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BEYOND THE CRAZY HOUSE |
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| Book: Paperback | 213 x 140mm | 256 pages | ISBN 9780141005102 | 20 Mar 2003 | Penguin Canada | Adult |
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Pat Capponi's first book, Upstairs in the Crazy House, was a perceptive and vivid memoir of her own experiences as a mental health patient. Now, a decade on, she returns to the subject of mental illness, introducing us to mental health survivors who, like herself, have managed to reconstruct their lives against all odds.
The survivors she profiles have fought most of their battles in solitude and silence, accompanied only by an excruciating awareness of the fear and anxiety their condition provokes in others, even the people closest to them. As their stories unfold, they share their experiences generously and speak their minds openly, offering a frank and unblinking perspective on mental health-one that is all too rarely heard.
Together with Capponi's own informed and eminently humane critique of our mental health system, the result is a captivating and powerful portrait of mental illness, the people who live with it and a treatment system in desparate need of reform. Beyond the Crazy House will transform the way we regard mental health in this country.
Chapter One
When Madness Is the Only Rational Response
Children have long been the silent victims of their parents’ fighting. Though most never talk about it, witnessing physical abuse at home causes them serious emotional damage, according to a new Statistics Canada study. Such children are more than twice as likely to be physically aggressive themselves and they have much higher rates of depression, worry and frustration than other children.
—Elaine Carey, “Witnessing Abuse Damages Kids: Study,” Toronto Star, July 14, 2001
There is a great deal of debate about the origins of mental illness—whether it’s a biochemical misfiring, the result of early family experiences, or some lethal combination of both. This debate matters, because if we assume everything is related to physiology then the primary, “sane” response is to treat mental illness with pharmaceuticals—a clean, easy solution, and one we have a lot of comfort with in the twenty-first century. It removes parental guilt and individual responsibility; it pathologizes and medicates behaviours; it elevates a pseudo-science to the big leagues. There is profit in the search for “magic bullets,” in the research, development, and marketing of newer, better, and costlier medications for the mind. Ultimately, though, this is a soulless and limiting response to pain and distress, however caused. In the rush to study, dissect, and understand the brain, we’ve forgotten that the whole individual is greater than the sum of her parts.
Whatever the cause of mental illness, a narrow approach to therapy leads to less effective interventions. We will look at mental illness and its origins in the lives of psychiatric survivors, some of whom had craziness inflicted on them through early abuse, others who—in spite of supportive, loving families—found themselves enduring a sudden, inexplicable onslaught of madness. However people become ill, they are not that illness embodied; they are people first, and they would be best served by assisting their efforts to learn, to grow, and to achieve a measure of quality of life.
Though there may come a time when science will allow an individual, feeling at the end of his or her tether, to walk into a hospital with no human workers, submit to a diagnostic machine that will test brainwaves, skin, blood, and urine in seconds, and then dispense a soothing drug that will slam the door on voices or calm self-destructive urges, we are not there yet. Thank God.
For now, the response to people who, as children, have suffered from feelings of powerlessness and abuse by authority figures, who have felt somewhere deep inside that they’ve brought all this down on themselves because they weren’t good enough or lovable enough, who’ve never felt safe and wanted, is to put them in a place where they once again have no power, where they are subjected to negative judgments and labels that confirm their fears that it was their own fault. Here the abuse comes packaged as therapy or protection: bubble rooms (solitary confinement in a room with a mattress and a small fishbowl-like viewing window), injections of powerful antipsychotics, and four-point restraints (the arms and legs are tied down at the wrists and ankles).
Laurie Hall and Barry D’Costa are only two out of thousands of survivors who were driven crazy by their home lives. Their search for a cure, a way to escape the feelings planted deep inside during their formative years, is a search many have undertaken, with varying degrees of success.
