Tu Te Calme!
I had never witnessed anything like this scene before, yet I’ve heard similar (and more severe) first-hand accounts of this nature when people make their way into therapy. One of those moments I’ll never forget--apparently helpless to do anything but affront the blatant abuses with my burning stare, I almost immediately regretted my inaction.
Last week I was traveling in Costa Rica and had visited its most popular national park near the town of Manuel Antonio. I was next in line to enter the two-stall women’s restroom that had an open entryway. There was a young girl probably five or six who suddenly made a loud fuss aimed at her mother who was next to the washbasin.
The mother’s was jarringly louder and shriek-like than the young girl’s protests, “Tu te calme! Tu te calme!” pinballed in the pink cement interior as she boxed the little girl’s ears—twice! Shockingly, it seemed I was witnessing a well-practiced motion. The woman glanced out at me before asserting her right hand along her side, and the brown-pig-tailed girl silently obliged her little fingers into her mother’s stronghold. Just as suddenly as she had protested near the washbasin, this small girl had been screamed at to be calm while she was being physically and emotionally abused! Within one second after her ear-boxing, this little one adjusted herself into a slight smile with glazed-over eyes as she walked out of the restroom in a kind of lock step with her mother. Something tells me that this sort of mother-daughter exchange had happened many times before with them.
Then an older girl with a dour face, maybe nine or ten, peered out of the restroom’s threshold with furrowed brow spying on her mother and sister (I assume) who absorbed into the nearby sea of tourists exiting the national park. As she lost sight of them within a couple of seconds, the taller sister flashed a panicked face, began running after the pair, and caught up with them just outside the entrance. With jerky and erratic motions, the mother’s left arm seemed to signal her older daughter to scramble toward the right side of her younger sister’s back. And then they were lost.
Trauma and Dissociation
I was really jolted out of my vacation mode having witnessed this abusive scene because who expects to see something like this in public on a beautiful day? I had the urge to confront the mother, but I held myself back. I don’t speak French. Who would I report the abuse to anyway? And if I had done something, anything to let these sisters know that there was an adult who would stand up for them, I could have been placing the girls in much greater jeopardy later when the mother was free from public view. I hate to imagine what happens to those girls in private with their mother.
What I saw unfolding before my eyes with these sisters likely was a desperate coping pattern, the need to attach to their mother at any cost. These girls developmentally do not have the capacity to make sense of their traumatic experience, and they do not have the choice to physically disengage and find safety from their abusive world. There is no perspective yet to put abuse into an appropriate context for their lives, no appropriate assignment of responsibility for the abuse (rightfully resting with the mother).
When the source of care and comfort is also the abuser, this makes for disorganized attachment to the caretaker that mirrors the chaotic behaviors and other unhealthy communications from the caretaker-abuser. Unfortunately, children naturally resort to desperate coping measures in these circumstances by dissociating from their traumatic experience because they cannot psychologically or emotionally handle them, and they cannot physically leave.
Dissociative Identity Disorder
In abusive home atmospheres, children cannot integrate their different ways of being in the abusive milieu into their consciousness. When abuse is severe, begins before the age of five years and is ongoing throughout childhood, dissociative coping often can develop into Dissociative Identity Disorder (DID). Lesser forms of dissociation do not organize a fragmented personality structure around dissociative coping and can be seen in milder forms, such as derealization of the environment, or depersonalization of the body when stressed or triggered. Usually these lesser forms of dissociation are correlated with less severe trauma histories.
While the story of these two unfortunate girls is all too similar to abuse around the world, there is help and treatment for those suffering from current trauma and/or past abuse. Many people do not find relief through treatment until they are adults, and children who are removed from their abusive home environments also incur the pain of longing for their abusive caretakers due to trauma bonding.
What You Can Do
The International Society for the Study of Trauma and Dissociation (ISST-D) has standard of treatment guidelines and therapist referral sources that are publicly available at www.isst-d.org. If you know someone who is in an abusive home atmosphere, please give them information about how they can seek help. If it is a child, please contact a mandated reporter of abuse, such as a school official. Thank you for reading my blog and thereby raising awareness on the phenomena of trauma and dissociation.
Photo by Aimee Vogelsang on Unsplash