It’s Not a Child’s Job to Heal Their Parent with Unconditional Love
NEWSFLASH: When someone opens up about their childhood trauma, don't blame that child for the trauma.
After years of writing and talking about my trauma on the internet, I don’t consider myself easily surprised. That all changed, however, when I logged on a few days ago to see a comment section that truly shocked me.
The comments were on a post I had recently written. The title? Let’s Talk About the Time My Mother Abandoned Me on the Side of the Road.
In the article, I detail an encounter with my mother in which she kicked me (17 years old at the time) out of a car after threatening me and getting angry at me. For pretty obvious reasons, it was a traumatizing event. The point of the story was to capture that trauma and describe how it still touches me to this day.
Most of the comments on the story were kind and supportive, but the shock came when I found a thread of 2 adults berating me for the traumatic event. Yes, you read that correctly. Two grown adults with their real names and profile pictures took to the comments and told me that my mother’s abuse was my fault because I didn’t “love her enough.”
The two posters went back and forth, comparing their traumas to mine and describing, in detail, why I had failed my mother as a child for not loving her past the trauma she inflicted on me.
Your mother was traumatized…no one loved her enough, including you.
The comments were heartbreaking. They were gut-wrenching. But most of all, they were infuriating.
It’s not a child’s job to love their parent out of trauma.
As a society, we seem to understand that children aren’t capable of consenting to the abuse that is inflicted on them sexually. When it comes to the psychological abuse inflicted on children by parents, however, we (by and large) tend to act as though parents are entitled to the radical consent of their children. It’s a strange sort of hypocrisy and it was on display in my comment section.
These two strangers ingested the story of child-me fearing for her life on a roadside and decided to hoist the blame squarely on my shoulders.
They based all of this on a sliver of knowledge: my mother was traumatized as a child. From there, they made the split-second decision to do what everyone else in my life chose to do —excuse every horrible thing that she did. Show her the mercy that they weren’t ever willing to show me.
Somehow it came back, like some kind of cosmic, sh*t-caked boomerang, the way it always did. That little girl growing up in a dirty house filled with sewage and animal feces was to blame for the actions of the adults around her. The comments were disgusting and I told the posters so.
It brings light back to this same fundamental problem.
As a society, we are too willing to gaslight the survivors of parental abuse. Still, as far as we have come, we are too quick to hoist the burden of abuse onto the shoulders of innocents who can neither ask nor consent to the experience. It’s soul-crushing to realize.