Breaking the Abuse Cycle

https://www.nytimes.com/2019/04/15/well/family/breaking-the-abuse-cycle.html

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Months before our daughter was born, my husband had noticed in sonogram images that she looked like me: She had my broad forehead, high cheekbones and the same small nose. And when she arrived, the resemblance was overwhelming. I recognized the shade of her ash brown eyebrows and the faint purple thread veins crisscrossing her cheeks.

It was like unexpectedly seeing someone from the past I’d rather not remember. The last time I had seen that face in person was in the mirror of my childhood home.

In that home, any minor annoyance could set off a frightening rampage. I was abused by a parent who left bruises on my wrists when I was 5 years old after I accidentally scratched my younger sister’s finger during a game. When I didn’t hang up the dog’s collar in exactly the right position, I was threatened with being choked by it.

When I looked down at my baby, I realized that my parents must have once looked down at me nestled in much the same way and seen a similar face. And then one of them abused me for the next 15 years.

It’s a shibboleth among child abuse survivors that we’re at higher risk of abusing our own children. In the past, studies suggested that about one-third of child abuse survivors become abusers, too, transmitting our trauma to our descendants. On one side of my family, I can trace our lineage of child abuse back at least four generations to my great-grandmother, whose father is said to have once struck her on the head so hard that her ear bled on the opposite side.

In 2015, a study published in Science used 30 years of child protective service agency records and reports from parents and children to debunk the old idea that parents who were physically abused as children are more likely to physically abuse their kids. Researchers did find that the children of child abuse victims were more likely to be neglected or sexually abused. However, the study author, Cathy Spatz Widom, pointed out that the use of data from child protective services may have picked up neglect and sexual abuse cases that are overlooked in the general population.

“What we found was that it was not inevitable, not deterministic, not the majority of these cases,” Dr. Widom said in an interview for the Eunice Kennedy Shriver National Institute of Child Health and Human Development. “It has this important message that you shouldn’t—one shouldn’t, if you have a history, that you shouldn’t necessarily feel that you’re bound to continue in this cycle of maltreatment.”

The violence in my family stopped when my parents separated, when I was 15. At that time, I thought of healing as a discrete task with a definite endpoint, a line item I could check off on my mental health to-do list. I hoped I would be officially healed one day, and serenity would fall over the rest of my life like a quiet, steady snow.

Instead, every major milestone has the potential to touch off a new aftershock. Many child abuse survivors grapple with how to translate our childhood experiences into our new families. What does it mean for us and our children that we come from the people who have often hurt us most?

In my baby’s first months of life, I experienced intrusive thoughts that a switch would flip inside me and I would hurt my child, too. The vivid images filled me with horror and anxiety. I dreaded my husband’s return to work. In the first few weeks alone with our baby, I paused at the end of each day to give myself credit for keeping her safe and healthy.

My therapist, whom I began seeing when I was pregnant, told me that the intrusive thoughts were a manifestation of my fear of becoming abusive, too.

“You have them because you’re scared of hurting your baby, not because you want to,” she said.

As the slow early days of motherhood passed, I realized she was right: Nothing in me wanted to hurt my child.

Before I loved as a parent, the abuse I experienced growing up felt inevitable. I didn’t think of violence as a choice because I didn’t know what it was like to have total power over a child’s life.

But when I held my newborn, her unassuming fragility broke my heart. What I had previously seen as an unavoidable part of my history suddenly looked like a series of incomprehensible parental decisions.

It had never been my fate to be abused and abuse my child in turn. Abuse is rooted in a desire to control others and often a belief that one’s own desires should take precedence over other people’s needs, according to the National Domestic Violence Hotline. Addiction and other untreated mental health conditions can loosen a person’s inhibitions and intensify abuse, but the core causes are authoritarianism and self-centeredness.

I could choose differently.

When my daughter was about a week old, I cut her fingernails for the first time. They had been jagged from birth but short, so I had waited because, like many first-time parents, I was afraid of accidentally cutting her tiny fingers.

But the first time she swiped at her face with her talons, I pulled out the baby nail clippers, held my breath, and trimmed her soft nails as my younger sister held her. On the fourth finger, I snipped a bit of skin. My baby cried in pain and my husband grabbed a box of tissues.

I tried to stop the bleeding, then my husband stepped in to help, and then my sister, who is a labor and delivery nurse. But because newborns’ blood is slow to clot, her finger bled for half an hour.

I sat on the couch in a stunned, guilty silence. It was the first time I had clearly made a mistake for which my child was suffering. My sister — the same one whose finger I had scratched as a child, triggering abuse — pressed a tissue to my baby’s cut.

“You will accidentally hurt her sometimes, but you’ll help her more,” she said.

Virgie Townsend is a writer and board member at Vera House, a comprehensive domestic and sexual violence service agency in Syracuse, N.Y.