I watched Troop Zero the other night. At the end, I cried and cried. I cried more than I normally do. I’m not a crier. I never felt safe enough to cry. I did love the story. It was a great movie. The main character was a little girl in a very difficult circumstance. Her mother had died. She had a father who had a big heart but struggled to make money. And she hitched her star to a woman who was going to walk away to attend law school. She was a misfit, a loner, but by the end of the movie, she had found a band of friends who were willing to be vulnerable and consider how life could be different.
It was an amazing movie. But my inner children were screaming. It was the “happy” ending they had always wanted and never found. To some, her poverty and her childhood without a mother would have been heartbreaking. To me, her life would have been everything. Why? Her pain was measurable. Our society has standards for what qualifies as pain and she falls right into our favorite story of pain. There are no secrets in her story. She was poor. She was motherless. That’s awful. We can give her a scholarship and a really nice grief camp and feel better about ourselves. We can watch her make friends with the other “less than perfect” people and feel like she’s found her place. We can tell her story and her “happy” ending because we can feel better.
But what about the rest of us? What about those of us with secrets? What happens when we would give anything to have a dead parent? What happens when we would rather be homeless than spend one more night in our hellish middle-income home? What happens when we can’t talk about the horrific abuse from our parents? We can’t talk about it because our parents are still alive and we should be grateful. We can’t talk about it because our families weren’t destitute and we should be happy for all we had. We can’t talk about it because it is stigmatized and nobody wants to hear about it.
So we suffer in silence. And we hope for any friend who isn’t an animal or an inanimate object. We hope for one person who would be there some of the time. We wouldn’t even care how faulty they were. Instead, we are alone because nobody wants to take the time to figure out how to save us. We are too complicated. We don’t fit the mold. We can’t just be saved. We are the dirty little secrets of the world.
I wish my parents had died. I know that sounds awful, but I do. I wish I could have had those Troop Zero outcasts as my friends. I wish I had a sense that one person cared about me at all. I wish I had one adult look me in the face like they gave a shit what I had to say. But that wasn’t my life. Everyone just looked at my typical life on the outside and ignored the hundreds of red flags because that was convenient for them. I was dissociating. I was exploding. I was bullied by everyone. But it was so much easier to look the other way.
In the movie, the main character was a bed-wetter. She was teased and bullied for it. But she started to wet the bed when her mother died. When I got a hold of my medical records, I found out I was a bed wetter too. When I was three, I was wetting the bed. You may be wondering why I wasn’t wearing a diaper at night when I was three. That’s a good question. I would love an answer to that question. But I also had chronic UTI’s. My mother would tell the nurses they came from my bed wetting. My mother said I got UTI’s from wetting the bed and nobody thought that was strange. Let’s face it! They thought it was strange! But they didn’t care. I had a mother. I had a father. They had some money. I wore a London Fog raincoat. I must have been fine. I didn’t grow up in a trailer. So I was fine. There were no programs for me. There were no social workers knocking on the door (except for that one brief mistake which was finally covered up). Nobody gave a shit. My story doesn’t make the movies. Nobody wants to watch my story on the big screen. Our society only wants the solvable problems. They want the low-hanging fruit.
How many kids have to watch the world feel sorry for the kids with the acceptable problems while drowning in their own complex trauma? I don’t know. But until we wake up and start focusing on the abusive, but very much alive parents, we aren’t going to solve this massive world crisis we are faced with. Dead parents and poverty are huge risk factors for children to face abuse. We have to acknowledge that. But abuse is happening everywhere and the kids who experience it are feeling completely alone. When are we going to do something about it?
Oh my god Elisabeth. Thank you so much for writing this. Your expression of thoughts so often gives me the ability to connect to similar thoughts of my own. This one is especially gives me access to some things that I have not been able to articulate before now. But now that I have seen your words for it, my own will come out in my writing. The secret vs. acceptable problems, wishing for acceptable problems because they would be more manageable than my secret horror. Thank you for what you do. I appreciate you so much!
Thank you Rachel!
Wow. Yes. How many times I wished I had the problems of someone else. Either that or only certain kind of problems. The kind that don’t make people go “then why don’t you just…” or “but look on the bright side”. The kind you can mention without having to mentally prepare to look after the listener afterwards because they can’t wrap their minds around it. The kind that make people go “Oh that explains it, now I know better in the future” inside their heads. The kind that don’t involve wishing someone in your family was dead. The kind that don’t make you a ridiculous overachiever in one place, a furious monster in another, and a passive taker of abuse in yet another, and overall terrified that anyone figures out you’re all of that and abandons you.
I wanted poverty and birth defects to explain my problems.
Took years and years into adulthood to understand that I was born okay, I was born lovely, I wasn’t born broken. The poverty did make things harder, but most of what I thought were birth defects were actually due to all the abuse and neglect.
Exactly May. Thank you for sharing your experiences here too. Trauma is definitely NOT the convenient answer.
To the core!
It doesn’t get more realistic than that. Thank you!
Thank you Regina!
