The #metoo Of Violence In Childhood

Dear Insane Minds:

It took me many decades, many tears, many ostias, many violence, a lot of therapy and a lot of friendship picking me up again and again but, finally, I have seen a little light there in the background.

I experienced violence in childhood. That was so. One of the things that happens with violence is that, as soon as you name it, all the alarms go off and that feeling of falsifying things, that it was not so bad, that yours was not so serious either.

And how we all walk in those, because we lack shared stories to realize that all and all of us who experienced violence in childhood think that ours was not so bad.

That is part of the process.

Well, look, I don’t know if it was for so much or so little, but I grew up in a state of perpetual fear and on several occasions, when I was quite an adult, I felt my life was at risk. And that does not seem to me that it has to be what happens in a family, really.

Overall, I have read a lot of things about the consequences of having experienced these situations and I have realized that there is something in the story that we are missing. And they are our stories.

Because everything indicates that having lived through this leaves us sequels for life, and you end up being convinced that you are a sequel with legs, a person with a defect, with a void that you have to fill but that you will never fill because that has already happened and that’s it. Will you tell me how you go back to fill it

And I have realized, or am realizing now, at my 45 years of age, that these narratives have not done me quite well, because they have been reaffirming the idea of ​​a trace of perpetual violence, that that hole, that emptiness is real.

And it is not.

Here I stand. That already happened, it already was. That was a lived experience that we have to place in its place in time and space, an experience that we have lived to tell it, that we have to be proud of having survived and being here, standing.

That this hole is a phantom void, that it does not exist, that it is not real.

That violence itself has made us believe that the hole exists and we do not stop giving it a ball. Enough. You have to give the hole back to whoever created it and tell them that it is not ours, that it is not mine.

That I grew up lacking in love, or with a violent love, that I have learned a lot from that experience, that I will explain it as many times as necessary because I am not ashamed anymore, that each one carries his burden, and that burden It is not mine.

That I am not stupid, that I am not empty.

That I do not lack anything, that there is nothing to fill, that I am not going to continue thinking as a victim and blaming myself, also, for victimizing myself, that I am not going to continue pondering whether it was for so much or for so little. That it was already.

I am still understanding the whole process and I lack the perspective of closure. But right now I am here, in a place that I had not even suspected existed.

And I am here not only for myself, but for the friends with whom we have shared stories, because we have told each other, we have spoken, we have cried together and we have recognized each other.

The wonder of standing up, groping, yes, hesitant, yes, but being there and finishing completing our stories from the present, from what we have managed to be.

Happy week, Minds!