No More Butterflies - Prologue

As babies we are usually born into the all-encompassing care of one or more parent, at least the vast majority of us are. Those parents, whether mother or father or both, take complete control of our lives. They decide when we eat, when we sleep and when we bathe and we, though we may try, have little or no influence on these events.

However, as we grow we are usually encouraged both to do, and to decide things for ourselves. We are taught to feed ourselves and dress ourselves and before long we get to decide things, given that we have learned to talk, like when we need to go to the toilet, what we want to wear and whether we like or dislike certain things.

In the normal scheme of things we then go to school and meet other people who might like or dislike different things and we learn to consider other options, other people’s opinions are heard and we learn to agree or disagree with them as we see fit. So we eventually grow up into kind, compassionate, well rounded and unselfish adults.

But, not so the life of the child of a control freak. Whilst these children are encouraged to do things for themselves, they are still taught the practicalities of life, whether it be cooking and cleaning or gardening and decorating, they are taught to be useful, but never, on pain of serious punishment, are they considered, nor should they consider themselves, worthy of making decisions on their own.

They must always do as they are told, when they are told and how they are told.

Individual thought is not only frowned upon but condemned as ungrateful, selfish, arrogant and wholly unacceptable.

Of course, no child born into such a life can point to any defining moment and say “That’s it...that’s when the abuse started.” As there really is no starting point, just that the control required in infancy is never lifted. These children don’t even realise they are being abused, at least not until the lasting damage is done.

They believe, as they are taught to believe, that all children have to do exactly as they are told. It’s just that other parents don’t ask the same things of their children. If challenged this is always because other parents are wrong, either because they are too liberal, too lazy or just too stupid to require the appropriate level of obedience and loyal behaviour of their offspring.

This explanation also prevents the child from enquiring to deeply of their friends, as none want to have to inform such friends that their parents might be deemed to be stupid.

As such abuse is so insidious and seemingly unthreatening it goes largely undetected in the wider world. Even when such children decide they now require their freedom and are labelled rebellious and uncompromising, no-one thinks to offer them help. The establishment simply does not see the problem and the child knows no better, they have no frame of reference which would enable them to ask for the help they need.

For physical and/or sexual abuse to then be piled on top of psychological abuse is then both simplicity itself for the abuser, as the fight or flight response has already been effectively disabled, and devastatingly debilitating for the abused, who has no idea how to deal with the situation they now face.

When finally they escape, these children leave home ill-equipped to deal with a life on their own. They either have no idea how to stand up for themselves, even though, by this time in their lives they know, intelligently at least, that this is a basic requirement of all life. Conversely, this knowledge only damages them further as they then feel inadequate, weak and unworthy. Or they turn out exactly as the role model they have observed for many years, they expect the world to give them exactly what has been expected of them since birth. Either way they turn into unhappy adults and it can take many years for the damage to be recognised and rectified, if it ever is.

To someone brought up without any experience of this kind of life it is difficult to understand the wholly ingrained nature of this psychological abuse. Adults who have endured this kind of childhood can be funny, intelligent, kind, compassionate and wholly ‘normal’ to the onlooker. This could be, if they are lucky, because they have faced and dealt with the demons created in childhood but most of the time it is because they have learned to hide the damage and to paper over the cracks. They are self-taught human beings, full of self-doubt and insecurities which they believe they alone endure and would be foolish to reveal to another living soul.

Read Chapter 1 from Monday 22nd May

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