The exiled child
From Griffith REVIEW Edition 15: Divided Nation
© Copyright Griffith University & the author.
Written by Meera Atkinson
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Meera Atkinson's biography and other articles by this writer
Our battle with the twenty-one-year-old party girl next door over her top-volume dance music came to a head one evening. Having tried the friendly, then friendly-yet-firm route, my husband and I decided to show we were serious. We'd called the police before and the music had promptly been turned down, but the cop who came that fateful night heard the doof-doof blast from downstairs and took it upon himself to issue a twenty-eight-day summons to cease and desist, even though she'd turned the music off on her way out a moment before he reached her door.
As he pulled out his pad, we listened from behind our door, exchanging triumphant smiles. Then all hell broke loose. We opened the door to find our neighbour, dressed to go out, screaming at the cop to get out and trying desperately to shut the door on him. He stood firm, one leg holding the door open, demanding the information he needed for the summons. When she realised she had no retreat, she became wild, kicking at his shins and throwing a live cigarette at him, her eyes wide in confusion, rage and terror. He warned her he would arrest her for assaulting a police officer. I appealed to her to calm down.
Suddenly his back-up arrived, and six or seven officers surrounded her in the hallway. She flailed like a trapped animal; her breast fell out of her dress. She cried out: she couldn't breathe; she was having a panic attack, a heart attack; she wanted her doctor, her mother; she couldn't believe this was happening; she had a party to go to. As the cops descended to make their arrest, her heels made skid marks on the walls. It was obvious that they viewed her as just another methamphetamine loser or, worse, a lunatic cop-hater. But for the first time since I'd met her, I saw her as a kindred spirit.
There have been many times in my life when people have come to negative conclusions about me, and many terms applied: juvenile delinquent, alcoholic, drug addict, drama queen, borderline personality disorder, self-destructive, hysteric, depressive, neurotic, phobic and hypochondriac. But I've discovered a new one, and according to the literature it may be at the heart of all the others: chronic trauma survivor.
I realised some years ago that I was a traumatised person, but it wasn't until I read Trauma and Recovery by Judith Herman (Pandora, 1998) – a book my therapist refers to as "The Bible in the field of trauma studies" – that I came across this phrase and finally understood the true nature of trauma. Many who have grown up in an environment of domestic violence, where trauma has become the norm, come to this realisation after decades of suffering. Most, like me, will have collected a hefty sack of labels along the way, labels that all too often only succeed in describing symptoms. The hardest thing about being a chronic trauma survivor (and it has no end of hardships) is the crushing loneliness of being misunderstood.
The simplest definition of trauma is that cited by Elizabeth Waits in Trauma and Survival: Post-Traumatic and Dissociative Disorders in Women (Norton, 1993): "Injury to mind or body that requires structural repair." I have known for the best part of two decades that growing up with domestic violence damaged me, but I used to think of that damage as a vague, amorphous influence on my equally vague and amorphous emotional life. Until recently, I didn't know that this damage occurred at a concrete level on the actual structure of my developing brain, and that this "structural damage" explains why the process of recovery for those chronically traumatised as children is such an enormous challenge.
Researchers from the University of South Australia, in their 2002 report Children and Domestic Violence, describe children as "the ‘silent', ‘forgotten', or ‘invisible' victims of family violence". They outline the problem of the traditional division between domestic violence and child protection – when child abuse is viewed as a health and welfare matter and domestic violence is referred to the police, courts and women's refuges, children fall through the cracks. The researchers conclude that domestic violence is a child protection issue: "There is now increasing recognition that these are not separate phenomena and that children's exposure to domestic violence is a form of child abuse."
MY PARENTS DIVORCED WHEN I WAS FIVE. After that came "the boyfriends". My mother had three live-in relationships between the divorce and the time I left home at fifteen. It was the second, a man I dared to love and came to fear, who proved to be the most traumatic – the man I'll refer to as Arthur. He earned the dubious title of "the worst" partly because he was probably sociopathic, and partly because he let me down so badly; I had desperately wanted him to be a loving partner for my mother and a father figure to me.
For the first few years after my parents' divorce, I clung to the hope that they would reunite. I interrogated my mother about why they'd parted. Though there must have been tension between them and in the home, my memories of early life are tranquil. The most damning thing I could say about my father was that he seemed distant and was often absent. During the late '60s and early '70s, I felt the stigma of being a child of divorce keenly. I absorbed the images of happy television families, and suffered from a constant sense of inferiority for failing to belong to one.
I was nine when my mother and I moved into a new apartment and I started at a new school. Stacey was among the first children I befriended. She was my age, the daughter of a single father. It didn't take us long to hatch a Brady Bunch plan. We decided that Stacey would come to my place after school one afternoon and stay too late to walk home. In between the idea and the execution, we each primed our respective parents about the availability and charms of the other. Arthur arrived at the appointed hour and lingered late into the evening, talking with my mother on the sofa while we girls giggled excitedly in my bedroom, plotting our deliriously happy future as sisters. Arthur and Stacey moved in quickly and the four of us enjoyed a blissful honeymoon. My mother, who was an indoor person and an avid reader, was lured out of doors on a seemingly never-ending string of adventures. We took boats out on the water, enjoyed long country drives and even went on holidays.
Not long after I'd started calling Arthur "Dad" and Stacey started calling my mother "Mum", my newfound happiness gave way to mayhem. Home became a place of increasing fear and secrecy. "If the idea of ‘home' implies physical and psychological safety and security as well as shelter," as Jill Astbury wrote, "then a child, adult or older person affected by domestic violence experiences a hidden ‘homelessness'." For a child – who needs a safe environment to develop – this homelessness can be a kind of lifelong exile.