Originally published at: https://prostasia.org/blog/bad-survivors-healing-myth/
I previously wrote about how so-called “bad survivors” – those who don’t fit with society’s view of survivorship – are cut off from support and silenced in their communities. This follow-up explores the experiences of sexual assault and abuse survivors whose healing process doesn’t match society’s expectations regarding recovery. As if ideas about the “right…
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As a moral rule, a mentally as well as physically sound future should be every child’s fundamental right — along with air, water, food and shelter — especially considering the very troubled world into which they never asked to enter.
Even if survived, early-life abuse left unchecked typically causes the young child’s brain to improperly develop. It can readily be the starting point of a life in which the brain uncontrollably releases potentially damaging levels of inflammatory stress hormones and chemicals, even in otherwise non-stressful daily routines.
It can amount to non-physical-impact brain-damage abuse: It has been described as an emotionally tumultuous daily existence, indeed a continuous discomforting anticipation of ‘the other shoe dropping’. For me at least, that includes a fear of how badly I will deal with the negative or horrible event — which almost never occurs — and especially if I’ll also conclude that I’m at fault.
The lasting emotional/psychological pain throughout one’s life from such trauma is very formidable yet invisibly confined to inside one’s head. It is solitarily suffered, unlike an openly visible physical disability or condition, which tends to elicit sympathy/empathy from others.
It can make every day a mental ordeal, unless the turmoil is prescription and/or illicitly medicated. …
In the early 1970s, my Grade 2 teacher was the first and most formidably abusive authority figure with whom I was terrifyingly trapped. I cannot recall her abuse in its entirety, but I’ll nevertheless always remember how she had the immoral audacity — and especially the unethical confidence in avoiding any professional repercussions — to blatantly readily aim and fire her knee towards my groin, as I was backed up against the school hall wall.
Luckily, she missed her mark, instead hitting the top of my left leg. Though there were other terrible teachers, for me she was uniquely traumatizing, especially when she wore her dark sunglasses when dealing with me.
[For some other very young boys back then and there, there was her sole counterpart — a similarly abusive teacher but with the additional bizarre, scary attribute of her eyes rapidly shifting side to side.]
But rather than tell anyone about my ordeal with her and consciously feel victimized, I instead felt some misplaced shame: I was a ‘difficult’ boy, therefore she likely perceived me as somehow ‘deserving it’. I was much too young to perceive how a regular-school environment can become the traumatizer of susceptible children like me; the trusted educator indeed the abuser.
Perhaps not surprising, I feel that schoolteachers should receive mandatory ASD training, especially as the rate of diagnoses increases. There could also be an inclusion in standard high school curriculum of child-development science that would also teach students about the often-debilitating condition (without being overly complicated).
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