect” … but as an adult I realized that my sibs to various degrees all resented the pedestal I had not even realized my parents placed me on. Two of the sisters cut off all family contact off and on for years. One came in for Dad’s funeral. The eldest cut got into a fight with my brother and mother as my mother was in her death phase and cut off with the three of us, me because I wouldn’t take a side. Since my mother died and the immediate estate stuff after the three sisters don’t talk to my brother or me, or each other as I understand it. Mostly. The youngest of the three and I emailed a few times when she wanted something from me, and I tried to help as best I can.
I’ve never directly heard any accusation from them of abuse or neglect, and was never witness to any. It wasn’t my experience. But they certainly act the part of minimally having experienced psychological abuse, which I can believe occurred.
If that did happen though, I was not the one who did it. I was not responsible for being raised differently than they were. It’s been decades since I gave up and trying to reestablish any relationships with them. I wouldn’t push away any attempt any of them make, but my wife gets angry at me when the subject comes up as she thinks they are just bad news, she really loved my mom. My wife has reached out more time than I have to the oldest’s adult children who also cut off as their mom told them too. My nephew’s response is basically he can’t have contact until our generation works it out or his mom dies, the latter which will come first. My kids and those kids, who knew each some growing up, stay in casual Facebook contact.
I do try to get why I was thrown away as an add on. And hearing the pain of stories like yours helps me understand why the extra level of protection is taken? Even though I still recognize how clueless I am. But even as a 65 year old who really wouldn’t have the emotional bandwidth to deal with them at this point in my life, with four adult children of my own, who all talk to us and each other, and who say they feel they were parented well, thank god, I still feel hurt thinking about it.
I assume their psychological abuse that I never saw. I just have to accept that they needed to do what protected them the best.
Anyway thank you for sharing. It helps me with my perspective from my outsider position.
I’m responding to DSeid’s spoiler. I was also a product of benign neglect. It fucked me up. (I’m better now: thanks, counselling!) However, I think that’s the combination of my nature + my experience. Other people in the same situation would be fine; other people who endured far worse are fine. I don’t have siblings, but if I did, I imagine that people growing up in the same situation would be wondering what the hell is wrong with me, since the worst thing that ever happened to me was spending almost all of my time outside of school alone.
So trauma is really individual, and the circumstances are not always a clue. People tend to see your trauma through the lens of their experience, which isn’t always helpful.
The OP’s experience is clearly unacceptable by any standard, and I’m very sorry they went through it, and sorry that so many people failed to see, failed to help, and (later) failed to appreciate the depth of wrong.
Just to be clear: I am not complaining about how I was raised. In my household I had a nurturing oldest sister, a brother who took big brothering seriously, one sister to whom I didn’t exist, and only one bully, the youngest of the older sisters. At school the bullies were, well more than one! And I got my parents at their best. Which yes was fairly hands off by kid five. I had it much better than my brother even.
My reason for sharing is merely to express appreciation for helping me further my understanding of the cutting off that my sisters have all done from all family of origin ties, including rejecting me, for issues that I had no choice or even awareness about.
The family of origin traumas and their lasting impacts shared by some here are helpful to those of us who are … adjacent … to psychological abuse as well.
An article that may be of interest in this thread. Gift link.
This ^^^ and 10x. And that includes all of you that have gone through childhood hell, survived, and dare I hope are thriving?!?
As a 42-year-old male with enough technical knowledge to build an RC car, change a tire or hook up a home theater system, the idea of repairing a water heater terrifies me. Rilch, I hope sharing this was cathartic for you and I hope you know that you did nothing to deserve what sounds like a horrible upbringing.
I held some deep resentment towards my parents for years because both of them remarried without telling me in advance (I was at boarding school). Seems like small potatoes now.
I can top that; my father remarried without telling anyone (including his mother, who was supporting him because he was unemployed), and then when I found out implored me to secrecy, which created understandable distrust and resentment from my grandmother when they ‘came out’ a couple of years after the fact, an occurrence which has made be chronically suspicious of anyone asking me to keep personal secrets from a common acquaintance. If it has to be a secret, then don’t fucking tell me because I don’t want to know or be held culpable for not correctly adjudicating when and how it should be revealed.
Stranger
You were in fucking seventh grade.
You were a child; and not even a technical minor who was almost grown, but a child of what, 13?. It was not your job to fix the water heater; not unless you were the survivor of some disaster that had killed off all the adults and near-adults in the area. It was your parents’ job. Failing that, it was the job of some version of child services. Not yours.
I am so sorry that you had to put up with that shit; and with that utterly absurd response you got when you first tried to share it.
Thank you so much for saying that! And as far as “deserve”, that’s what turned my relationship with my parents so sour. I knew I didn’t deserve it, but it was happening anyway, and it made me think they really didn’t care about me. My mom also invoked The Depression and The War. When she was in high school, she had her school uniform, a Sunday dress, and an everyday dress. End of; apparently no skirts, blouses, “dungarees” or shorts. Well, maybe, but as I think I said above, probably everyone at her school was on the same level, or not much higher. TDaTW were crisis time, and they were happening to everybody. I was a huge sore thumb at my school, and I didn’t appreciate my mom sighing, “I wonder how they’d treat somebody who was really poor?” What was I, a social experiment?
Thank you, too, for this. Yeah, that guy…I forgot to mention that after I got to know him better, I told him the full story, and he was drop-jawed. But see, at the time, he’d been like that with everybody. As time went on, he phased it out.
I’m going to add – nobody should fix a water heater who doesn’t know how. It was your parents’ job, if neither of them knew how, to hire or otherwise find somebody who did; or to do a considerable bit of studying first. Because, if you screw up a water heater badly enough, the result is potentially a large bomb going off in your house.