I grew up watching dad abuse mum – I’m a victim too

One of my clearest childhood memories is of my dad throwing a chair at my mum.

I slid down the back of the door, curling into myself, covering my head with my hands and sobbing. I must have been about six.

That day wasn’t unusual. My dad exploded over anything and everything. Afterwards, he’d convince her it would never happen again. But it always did.

Three decades later, it’s actually the noises that haunt me more than the images. Nights were the worst; I remember the sound of my dad punching my mum over and over and over in the bathroom when I was trying to get to sleep.

I remember waking up to my mum’s forearm wrapped in a towel soaked through with blood. My dad had thrown a glass at her. She was told that the cut was dangerously close to an artery.

A fear that my dad would eventually kill my mum never left me.

He never physically hurt me as badly as that, although I do remember being dragged down the stairs while wetting myself with fear, being told I was fat regularly and doing anything I possibly could to avoid being alone with him – the person who was supposed to be my safe place.

I had to read the atmosphere at home and prepare for whatever version of my dad walked through the door. I became hyper-attuned to sounds and moods and learned to assess danger in seconds.

And this is what I wish people understood about children who grow up witnessing domestic abuse: they are victims too, even if the violence isn’t always directed at them.

Trauma is having to witness abuse and live in fear. It is being forced to monitor danger, mediate adult emotions, or hide the truth.

I felt like I had nowhere to turn for support.

Ironically, I was a high achiever and model pupil at school. But that’s only because I had to be good – I knew ‘bad’ behaviour would make things at home even worse.

As a child, my mum never reported the abuse. When she went to the hospital with her arm, she told staff she’d fallen over. It meant that I never had a professional involved – no one intervened with support.

If she knew how it impacted me, maybe she would have left sooner. In the end, it took 13 years and she only left him for good when I developed anorexia.

I was very vocal about the abuse to my friends, even at a young age, and my adult family members knew – they just chose to look the other way. My dad’s family denied it completely and I was told not to ‘tell lies’.

When children in abusive households grow up, no one connects the dots between what happened in their younger years and their adult pain.

So often, we’re left to carry it alone, especially when family members maintain that you should just ‘get over it’.

For me, the trauma has intensified with time. On the outside, I look like someone who has ‘made it out’. I have a good job, I’m married to a man who is the opposite to my dad and I have two beautiful children.

But I struggle with emotional regulation and can experience sadness, anger, stress, frustration and elation all in the space of 15 minutes. Sometimes I hate myself –  feel that, if my parents can’t love and protect me, it was impossible to love and protect myself.

I become overwhelmed with grief, sadness and anxiety when I’m triggered, especially when I see big, loving families out together. I grieve the family I never had, and the family my children won’t have because they’re not safe around my parents.

I still have days where I feel so overwhelmed that I self-harm or feel suicidal, even though I fight those urges as hard as I possibly can. I don’t want to put my children through a different kind of trauma.

Yet I feel horrifically guilty that I’m still struggling.

I’ve never felt worse than I do at the moment and I’ve been asking professionals for help for almost a year. I recently started private therapy, which helps, but is costly, so I can only afford a couple of sessions a month.

Healing isn’t linear; it is messy, painful, and exhausting. Some days I feel strong and am proud of what I’ve achieved.

On other days, I’m wondering how I can carry on.

I keep my mum at a distance – we see each other around once a month. I don’t think she ever meant to hurt me but she did, and now she isn’t able to help me. 

My mum hasn’t resolved her trauma either so she can’t help me. I hope one day she can get the help she needs.

I’m no longer in contact with my dad – it’s taken me 34 years to accept that he will never change or care about the impact his behaviour has on me.

In hindsight, I believe the most dangerous thing about him was that he could be completely and utterly charming.

I’ve tried multiple times to ‘forget’ the abuse and ‘move on’, but he is the same person now that he always was – I’ve been on the receiving end of his rage as an adult, in front of my children.

Children who witness domestic abuse need to be treated as victims, not witnesses. It breaks my heart, and makes me outraged, that hundreds of thousands of children are currently living through what I did, and it feels like no one’s talking about it. I want to change that.

Children who witness domestic abuse need to be treated as victims, not witnesses. They need specialised support from mental health services, safe family and friends, domestic abuse charities and social services, before the trauma becomes lifelong.

There are so many of us out there who are still struggling with what we were made to see and experience as kids and the system barely acknowledges we exist.

Most importantly, as adults, we need to remember that we are not powerless anymore. We deserve support, and love, and safety – all of the things we deserved from the start.

I know that a better life is possible and I’m fighting for it every day.

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