Normalising Parental Abuse!

"You are a slut! Given a chance you will sleep with every man in the whole neighbourhood!" 

"When will you die? Can you tell me when will you die? I can then be at peace for some time?" 

"You are so ugly..it is so difficult for me to take you anywhere!" 

"You will keep losing your jobs! You don't know how to talk to your own, no wonder you would not know how to talk to the world!" 

"You will never become anything in life! I at times wonder if you are our own!"

These are just some of the things that children from so called "normal" families have heard and that they vividly remember as adults. Not only that they remember but some of these are repeated when they clash with the larger world and face a challenge. Their families repeat these with a "I told you so..." put in for better effect. If you think of these sentences in isolation, without knowing who said these to whom, you would have asked the receiver of these sentences to run away from the utterer as far as she could, but the moment you hear these are from the parent, you start making excuses in favour of the abuser. Or let me say we all start playing by the script we have been taught, the moment we hear that lofty word.... "parent" or even an "older sibling" at times. 

In my observation, we talk about toxic relationships in terms of intimate partners much more than with regards to parents or close relatives who hold us hostage in the name of "knowing the best for us" or "having the best for us in their heart". The world goes around worshipping parents, celebrating the proverbial father or the sacrificial mother and shuts you up by saying, " ...but they must have had no malice in their heart..." and you sit there thinking who then will give space to the lifelong suffering of the people who are torn apart everyday by their parents' words, actions, and simple lack of willingness to love their own children. You sit thinking why did they even bring you to the world if they had no plan to love you! Oh you of course know what caused that but you also like to think like that some times. Coming to think of love, a lot of them will actually try to shove a big truck-load of abuse down our throats, in the name of parental love. Let us start counting what all pass as parental love and "they have the best for you in their heart": 

1. Making you choose stream of study that is absolutely contrary to what you want to study. 

2. Making you do housework to an extent and berating for every little mistake that you feel the abuse literally in your bones.

3. Marrying you completely against your wishes to a stranger. 

4. Deciding on your behalf whether you should continue or discontinue your studies. 

5. Making sure you find it impossible to end your abusive marriage. 

6. They make you fulfil their wishes of becoming a theatre artist, of being a painter, of being a doctor, or an engineer, or a government officer, an insurance agent, completely ignoring if you want to be any of these. 

7. Making the whole world your enemy! Constantly feeding you that you must get approval of your parents for everything. No one else loving you matters! It is only parental approval that can make you feel you have some existence otherwise your whole life is in vain. 

And these are just some of them.... 

These families are called "normal",  because they fulfil all the normative criteria of the social norms. The parents are not divorced (it is another matter that they may be wishing death in a muttering or in a loud voice, on each other's head every day), the mother cooks a meal (if not everyday then at least on special occasions), the father earns a regular wage and not an alcoholic, or a vagabond. That is about the point to which the norms around the normal families would go. No one will question beyond that! No one will question the incessant bickering pouring out of the doors of the household. They will even laugh when the husband "jokes" about how they make sure no bird gets to rest in that whole community due to their loud-pitched clashes every day. Everyone laughs and no one questions what happens to the small bird-like heart of the young child in that family. The loud-pitched shouting matches are "normalised" by using jokes and a child sit big-eyed thinking is this really the normal? And then she learns only raising voice, only throwing things, only crying loudly will get her attention and that attention can actually be a few slaps or a few choicest lines that he has always heard. She learns that calling her "bad", "disobedient", "headstrong", "the one with a little loose screw" are all normal things. She will learn showing emotions will only make her more vulnerable to these phrases. The word -phrases will seem "normal", "usual", "every day", bit by bit. The whole world around the child is working towards getting this normalised. They are working in like a machine working in perfect coordination. 

And as they say there is always a child in every family system that "gets it!". You remember the proverbial child who called out the king naked, do you? If you are sadly (yes, I say sadly) the child who sees the truth and also decides to speak up the truth of this complete dysfunctional system, be prepared to be isolated, called names, be the target of a smear campaign with all the relatives. May be you will like to go through this video if you have been the truth-teller in your family and felt something is totally wrong with you: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VOEFh5042JQ 

And then at times after many years the heart of that child speaks out in an adult body. And no wonder he finds it so strange to hear when his heart says it can't take the shouting any more and stay away from it. He starts doubting his own heart. How can he not like to go back to his parents' place? The whole world is "nostalgic" about their place of birth, why is he not? What is wrong with him!? His parents, other siblings join the chorus, "What is wrong with you?" The whole world tells you that you are supposed to like your bickering parents, your berating parents, your verbally 9even physically) abusive parents, and you need to post about them on Mother's Day and Father's Day and if you ever try to tell your friends about your troubles with them, remember they are those afflicted by the same disease. They will tell you, "Oh they don't know better but they have the best for you in their hearts!" oh yeah?! And you will come back with a feeling of even lesser space for the likes of you in this world. And then you remember that movie Body Snatchers in which they say, "Where you gonna go...Where you gonna run...where you gonna hide, because there is no one like you left!"? And you indeed feel there is no one like you. There is. There is. Aplenty. You have to look for them. Make them feel they can talk. They can talk too. They will then listen to you too as they have faced and facing the same. They are just not in your current friend-list. Please remember when normal is THIS, it is your duty to be abnormal! 

And! Hey Universe! Can I ask you to make a little space for these adult children of emotionally immature parents, please? Expand a bit faster tonight because the ones around us do not always agree to let their hearts expand as fast. 

Picture Credit: Google

Case-Study: name Changed for privacy