Though I had heard of Laurie Hall, the executive director of Away Express Courier Service, a survivor business, I didn’t actually meet her until 1995 when we ran into each other at a hearing into the fate of the Ontario Advocacy Commission held by the newly elected Harris government. In T-shirt and jeans, her bare arms covered with dramatic, self-inflicted scars, Laurie had taken her place in front of the gathered politicians and argued passionately for the commission to continue its necessary work. Her voice was low and smoky, her delivery compelling. Even knowing that the decision had already been made to disband the commission and that the hearing was just window-dressing, she made her points with devastating accuracy.
Months later, when unemployment and excruciating poverty were making me “mental,” it was Laurie who said, “Come work with us.” Away was, in many ways, her territory, the place that had recognized her potential even before she could see it, had nourished her, and helped her grow from courier to executive director, from mental patient to psychiatric survivor leader.
These days, Laurie is one of the most respected psychiatric survivor leaders in Ontario and the country. She is a bridge-builder and an inspiration to many still trapped within the mental health system. She has fought for a place at the table with bureaucrats and politicians, and for the right to help shape government policies. Though diminutive, and at times shy, she shines like a lighthouse through the deep fog of her community, using humour and her experiences to encourage peers to overcome their “illnesses” and their poverty. But it was a long journey, fraught with danger and self-destruction, to find her strengths.
Laurie’s bedroom closet was the safest place in the isolated old brick house her great-grandfather had built. The bedroom itself would not do. She would hear her dad stomping up the steps, and then the door would slam open and there would be no escape. Laurie was the eldest of five children. When she was little, her father treated her like the son he wanted, taking her everywhere. She’d ride the tractor with him on their small farm with its mix of beef cattle, a milk cow, a few pigs, and a vegetable plot. When he became apprenticed to a mechanic, she went with him to the garage, learning the names of the tools and the parts. She was six when her brother Scott was born, and soon after she was left behind with the women at the house to do girl things, while Scott was taken along with her dad. The rejection left her angry and confused. Later, she remembers her dad bought yet another second-hand pick-up truck, one with less rust and fewer dents. He painted a sign on it—S. Hall and Son—as though the rest of them just didn’t exist.
Her father, 5’7” and 220 pounds, was short-tempered and abusive; he wouldn’t tolerate no for an answer. He had to control everyone and everything, and couldn’t hold a job where he had to take orders. So he was at home a lot. Consequently, they didn’t have much money—second-hand clothes from cousins were the norm.
He picked on her mother all the time. Laurie especially hated the way he caused her mother to break into helpless tears. Both Laurie and her mom were short and compact, with black hair and brown eyes. Her father had always reserved his physical violence for his eldest daughter, who so closely resembled his wife in every aspect but temperament. Often Laurie tried to get her mother to fight back, suggesting that she pack her bags and escape to something better. Sometimes she almost believed that her mom would find the courage, but she never did.
But Laurie could and would.
On Laurie’s last day at home, when she was fifteen, the family gathered around the scarred wooden table in the kitchen, eating lunch and getting ready to go to the town fair. The five children clamoured for their allowances; Laurie’s dad demanded to know what they’d done to earn it. The girls, including Laurie, talked about helping their mom in the house, cooking, baking, and cleaning.
“That’s not real work, that’s woman’s work,” he shot back, turning to his son to ask what he’d done for his money. Scott had worked in the barn and the fields, and fed the animals—this was manly work, so he got his allowance.
Laurie challenged her dad, saying, “That’s not fair.”
Her dad swung at her face with his closed fist, knocking her to the floor, while her mother and the rest of the kids ran out to the car as they always did when he went off on Laurie.
“You don’t like it, you know what you can do!” he shouted.
This time, the last of many times, she wanted him to be more specific, to actually say that if she didn’t like it, she could get the hell out. A good friend of hers had run away a few weeks before, and Children’s Aid (CAS) had placed him in a foster home.
“I found that so exciting, the idea that you could get out. That day, we all drove to the fair as though nothing had happened. I met up with my friends, and arranged to go home with one of them.”
