Abuse Leaves More Than Bruises and Emotional Scars
Abuse can actually cause physical deformities in the child’s brain, said Dr. Martin Teicher of McLean’s developmental biopsychiatry research program. Dr. Teicher said that verbal abuse (which would classify as emotional abuse) can be as damaging as sexual abuse.
Dr. Teicher also found that the fibrous link between the two hemispheres of children’s brains is changed in abused children and affect the communication between the right (mostly emotional) and left (mostly logical) lobes of the brain. Dr. Teicher has had this theory about the link between abuse and physical brain abnormalities since 1984, but only recently with the acceptance of mental illness as a physical disorder has his theory received much publicity. Boston Globe Online/ Dec 15, 2000.
Growing up sad
I didn’t smiled much as a child or as a teenager. I feel as if I’ve been catching up on all the smiling that I didn’t do, now, as an adult. It’s a strange experience because I always thought that children had more reasons to smile more than adults - after all children had not learned much fear or mortality.
Someone had told me that I was empathic. I soaked up other people’s emotions like a sponge. I felt what they were feeling, and sometimes that kept me down for a long time. Since I was young I had been thinking about all the suffering in the world, and I wondered why this was so. As a child I was quiet and hardly spoke. I was obedient, thinking too much, and in my own world.
When I was in kindergarten I realized I had no one to turn to. My dad was always away for business so it was just my mom, my brother, and me. My brother was often sick as a child and required a lot of attention.
One day after kindergarten I had an accident. A big kid on a bicycle sped by as I was walking home with a buddy and hit me. The big kid hurriedly got back onto his bike and fled. I was bleeding from the knees where I fell hard on the gravel. My walking buddy was scared, but I was feeling more of something else than pain from the injury. I got up and brushed myself off. Then I started crying.
I couldn’t stop crying. I leaned against the nearby lamp post and cried. I still don’t understand why I cried so hard then, although I knew it was not from the pain of my knees. My walking buddy begged me to stop crying and that he would walk me home. I wouldn’t budge. I didn’t want to go home because that was not where I found comfort.
After a long time, I finally moved away from the lamp post. My walking buddy and I walked to where I lived. When my mother answered the door, my walking buddy told her I was hurt from the accident with a bicycle. I was grateful that my walking buddy did not abandon me and walked all the way home with me (we usually parted at the street corner where I would walk to my house and he would walk the other way to his house).
That wound slowly healed too.
Eggs
When I was maybe 5 years old, I had learned to bathe myself, and wash my own hair.
One evening I was getting ready to wash my hair, when I noticed that in the corner of the bathroom, on the tiled floor adjacent to the bathtub, was a pile of tiny black pebbles. I wasn’t sure what they were, so I called for my mother. She walked by the bathroom (the door was open) and took a look, and told me ‘those were cockroach eggs’.
Cockroach eggs? Cockroaches! I jumped back, disgusted and afraid. Images of tiny cockroaches squirming in the little black eggs immediately flashed into my head. My fear was apparent. My mother snapped saying ‘they’re just cockroach eggs!’ and then she told me to put my left foot on them.
I could hardly believe what I was hearing. Suppose I put my foot on them and crush the eggs, and thousands of tiny cockroaches swarm over my foot! I looked at my mother, in panic and unable to speak.
My mother demanded that I put my foot on the eggs. She was my mother and therefore she was to be obeyed, so I held my breath and put my foot on the little eggs and could feel the little pebbles underneath my left foot.
The eggs thankfully did not burst open as I had imagined. My mother seemed satisfied and left. I continued my shower, but I still remember how the roach eggs felt underneath my foot.