Two questions: thinking out loud about surviving abuse

“How many times do I have to apologize for ruining your childhood?”

If you’re an adult child of that classic dysfunctional family, the alcoholic and the enabler, you may hear this question at some point, usually at a time of crisis for you and possibly for others around you. It will probably not come from the alcoholic – if you’re smart or lucky or both, that person is already long gone, and if they’re around, they’re still a drunk, still selfish, and still supremely uninterested in what happens to you, particularly if it inconveniences them. They opted out before you even came along, really, no matter how long they stayed around to destroy you in the name of their own pain.

You’ll hear it from the parent who generally sticks around, the one with the conscience who has been there for you in many, many ways, the one you idolized as a child because you needed to believe in someone. That’s what abused children do in addition to blaming themselves – they try desperately to reconcile what they need, unconditional love, with what’s available. It cannot work, but the effort is constant and all-consuming and far, far beyond any child’s ability to understand or control. There’s no meta when you’re a kid trapped in hell. There’s the devil and the angel, the bad and the good, the chaotic and the predictable, and you need those divisions for some kind of stability because there is just no other way to survive. The devil, of course, is the active abuser. The angel is the enabler.

And even when you get old enough to start seeing your parents as people in shades of gray instead of black and white, even when you’ve finally realized that much of what you needed and still need you’re going to have to find for yourself, those habits of thinking persist. Because it’s not just a set of habits; it’s the way you see the world. You can work and work, make hard choices, face what you are, try to be healthy and productive and not defined by your childhood, and at a moment of crisis that child’s mind can take over in an instant, and when it recedes again, all the muck and the ugliness and the horror is back. Not as strong, maybe – or maybe so, since recovering from abuse is not a steady stroll down a straight path.

And the worst, worst thing the enabler can do those years or decades down the road is… apologize. That person may have changed, but the past hasn’t and won’t. Ever. Apologies, excuses and rationalizations are what kept hell going, kept it hidden, forced a child’s mind to twist and turn around itself to try to make sense of a senseless world. In the truest sense of the word, an apology is meaningless. So is that question.

What works, and then only sometimes, is not apology, but acknowledgment. A therapist may help put this need into words, but you already know it if you’ve made it this far. The only thing from outside yourself that can help you is hearing one of the people who was responsible say, “I was wrong. I was crazy. I lied and asked you to lie, too. You were helpless. You were a child. I was the adult. I failed you. I know it.”

Because what you need is not sorrow or sympathy. You need your mind back. You need that child in your head who was trapped and helpless and wronged to hear that it wasn’t their fault, that they weren’t crazy, that their world was insane and that at least one of the people who made it that way will confirm the truth at last. Then that child might go away again and leave your adult mind in charge. The alcoholic will never do this. The enabler might, but at enormous cost: they will have to admit that they were sick, that they were guilty of abuse, that they put something irrational in their head or bad in their past ahead of the welfare of their child. They will have to acknowledge that whatever was perpetrated upon them when they were helpless, they had no right to continue the cycle; that once you bring a child into the world the free pass to live out your own sickness instead of facing it is over. They may not be a bad person, but they did a bad, bad thing. They were not solely culpable, but they were equally complicit, and to an accomplished enabler, seeing themselves as the good guy and the one who holds things together is a necessity. It has to be; how else could they justify their own behavior all those days and years? Shades of gray are dangerous.

So if that parent is truly interested in helping an adult child at a time of crisis, the real question is not,”How many times do I have to apologize?” but “How many times do I have to acknowledge what I did?” Could anyone do this? You may never know. All you can do, if you have the courage, is ask.

You may hear “Never.” You may not get an answer. The answer you want to hear: as many times as it takes, whenever you need to hear it, whenever you’re thrown back into some crazy mental pathway from your childhood, whenever an opportunity to heal occurs.

The real answer, maybe, is the other question I’ve heard a lot lately.

“When do you give up on your child?”