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The Heavy Price We Pay for Secrets
Most Adverse Childhood Experiences are chronic stressors that happen behind
closed doors; parents or other adults may humiliate or tease or mistreat a child in
their own living room, or at the dinner table, or in the locker room in ways they
wouldn’t do at a larger gathering or an event where others are watching. Which
means, from a child’s perspective, that what is happening is a secret. And as
psychologists have long known, when kids feel that something is being kept
secret, when no one speaks to them about what’s happening or why, but they
know that something feels wrong, they assume that it must be bad, and that it
must be about
them
. If no one is talking about it, that must mean it’s their fault, it
must mean that they are the one who
is
bad.
Looking at the sheer numbers, given that 64 percent of kids face a form of
severe adversity, there is a good chance that many children are walking around
with the vague or pressing sense that something bad is going on, and that they
are in some way to blame.
Think of it this way: if you grew up with childhood CUTS, you knew that
something wasn’t right, even if no one said a word. You likely felt some sense of
shame, as if you were, yourself, to blame.
Research bears this out. One recent survey found that nearly 60 percent of
adolescents recognized that they were facing, or had faced, at least one category
of childhood adversity, even though these teens were only thirteen, fourteen, and
fifteen years old. They recognized that they were facing adversity even though
they lacked the perspective that they would one day have as adults. And 60
percent of these teens who said they were facing childhood adversity said they’d
already faced multiple childhood adversities.
They acknowledged, to researchers, that something that was taking place in
their lives was wrong—because researchers asked them the question.
But most kids are never asked. Kat went from the age of five to thirty-five
without anyone ever asking her what had happened in her early life. Her past
was always “The Big Unmentionable.” As a result, she felt “deep-seated shame.”
Wherever she went, she says, “I carried so much unspoken guilt about what my
father had done and about my having said the words that sent my own dad to
jail. My family almost never talked about my mom’s murder. It was as if none of
it had ever happened.”
Laura was stuck in a small house with her mother’s put-downs. “My mom
used to say to me, ‘It’s you and me against the world,’ ” Laura says. “It was as if
we had this secret together, no matter how crazy it might get, it was just between
us. So it never occurred to me, for many years, that in many ways, it was my
mom against me.”
Kids don’t perceive being humiliated or neglected as a moment that holds
growth potential. They just know that the family secret they are keeping hurts.
Priscilla, now sixty-one, grew up taking care of her own parents and keeping
their secrets. “I grew up surrounded by mental illness,” she says. “No one
explained it to me. It was never discussed by anyone. I just grew up parenting
my parents, as if that were the most normal thing. My dad was a manic-
depressive, on lithium, and my mother was a narcissist who needed me to
mother her.”
When Priscilla was sixteen months old, she had an acute infection. Her fever
shot up to 106°F. She began having convulsions in front of her mother. Her
parents took her to the hospital, admitted her, and then left her there alone. In the
middle of the night, her throat closed up. She was choking for air. A resident
walking by her room noticed that Priscilla had stopped breathing and gave her an
emergency tracheotomy—without anesthesia. Later, her mother would tell
Priscilla the story, over and over, of how scared she had been, rushing her
daughter to the hospital, on “the night you almost died,” and how her mother felt
like
she
might die because she was so scared and unprepared “to have to save
my own daughter’s life.” Priscilla says, “I would have to comfort her about
almost losing me. She never thought about how a baby might have felt, having
surgery without pain medication, and being left to recover in a hospital alone.”
That set in place a pattern in which Priscilla handled all of her crises on her own.
“When I broke my collarbone at summer camp when I was eleven, I didn’t tell
them; it never occurred to me that I
had
parents who could protect me from pain
and suffering,” she says. “I lived with the pain. When I returned home at the end
of the summer, a family friend saw the lump on my chest and told me I had to
tell my mother. My mother took me to the doctor. He said it was a case of gross
negligence.”
But Priscilla didn’t resent her parents when she was growing up. “I felt like I
was the ‘hero child’; I was saving my mom. She was so complimentary, and
wanted to be so close to me, I assumed that must be a good thing.” It was only as
Priscilla came into her teen years that “I began to realize that my mother was
living through me; I started to feel emotionally violated by her narcissism. She
had to be included in everything I did with my friends, as if she were another
teenager. She wanted me to be
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