Just once, she had tried to talk about the hell at home. It had been during a grade seven health class, where the girls were separated from the boys. They’d been talking about spankings and punishments, and the kids said things like, “My dad keeps a strap on the back of the door.”
“I had had a particularly bad beating the night before. He’d used horsehair ropes that left large welts on my arms and legs, and I started talking about it. But I didn’t get very far before I looked at the faces around me, at the shock on the faces of my classmates, and three things went through my mind very quickly. Number one was: Shut Up. Number two was: they’re not talking about the same thing. And the last was: how horrible I must be for my father to be doing this to me. It was my first indication that this wasn’t happening to my friends, or to any of the other people that I knew. The teacher never pursued it. In retrospect, I might have been testing the waters, telling myself: Let’s put a little out there and see the response. I never talked about it at school again, or anywhere outside of home.”
The family that took her in was quite poor. Their house was a ramshackle, falling-down affair, but they had forty acres of vegetable plots that had to be worked, so there were always kids around. Her father came looking for her and told her to get in the truck, saying that he just wanted to talk. Since she’d left her clothes behind, she went back with him to pick them up, telling her friends to come get her if she didn’t return in thirty minutes.
He didn’t hit her, but he yelled a lot. “How will it look to the neighbours?” he raged. It was especially galling that she’d prefer hardscrabble poverty with the foster family to living at home. What would people think? What lies are you telling about me?
But she was out from under his fist. She packed her clothes, and she was gone.
In spite of the upheaval in her small world, Laurie kept going to classes from her new home—except when all hands were needed in the fields—knowing she wanted an education, wanted a real life.
One day, her mother showed up at her school to speak with each of her teachers: she cried, wrung her hands, and wondered aloud how and why such a thing could happen. Everything was fine at home, could Laurie be on drugs? When class started, Laurie was forced to listen to a rant about respect and filial duty to parents.
“All of a sudden, my teachers couldn’t stand me. They totally bought that it was just me being bad. My parents had always been able to pull off the ‘stable family’ image, and I was threatening it.”
Years later, her mother told her in self-defence, “Your father and I always believed in corporal punishment, we didn’t mean to hurt you.”
She thought she was free, she thought she’d escaped and left behind all the violence, all the pain, succumbing to that brief and common delusion that we can put our past safely behind us and move on.
Given such a shaky start, it’s not surprising that Laurie ran into a world of trouble. She moved to Guelph to stay with a friend, and to finish up grade thirteen. She hung out with college students who were through school for the year. Soon everyone had gone back home or away to work, including her roommate. It was hard to come up with the money for rent all on her own, but she found a job that paid minimum wage at a local convenience store. Her hours were from 4 p.m. to 12 midnight. She could easily do her homework there, especially since no one ever came in after 10 p.m.
She could also drink, and this drowned her inhibitions and tapped into her anger, though finding the money to pay for it was challenging. Laurie started to not ring in sales of cartons of cigarettes, just pocketing the money, in the era before cameras and lie-detector tests. Her take began to add up, and the owner had noticed enough to keep tabs on two male employees who were his first suspects, even spying on them. One of the employees was dealing drugs out of the store; but it was Laurie who was responsible for the diminishing inventory. She felt things were closing in on her, and one night, burning with liquid courage from the forty-ouncer she kept hidden in the backroom, she made a plan. She emptied the cash register, stashed the money in a sack, and hid it in the same place as her bottle. Satisfied she was being clever, she then called the cops to report a robbery. (In her less-than-astute state, she figured she could use the money to gradually replace the missing inventory so that they wouldn’t be able to tell she’d been stealing.)
The cops were clearly suspicious.
