*art from here

There’s a method to an abuser’s madness. 

 It applies to child abuse as well as domestic abuse. 

Abuser’s control their victims in a variety of ways.

 

 

  First, there is isolation. 

 Isolation was used on a regular basis with “the punisher” 

 

When the punisher had the little girl in her sight maybe she felt guilty, and maybe she didn’t, but in any case, the girl was banished often to her room, often for the whole day, many times ordered to go to sleep before the sun even went down. 

 

 The girl’s favorite posession was a small battery operated radio (about the size of a drink coaster) that she got for Christmas one year that she stuffed into her pillow at night to listen to music.  The music soothed her to sleep. 

 

 

 In the summertime, this was torture for the girl to hear kids playing outside and having fun, swimming in the back yard pool, laughing. 

 

 

During certain times, the girl’s older brother would request that the girl be allowed to go places with him instead of being punished to her basement room. 

 When he made such requests,  8 times out of ten, the punisher would relent, and allow the girl to go with him for 2 or 3 hours either to a movie, or swimming or a friend’s house.

 

 

 Otherwise, the girl stayed in her room (first upstairs and later a basement room). 

 

 

 It helped the her to cope with this arrangement to fantasize about things, such as what kind of man she’d marry.  How many kids she’d have, and what she would name them.  The perfect day. (usually involving the ocean) 

  

The girl got really good at sneaking food out of the cupboards and refrigerator to take to the basement room and eat, while the punisher’s family was outside, enjoying the summer evenings.  It was a game to the girl, to not get caught, and also it was a way for the girl to stay in some kind of control over her own life.

 

 

 When school was out for the summer, the punisher ordered the girl into the backyard in a lawn chair for hours.  When the punisher got tired of seeing the girl there, she was told to leave for a short time, but the girl had few places to go.

 

  She had very few friends that she hung out with.  Her best friend became the library and the woods.  At the library, she got lost in the hundreds of books there.

  It was a nice reprieve but a lonely one. 

No one talked to the girl. 

No one befriended her. 

 

  Walking in the woods, was peaceful for her, but even lonelier than the library.

   Eventually, the isolation that the punisher put forth was the norm.

 

  The girl rarely escaped from her ongoing punishment of isolation since the punisher always found some reason to have her stay there in her room.  Some of her infractions included “acting snotty” or  “not doing her chores right”

 

  Years later, when the girl was free, a grown adult.  The punisher told her:  “You are just mad at us because we kept you a prisoner in the basement” 

 

 The statement was made with all the indifference of someone saying:  “You are just mad at us for giving you a cheeseburger instead of Peanut butter and Jelly sandwhich” 

 

 The punisher never understood nor fully grasped what the impact of the abuse actually was to the girl… 

 

The next part of the control was actual REAL controls.

  The punisher controlled the girl’s showering, telling her she could only shower on Monday , wednesday and Fridays, while no such control was ever given to her brothers.

  Even the way she used a towel was controlled.  The punisher instructed her to NOT dry her hair with the towel FIRST because the towel would get soaked and when hung up to dry would not dry fast enough.

 

 

During adolescence when showering and bathing is not only a must, but when kids are so self conscious of the way that they look, it was hard for the girl to accept that she couldn’t wash herself when she might’ve needed to because it wasn’t the right day. 

 The punisher also frequently controlled the clothing the girl wore, but not in the way that parents do when they are exasperated with the kid’s wearing one pair of blue jeans for a week… 

 

This was way worse than that.  The punisher sometimes picked outlandish combinations of clothing, to humiliate the girl.  Such as a lime green and yellow short skirt with brown suede clunky shoes.

 

There were many ways that the punisher humiliated the girl. 

 Humiliation of the girl was also a form of control. (see part one)  The punisher continued to call the girl a liar, a bitch, a witch, a jerk, no good, and told her that she would never change nor grow up to be anything.    The punisher also blamed the girl for all of her ongoing abuse, insisting that it was needed because the girl was so rotten. 

 When the punisher got really mad, she dug her fingernails into the girl’s face, pulled her hair until there were swellings where the hair was pulled almost out by the root, scratched, pummeled, nearly pushed down the stairs until the other grown person in the home, separated them. 

  There was no one to soothe the girl’s injuries. 

 No doctor was never called. 

The police were never informed. 

 The girl never told anyone what the punisher did because the abuse was humiliating for her to recount to anyone.   

 

The punisher controlled the others in the house to a much less obvious extent. 

 There were times when heavy guilt was used to express the punisher’s own unhappiness with life.

  The entire household was able to witness the screaming rants which followed with the punisher locking the bedroom door and threatening to shoot/commit suicide behind the locked door. 

The gesture happened more than a few times, and left the family torn between the stress of the abuse, and the stress of wondering if the punisher would ever really pull the trigger, or was it just more bad “theater”.

 

 Never could the girl imagine that life would turn even worse for her during her teens, but it did. 

   Way worse.