***TRIGGER ALERT – The following article describes childhood trauma and could be triggering.***

I twirled around, causing the skirt of my best Sunday dress to flair out in a way that delighted my four-year-old sensibilities. It was 1966, and my black patent leather Mary Jane’s made a wonderful clacking sound on the creaky oak floors of the sanctuary. The problem was I was supposed to be sitting in my seat. My father scowled at me from the pulpit. Mrs. Wagoner, a wonderful, kindly old widow, had been tasked with watching me that Sunday morning, but try as she might, she couldn’t convince me to sit down. For some reason I cannot remember, my mother was not in attendance at the service that day. 

I did not want to sit in the hard pews and listen to another one of my father’s long, boring sermons. I wanted to twirl and watch the pleated columns of my skirt float around me like the ballerinas I so admired. Mrs. Wagoner finally enticed me back into the pew with a stick of fragrant fun stripe chewing gum.

After the service, I stood on the stoop of the church in abject shame as, one by one, the congregation filed by, waiting to shake my father’s hand. “Good sermon,” a man said as he looked at me in pity. “Your little girl has a lot of spirit.” The man gave me a weak smile, but I only stared at the ground and tried to disappear behind my father’s black suit. 

As soon as the service had ended, my father had made a beeline straight for me. His familiar look of rage communicated just how much trouble I was in. Grabbing me by the arm, he gritted his teeth and growled into my ear, “You’re getting a whipping when we get home.”

I knew I deserved it. I was bad through and through to the core of my being. I was the most wicked girl that had ever lived. Why did I constantly cause so much trouble everywhere I went? I looked over at my older brother by eighteen months. He was perfect. Able to sit for interminable amounts of time without moving a muscle or saying a word, I could not understand why I could not be like him. Why was it so hard for me to get through the Sunday morning service? Not only had I failed to sit still, I had committed the unpardonable sin. I had made my father look bad, and I had done it in front of the people he most wanted to impress—the church congregation. 

One by one, the congregants filed by until it was poor Mrs. Wagoner’s turn. She tried to defend me as she placed her white-gloved hand into my father’s. “She’s just a little girl,” the old lady clucked. Reaching over, she gently touched my hair. “Don’t be too hard on her.”

Mrs. Wagoner could not imagine what awaited me when we got home. No one in the congregation could. I would get a beating within an inch of my life. I don’t remember ever moving during a church service again after that day. 

To outsiders, we were the perfect family—my father, gregarious and socially adept, covered for my mother’s awkward introversion. Pillars of the community, my father was a bi-vocational pastor and a successful businessman. My mother, an elementary school teacher and avid homemaker, was famous throughout the community for her amazing rose garden and specialty Christmas cakes. But underneath the surface, a boiling rage ran through our household. My father was a monster, and my brother and I were terrified of him. Beatings were dispensed at the slightest infraction. No emotion, expression, or individuality was allowed. He and he alone ruled the household, and he did so literally as an iron-fisted tyrant. 

My mother was just as dangerous. Perhaps more so. Unstable, you never knew what might set her off. Filled with unexpressed anger from my father’s dominance, she took her frustrations out on her children. In addition to physical abuse, my mother perpetrated the most damaging abuse of all. Warped from her own sexual abuse, she, in turn, abused us. Even your body was not your own in our household. She played endless mind games where emotional torture and threats were her favorite tools. Constantly fearing for our lives, my brother and I lived in the shadows, sneaking from room to room, hoping our parents would not notice our existence. Staying out of the way was the only way to survive. The trouble was that I couldn’t figure out how to do that. My brother, however, was stellar at it. No matter how much he tried to protect me, I somehow managed to be in the way. He would look at me with compassion while I took another beating or sidle up to me in sympathy as my mother, fists balled,  screamed at me for some small mistake. 

The abuse seems so clear as I describe it now, but I emerged from that home at the age of eighteen, still thinking we were not only perfect, we were better than other people. My father was the authority on all things. His opinion held special importance because he had more insight than anyone else. My mother couldn’t understand why everyone wasn’t as wonderful as she was and why the accolades she deserved had never come her way. My home might as well have been called a mind-control cult because that’s exactly what it was. It wasn’t until much later, when the wheels came off that I began to see the truth, and that truth would come to me in stages as my mind and emotions were able to handle it.

