Over the last year while dealing with the grief of my life just falling completely apart, whenever I started to wonder how I got here, I saw little Danielle.
Little Danielle has a childhood ACE (Adverse Childhood Experience) score of 7 out of 10.
She is afraid of the dark.
She flinches when loud noises come out of nowhere.
Her heart races when voices start to raise.
She doesn’t make eye contact for fear of her face showing what she’s thinking.
Little Danielle read books to escape her reality.
She knows what happens in the house has to stay in the house.
Her school work is her primary focus because it’s the key to getting out.
Little Danielle knows how to make herself small.
She knows how to pick up on moods and when they mean staying out of the way.
Her brain compartmentalizes, so people won’t notice her wince in pain from last night’s “spanking.”
Little Danielle is me. Little Danielle didn’t have a voice. Not a real one that folks listened too.
But Adult Danielle does. Adult Danielle is brave and outspoken, at least for others she is.
Little Danielle has been protecting Adult Danielle for so long, And now it’s time for Adult Danielle to protect Little Danielle. Stand up for her. Speak up for her. Hold her. Defend Her.
I thought that I was protecting Little Danielle by never writing about the physical, emotional, and mental abuse she experienced, but I was really just letting Adult Danielle’s shame get in the way of truly healing.
Almost six years ago, I wrote a post entitled “Being a Strong Black Woman Is Killing Me.” I talked about how holding in my struggles was hurting me and that the resulting anxiety and depression were starting to suffocate me. It was all about the first time I admitted that I wasn’t okay after having my second son. Most people, myself included, tried to chalk most of it up to postpartum depression, but that’s not the complete truth.
The complete truth is that I grew up in a physically and emotionally abusive home, which led me to falling in love with an emotionally abusive man. I was raised in a religious environment that aided in reinforcing my mother’s abuse, and even though I left the church before getting married it still shaped not only the way I behaved in my marriage but also the things I tolerated. While I was able to get help for my anxiety and depression 5 years ago, that didn’t change the fact that the people who were supposed to love and protect me have deeply and irreversibly hurt me.
Before I go any further, I want to say that I have mostly made peace with both my mother and my soon to be ex husband. They both did their best with the tools they had and I know that their lived experiences played a role in the way that they treated me. I am sure that they loved me in their own way, it just wasn’t a healthy love. I will not talk about the reasons they became how they are, that is not my story to tell. What I will talk about is how my life has been colored by their actions and treatment.
People always talk about how transparent I am about my life, but the truth is I’ve been transparent about the things I wanted people to know. The things that I felt were okay to discuss publicly. And as many people noticed, I stopped writing a lot in general and that’s because I couldn’t get around having to talk about not only the abuse I endured as a child, but what was happening to me in the moment. I didn’t know how to talk about my parenting choices, which were certainly rooted in Black feminist principles, but also extremely colored by the fact that I never wanted my children to fear me in the ways I feared my own mother. I didn’t know how to tell people that I was increasingly feeling that same fear from my husband but I couldn’t understand why since he didn’t hit me.
It’s only after being separated from my husband for close to a year that I can see the connections between the ways he manipulated me and how my mother operated. They are both outgoing and charismatic. People gravitate to them. I remember growing up and other kids my age always loving my mom and wanting to come to our house because the mom they got from her wasn’t who me and my siblings received. It felt the same with my husband when other mom friends would say he needed to teach husband classes.
It’s a reminder that abusers do not abuse everyone around them because then how would they get away with it.
Did you know that April is National Child Abuse Prevention Month? I know that there has been an increase of parenting influencers discussing different parenting methods like conscious discipline and gentle parenting. There has also been an influx of people making jokes around those of us who chose to parent without mental or physical violence. When we talk about gentle parenting and conscious discipline, I want you to consider that some of your favorite writers and content creators not only grew up in physically, emotionally, and mentally abusive homes, but those childhood experiences led them to adult relationships that were physically, emotionally, and mentally abusive as well. That so many of us were spanked and we are truly not okay, and when we’re parenting our children gently we’re healing ourselves as well.
I’ll be sharing more about my experiences as a survivor of childhood and intimate partner abuse on my Patreon as I write my way through healing Little Danielle. The first excerpt is already up, so if you want to read more go ahead and become a patron.
