Generational Abuse It Happens and You Can Be the Change

 Growing up in a small town with, how do they say,” a million dollar family”? A mother, father, brother and me, the girl.  My family was somewhat different for that time of life.  My mom worked outside the home in a factory where my father also worked.  They married young and had children right away.

My father grew up in a very abusive family. His father was a truck driver and farmer and his mother kept the home fires burning.  My dad grew up very fast tending to the family farm before and after school. I have been told that the gentle man I knew as a grandfather was a tyrant in his younger years; he would beat my dad with his belt until his butt would be bleed.  There were also times that he physically punched my father and would knock him around until he couldn’t stand. It seemed that my grandfather did not lift a hand to correct my father’s older sister or a much younger brother, the focus of his abuse was my father.  My grandmother would not intervene to stop this type of punishment.  I’m not sure if he was abusive to her or if she let it go so nobody else endured his rage.

Our family home was better, but the abuse still occurred.  My dad learned from his father abusive ways to handle situations and continued to punish in some of the same ways.  Dad would use a belt on my brother for unacceptable report cards and would spank him.  Not to the level his father used but still very abusive when using the belt. He would occasionally leave marks on my brother’s butt.  Never did he lay a hand on me but the verbal and emotional abuse of hearing my brother cry and some of his berating me was at times too much for a little girl to handle. I am sure that he thought he was doing better than what his father did and in some ways he was right; in others he was very wrong.  You see, the emotional scars that he left were just as damaging as the ones he dealt with for years as he was growing up. 

So goes my story, my parents got divorced when I was in 5th grade.  I would have given anything to stay in our newly built home and tolerated the emotional abuse. I found out that my dad had many affairs with women that he worked with and my mother would be forced to hand over her paycheck every Friday.  My father would go out on the town and pick up women.  The worse part of this was when he had an affair with my mom’s best friend, and we knew her as family.  I still remember the first time we had to see her after the divorce and my dad said directly to me “You better treat her nice or you will never come back to see me”.  How much more abusive could he be?  I loved my dad and was so hurt by this I was quiet the rest of the visit.  My voice had been taken from me.  This continued throughout my adulthood with messages of you will never finish college to you are too heavy you need to lose weight. 

As I look at my life as I was a young mother I, too, had collected some of the negative ways of handling my children, not with the physical discipline that I had seen but the verbally abusive language that would at time escape my mouth without thinking of what it was doing to my children until I saw that very look that I remembered so well.  I wanted to CHANGE and I did!  It took a deep look into my very soul to nurture that little girl into becoming the woman, mother and wife I am today!  Generational abuse can stop at any time if the desire is sincere to change.