Middle-Knowledge

Dealing with childhood trauma takes time. When your mind is shattered and your emotions a wasteland, there is a place that trauma survivors live called middle-knowledge.(footnote 1, Grief Counseling and Grief Therapy by William Wordan, pg 44). Middle knowledge means knowing and not knowing at the same time. Underneath the surface, I knew that my parent’s behavior was off, but I put that knowledge away. To fully embrace the truth was too great a threat to my existence. My father and mother and the constructed reality they ran held complete control over my thoughts and actions. To step outside of that system would be to call down the most disastrous consequences possible. Dread and fear are powerful ways to control other people, and my father and mother wielded those tools with exact precision. 

Underneath all these power plays lay the worst threat of all. The threat to withdraw love. Abandonment hung over everything my parents did. If I refused total compliance, I would be shunned, cut off, and thrown out with the dogs. Love was never unconditional, and the carrot of acceptance was like a disappearing vapor that I could never quite grasp. 

My abusers used a two-pronged approach. Do everything you can to undermine the self-confidence of your victim while at the same time convincing them they cannot live without the abuser’s control. 

I lived over half my life before I began to make significant strides toward healing. My twenties, thirties, and forties were spent in survival mode. By the time the suffering was so severe I was forced to address it, I had lost over five decades. So much time had passed. My children were raised, my career path chosen, all the major decisions of life had been made, and I had stumbled through it all with trauma undermining my every thought and decision. It was too late! Too late to be a better parent! Too late to be an encouraging partner! Too late to follow my dreams! Too late to be happy and too late to heal! Or was it?

We took my mother out to eat on one of my last visits with her. She was at the beginning of twenty years of institutionalization that would define the last years of her life. For ten years before that, I had tried to deal with her mental illness expressed through panic, rages, control, manipulation, blame, and coercion. Nothing I did made any difference. She was completely lost. Her life had fallen apart after my father left and divorced her, and though she lived in a beautiful home, she could not manage her money or her life. Inch by inch, the darkness completely took over. The torment of knowing her in the present was just as destructive as her abuse had been in childhood.

My husband, my two college-age sons, and I sat together with my mother in a booth at the restaurant. She had aged a hundred years since I’d last seen her. The wild-eyed hunted look that used to come and go had taken up permanent residence. My children looked at her in fear. She was so odd. Later, on the drive home, my oldest son commented. “That was the closest to meeting Gollum I have ever been in real life.” And indeed, that’s what she had become. A wizened, withered shell of a person existing but not living. I cried all the way home.

The eternal flame of hope that somehow, some way, my family of origin might return to that idyllic perfection I had been brain-washed to believe in finally began to die. My mother was never going to get better. Things were never going to return to the secure delusion I so longed for. She was never going to comprehend the destruction she had wrought in my life, and worst of all, I was never going to be released from the prison of trauma that so pervaded everything because both my parents were still participating in it and in fact would keep participating in it until the day they died.

I felt condemned to repeat the dysfunctional patterns forever. Terrified I would destroy the lives of my children and haunt their adulthood as she had mine, I began to consider what to do. I felt lost, just as lost as my mother had been. I couldn’t control my emotions or anxiety any better than she had. Terror ran my life, and I knew it had already had a major impact on my children. But I wasn’t dead…not yet. My mother had resigned from life. I, at least, was still in the game.

It is never too late to heal from trauma. In fact, it is imperative that you take up arms and heed the call to do so no matter what life stage you are in. You have been given a mission, and you alone are the only one who can fulfill it. Within your grasp is the ability to break the transfer of trauma from one generation to the next. Your choices have a profound influence on the world. Perhaps you think your little life doesn’t matter. I can assure you it does. You have the chance to be a blessing or a curse. To leave behind anger and hatred and give the gift of peace and kindness. It is a gigantic task and one that can feel overwhelming. Where in the world do you begin? You begin where you are. Whether you are eighteen or eighty, if you take one small step toward healing, you will be starting at exactly the right place.

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Rebekah Brown

Rebekah Brown, a native of the south, now resides in the Great American West. Surviving a complicated and abusive family system makes her unique writing style insightful as well as uplifting. Rebekah is the proud mother of two and grandmother of four.