Like many modern families, my son’s has included a lot of family friends, godparents, parents’ partners, and other more ephemeral members. Of course, many of us do not have any legal rights as far as protecting him goes. In theory that’s good; ideally, sane, healthy parents use their rights to filter out people who are not safe for their children to be around. Sadly, in his case it has instead meant that his abusive birth parents slowly cut anyone out of the family who challenged their abusive ways.

There are many, many stories connected with that, and I may tell more of them over time. For the moment, I’d like to share some of the things I’ve been able to do to help him survive a smorgasboard of abuses.

Thing the First: Talking to him about abuse.

Like many people, I used to be afraid to talk to my child about abuse. I associated talking about trauma with the trauma itself: on some level, I feared that it would traumatize him to even hear about the possibility of abuse or to learn that his mother’s yelling, violence, and neglect would be called abusive. As if telling him it was abuse would magically turn it from “maybe okay” in his mind to “horribly painful.” Plus, I knew how important denial was to my survival as a child and I feared what would happen to him if I broke that denial.

But I couldn’t just ignore it and condone it with silence. I knew, too, how harmful it was to survivors to have their abuse go ignored and unchallenged and how hugely that contributes to the trauma. If I continued to stay silent, I would become an accomplice. Sure, there were things I could do, and had been doing, to mitigate the abuse – like arranging to have him more of the time, refusing to drive him to see the nearly-absent parent who had admitted to sexually abusing him and then tried to recant, and teaching him healthy coping skills. But it seemed to me that from a child’s perspective, there was a huge difference between someone subtly trying to intercede to prevent abuse in a way that might not be obvious for years, and someone flat-out saying “What is happening to you is not okay.”

I found that at first, especially when he was younger, he was afraid to talk about what had happened. He was afraid to admit that, for example, he was afraid of his mother’s anger and afraid that she would hurt him, even when he had brought it up before. Paying attention to his art helped; he would sometimes draw very telling pictures, such as one that he said was a monster: his mommy, angry, with long sharp claws. That also gave me a conversational opening, and some idea of what was going on inside his head and what he was experiencing away from me.

Sometimes we would ask him questions about how his teachers and other family members handled discipline, or if they ever hit him or yelled at him – each time asking about them one after the other by name. It helped a lot not just to give him a big vague group question like “does anyone ever yell at you,” which is too wide a net to throw a three-year-old. What helped me, too, was that he had been to a preschool where the teachers did yell at the children and slap their hands and arms, so when I felt afraid that he would think I was obsessed (and really, I didn’t bring this up that often) I at least knew that we both knew there were grounds for asking these questions. Of course, in reality, we both knew that anyway. It also helped to use the same one-by-one question format to ask about things like how different teachers and family members put him in time out – which was how we discovered that his preschool teacher had grabbed him by the ear to drag him back into time out one day, which was the last time he went to that school. So these are great things to ask kids about even if you don’t think they are being abused by another family member at all….

Sometimes he would talk about being afraid of his mommy, or we would ask if she ever hit him, and he would say yes and then take it back. Or take back having ever said he was afraid of her. It helped to remind him of things he’d said in the past; like when he tried to take back calling her a monster, and claim that the picture wasn’t of her but really was just of a monster, I could casually agree that I remembered him calling her a monster before, and move on. It helped to gently let him know that I believed what he said about the violence and fear he experienced, and that I had witnessed it myself more than once – without pushing him or trying to argue with him.

As he got older and I learned more about abuse and recovery, I started talking to him directly about abuse. The way I chose to explain it was that abuse was something that someone did to you that was Not Okay. I suggested that this might include things like hitting and yelling and asked if he could think of any examples. To my surprise, he immediately jumped in to bring up his mother spanking him.

Personally, I do think that spanking is always child abuse and always harmful – and whether or not it’s harmful, it’s also really pointless. It doesn’t teach children WHY they shouldn’t do something, even running into traffic (an example that is often given by those who sit on the fence about spanking) – it just teaches them that you do not want them to do it and they will get spanked if they do it. Which then means that once they are too old or too big to spank, they are left without any idea of why they should make the choices you were trying to teach them.

But in his case, spanking was a particularly obvious problem. It was a fairly clear-cut case of covert sexual abuse, because his mother had already made it clear in front of him, on many occasions, that she thought of spanking as a sexual act. She often talked loudly to friends and acquaintances about the latest sex party she had gone to, in front of her small child, in that common grownup fallacy that if a child isn’t looking directly at them they’re not listening. Or possibly that he wouldn’t understand anything he was hearing. I call it the “little pitchers don’t have ears” theory. So not long after, when she tried spanking him as a form of punishment, he was considerably more upset than even your average kid would have been – and, of course, too young to articulate why it was not okay with him.

I am very proud of him for being able to articulate, later on, that that had not been okay with him and that it was a kind of abuse. And I think that it is evidence that this way of talking to children works. I had asked him in the past about her spanking; talked to him about it at length on another occasion when he said she had taught him how to spank her friends (which she, a longterm BDSM safety advocate, confirmed was her response when he went around her party spanking them too high up on their spines….), and told him more than once, especially when he was terrified of getting in trouble for one thing or another, that I did not think that her spanking him had been okay and that I would never spank him. At one point, he was even brave enough to ask me and another one of his parental figures to talk to his mom for him and tell her that he did not want her to spank him or yell at him anymore. (I think that the spanking thing took, or perhaps that she had already abandoned it; the yelling part did not.)

And over several years of this tentative conversation, he became able to bring it up himself and vehemently, firmly say that it had not been okay with him. The miracle of this, to me, is that not only was he able to bring it up – this child who was terrified to talk about even thinking his mommy was scary, and who had never been willing to tell anyone that I know of about the overt sexual abuse he experienced – but that he became able to talk about it without any shame whatsoever. I think most if not all survivors reading this will know the kind of guilt and shame we take on: the fear of ever talking about what happened to us, of admitting that it was not okay with us, the secret deep-seated belief that we did something to deserve it or could and should have done something to stop it even if consciously we know that’s not true. It gives me a lot of hope to know that in at least one area, consistent support from at least one adult in his life let him let go of that shame within just a few years. And I think that is the area in which I was able to give him the most consistent support.

Next time: suggested dos and don’ts!