They looked around, and asked if the robber had used a weapon. Laurie said the robber had his hand in his pocket, and something hard was pointing out at her. Could she describe him? In the most general terms possible, she did. The two detectives told her they’d come by her apartment Monday (it was a Friday night) with a sketch artist. It was the longest weekend of her life, and she was very alone, very scared. The conflict between wanting to be stopped and the fear of being caught played out feverishly. When the cops arrived Monday morning, they were not carrying a sketchbook. Casually, they told her about the last case they’d worked where a guy had reported a robbery, but it had turned out he’d stolen the money himself.
She broke.
“I know you know I did it. I just want to confess and give the money back.”
They were very sweet to her, these burly plainclothes officers. On the drive to the store to pick up the cash, one of them slipped her a business card, and said, “He’s a good lawyer, and he takes legal aid cases.” The other cop expressed his regret that it wasn’t the owner who’d done the theft, letting Laurie know that they’d had their eyes on the place for a long time. If Laurie came back in a couple of years, he’d be glad to tell her all about it.
It could have been a lot worse; they only charged her with public mischief. She was fingerprinted and photographed, and released with a court date.
She missed it.
The police picked her up at school. Her lawyer showed up at the station, and she didn’t have to spend time in the cells. The judge asked for a pre-sentence report, giving the caseworker a month to write it. When it was finished, Laurie found it instructive to read about how she was viewed at school (depressed, withdrawn, doesn’t interact with others), how her life looked on paper.
She was given a year’s probation, and a probation officer whom she really liked. He would tell her: Laurie, all day I have to deal with rapists and murderers, and then you come in and brighten my world. Many people feel that way about her.
That was in June. By September she had run away from the psychiatric ward where she was enduring her second admission (her first had been the result of an overdose of two bottles of Tylenol). Four days before, she had piled up a bunch of sheets in the linen room and set fire to them. It was a contained fire in a room that would not allow it to spread, but the smoke was so thick the fire department had to bring huge fans to clear it out. No one suspected Laurie, and she was getting very frustrated: What does it take to get caught?
It was dark and cold. Escaping the hospital had been pretty easy, going back to the same store she’d broken into a few times before seemed the thing to do. Not that she thought about it much, she was mostly on automatic pilot, and had been for some time. This night, however, there was a security guard inside the building. He’d left his car running, and the doors open. The backyard of the store was essentially a gravel dump, with artificial hills piled up around the parking lot. She got in the car, slammed the doors shut, and tried to drive up those hills. The car stalled halfway up the second one, and she abandoned it, running away through the night. She returned to the scene a couple of hours later, saw the guard looking up and down the street, and brazenly approached him.
“Are you looking for something?” she asked innocently.
He was angry that someone had stolen his car, but he didn’t suspect her. She’d been trying to get caught for some time, and it was a lot harder than she’d thought.
“What does a person have to do?” she muttered to herself.
For months now, under cover of darkness and fuelled by wine or whisky, she’d been “marauding” in the neighbourhood—petty pilfering, breaking windows, removing bikes from backyard sheds and abandoning them a few blocks away. If she was considered so bad and different, then she would act the part. A gradual escalation drew her in deeper.
“At seventeen, I was just this package of compressed rage walking around.”
Laurie was already on a year’s probation and if she were caught, she’d have to do the time for the first offence, along with whatever she was given for the second conviction. A nurse she liked, whom she’d told just a little about her illegal activity, talked to her. Laurie said she was “really good, one of the few.” The floodgates broke and Laurie confessed again. She was never charged and never went to court. Although two police officers were called in, they didn’t believe she’d set the fire.
“They were so nice, I think they thought I was really mental.”
Laurie was lucky, at least compared with many who now languish in prisons, having finally found ways to make the world pay attention. Living under the thumb of a petty tyrant for years and suffering physical and emotional abuse had left her with a blinding, consuming rage that medications or psychiatric labels could not cover up.
