TRANSCRIPT
When I was a little boy, my parents told me that they were my life’s greatest defenders. And because they said it, I believed them. However, where was the evidence for that? Well, the story that I’m gonna share now happened when I was 12 years old.
We were living way off in the countryside, and I had a pet duck who I loved so much. I raised that duck from an egg in an incubator, and he was my baby. He hadn’t printed on me; he followed me everywhere. When he was very little, he had great balance. I taught him to bounce on my shoulder so I could walk, and if I walked slowly and very straight and very carefully, he could stand on my shoulder when I walked and not fall off.
Well, the problem is our neighbors, who lived across this little dirt driveway that we had, had two vicious dogs—large dogs that were probably bigger than I was. They would growl, and they were terrifying. Thankfully, these dogs were kept in the house almost all of the time. However, one day I was out on my family’s property on our side of the driveway, and the dogs were out. I had my duck on my shoulder, and these two dogs saw the duck, and they went crazy. They ran and they ran right across onto my family’s property, and they started jumping and trying to get my duck like they wanted to kill it and presumably eat it.
I was fighting, you know, trying and kicking them, and they were trying to bite me, and it was terrifying. I was screaming at the top of my lungs. Well, what happened is one of the dogs grabbed me by the knee, and it literally teeth sunk into my knee. It started shaking me and threw me over onto the ground. So I went over my duck, and I was trying to bury it because they were trying to bite me and snapping at me.
Well, I did have a defender, and it wasn’t even a human. It was my dog, my family’s pet dog. For some reason, he heard the commotion, and he came from around the other side of the house. He ran and he started fighting with these dogs and biting them, and they were biting him. For just a second, they got away from me, and I was able to escape. I grabbed my duck, I ran in the house as fast as I could, put the duck inside, came back out, and was screaming.
Well, as this was going on, and their dog was fighting, their dogs were fighting my dog on our property, the neighbors came out. Oh, they were screaming, and I’m trying to kick their dogs and get them off. Well, what happened is they managed to call their dogs off. Their dogs went back. I got my dog back; he was a little hurt. He’d been bitten a few times and was bleeding. I was still bleeding from my knee. I was crying. I was sobbing. I hated them. I was screaming, “I want to kill your dogs!” and all this. “Shut up!” and they’re screaming at us.
Well, what ended up happening is I went inside, and eventually my parents came home. They found me crying, and I told them the whole story. I told them how the dogs had tried to kill my duck and how they’d bitten me on the knee and threw me on the ground and how our dog had fought them off and how they bitten our dog, etc., etc., etc. Deep down, what I was hoping is if they were gonna go over and do something about it. They were gonna call them out on him. Maybe they were gonna call the police. Maybe they were gonna have those dogs removed. Those dogs had attacked me and made me bleed. I was terrified also that I could have been killed. It was a horrifying experience.
Yeah, what happened as my parents listened—my parents who said they were my life’s greatest defenders. My mom told me that again and again. “I’m a mother bear! I’ll defend you against anyone!” And yet in this moment, the lesson I learned is that’s not what happened at all. They did nothing. They never even mentioned it to the neighbors. They never went over there, and they never marched over there. They never marched over there with me. My dad never called the guy out and shook him. They never said anything about the dogs. It just went on like nothing had ever happened.
I realized again and again in my childhood that is what happened when I had problems. So what was I left with? I was left with fury. I was left with rage. I was left with a feeling of impotence. I was left with a feeling of powerlessness, of vulnerability, of terror, and all these feelings that had nowhere to go. I got no sense of justice whatsoever. So what I did is I went in my bedroom, and I cried some more. I cried with my duck. I remember I would have conversations with my duck. I might make it even with them, blah blah blah. I had fantasies of killing their dogs and all these different thoughts and blah blah blah blah blah. I was so mad.
Well, what happened is as it turned out, I had a BB gun. One day I went out with my BB gun to go target shooting, and I walked up the driveway past the neighbor’s house, and they were gone. Their car was gone; their dogs were gone. I looked, and on the side of their house, there was one little window—a little thick window. I think it was a bathroom window. I thought, “Oh, this is my moment.” I pumped up my BB gun, and boom! I shot the window. I don’t think the BB went inside, but what happened is it made a little tiny hole, and it spidered the window and broke the glass. It didn’t shatter; the glass didn’t fall out, but it broke the window.
