To Forget Is To Protect

 Every time I talk about the daily abuse I was facing in my childhood and my parents are listening to me, they always say this one thing to me.

"If you had just told us how things were really like, we could have done so much more."

I know my parents and their intentions; they don't blame me for being abused or traumatized. Both of them have had very long careers in the field of education, and especially my mom knows a lot about kids abusing each other at school. She knows it's never the victim's fault or responsibility, especially if they are already being neglected by those who are supposed to be there for their protection. 

layers.

No, my parents aren't telling me that it was my fault for not talking about it more and therefore letting the abuse continue unchecked. They're telling me that they feel guilty for not being informed enough on their child's safety and well-being. And I understand that guilt, they have the right to feel that way, even if I don't necessarily blame them. 

Because the truth is that they just could have never known the true extent of the abuse – it was impossible. Because even I myself was not aware of it when it was happening in real time.

As I have grown older, I've found some old journals I used to keep as an elementary student. In a few entries, there are vague descriptions of the kind of violence I was subjected to, but one thing sticks out to me in all of the journal entries: the overwhelming downplaying of the severity of the situation. 

I thought this was merely a reflection of my character as a young child; it's not that serious, I can handle this just alright! But something that I have later discovered is that dissociation causes you to block out traumatic events, to the point that you forget about them for a very long time, until your brain is able to deal with them and they come rushing all over you at once. 

For the longest time, I had the following interpretation of the extent of my trauma: the abuse started when I went to school as a first-grade student, ended for a brief moment, until it started up again in fourth grade. This continued on until the seventh grade, which is when the whole thing came to a screeching halt, and I was free. This is not the reality, though. In actuality, the abuse started way before I was an elementary student, all the way back in kindergarten. There were some time windows when the abuse was not as bad, but it never fully stopped. The daily abuse lasted at least an entire decade, from the very early years of my childhood until mid-teens. And even after that, I have never been freed of the cycle of violence: newest instances happened just a a few months ago. 

But why am I remembering all of this just now? The more I think back on my childhood, the more apparent it becomes to me why I thought the situation was never as dire as it actually was: I was blocking out the majority of the abuse to protect myself. 

The brain of a child is too underdeveloped to process traumatic events. For this reason, children who are abused in their childhoods experience dissociation that disconnects them from the horrifying reality they're living in in order to protect the brain. When dissociation becomes a constant state of mind, it leads to chronic amnesia, lasting from anything between days to years. 

The multiple layers of dissociation were protecting me, blocking out the worst of the daily abuse, making me forget. So really, there was nothing to tell my parents. I had forgotten about it all before I got back home.

Remembering,

ichigonya