Like Laurie, we don’t understand what drives us, but in brief flashes of clarity, we know that we’re out of control. We need practical help to validate and then rein in that anger, and we need reassurance that it isn’t our fault, that we’re not as bad as we fear we are. Unfortunately, that support is often not forthcoming from hospital staff concerned with the smooth operation of the ward, and we’re left feeling that we’ve simply traded one form of abuse for another.
We do know, however, the consequences of trusting, of asking for anything—of setting ourselves up to be hurt, disappointed, or ridiculed. So, again like Laurie, we wrap the ragged remnants of our self-respect around us and hide behind our defiance, declaring our awareness of the reality of indifference or worse lurking behind professions of concern.
Barry D’Costa is a passionate, sensitive, young man, brown-skinned, with finely draw features and expressive eyes. His parents were born in Kenya and their parents in Portuguese Goa. Barry spent the first six years of his life three hours north of London, England, in an area called the Midlands, and then his parents immigrated to Canada and settled in Kitchener-Waterloo.
Barry read my first book, Upstairs in the Crazy House, while living and working in Kitchener-Waterloo, between hospital admissions. It struck a resonant chord in him, and he eventually made his way to Toronto to take up a position with PERC (Parkdale Economic Resources Committee), a fledgling survivor business based at the Parkdale Activity and Recreation Centre. He was part of a leadership group I conducted for the Ontario Council of Alternative Businesses (OCAB); his energy, commitment, and passion made him the best of the best.
Barry grew up watching his mother take constant verbal and physical abuse. There was so much unhappiness, violence, and turmoil in his home that as a child he found it impossible to concentrate at school, or even to stop crying. Teachers may have asked him what was the matter—he doesn’t remember—but he wouldn’t have, couldn’t have, told them anyway.
Fights at home were about anything and everything. He was fourteen when his new baby sister came home from the hospital. He remembers the awe he felt holding her, and the need he had to protect her, watch over her, love her; and yet, after less than a moment, his arms felt numb, as if part of him knew he was essentially powerless.
“Disrespect was the message my parents constantly communicated to each other, and also how they portrayed each other to their kids. I always felt unsettled, just by virtue of the people I was living with.”
Both parents worked, and Barry couldn’t understand why his mother didn’t take advantage of the fact that she had her own income to leave.
“I never understood the dynamic that kept them together. I felt Dad was indifferent to the kids, violent towards her. We would have done better if we had not lived with him.”
He felt responsible, deep down inside where all bad feelings are kept—if he’d never existed, his parents wouldn’t have had to marry, and therefore would have saved themselves and their children a whole load of grief. [Barry’s in a writing group we hold every second Saturday morning at the Raging Spoon—a psychiatric-survivor-run restaurant—and he wrote a story once where he went back in time to talk his father out of this ill-fated marriage. As we listened to him read, more than a few of us sighed wistfully—if only it were possible.
Barry started skipping school early in life, boarding the bus as usual every morning, but spending his days at the local arcade or a Chinese restaurant that served him beer. He grew even less attached to his family. Things came to a head shortly before Christmas in 1987. His father was beating his mother again in front of the children, in front of the baby sister he’d longed to protect. Barry picked up the phone and called the police, and they came and took his father away. Later, his mother got his father freed.
That was a watershed moment for him, knowing his mother would rather continue this endless battle in spite of what it was doing to her kids. Barry was arguing, pleading with her, when something snapped. He picked up a chair and flung it at the Christmas tree, decapitating it.
“I had just demonstrated to myself that I was becoming a person with destructive tendencies. I destroyed the family Christmas tree in a rage at the hypocrisy of pretence. Acting violently towards this tree—and of course it was more than just a tree—in front of my baby sister really distressed me, so I bailed.”
