Normal Trauma

In 1921, less than 100 years ago, my relatives sent my 14 year old grandmother from her rural Italian home to marry a 26 year old man she had never met, in the United States. She was forced to leave everything she had ever known to fulfill her family’s wishes. She never saw her parents again. Eighty years later she retold the trauma of being torn apart from her parents and her first love, when she was sent off to America to be married.

During that time and in that cultural setting such action was common and normal. Against the backdrop of 21^st century American culture, parents who force a 14 year old daughter into a sexual relationship with a man she does not know, for economic reasons, isolating her geographically and emotionally from everything she had ever known, may be considered to have committed familial abuse.

During my mother’s lifetime, child rearing practices often praised the benefits of minimizing physical contact between parent and child. Allowing a child to develop with scant physical contact might have been considered normal behavior during the 1930s and 1940s. Today such physical deprivation might commonly be labeled parental abuse, resulting in a condition known as “failure to thrive”.

For hundreds of years, a prevalent example of normal Christian advice came through the saying “Spare the Rod and Spoil the Child”. Some of the physical punishments doled out in accordance with this saying, are labeled as physically abusive behaviors in the 21^st century in the United States of America.

Frequently, societal practices labeled as normal behaviors, upon reflection and further considerations are relabeled as abuse. Many people living within the constraints of these societal practices are subjected to the trauma of these abuses as a normal practice. Before the practices are further evaluated or reconsidered, a significant group then might have to live life without knowing that they had endured abuse at the hands of their parents. What they lived was just normal. They lived through this normal trauma with many others around them.