Child Abuse Story of Healing and Recovery From James

by James
(Hawaii, USA)

Hard Work, Cruel Beatings, and Humiliation: 
From at least as young as 5 or 6 years of age, I was physically and psychologically abused by my father, and also by my older brother. There is no other truthful way to describe what they did. Throughout the time the abuse was happening and into my young adulthood I felt that what they were doing was wrong. In response to my objections for their treatment, they ridiculed me and beat me and taunted me all the more for my crying and being cowed by their actions.
My father had from my earliest memories used whippings for punishment of my brother and myself. This was often in a calculated use of a switch from a tree. Sometimes it was in an outburst of rage and he would use whatever he could grab first -- such as tool handles or belts, or he would just grab us by the arm and kick us until we fell down. The whippings sometimes left welts or bruises that stayed for several days.
At an age as early at about eight I was working in the main crop produced on the farm, tobacco.
The house we lived in at first on the farm was very old and small. When I was nine years old my parents decided to build a new, larger house. To pay for this required that we increase by a great amount the size of the tobacco crop and the amount of custom machinery work we did for other farmers.
It was also at about this time that my older brother began to physically abuse me quite a lot, although he had always been a bit rough. He was very physically strong, even for his age, and I was smaller and physically weaker than most boys my age. On numerous occasions he punched and kicked me. There were several ?black eyes?, bloody noses and split lips. He broke my nose by kicking me in the face. At first I told my parents about his beating me. They told him not to do it, but he did not stop. He would beat me even more for having told them. Since they could not or would not stop him and he took revenge for my telling them, I quit telling them.
Being a child, and one who had such limited world view of what was right and wrong, I felt very conflicted as to whether my own perceptions were correct. Over the years it became obvious that it was abuse. There were a few people in my life that suggested as much ? the school bus driver, my maternal grandfather, and other children.
My relationship with most of the other students at school was not very good. I was not good at sports and I came to school with tobacco stains on my hands. School events or activities that required money were always out of the question.
Through elementary and junior-high school, I would sometimes be kept at home to work in tobacco, and in the winter would work at night with my father and brother pulling the dried tobacco leaves off the stalks to prepare them for selling. This made it difficult to do homework in the way it needed to be done.
When I was 14 my father's poor health prohibited him from continuing to farm and he went on disability.

During the time I was in high school, since my father was no longer working, we went fishing together some, and this helped our relationship. Still, sometimes at home he would get enraged at something I had done or said and beat me. This is not to say that I never did anything to deserve correction, but I never deserved the beatings he gave me. On one particular occasion he used a metal clothes hanger and beat me until blood rose to the surface of the welts on my back and arms. It was during this time that I began having nightmares about being beaten by him or my brother. I also did some sleep walking.
When I was 17, my maternal grandfather shot himself in the head. This was of course a shock to the family. For me it was a shock because I had for some time recognized that killing myself was one way I could escape from the pain in my own life. When he shot himself it made me realize how close I had come to doing the same thing.
As I grew older and lived on my own, I continued to struggle with what it all meant and slowly came to see the abuse for what it was: two bullies taking advantage of their physical power over a weaker person unable to defend himself and with no opportunity to escape. This brought me to realize that part of the pain, no less than the welts, bruises and broken nose, was the shame I felt for not defending myself in some way.
Eventually, in my heart I was able to forgive them. This came as part of my own spiritual awakening in my early twenties and the realization that they would need to deal with their own consciences, and that I could live with my own conscience better by accepting that reality for what it was. This forgiveness took me a long way toward healing. Forgive, yes. Forget, no. The insult and injury of the abuse, and the feeling of betrayal it gave me, was too much to forget.
I had learned along the way, from counseling sessions and media reports, that generation-to-generation repetition of child abuse is common and a cycle that is not readily broken.
When I became a father myself, I realized with great clarity why it was absolutely essential that I should never ever forget the abuse I had received at the hands of my own father. When I held my first child, only a few minutes after she was born, I committed that I would not repeat that abuse.
Now, with my own children as young adults, though not yet parents, I can say with certainty that I have not perpetuated that cruel cycle. Can I really be proud of avoiding the perpetuation of something so terrible?

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