He went to stay with a friend who’d also left a bad home, but was the smartest kid in the school he still attended. If he could do it, so could Barry. Living with his friend provided much-needed security, but Barry was learning that he could be ambushed by feelings he was trying to keep at bay; his life was getting scarier, and there seemed to be nowhere to go. He was drinking and smoking pot, not for enjoyment or pleasure, but to hold back the pain and anger that constantly threatened to consume him. Sleeping was difficult; life was difficult. He got a job dishwashing at a pizzeria from four to midnight and went to school during the day. His high school grades fluctuated between “failing to . . . above-average,” depending on the subject, on his attendance, and on his ability to do the course work. Once, with no provocation, he verbally threatened a teacher he liked. He’d acted out of fear, and fear was always a trigger for him.
“I felt weird and fucked-up. I had this sense of being persecuted, that there was danger all around me.”
His vice-principal suggested he go to the local hospital emergency, but Barry swore he’d see his family doctor. Though he’d trusted him in the past, Barry knew the doctor was still in touch with his family, and he didn’t want to discuss what had gone on at home—how it was still affecting him. He feared the doctor would tell his parents.
When his father had wanted to belittle his mother, he’d often say she was crazy and that she needed to see a psychiatrist. For Barry, from an early age, psychiatry seemed to be a silent partner in the abuse at home. Certainly a threat.
Nonetheless, Barry kept going, finished high school, worked at minimum-wage jobs, and applied to university part-time as a mature student in philosophy. He was surprised at how easy it was and his grades were good enough that they accepted him full-time. Often, as mental health patients, we can function in the world for some time, fooling ourselves and others, faking it to make it, until the fissures widen and swallow us up.
Barry made it to his third year.
During a bio-ethics lecture, the only class that he took with one of his sisters, something the professor said was a trigger. There had been a lot of talk and press at the time about the Heritage Front, a neo-Nazi organization, setting up in Kitchener (formerly called Berlin). Sleep-deprived and delusional, Barry found it impossible to concentrate. Ideas ran like skittering mice through his head. He felt the Nazis were about to foment some evil conspiracy against society. He couldn’t believe it was just his imagination; he felt compelled to speak out and to reveal the truth. Frightened but resolved, he stood up and ranted for what seemed forever, refusing to be silenced, refusing to take his seat. Finally, the teaching assistant and his sister persuaded him to leave the class, offering to drive him to hospital. He promised again to go on his own, but he just wanted to go home. He just wanted to sleep.
Barry has distrusted doctors and hospitals all his life, although he has since found one worker he trusts and likes. These days, he prefers to do his talking anonymously to what he calls Priests-in-a-Box, going into confessionals in different churches and having his say, secure that no one else will hear him but the priest, who is bound by confidentiality.
The story of my family is one of continuing tragedy, filled with psychiatric wards and labels, suicide attempts, addictions, and too many failures to count. We were driven crazy—every curse, every blow, every corrupted touch ended up distorting us, breaking us, shaping our separate destinies.
If you didn’t look too closely, and no one ever did, everything might have seemed fine, even ideal. The father went to work every day, so he must have been a good provider; the kids went off to school the way kids should, and for a long time the mother stayed home the way mothers should.
There were few visitors, no friends to speak off, just extended family dropping by once or twice a month. Sometimes, Dad would pile everyone in the car and we’d go for drives in the country, picking up bushels of apples and corn from the ubiquitous roadside stands.
The five kids were sent to Sunday School at the United Church a few blocks away to learn about right and wrong, heaven and hell, Jesus and the devil. We could relate to the ideas of damnation, hell, and punishment, though they seemed a bit watered down and sanitized in the sermons from the pulpit. Hell was where we lived, where we returned to, after the minister and the choir filed out.
Seven lives.
Four are dead now; there are only three of us left.
And we the living are uneasy, waiting for the axe to fall.
I could not love the two people who brought me home from the hospital into their family, into their war: just another tiny hostage to be used and abused for simply being.
And because I couldn’t feel love for them, or from them, I felt unnatural, alien.
I was a solitary child, a loner. I lived deep down in a place where fear and pity smothered any other emotion, prevented any other attachment.