I don’t remember thinking, “Yes, good! That’s my way of getting even.” Mmm. And what happened after that is I went home, and I was scared. I was scared that I was gonna get in trouble and that I was gonna get busted. I made up all sorts of stories about how I was gonna lie and what was gonna happen when I got accused because I knew they were gonna come over and say something to my family. But they never did come over, and my parents never mentioned it, and no one ever mentioned it. It was actually forgotten, except it wasn’t forgotten by me.
Every time I went up that driveway—not every time, but certainly a lot—I’d look over and peek over at their house on the other side of the driveway, and I’d look and I’d see that little window with its spider shot and that little BB shot right in the middle. I thought, “You know, they deserved that.” I still have a little scar in my knee. I thought that for many years while I still had the scar. Let them have a little scar in their house to remember that they hurt me. Their dogs did that to me.
What are you? Fast forward a little bit. When I thought about that more over time, in my 20s and in my 30s, I thought there are some lessons for me in this. There are some takeaway messages in this story. The first is that I didn’t have any defenders. There was nobody to defend me, and that I had to take justice into my own hands. At 12 years old, my justice was not appropriate. It wasn’t appropriate to go shoot their window out. I’m actually kind of embarrassed to say. Actually, it’s illegal what I did. It was a bad thing. I violated their house. I violated their property. But does the fact that their dogs did that to me violate my body on my land? Does that justify what I did? I think really fundamentally it doesn’t because I really do believe that two wrongs don’t make a right.
However, from the perspective of a child, I think it did give me some sense of peace on the inside because what I learned in my childhood, so, so, so often—I learned it inside my family, and I learned it outside my family—is that if something bad happens to me, that nobody is gonna defend me, that I have to take care of myself.
Window wasn’t really in any way defending myself. Actually, what that was, was acting out. That was taking all my unresolved feelings and taking it out on a target that really wasn’t to blame. That window did not cause me problems. It was the cry of an impotent boy. It was the cry of an innocent boy who had no way to express his feelings because my parents were not modeling healing. They weren’t modeling having good boundaries.
I wonder how it would have been different had they gone over to my neighbor’s house and confronted them, really confronted them directly, shown the neighbors my hurt knee that had the blood marks on it. I remember that. It was like they failed to teach me that lesson.
Well, fast forward many, many years later. I remember going back to visit that place, visit that house that I spent a lot of time growing up in, walking down that driveway and looking over and realizing those neighbors, they were old. Even when I was a kid, they were old. Now they’re dead. They’re long since gone. Actually, the house got torn down and a new house got put in its place. They never did replace that window; they just tore down the whole house and it was gone.
And then I remember at that time looking down at my knee and inspecting it and realizing actually the scars of those dogs, those dogs that are long since dead. The scars healed over; my skin doesn’t show any more scars. But on the inside, something still affected me.
I wasn’t really taught proper self-defense as a kid. Actually, I was taught the opposite. Again and again, I learned that to directly have boundaries, to directly say “that’s not okay,” and to defend myself against people who were harming me only caused me more problems. I certainly learned that in my family of origin. When I stood up to my mother and said no, when I stood up to my father and said no, when they really treated me badly, it just made my life worse.
So what I learned is I had to bury my feelings. I had to bury my reactions, and I had to accept trauma. I had to accept that as a normal part of life, and I had to shut down my feelings. I had to dissociate. And then all I was left with was to face the consequences of trauma, which was all these destructive feelings inside of me: not loving myself, hating myself, acting out in all sorts of ways as I grew older, having different kinds of addictions, misusing substances in different ways, not being able to have healthy romances, all sorts of things like this. This is the consequence of what I learned from not having been appropriately defended by my parents.
And so in my life, a big part of my healing process, as I’ve brought up my traumas, brought up my feelings, looked at what was done to me, and looked at the different ways in which I acted out toward others and especially toward myself, as I’ve processed those feelings, I have learned that I have a responsibility to defend myself.
And as an adult, especially no longer a traumatized, helpless, powerless child in my abusive family system, as an adult I’ve learned that I can create boundaries. I can call people out when they are inappropriate with me. I can call dog owners out when their dogs have been inappropriate because it’s happened again and again. And it’s been something that gives me self-esteem to defend myself. To do esteemable actions in life is how I have built my self-esteem. And the more I have defended my boundaries, the more I can really love myself.
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