Читать книгу The Cosmic Ocean - Paul K. Chappell - Страница 14

The article’s fifth misconception is not taking into account the kinds of trauma that occur unpredictably over a long period of time. I know some people who were spanked a few times by a parent, yet they do not show obvious signs of trauma. The way my father attacked me was far different from spanking. An army psychiatrist told me that in addition to sexual abuse, the most traumatic experience a parent can inflict on children is to “subject them to violent and out of control attacks in an unpredictable way over a long period of time.” According to this army psychiatrist, children who grow up in an unpredictably violent household have symptoms similar to traumatized war veterans.

Unlike a controlled spanking, when my father attacked me he would become so enraged that he seemed completely out of control. He would sometimes threaten to kill me, and during the worst beatings my mother had to restrain him to stop his assault. I remember my mother yelling at him, “If you keep hitting him in the head, you are going to give him brain damage!” When my father beat me to the point where I feared for my life, the size difference between me and him was truly terrifying. Imagine being beaten up by a man who is ten feet tall. That is how I felt as a child when my six-foot-tall father was stomping on me.

Although my father often made me fear for my life, this terror was magnified by the unpredictable nature of his attacks. Sometimes I would make a serious mistake (such as getting in trouble at school for having behavioral problems) and he would not punish me. On other occasions he would attack me for making a very small mistake or when I did not make a mistake. Sometimes he would assault me in the middle of the night when I was sleeping. When these unpredictable attacks occur over a long period of time throughout most of someone’s childhood, it can rewire the brain in dangerous ways that I will discuss throughout this book.

According to psychiatrist Daniel Siegel, “When an attachment figure [such as a parent] is the source of terror, the child’s brain has two processes going on at once. One is the inborn attachment system which says, ‘I am in a state of alarm. I need to go to my attachment figure for soothing.’ But if that attachment figure is the source of the distress, and I don’t just mean being upset and you don’t get ice-cream before dinner, I mean terror, then what happens is … another track in the child’s brain will state, ‘Do not go to that figure. That is the cause of your distress.’”9

What happens when a child’s brain experiences the confusion described by Dr. Siegel? When the people who are supposed to protect us make us fear for our lives, it can rupture our ability to trust not only them, but all human beings.