Okay so I just saw someone in a RBN comment thread say “I didn’t have it anywhere near as bad as some people who post here, but…” and it brought up an idea that sort of lives rent free in the back of my mind, something I’ve done a lot of work around in therapy.

When I first started therapy and coming to terms with how I had been “raised,” I would tell people “I knew every one of my dad’s buttons and I pushed them all at once. I know he was the adult and I was the child, and I know what he did to me was legally abuse, but I also know that I was very difficult to raise.” Or something to that effect.

For years and years, I’ve struggled with seeing what happened in my childhood as abuse. It’s like the word abuse is disconnected from the idea of parents in jail, kids with broken bones and burns and suicidal ideation from the mental torture they deal with. “Sure I was abused. But not THAT abused.”

And then when I line up the facts I realize that yes, while a lot of the time we had a great relationship, while he was fun and funny and loving and my best friend and my hero, he also boiled over at least once a month, chased me from one end of the house to the other, cornered me next to the stove, and whaled on me until his anger abated. I examine my childhood and vividly recall the police showing up because the neighbors could hear him screaming through the closed doors at the back of their property, hundreds of feet away, as well as I recall the older-than-me, psycho piece of garbage guy next door telling me he sat next to his open window with a bowl of popcorn and listened to my dad beat me. I remember being punched in the face at least twice: once hard enough to pop the skin on the bridge of my nose and cause me to see stars, the other so hard that I briefly lost both consciousness and control over my bladder, and had to mule kick him in the chest to snap him out of the flurry of hits landing anywhere he could reach.

Do any of you struggle with the idea of having been abused, and your lived experiences, not feeling AS MUCH like abuse as what others dealt with? Or feeling less than, feeling… idk like you weren’t abused ENOUGH to really say you were? It’s kind of hard for me to formulate it into an idea made of words, so I hope you get what I mean here.

Happiest of hols to those who, like me, got out. And biggest of hugs to any of you who are spending the hols somewhere you do not want to be. My heart is with you all. 🫶🏻