Learner Therapist (57) …
Retraumatising forever!
Torrey
OrtonMarch 24, 2015
When
the family makes a late, uninvited and seemingly unavoidable return…
There are many things
about trauma which are difficult to understand, both for the traumatised and their
friends and colleagues. High among the list is re-traumatising within the
family, or other social system(s) of origin (e.g.-schools, clubs, churches…).
Poor relationship choices are almost unavoidable, at least the first times
around. These choices arise from inappropriate relationship needs shaped by the
original abuses.
Maybe you wouldn’t have
heard the one about the parents who had to call on their children for rescue
from their everyday self-management incompetence? Or the one about the parents
whose most abused male child bought them a new house after they lost the family
home and then they lost it again, having never acknowledged the gift before
losing it? But the parents who refuse to stay away are another thing. Here’s
such a story.
The two children have long
before moved to a distance beyond daily or weekly visits to or from their
parents…both at times to other sides of the globe. One finds himself back in
the monthly visit range with Father and weekly with Mother, while himself in
the early stages of child raising and attempting to integrate family and
continuing work demands with a rigorously perfectionist self-assessment system
in place. It’s one of the unintended consequences of his parents’ respective withholdings
of affection and engagement with him 35 years ago, amplified by conflicting
gender role expectations arising from their southern European origins. Now, Mother
can’t resist commenting on child rearing practices and behaving in ways which
replay almost verbatim to his children the treatment she dished out 35 years
before to him.
Dad has kept himself to
the old family town more than a day away and retired with such bad effect that
he’s lost all of his retirement funds except a vaguely commercial property in
said town. He’s acquiring a new wife and the prospect of a sale of the
property, but with no commercial nous that would ensure he doesn’t lose it all
again. He, like Mother, keeps number two child, a daughter a few years younger
than son, appraised of the collapse of his financial worlds. This sharing
elicits without soliciting (and so all the more powerfully demanding) a
financial sympathy which slides into a felt obligation to help. This sense is
then imposed on the son with blind complicity by number two’s intermediation of
the messages about the parental decomposition.
This would not be too
much if the children were rich and calmly located in the upper end of their
parenting cycles, but they are not. And the implied burden of the assistance
they should provide is unequally spread, too. Because number two lives in
another country she can’t remotely be expected to house Mother as she slides
towards a physical infirmity paralleling her financial one. And note that this
pattern of implied obligation, openly but indirectly (through Number Two)
proposed, also repeats the pattern of indirect expectations the children had
been subjected to in their childhood!!
Abuse creates guilt in
the abused, almost without exception (and completely beyond the understanding or
appreciation of the ‘normal’). The re-traumatised, as Number One and Two are,
get to revisit the experience of guilt when their incompetent parents reappear
with more or less explicit pleas for family succour and without acknowledgment
of the abuse which created the original guilt. The children now have the guilt
of their desire not to succour the incompetent and abusing, which Number One
has made a professional life around as policeman, and similar occupations!!
