Sorry this is pretty long.
I was a pretty badly behaved kid growing up. Not intentionally so though. I was just doing what my parents told me too. I really tried to do the “right” thing but others saw me as being cruel. Even the teachers hated me. I guess the signs that I was abused where there but I did too good of a job of masking them because instead of questioning my home life the school questioned my intelligence.
I remember endless streams of IQ tests and cognitive processing tests that I constantly passed with flying colours while my teachers got increasingly frustrated and angry with me. I even remember one teacher dragging me to an empty classroom and furiously quizzing me on math right after I passed yet another IQ test and calling me a liar when I said I didn’t know the answers. Shouting at me and even throwing a desk.
The thing is my dad was an abuser and my mom as much as I would love to paint her as a perfect victim she enabled him in many ways. She was a victim sometimes but sometimes she joined in the abuse perhaps unknowingly. I don’t blame her though and I’m not mad at her, she was abused and I don’t think she knew what love looked like.
Anyways because of this… I didn’t know how to treat others so I frequently angered everyone around me.
One day in 7th grade a teacher saw my dad screaming at me and pulling me by the arm. He left bruises. She helped me help my family. My mother left we thought everything would become “normal” I guess… whatever normal looked like.
Anyways something that really sticks in my mind was that I was really trying to process my trauma. My family councillor said things like “Don’t be afraid to talk about it! Don’t be silent!” So I stupidly took her advice.
The kids did not react well. Their responses varied greatly from
“You probably deserved it.”
” How hard did he hit you?”
” What were you doing at the time?”
and even silence.
There was the occasional “I’m sorry. That’s terrible!” but they were few and far between.
And gradually they all distance themselves from me. One not even said my dad probably hit me because I’m an ugly bitch.
The most painful was when the teachers caught wind. The cold shoulder. The quiet turn of the head and walking away as if to say “well you had it coming.”
I get now that they were not responsible for my pain. I shouldn’t have put that on their shoulders. But at the time I guess I was just trying to process what happened to me in my own stupid way.
But you know in all the movies it’s like this big reveal. “protagonist discovers a kid is abused! Everyone rushes to comfort them and help them heal!” But that’s not how it goes down at all. I felt like I was better off never being born. Because not only did my dad hate me, but all the kids and teachers. What better confirmation that you are a waste of space than that?
My head gets caught up in these memories a lot. Even though I have a nice life now when those memories come back I get a really strong urge to hurt myself. I’ve been to therapy and tried medication. It doesn’t help. I feel the overwhelming feeling that I shouldn’t have been born and I think that everyone would be better off without me.
TLDR: Everyone in school kids and teachers alike hated me because I was a piece of shit because my parents abused me. They made me feel they were glad I was abused when my misguided family councillor encouraged me to open up about it. Now 20 years later the memories still make me seriously consider offing myself.
Anyways I guess I’m just wondering… why do people react like this to learning of stories of abuse? Why can’t I just move on and get over it?