Autumn bonfires

It enables the child to imagine their parents being concerned, scared for the child’s life, getting them to a hospital or simply being worried and loving and hopeful that the child will be alright, that they’ll stay alive. For the abused children, there’s often no other way to prove to themselves that their parents care, so they’ll fantasize about a scenario that would force their parents into a situation where they’d have to show care, they’d have to slip into action and to something immediately on the spot in order to save the child. It also enables a child to fantasize about their parent being kind, even if it’s out of fear that they’re losing the child. The child reassures themselves that their parents would care, in a life-or-death kind of situation at least.

If you have to imagine a life-or-death scenario in order to imagine your parents caring and being concerned, your parents are most likely abusive.

There’s another reason abused children will imagine all kinds of horrible things happening to them - things like being physically tortured, abandoned, kidnapped, violated, sold or exploited - and that’s because children are trying to think of a situation where their pain would be explained by real-life events. The child might be in so much pain, but since they’re convinced that they’re not abused, and they’re groomed to normalize and accept the abuse as ‘no big deal’ and ‘just being sensitive’, they can find no reason for their emotional turmoil. So, they wish they had something. ‘If only I was kidnapped and tortured, then it would be reasonable to feel this kind of pain, and everyone would acknowledge it and believe me’.

That’s a thought only someone who is already badly abused can have. Normal people don’t wish for severe trauma to happen, only to explain and acknowledge their feelings. The massive amount of trauma that explains those feelings is already happening, but the child is conditioned not to be able to acknowledge it or even see it as real; they’re used to their senses and experiences to be dismissed as nothing, so it’s impossible for the child to take themselves seriously, to acknowledge that they’re already being tortured.

These fantasies can also be over-the-top cruel, not because the children are being dramatic, but because the children have been told that only the most extreme, most traumatic, and most heavy to endure situations would ever be serious enough to be acknowledged. They’re being compared constantly to ‘those who have it worse’, so in their fantasy, they’re going to have it the absolute worst.

Dreaming of trauma is often a symptom of trauma. If you spent your childhood imagining horrible scenarios, and even hoping for them, it’s likely you already had it bad enough, and just wanted for other people to see and acknowledge it, and the imagined trauma was just something that would help that to happen. it’s possible that these fantasies are followed by some sort of guilt (what kind of person would hope for these things?), but it’s absolutely none of your fault. You were searching for acknowledgment and for your feelings to be something explainable, something other people would understand and admit as real. This was something denied to you, and it was making your pain worse for everyone to pretend you had no reason to feel it. You were not imagining it for the attention - you would only ever get negative attention for expressing such things anyway.

To have a child is to bring an entire person into the world. This person can not consent to this. This person is inherently vulnerable, hardwired to depend on you, and must be taught the skills neccessary to one day care for themself.

When you have a child, that child's well being is entirely on you. It's your job to keep them safe, to keep them fed, cloathed, and happy. It's your job to make sure they feel loved.

When you choose to have a child, you are signing up to spend years and years of resources on that child. That is your choice. The child was not alive and could not agree to your decision to drag them out of the void of nonexistence. The child was not asked if they wanted to experience an entire lifetime of conciousness, and all of the potential suffering and agony that comes with that.

That decision is entirely that of the parent who has made the choice to have a child.

You are not "granting the gift of life." You are not doing this hypothetical child a favor by having them. You are doing this for you, because you wanted to be a parent. You wanted to have the experience of raising a child.

This means that if you have a child, you owe that child. You owe them time, and love, and safety, and care. You asked for this, it is now your responsibly to follow through.

Children are not a toy. They aren't a fancy new car for you to parade to your friends. They aren't a fashion accessory for you to put on the shelf when you lose interest. They aren't a mini you. They aren't a magic cure-all to your trauma, and they aren't there to fill some void in your chest.

They are a vulnerable person who is easily abused and neglected and who will be at your mercy throughout much of their development period.

A parent owes their child. Failing to follow through with the responsibility they signed up for is a failing on the parent's part. Making the child feel guilty for the crime of existing is the fault of the parent. A child is never a burden.

It’s skipping meals because you don’t feel like you deserve to eat today. It’s having sex because you want to be used or abused or defiled. It’s drinking recklessly because you might have the ‘courage’ do something stupid. It’s smoking - not because you need the nicotine - because you know it’s bad for you. It’s banging your head against a wall when you’re angry. It’s crossing the road without looking because you lowkey hope a car might hit you. It’s thinking about all the ways you could break a bone and make it look like an accident. It’s not taking painkillers because you want to suffer. It’s taking painkillers in excess because you know it’s dangerous. It’s walking home the more dangerous way because you’re kind of half hoping you’ll get attacked or raped or stabbed. It’s going for long walks at night and getting chilled to the bone and hoping that you get lost so that you can’t find your way back. It’s seeking out triggering material. It’s all the stupid little ways you punish yourself for existing.

Sometimes self harm happens when you put effort into depriving yourself of things you like or need, and sometimes it happens when you don’t put any effort into doing the things you like or need.

It’s a pattern of self-destructive behaviour, and it doesn’t only happen in one way.

“I don’t know what type of fucked up shit you got goin’ on inside your head and I don’t know how to help. But I can tell you one thing - this drug shit…it’s not the answer.”

“Ya know I remember when I was 11 years old…it was a couple months after my dad got diagnosed (cancer) and we got the results back from the prognosis and it was really good - it was like 80 / 20 and we decided to celebrate, so we ordered a bunch of Chinese food (chuckles). I was laying between my parents in bed and uh…..all of a sudden I couldn’t breathe, it was like there was no more air left in the world…and I was gasping, I was panicking…and they called the ambulance and they thought it was like an allergic reaction or some shit….and then when I got to the hospital….they gave me liquid Valium (laughs)….yeah….to calm me down - and when it hit me I thought ‘this is it…..this is the feeling I have been searching for my entire life, for as long as I can remember’ - because suddenly….the world went quiet…and I felt safe in my own head. Two years later he was gone, panic attacks stayed…and I found a way to live. So…will it eventually kill me? Maybe? Fuck maybe not, I don’t know.”

Written by me

Please don’t steal without credit