Your story, although your abuses were different (mine was physical child abuse, verbal, mental, spiritual, emotional abuses by BOTH parents plus brutal DV between parents and my having to witness the violent physical and other abuses of my siblings-I lived in life-threatening terror daily as the abuse was daily) could have been word for word the way you described in this post. I too wet the bed. I had night terrors. I was diagnosed at 13 with panic attacks and given daily Valium. I prayed to die often. Not one ally all my life although my cultlike clan of extended family all lived in my same building and knew for a fact about the abuses. Not a word or deed to help helpless, hopeless, terrorized children.
The abusers are still alive and still abusing. As a married adult, I kept my distance as I had done most of my life. Yet they got sick at the same time and drew me back in to their “orbit” begging me to help them. (My siblings weren’t their choice because the are severely enmeshed-Stockholm Syndrome-like codependency where they now idolize their abusers and deny their own abuse. I was the one who kept separate. They wanted to lure me back for worse abuse as retaliation for my boundaries and periods of No Contact. I know this in hindsight.) My husband and I did above and beyond helping them in their time of need. They were on their best behavior. Until they weren’t. They’d conspired with a particularly unstable married sibling, who chooses to live with his abuser parents for past 20 years and is a very jealous person and acts over the top grandiose to cover up his shame at living with parents in his 50s, and who hates us. The plan was to ambush us and attack us violently with a weapon at parents’ house as parents watched after they’d lured us there. Serious injuries. Police. We decided on permanent No Contact with ALL the abusers, enablers, those who kept silent, those who lied for them to cover up the abuse all my life, the “neutral” fence-sitters”, allies of evil…So that leaves not one family member and not one friend to stand with us for what’s right. They prefer the “good standing” position with the abusers. They don’t want to incur a “cost” or inconvenience for doing what right. How worthless does that make me and us feel? Pretty damn worthless to people I’ve known all my life, who know my good character and kind heart, who I have always been there for whenever they needed me even though they were the people who stood by as I was brutally abused as a child. I gave them all passes to keep the peace. No more. But I’m the one punished by isolation and a friendless existence. My character has been and still is being smeared by those I chose to now reject in my life. Hard to start a new life, make new friends when we are retired and don’t belong to any groups where we could meet people. And that “trust” thing poses a hindrance in putting ourselves out there. We were made to feel like garbage by those who knew us best. Hard to wrap one’s head around that and rise up again to join the “living”. I got them out of my life. No more poison. But. No happy ending for me either.
Love to you Z! This story is so relatable to me (and I know others too).
It is the reality in the end. I live this too.
Thank you so much! Yes! Such a relief to know that invisible abuse is so traumatizing. Nobody can talk about it. I’ve often been jealous of people with “socially-acceptible” trauma. Nothing worse than having to be f-ing “grateful” for abuse. Beyond humiliating and retraumatizing.
Love to you Andrea!
THANK you for this post. I too came from a middle income family with lots of neighbours who KNEW about the physical and emotional abuse, but didn’t care. Teachers didn’t care – I was abused my teachers too, neighbours didn’t care, peers bullied me. No one cared because I came from a middle class income family with “charming” parents who basically convinced me and everyone else that I (a child!) was evil, bad, wicked.
Exactly! They know and they do nothing.
I have said so very many times….One can SEE the “”disability”” of: A person in a wheelchair, a dwarf, or perhaps a blind person…. hence, sympathy is shown, “understanding, being kinder, gentler, more patient, just plain NICER to them ” but you cannot see the PTSD and permanent emotional damage and outcome of severe abuse and trauma….. hence lack of sympathy and understanding and all the nice emotions and feelings people would afford me if only they could see the scars and deforming of my soul!!!!
Yes! Thank you Elna!
Your article must resonate with so many people like me from ‘nice’ middle class families where the emotional abuse was so insidious and acceptable that I felt it had to be me, the small, helpless, desperate-to-please child, who was always so bad I was forever being punished. It took me over fifty years of abusive partnerships that almost ended up killing me to realise that my parents weren’t the ideal they held themselves up to be. And that their narcissistic/codependent marriage wasn’t the happy ever after ending I pathetically strived for. No more! Struggling out of the fog of denial was the best thing I ever did. Better late than never! Good for you for speaking out on this Elisabeth.
I am so glad you are breaking free Tilly! It can be incredibly difficult to see these things when it all looks so “normal” on the outside.
How can we get past the emotional turmoil? It is still there and still I suffer. All my relationships are suffering due to trauma but how can we overcome it? How can I laugh everyday and just feel happy? I find it incredibly difficult
This is not easy for sure. All these flashbacks need to be expressed. The more we hear the message from the emotional turmoil, the less we will suffer form it. But it is a process that takes time, more time than we want to give it.
My mother was a bully and I lived every minute in fear of displeasing her. Then I was bullied in school and too ashamed to ever tell anyone I learned to be afraid all the time and to please everyone. So all the other adults in my life praised me for being such a good boy. All my problems were buried deep
down. I just wanted a friend so badly.
Of course you did. That’s all we really want.