Denial

I've been struggling with the part of myself that is incredibly invested in denial. In the face of overwhelming evidence to the contrary, this part will insist that nothing happened, and that nothing is wrong in the present moment, either. It works externally, coordinating the one lie that I have been able to tell successfully: that I'm doing just fine.

Internally, it's even louder and more vehement. It makes me doubt that anything bad happened, or if things happened that I remember, it insists that they weren't as bad as it seems like they were, that it's just my interpretation, and nothing was so hard about it. And it also blanks out my memory of things, so that I have to keep working through the internal doubt and denial, every time the effects of childhood stuff start to make my life difficult in the present.

It's a single-minded, and not very strategic part, when it comes down to it. These are the arguments it uses: "You'd remember if anything bad happened, and you don't remember any of your childhood, so nothing bad happened." "Look at your sisters and brothers. They're doing just fine, and they'd have problems if anything bad had happened." (This is a particularly stupid piece of evidence, given my siblings!) "Someone outside of the family would have noticed and intervened if anything bad had happened." (Well, in a perfect world, yes, but that's not a realistic statement.)

But that last part got me thinking. And it's amazing to me how, in the general way with people, they are willing to believe someone so readily if that person says, "Oh, I'm fine. My parents are great. Everything is wonderful with me."

But often, I feel like people in the world are really resistant to hearing that something bad happened. Or else it's just that those are the people I'm most inclined to listen to, because I'm so afraid that it's all lies and that I'm making things up, or blowing things out of proportion.

Because, of course, that was how I was raised, to believe that my perceptions didn't matter and that nothing bad was really happening, and that if I thought it was bad, it was because I was being too sensitive.

You know, like when my family (all of them white) keep using the n-word in reference to me, or telling racist jokes, or say I only got into college and only got scholarships because I'm black, my problem is that I'm too sensitive and can't take a joke.

Or when I'd get hit or punched, and then immediately told, "That didn't hurt. Stop crying."

But I think about the outside people, like teachers and neighbors. I can only think of one time when someone intervened, and my memory is incredibly vague--someone at one of our schools called children's services, who came and investigated, but things were left the same afterwards. Because my parents aren't stupid, and were entirely able to act as though they were perfectly good parents, and it was whichever of us kids who was making something up.

Thinking about it, though, all those years--there are eight kids in my family, spread over 20 years, so that's a LONG time with kids in the school system. Only one teacher noticed something was up?

And I admit that I'm especially infuriated, in a general, not-related-to-me sense, about the fact that the mandated reporter trainings I've had about child abuse NEVER MENTION that not all abused children misbehave, and that, in fact, the kids who are terrified of making mistakes or doing absolutely anything wrong at all... they also might have things going on.

I guess it's the years of being utterly surrounded by people who seemed trained to think nothing was going on that makes it so hard for me to understand that most of the people I know in my adult life are willing to believe that bad things happened back when I was a kid. And it makes me angry on behalf of the kid parts, who even though they did their best to hide things, should not have been even one tenth as successful as they were, because they just weren't that good at hiding things... except no one chose to look for the signs.