She told me about how, when the beating was over, she would go hide in her closet for hours. Standing because she couldn’t sit on the bruises. Until she knew it was safe to come out again. When she knew her mother would have had enough wine to make her nicer, easier to be around. Less enraged about her B’s. She told me how this happened every single month when the report cards were released. She told me all of this, without emotion, looking out the window towards the UC Berkeley campus, a few blocks away from my offices. Unknowingly dismissing her past.
“I am so, so sorry that happened to you.” I said, tears welling up in my eyes and a pit in my stomach. “That was not okay. No child deserves to be treated that way by their mother, not by anyone.”
“Oh, it’s fine,” she said, cooly, “That’s just the way things were. It could have been worse.”
“It’s not okay,” I said again emphatically. “You didn’t deserve that. That was abuse.”
“No, abuse is when parents molest their kids. At least that didn’t happen to me. She just wanted me to succeed. It made me work harder in school. It’s probably why I’m professionally successful now. It’s not that big of a deal.”
Still, she looked out the window, not meeting my eyes, speaking with some distance, some detachment from her story. As if she were reciting the grocery list she had plugged into Instacart that morning.
This conversation isn’t a real conversation that happened. Details have been changed. But it is an accurate amalgamation of countless conversations I’ve had over the years.
It’s a kind of conversation where, when finally ready to go back in time and speak about details of their pasts, my therapy clients dismiss and diminish their own childhood trauma histories, their own abuse, the suffering they endured as they recount their past.
It’s a conversation that slowly but inevitably allows us – as therapist and client – to talk about the way they dismiss and diminish their past, and why this is so important to recognize and to change.
If you – if any part of you – can relate to this experience of excusing, dismissing, minimizing, explaining away the abuse you endured, today’s essay is for you.
Please join me to keep reading about why you may dismiss and diminish your past, why it’s important to stop doing this, and how we can support you in changing this.
Dismissing and diminishing childhood trauma are psychological defense mechanisms.
“The past is never dead. It’s not even past.” ― William Faulkner
Why do we dismiss and diminish our pasts?
Simply put, the acts of dismissing and diminishing our past are psychological defense mechanisms.
