Dear T:I Really Need to Tell you Something... Part XXXVI

I'd tell her that it wasn't okay
that a ten year old girl should not be responsible for the emotional burden of being her mother's therapist and shielding her brother from any knowledge of the issues
a ten year old should not be sworn to secrecy with the knowledge that her mother is asking her father for a divorce and feels trapped in an emotionally abusive marriage
that repeatedly praising a ten year old for being so "brave" and "strong" and "mature" is telling the ten year old that that's what's expected of her, that she's not allowed to be weak
that a child should not regularly wake up to her parents screaming at each other
that all parents get angry, but a child should not regularly experience a parent's out-of-control rage
that the other parent using guilt instead of anger can do just as much long term damage when the standards are so impossibly high, that it is not healthy for a child to feel guilty all the time
that not praising your child and only ever using criticism will **** them up, but it's even more ****ed up to also discredit the praise they receive elsewhere and basically tell them that their teachers have low standards and any praise from them is meaningless
that it is not normal or okay for a 13 year old to cut herself so she has an excuse to allow herself to be gentle towards herself by treating the cuts afterwards

I'd tell her I wanted to punch her father in the face, because what kind of asshole feels the need to physically intimidate a child a third his size while screaming at her? I'd tell her it was ****ed up that her mother watched it happen and often hadn't intervened.

I would tell her that her childhood wasn't just "less than ideal." I would tell her that her parents had failed to meet the bare minimum standards for "acceptable" or "reasonably good" parenting. I would tell her that she deserved better, that should have been able to expect better, that it wasn't fair. I would tell her that I was sorry she'd had to go through that alone, and that that must have been really painful. I'd tell her that she was a child and she deserved to be protected and to feel safe, not just physically but also emotionally.

I'm sure you've worked with plenty of people who've had really traumatic childhoods and really ****ed up abusive parents. You probably wish you could tell me to just suck it up and be grateful that my parents were okay and it wasn't that bad and nothing terrible happened.

if someone's parents beat the **** out of them, then that person has every right to feel sorry for themselves if they want to. That person has every right to see themselves as a victim if they want to.

If my childhood was okay enough but I was just really sensitive and fragile and anything less than perfect parenting would have lead to me being this ****ed up or worse, that's different than if my childhood was objectively ****** and not a suitable environment for a child to grow up in.

I want to know whether I'm allowed to call it abusive
but if I ask and you say you don't think it was that bad I'd be mortified for having been so melodramatic and trying to feel sorry for myself when I didn't deserve it