Living beyond Trauma the family system

I am sixty years old and it has taken a lifetime to heal from trauma. I don’t want that to sound discouraging. In fact, the opposite is true. I am encouraged by the fact that it is possible to put your life back together after childhood trauma. It takes time and effort, but it is more than worth it. The greatest revenge you can ever have on those who abused you is a happy life. Stopping the chain of abuse from being passed to one more generation makes the heartache and struggle worth it—let’s be honest...most of the time. 

How do you live beyond trauma? How do you get to the point where trauma symptoms stop running your life and just what does that look like? This next series of blogs entitled, “Living Beyond Trauma,” starts with challenges. Without acknowledging challenges, it is hard to know where to begin and how to continue without becoming discouraged. The first challenge is one of the most difficult—your family system. 

Living Under My Family System

I stuffed my report card into my desk and tried to swallow the lump in my throat. The end of the six weeks had arrived and the day of dread was here. My parents would see everything I had done. They were going to have to sign my report card. The teacher wouldn’t let me back in class without it. I thought about my Math grade. D. English and Social Studies were alright, but everything else was a C. And I was lucky to get that. School exhausted me. Just like home, I didn’t fit in. I was too stupid, too loud, too ugly, too slow. I was an idiot, and my report card proved it. If you think about it, children spend more time at school than they do at home. Despite not even being in my parent’s presence, the tentacles of my family system invaded even school and shaped who I was every waking moment of the day. 

You see, no matter what I did, grades, chores, achievements, no achievement, church, friends, I was a complete and utter failure and my parents could not have hated me any more than I hated myself. I was a reflection of their system. The system I was forced to live under, and I didn’t even know it. 

Looking back, I can see that the system my parents ran came from the same type of abusive systems they had grown up in. They were terrified, they were abused and they figured out a way to survive by dominating others allowing no voice but their own. They were used to being beaten so they beat my brother and I. They were deeply unhappy so the system we lived under was nothing but sorrow. 

The Most Devastating Part of Childhood Trauma

When you hear about childhood trauma, people often think it has to do with one event or a series of events involving sexual or physical abuse. While those things are also part of my story, the most devastating part of childhood trauma for me was the system. And in adulthood, the system was the most difficult thing to escape. 

It ran my life. That is the devious nature of childhood trauma. Once set in place, the system continues to operate automatically. It’s all we know and until the light comes on, we don’t even see it. As an adult, I was always looking for threat. What if this happens? What if that happens? I never felt safe, never felt at home, never felt loved. Like many survivors I pushed through life until I couldn’t.

Isolation, coercion, no-talk rule, gas-lighting, narcissism, mental illness, these and more are hallmarks of the long-term, ongoing abuse that occurs in these types of family systems. It is devastating. The people you are supposed to rely on the most are the people who are hurting you. In addition, family systems like these are so entrenched, abusers rarely if ever take responsibility, apologize or change. There is no self-awareness. In fact, the light of truth is to be avoided at all cost. 

Instead of being authentic, the family system forces its members to play a role. For example: the head abuser or narcissist is often the gregarious “star” of the family. The other parent serves as the quiet enabler and children are assigned roles such as the golden child or the scapegoat. In my case, my father was the star and my mother the identified problem. They enabled one another. I was the scapegoat. Roles are the way the system is articulated. 

Why Family Systems are such a challenge

But why is the family system such a challenge to living beyond trauma? Because, whenever a member tries to step out of their assigned role, the system attacks. Anyone who no longer wants to serve the system, threatens the system and that is the last thing a narcissist will tolerate. Think about your own family system. What is the unsaid message? 

If you don’t comply, you are judged  

If you don’t continue to agree with the lies, you are the problem

If you don’t comply you will be abandoned

If you don’t comply something terrible will happen to you

You aren’t competent enough to be your own person so you must comply

These and many other threatening messages keep us hooked into the system. Until we can see and understand how our particular family system operated, we will continue to fall prey to lies and deception making it difficult to ever break away from abuse. 

Narcissists have endlessly clever ways of setting us up. I have one friend whose father was the obvious abuser while the mother played a victim role and pretended to be the “good” parent. Compliance with abuse is abuse. Staying in an abusive system is abuse. You can have compassion for the suffering of others without allowing their suffering to become your own. As long as you respond to the demand of the system, you will be forever trapped. 

Defy trauma, embrace joy. No matter how long you have lived under the system created by abuse, it is never too late to break free.

Sign up for my newsletter to receive free video and downloads and information twice a month.