Essays from The Shadows
Volume Two
Neglect takes many forms. I can look around and see worse examples of an upbringing. Always someone poorer. Always someone richer. In the same way, there are people more abused and less abused. We don’t rank people. Apparently.
A feature of my own very special way of looking at things seems to be that I won’t spot the bleeding obvious, even when it is staring me in the face. My therapist would often tell me that I didn’t stand a chance. I used to hear it as polite conversation, a kind of therapist-speak for mild support wrapped around the truth.
I have cleared a lot of the ground and progressed through my recovery, as we are grandly referring to it now. Personally, I think it is more akin to flailing around in the dark without a torch, but we can go with the grown-up version. Recovery, it is.
The absence of crippling things like dissociation has allowed me to start seeing things through a different lens. Understanding why things happen and the impact they have had on me, becomes clearer. A bigger picture, with more detail, makes it possible to notice things and begin to learn about them.
A combination of piles of paperwork, facts, and reports, alongside my own memories refocusing. Seeing the truth of events and others’ motives, has enabled me to start looking at things more clearly.
I don’t wish to labour the point or sound ‘woe is me’. But for the sake of clarity, here’s a quick summary.
My mother died when I was 12 weeks old. My father handed me over to an unqualified, untrained and apparently unhygienic woman to look after me. (One report said there were bones on the floor, raised by the Flintstones.) On his return, he was horrified to see the state of me and at that point put me into foster care.
Four different placements in two and a half years and then returned to my father, who by then was practically a stranger, and his new wife who was about to give birth to their first child.
A violent, strict, irrational father who punched, kicked and slapped me into oblivion and locked me in my room for days at a time.
Sent to boarding school at 12. No, really, I was okay with that. Not so keen on the next few years of sexual abuse by a member of staff and an array of my peers, but the school was amazing.
At 15, I was put in care and lived in children’s homes and various bedsits and eventually wandered off into the world.
Fundamentally, I was raised without much love or attention. I coped as best I could from the age of 12 and from 15 onwards I wasn’t part of my family again for about ten years.
What is interesting is that it has taken months for me to have any recognition of what that means. What it did to me. The madness of abuse is that if I met someone socially and they rattled all that off, I would have enormous sympathy for how that must have been for them.
Ask me how it affected me and I would have told you I was fine. It was just how it was. No big deal. You get by, don’t you? There are always people who have it far worse than me.
I started to notice. We could be kind and say I had certain ‘features’. Software glitches. Dysfunctional oddities. The sort of things that go unnoticed until you start paying attention. Looking closer. Examining.
I minimise extreme abusive behaviour done to me.
I avoid taking up emotional space.
I do extreme containment.
I process emotion cognitively, not emotionally.
Entitlement doesn’t occur to me. Not to attention, affection, emotional recognition, to nurture.
I learnt early not to expect emotional response and I lived as if that was normal.
It probably also explains why people sometimes assume I’m slightly autistic. They’re wrong, but I can see why they think it.
I had these symptoms and never knew it was a thing. As I am gradually learning, I am not unique or special. People have been there before me, so many that they have named it. Another thing to add to the list of many and wondrous things abuse inflicts on you.
Chronic Emotional Neglect. Naming things doesn’t help, not really. There is a crumb of comfort in knowing that others understand it. It doesn’t make it go away or make it easier. It’s not like you get a badge, gotta catch the syndromes, gotta get them all.
This is not a big revelation, more a recognition, a framework for how I react and respond. Understanding the various ways it shows itself is useful. I’m not even sure I can change anything at this late stage in the game, but I can see it, learn to recognise it and avoid attributing it to a personality disorder or blaming myself. Which I guess is something.
Chronic | persisting for a long time or constantly recurring
Not going to get over it any time soon then. Recovery seems less about fixing anything and more about explaining it. Get to live with it, don’t get to get rid of it.
There is the other side of the coin. Maybe I wouldn’t be quite so capable of survival, independent, adaptable, able to look after myself, isolated, mentally agile. Which always sounds as if something was gained despite everything.
Thing is, if you were asked at the time, would you trade all that for some love, attention, affection? Would it be better to have been seen? Raised not ignored? Lifted up not suppressed? I will never know. All I know is this: what Chronic Emotional Neglect does. It does this.
I will learn what this is.