In this excerpt from his book Escape Routes: For People Who Feel Trapped in Life’s Hells, Arnold relates the story of Scott, a young man he has counseled.
Children have no immune defense against evil, and even the smallest germ of pain, hatred, or horror may infect their entire development and sense of self for years. Childhood is the first great battleground between heaven and hell, and its victories and losses tend to shape us in ways that later experiences will not. More simply put, a great part of coming to terms with ourselves as adults is coming to terms with who we were as children.
Psychologists and therapists speak of discovering one’s “inner child,” and in general, this is accepted as an important, positive, worthy pursuit. But what if your inner child is broken, wounded, or smarting? What if you’re like Scott, a young man I know whose childhood was hell?
My father, while physically present, was always – and still is – a complete stranger. I realize that this situation is by no means an uncommon one in today’s society. Yet that doesn’t make its lifelong effects any less real.
My earliest memory is of a physical and verbal fight between my parents. I must have been three or four years old. Because I “mumbled” – something that infuriated my father – I internalized everything I felt. Every time I spoke he’d shoot back at me: “I don’t have time to sit here and listen to you mumble, go away and come back when you can talk so I can hear you.”
I became reclusive, distant, and introverted, spending hours by myself, fantasizing. At school, even my little brother would defend me by fighting off other kids, because I would just cry and try to run away. I physically recoiled at the slightest hint of confrontation, often curling up with my head in my hands.
Punishment was unpredictable and harsh. For example, at dinner at a neighbor’s house I goofed off. Long after I’d forgotten the incident, my father took me on a walk. We ended up in a shed out of earshot where he beat the crap out of me. Eventually I outgrew him so the physical abuse stopped.
Up till my twenties, he’d try to hold me under his thumb – or throw me off balance by making me acknowledge that I needed him, but keeping me at arms’ length. I grew to hate a line often repeated to me by my mom: “Even though your father doesn’t show it, you know he loves you.”
My mother was a hardcore Christian, and our house was loaded with holy cards, photos of the Shroud of Turin, crosses, and pictures of Jesus. I would flee in terror from these images. Many times she reminded me of this, leaving me with the conviction that something was deeply wrong with me: “You were scared of pictures of Jesus.” When staying at friends’ houses she would tell me, “Be sure to pray, because I have seen the devil in the room you are staying in.” She treated nightmares as occasions for miniexorcisms, opening up religious books and leaving them around my bed, or telling me to chant “Jesus” over and over.
There were normal times in between, but terror was the underlying reality of my childhood. While the boys I grew up with had dads who taught them about cars, sports, and life, helped them with projects and homework, and explained sex and girls, I had none of that, ever. The only “advice” I ever got from my father was once after he had got mad and hit me. He said almost tauntingly, “You have a lot of anger in you. You’d better get it out or it will come out later in life.”
For me the most tormenting thing about my father was the dual personality he had, abusive at home but with a friendly face to the world. While the sham of our picture-perfect “family life” slowly but surely strangled me, others seemed blinded by it. In fact, everyone I knew saw my parents as “friendly and loving.” And while my father had once admitted to me that he was “incapable of feeling,” young adults flocked to him, telling me that he was like a “second Dad” to them and saying how much they valued his advice. They meant well, I know, but it was acid in my wounds.
When Scott was seventeen, his father finally showed his true colors in an unexpected public outburst at church, and the family’s respectability was exposed as the masquerade it had always been:
Something snapped, I guess, and after all those years of everybody assuming that my parents were such loving, thoughtful people – while I was silently screaming out for help – everything came to a head. My parents escaped the situation by moving to my father’s hometown. I found another place on my own.
During the first couple of weeks I fell apart. I tried alcohol first, and when that ran out the really bad nights came. The first time, I just had a few beers with a friend. The next time, though, I drank alone, and I got this really dark feeling. A sense of total terror just hit me; I wanted to die. I wandered outside, in the dark, only to be terrorized further by the tempting thought of throwing myself under a train on the tracks that went by the house. I panicked, and went back inside.
How do people like Scott deal with the hell of their past? One way, tragically, is by conceding defeat – letting old sores fester, and allowing the pain that wells up as a result to ferment until it is a poisonous brew. It’s a devilish cycle, and one that will spin off new hells as long as it turns. It’s also the cycle of imprisonment – of shackling ourselves to the evil we have suffered and eventually becoming one with it.
Another tack is nurturing a “positive attitude,” and holding on to faith in the numbing effect of time. Both work, to a degree. Time does heal, and a hopeful outlook is certainly better than a pessimistic one. But just as hours of scrubbing cannot fully remove some stains, the best will in the world may not be enough to erase the marks of emotional pain.
A third way is to let go of the resentment we nurse toward the agent of our misery. This is easier said than done. For many people it is so difficult that it takes years, and in the interim the past may bind them so tightly that the way ahead seems barred. Still – and I do not say this lightly – those who go this route will find that when it comes to picking up the pieces of a shattered childhood, what they do has greater significance than even the worst that was done to them.
That is what Scott discovered. The years since he and his parents parted ways have been anything but easy, and yet in actively confronting the dark places of his past and struggling to forgive his parents, he has found release from the grip in which they once held him.
From Escape Routes: For People Who Feel Trapped in Life’s Hells.