My older sister Terry and I shared a room in the house she called a concentration camp. Though I felt awful when Terry used to cry herself to sleep—deep choking sobs she’d try to muffle with her pillow as the storm of his fury raged around us—or when my mother would scream for him to stop—a terrible wrenching pity that would well up and almost stop my breathing—there was nothing I could do, and there was nowhere to run.
Sometimes my mother would scream out that he had raped her, forced her into more pregnancies, so that she couldn’t ever escape. It was simple logic, then: if I hadn’t been born, none of this would have happened. It was my fault, all this terror, all this pain.
I would spend a lot of time staring out the second-floor window to the street—the street that some considered picturesque, with the houses so close to us and each other—and see only studied indifference.
Once, when we still lived in Two Mountains, Terry had run crying to a neighbour’s house, to beg them to make him stop beating her mom. Some crimes are bigger than others, and this telling was the biggest. Both parents beat her.
Being the wrong gender may well have been the first strike against us: four of us females, only a couple of years separating us, in the search for a son to carry on the name. The second strike was undoubtedly the cost of feeding and clothing us, these superfluous daughters. And the third seemed to be that we were never deemed worthy of the effort and sacrifice put into us.
Terry was determined to break out of the nightmare we lived in, and for her, education held the key. She studied long into the night, sticking her fingers into her ears to shut out the screams and thuds and curses that rose from downstairs. Unless, of course, it was her turn to stand before him for judgment, for a beating. (Sometimes he’d just line us all up, moving from one to the other with increasing brutality, not needing a reason, not fearing interference from neighbours or police.)
A man’s home was his castle then, his children his to raise however he saw fit. He allowed his wife to take a job in the same aircraft plant he worked in, where he could watch her, control her, and be sure she wasn’t planning to escape.
Terry did get out and went away to teacher’s college. I had the bedroom to myself. I wrapped it around me for some illusion of safety, of apartness.
But it was my turn now to be left in charge of the others—who nicknamed me the warden—to make breakfast, to get them off to school, and to ensure chores were done.
I desperately tried to maintain appearances, the way my parents always had. It seemed to be all they cared about: how things looked.
But years of abuse had already taken root: all the curses, all the words he’d used as battering rams to destroy any sense we might have had of our worth, of our potential, had already defined us, condemned us, and set us apart.
I never considered fitting in at school an option—I would have happily settled for invisibility. I’d learned pretty quickly for a “stupid” child that any attention was potentially lethal.
School was torturous for me. I was immediately overwhelmed when I tackled things like multiplication tables, or long division, or fractions. Even in grade ten, exasperated teachers were using flashcards to try to teach me. No one said, “Of course, you’re having trouble, you’re scared to death of going home. You know the punishment for saying the wrong answer.”
It’s funny how long things stay with you. That feeling of misery and failure, that constant fear of ridicule, put on with school clothes, woven into the very fabric, part of the uniform, part of you. Teachers were more adults who saw me as a screw-up, who shook their heads or rolled their eyes or made sarcastic comments to get a laugh from the other students when in blind panic an answer would not come. There was no whisper of a hint that they might be wrong.
Some lessons we learned very well.
It’s easy to teach bright, attractive, untroubled boys and girls. It’s the kid that you instinctually dislike that needs you the most—the one who desperately needs reaching, needs to find something he can do that will perhaps bring the first praise ever into his life.
For me, it wasn’t until the last years of my high school experience that someone, anyone, took the time to say: You have talent, you have potential. The others weren’t so lucky. All they felt was condemnation, and they were determined, for a time, to live down to it.
Michael, the youngest, was breaking into cars and stealing stereos. The two girls I was supposed to “control” were doing what troubled girls have always done. I suspected these things, but telling on them was not an option, not any kind of solution.
I felt I was failing once again.
Failing them, failing my parents, failing myself.
I started to crumble, from the inside out.
