Children And DV...The Hidden Victim
THE VICTIM WE DON’T SEE
Domestic Violence doesn’t only hurt the victim or primary target involved in dystrophic social dynamics.
Friends and family members are hurt as they witness and try to involve themselves in the chaotic and dysfunctional world wind of turbulence cast by abusers onto their loved ones in their aim to help them.
Time, energy and resources are devastated by those who might exhaust themselves trying to subvert the psycho-social, economic and even the physiological strife victims face at the hands of their abusers.
And still yet, social service providers are unceasingly overburdened with the task of trying to provide accommodations, such as safe and supportive housing along with various other resource allocations for victims and their families as they seek safety, security and freedom from abusive, tumultuous or otherwise harmful and corrosive relationship structures.
However, unbeknownst to most, there is a far darker side to the nature of violence within intimate partner relationships, where hidden figures lay devastated as they themselves witness the dysfunction of brutal beatings, the forced servitude and slave dynamics of financial abuse, and the deepest of wounds caused by the emotional trauma they and their loved ones suffer from within violent relationships.
These hidden and frequently overlooked figures, also trapped within the dysfunctional confines of violence, are the children who witness and try to conceptualize and cope with the violent dynamics faced by their parents and caretakers.
The devastating effects many children face, from emotional tension as they try to sooth both themselves while also trying to compensate for the deep traumatic wounds they experience in their familial households, the conflicting and absurd behaviors they witness as victims try to function within dysfunctional circumstances, and even the neglect and strained communication and connections many of them deal with, as they seek to identify with their own needs and likewise their self-identity outside of dysfunctional social structures.
UPSIDE DOWN AND INSIDE OUT
When caretakers of children and families are enthralled within the dysfunction of abusive relationships, not only is it difficult to meet their own needs, but in dealing with the constancy of invasive uncertainty and the tumultuous nature of intimate partner relationships, so much is overlooked and unattended to, as most all caretaker energy and effort is expended trying to subvert further harm.
As such, most other primary household and familial needs are severely constricted, as the victim tries to survive within the violent relationship.
This is known to manufacture pivots in the structural and hierarchical dynamics within parent child relationships. Children might appoint themselves as soothers or caretakers of debilitated or wounded parents or caretakers as they try to compensate for the devastation the family is facing.
Likewise, in their efforts to normalize dysfunctional circumstances or gain leverage, especially if all other social and financial supports have been effectively dismantled or divided, primary targets, or parents and caregivers might start to look to first tier or internal structures, such as children for supports, effectively inverting the parent - child or caregiver – caretaker relationship.
This can promote and increase of resented feelings of discontent amongst the family structure, inciting familial degradation in communication and function as the natural familial balance becomes defunct, effectively procuring upside down or inside out relationship dynamics.
CHILDREN AS FLYING MONKEYS
Most abusers, in their effort to procure dominance and strongholds over their victims will frequently appoint the victim’s children as pivots of detriment towards the primary target, the caregiver, in their aim to solicit compliance in furthering and enforcing abusive actions towards the victim while inciting the pivot or child to remain insensitive or apathetic towards the harmful actions carried out against their parent or caregiver, effectively employing the target’s own children as flying monkeys against them in their reign of terror and abuse.
Due to the effective nature of the triangulation and deception involved in these types of relationships, most children, unbeknownst to them are also victims of the abuser, as they are usually being heavily groomed and desensitized to normalize the offensive, disrespectful and harmful actions carried out against the caregivers within their family structure.
And if exposed to toxic and otherwise dysfunctional behaviors long enough, they themselves might even subconsciously help the abuser in their efforts of harm.
It is critical to note though, that ALL INVOLVED are usually the victim of the abuser, whether they know it or they don’t. And even when they behave in ways adverse to the primary targets or caregivers trapped within the dysfunctional relationship or even towards other members within the family structure, they themselves are in fact objective pivots that are being used by the abuser to accomplish their aim of furthering their harm against the primary target.
USING THE LAW
Abusers have the keen understanding of the connection and bond between a caregiver and their children or close family members.
As such, most abusers will use children as tools of leverage to elicit compliance from their targets with threats to take them, or in some cases, actually kidnapping or stealing the children from them.
They may falsely claim child endangerment, abuse or neglect, or tie up the victim in legal battles so as to use the children to procure narcissistic supply, or to force cooperation and submission onto the victim, or simply as a way cause deep emotional wounds to both the parents and their children.
The devastation this causes, as caregivers desperately try to reunite with their families is inconceivable.
It could take years for targets of violence to be reunited with their loved ones, with some being permanently disenfranchised and divided from them, as the narcissist’s cruel and unusual method to both punish and hurt the children and victim.
WOUNDED CHILDREN…WOUNDED ADULTS
Our most prevalent actions become ingrained behaviors thus becoming habits and likewise becomes our most prominent attributes.
When we are inundated, especially in early childhood, with the social attributes of communal care and respect for one another, we have a higher proclivity to interact or socialize and commune from a place of integrity, truth, mutual respect towards each other, and most of all, from the protectiveness and nurturing qualities within the relationship to foster the benevolence of healthy socializations.
Likewise, when we are imbued with competition over collaboration, or other such dystrophic attributes that encourage the survival of one in a social or familial group, at the sacrifice of others, we learn that disrespect, insults, physical, emotional or other types of social violences are all acceptable means of communication and conflict resolution, in turn normalizing maladaptive or otherwise defunct behaviors, that cause dilapidation and structural familial collapse.
We also learn from these teachings that all within the group can’t succeed, and since our inherent or basil nature is survival, we are likely to hurt and destroy other members within the social group to procure such survival, even though the foundational premise of such an understanding is false.
This is the effective aim of the abuser, as division and conflict are powerful weapons in their arsenal of procuring power and control over their primary targets, by seeking to separate them from all who love and mean them well, or who otherwise have strong bonds with them, especially their children.
Such isolation serves twofold to remove the target from any and all affirmative social supports, while reinforcing target acceptance of predatory behavior.
In effectively forming alliances with the natural supports of their victims, it is far easier for the predator to harm the primary person of interest, thus most abusers seek out and purposely repurpose those closest to the target, so as to use them as a secondary means of inflicting harm.
Further, what makes these types of relationships even more dangerous is that the adversely learned defunct behavioral attributes learned in youth, are carried well into adulthood, with most young pivots of domestic violence aim maintaining in cyclical fashion, the very same behaviors, thus manifesting what is known as the DOMESTIC ABUSE CYCLE OF VIOLENCE.
BREAKING THE CYCLE FOR THE LOVE OF OUR FAMILY
I can’t stress enough the critical nature of GETTING OUT of abusive relationships, as the harm they cause, both in the interim and in long run can contribute immensely to familial degradation, particularly to the lesser-known victim within the circle of violence…the children.
Further yet, we each of us are far more apt to live what we learn as opposed to behave from directives or verbal ideations, as we learn in higher degree from what we live, or better phrased…we learn what we live. This is especially true pertaining to the social developing phases within children and youth, largely contributing to revolutions of domestic violence attributes.
Children who experience domestic violence are twice as likely to either fall victim to predatory or otherwise maladaptive and exploitative people and groups or to become abusers themselves, by nurturing and adopting dysfunctional and corrosive social attributes as their own.
Likewise, in trying to unlearn dystrophic behavioral traits so as to learn new ones, we better equip ourselves to teach our progenies by way of affirmative show, what it means to live in and socialize from vestiges of social health.
Our children are our future…may we love and protect them – and most of all may we show them that the true nature of relationships are ones that don’t hurt us.