Living in an abusive family, even when they’re not actively hurting you, is damaging all the time. For every moment you are there, you’re forced to see yourself thru their eyes. Even on the days they don’t talk to you, don’t yell at you, don’t say anything, they make sure you know what they think of you, where you stand in the family, and just how little you mean to them. How lucky they would be to dispose of you.
As long as we’re living among other people, our perception of ourselves is shaped by our role within that social circle, it’s natural for us to consider how others see us and let that define part of who we are in this social context. And this is not only defined by words they tell us, but by actions, way we’re treated, how much resources we’re given, how high is other’s respect and regard for us, the way their face looks when they glance at us, the tone of voice, the chores we’re assigned, how we’re treated compared to everyone else in the family.
And when you’re a child in an abusive family, you get told in every single way that you are worthless, disgusting, lazy, selfish burden, that your mere presence is ruining everyone’s life, that everything you do, think and say is stupid, not worthy of attention, that your needs are a problem, your pain is a pathetic reach for attention, your feelings are a burden, your memory is wrong, you deserve nothing. You can see the disgust on their faces as they look at you, it starts to hurt so much you want to run away, but even if you lock yourself up in your room, they eventually come after you, blaming you, demanding, pushing at your guilt for not doing enough, saying something wrong, being yourself.
And when you are forced to stay there for a long time, you have no other choice but to start believing they might be right about you, that you really are nothing but a burden and a dead weight on the entire society, that nobody in the world could possibly find any use of you, much less find you worthy of love and care.
This itself is traumatic. Even if nobody ever lift a hand on you, this will damage your own perception of yourself and torture you for years and even decades if you don’t find real and completely solid proof that they were wrong. But how would you find that? People don’t walk around the world trying to prove to you that your family was wrong about you, that you are not in fact, worthless. How will you know, whenever you are, that people don’t secretly find your presence a burden? How will you know if people are not secretly wishing you were dead? You start seeing hatred everywhere, proof of what abusers think in everyone’s actions. It makes life mortifying.
This is not your fault. Any human being, being put in environment of hatred, abuse and disgust, and having all that blamed on their own person, would end up feeling exactly the same. It’s psychological torture meant to harm you, meant to break you to the point where you could no longer have a healthy perception of yourself. It’s cruelty. And you did nothing to deserve it. There was nothing of less value in you. In fact, people who found it easy to be this cruel to you, a human being, are monsters. People who found it easy to inflict actual psychological torture on you, are disgusting. If they had a shred of compassion or humanity in themselves, they could not endure seeing another human being suffering that hard, taking on a burden so big. This entire time, you were human, fully deserving of compassion, of being acknowledged, heard, given resources, given high regard, respect, care, and welcome in their lives. If they did all that, you would have zero doubts in your heart about who you are, and what your value is. They could have given all of that to you, and they didn’t. They owe you all of it. Their debt to you is so big they can never, ever redeem themselves.
Them doing this to you did not lower your value, it tortured you to the point where you felt you had none. They destroyed their own value. They failed as a family, as environment, as social circle, as human beings. But you did not. You were, and are, a human being, this entire time.
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