Couldn’t go to school, couldn’t leave the house, couldn’t see a way out. My nerves were stretched taut. I had prolonged fits of crying as I spent the daylight hours wandering from room to room, wringing my hands, steeped in fear.
And every evening, when his car pulled into the driveway, when Daddy brought them both back from work, I struggled to hide my disintegration from them, clenching the muscles around my mouth so forcibly that the keening sound in back of my throat would never escape.
But I had to get out, had to run, had to try.
Barry, Laurie, and I learned the same lessons very early: as children we were not important enough, or good enough, or bright enough, or lovable enough to cause our parents to interrupt their wars on each other and on us. The rest of the world (outsiders and extended family) would rather not know what was going on, and if they did find out, it was quite likely they would ascribe the blame to us.
We learned powerlessness; we learned that might makes right; we learned there was no safety; and with every emotional or physical blow, we learned to misshape our self-image into the one so violently drawn by our abusers. We learned that the major institutions and the people with the most impact on our lives were betraying us too.
As a group, those of us raised in this kind of environment are more attuned to detecting the Big Lie than to buying into the Big Illusion. We learned the hard way to hate the pretence and the hypocrisy, which were given more validity than truth, and that truth would be sacrificed to maintain illusions. And we learned, deep down where it counts, to hate ourselves.
In files that grow thicker with every hospital admission, the words appear often enough, couched in clinical jargon and so frequently that they have lost their power to move the helpers: abused child, hit, kicked, punched. But the words are so small and the acts so devastating, words cannot convey the weight of them.
And we who have suffered this abuse know that.
So victims stop using words. We resort to acting out the pain and despair in a mute show of need that brings only more blame and confirmation that it is indeed us who are the cause of the horrors around us. We are drowning in a deep ocean of self-loathing, within sight of the shore, within sight of people who turn away, scornful and dismissive.
The same way they always did.
When Laurie tried to speak out about what was happening to her at home and realized that no one wanted to know, she understood she was alone and lost and full of blame. No matter that somewhere in the deep recesses of her mind she recognized that the abuse she suffered was wrong, even criminal, certainly unjust. How could she sustain that knowledge when it was never confirmed by others?
Barry, perhaps already knowing what the response would be, did not speak—not until he was out of the home and out of the immediate reach of his family. He had feelings of agonized powerlessness when he held his sister in his arms. I know those feelings, too; to watch suffering is always worse than to endure it yourself.
Most of us get to a point where we stop running, stop reacting, and make some accommodation for the pain bedevilling us. For some, it may take a decade or so to experience some release; for others, it will never come, except through an overdose or after a leap in front of an onrushing subway train.
The best revenge comes from living well, or so the old expression goes. Those of us emerging from family war zones would do well to keep that in mind, rather than continuing on with the self-destruction that begins in infancy and ends when we are jailed, hospitalized, or caught up in the clutches of addictions.
The tyranny of the majority view of “family” silences, cripples, and condemns. As early as grade school, children should be given the tools and the right to speak up. The curriculum should support studies of different kinds of families, and explain what a child can do when his parents are violent and hurtful. It should help students get a sense of how abused children feel guilty and bad, and how those feelings are likely to play out, if we’re not watchful. School officials and extended families must not turn a blind eye to clear evidence of abuse, believing all parents to be wonderful, loving creatures who are occasionally burdened with the “bad seed” child.
Mental health professionals must learn the silent language of behaviour, rather than reject those who are troublesome and non-communicative. Counsellors can channel a victim’s anger to fuel a drive for success in life, for revenge of the best sort. Children emerging from violence desperately crave warmth and acceptance and understanding. They take to it like fish to water. The problem is, even in the caring professions, they so rarely encounter it. Psychiatry is too concerned with the search for the biological and physiological causes of mental illness to address these basic emotional needs, and so it fails us. We are more than chemical disorders—we are individuals smothered with pain, and we need a human response to suffering if we are to overcome it.
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