Like too many children in this world, I grew up in an abusive household. Like some of them, I was the only child among my siblings that was abused. Don’t get me wrong, we were all neglected in various ways, as my parents, while presumably doing the best they knew, failed to meet many of the needs that every child has in this life.
My name is Sage Spencer and I was the Differentiated Child in a family of five children.
The Differentiated Child is the term I have coined for my situation and that of others like me. I Googled it and found nothing. It is possible my situation is called something else by the professionals who study these sorts of things. I am not a mental health professional. I speak only as a survivor.
While it took me many adult years to even see what was done to me, let alone understand it or extricate myself from its chains, I realize in hindsight that my first experience with a Differentiated Child was likely as a little girl – as a childhood friend may have been one as well.
At the point in time that I knew my possibly Differentiated childhood friend, I was young, young enough not to understand sex. My friend, I will call her Catherine, came to tell me that she was leaving our primary school. While the order of events is fuzzy to me, I remember clearly being in the presence of my teacher and Catherine and being instructed by my teacher not to discuss what I had learned from my friend that day with anyone else. I realize now that it may have been inappropriate of my teacher to attempt to silence me, but her intentions were all good. Catherine had presumably told me because she trusted me. I was the keeper of all secrets, even then.
What she told me that day was that she had to move to another school. I asked her whether her family was moving far away. She told me that her siblings were not leaving the school, only she was. I remember being confused by that answer. Catherine was a very sweet girl. The only reason I could conceive of at that age was that badly behaved kids might have to leave school, so I did not understand. She told me that her dad was doing things to her that he was not supposed to, so she had to go live somewhere else. I remember the silence after that. I remember where we were standing on the grounds of my school, as if it was yesterday, as my young mind tried to process her response. It is certainly one of my strongest childhood memories. I knew that it meant something sexual, but I did not really understand. In hindsight, I cannot believe that I asked her the next question, but when I look at one of my nieces, today a similar age, and the questions she regularly asks, I realize it is just the difference between children and adults. In some form or another, I asked her whether her dad was doing things to her brother and sisters as well. It seemed an appropriate question to my young self. What I do remember clearly, was that she said, “no, just me” in a manner that now as an adult, suggests to me that that is what she believed to be true. Whether she was a Differentiated Child, the child targeted for abuse, in her family of four, I will likely never know, though I will wonder about her for the rest of my life.
I was a Differentiated Child, the child targeted for abuse, but as with all children like me, I presume, I was brainwashed into believing I deserved it.
None of what was done to me was at all apparent to me, until I endured too large a number of tragedies in a row to cope with on my own, something I thought I had perfected until then, and needed guidance by way of therapy, something I never thought I would do until I did.
While I kept the abuse hidden as long as I could after starting therapy, I did this mostly unconsciously. Abuse had been normalized for me. I did not understand exactly what I was keeping hidden, because I did not grasp what had been done to me. To this day, I have never told anyone all the details of the abuse, or even most of them. The therapist who I saw for a time got bits and afterward my best friend some more bits. While I have come a long way since those first days, I do not know if I will ever tell my whole story. It is too humiliating and I have suffered enough.
What I now know, clearly, is that outside of my home I was well liked; inside my own home, I was not. This was not a behaviour specific situation, in that my behaviour was inappropriate inside my home and appropriate outside of my home, as can be the case for some children with situation specific behaviour issues.
Outside my home was easy. School was a refuge, a place where the rules were clear. You behaved properly, were respectful, did all your schoolwork and the adults not only liked you, but wrote beautiful words about how you were a pleasure to teach. I did the same things at home, but in that environment I was instead defective, disgusting and needed to be regularly punched and all manners of physical, verbal and emotional abuse.
I have figured out several things now about myself as a Differentiated Child.
1. That my parents used me as their emotional and physical punching bag. Whatever emotions they chose not to take responsibility for themselves, they took out on me. Why me, and not one of my four siblings, I assume I will never know the answer to that question.
2. That I did not deserve any of the physical assaults, the neglect or the emotional and verbal abuse I endured. As an adult Differentiated Child survivor, I have now finally separated myself from many of the brainwashing effects, enough almost to see the ridiculousness of ever thinking I did deserve it. Looking back, at the raw facts - as Dr. Phil might say, with his litmus logic test: is it true; does it serve my best interest; does it protect and prolong my health; - I was a very polite child, a respectful child, a good girl, that everyone outside my home seemed to like and someone always entrusted with responsibility beyond my age. How much of that character was created in response to my circumstances and how much was nature I do not know. But I know this, whereas while outside my home I had, from childhood to adulthood, authority after authority attest to my character by word, document or award, inside my home I was deserving and warranted regular abuse, even though I was in fact the same person.
3. That I have never had any desire to be a mother, because of the abuse. By that I mean, that I felt no interest in being a mother, no biological desire to carry a baby or to raise a child, things that all my girlfriends seemed to have always had. I have spent my life working with children and yet never felt one single moment of wanting to be a mother, until very recently, not one. Certainly, every woman has at least one moment I told myself regularly? Person after person attempted to convince me that I would change my mind. At one point, I seriously considered whether I had some chemical missing in my makeup as a girl that facilitated that biological drive. I Googled that as well, to no avail. Then one day, I had one of those Oprah defined light bulb moments. It was quick, subtle and quite soft, not at all loud, scary, frightening or even upsetting. It just came, like a truth that had reached its way out of my gut, from where it had been hiding for decades, just when my soul decided I was ready.
I had never wanted to be a mother because I was afraid I would be my mother to a child.
4. That there were signs, that any of you looking out for Differentiated Children could see. From childhood to adulthood, without exception, every friend and boyfriend that walked through my life asked me in one way or another one of two things: ‘why does your mother hate you so much’ and ‘why does your mother treat you so differently from your brothers and sisters’?. Never once did I ever say anything bad about my mother to anyone of these people. I was in denial about these truths until recently and unconsciously I did not want anyone to know. It was self-preservation. My friends’ observations arose simply from being part of my life.
5. That my reading about the details of differentiation, revealed by the siblings of Jeffrey Baldwin to their foster mother, after Jeffrey’s death by abuse, saved me. I like to give credit to Jeffrey Baldwin for that.
CBC, The Fifth Estate, Interview with Jeffrey Baldwin's siblings' foster motherFor the first time, I realized I was not all of the hateful things I had been labeled. I did not deserve or warrant regular abuse. I was a Differentiated Child, just as he was, and while he paid with his life for the abuse he endured, the process of separating the children into acceptable and unacceptable was the same. The Differentiated treatment was the same.
I now know, with gratitude, that I am not only not my mother, but I am in fact nothing like her, something I think may be a miracle.
My mother is cold, cruel, insincere, a compulsive liar (I considered the possibility of pathological at one point) and incredibly abusive. Trying to get my mother to take responsibility for anything and I mean literally anything that she has done or to tell the truth is like trying to pin Jell-O to a wall. These are strong and hateful words; I realize this. This is the first and perhaps last time I will ever utter or write them. As someone who was regularly called abusive names by my mother, it feels sinfully hypocritical to write that. However, as a wise therapist once said to me, if it is true, then it is not abuse. I understand that my mother has not been all these things to everyone she has encountered in her life, though she did manage to scare everyone from small children to burly construction workers. She was all those things to me.
While it has not been that long since I was asked by a therapist to effectively say something good about myself and could think of nothing, I can say now, albeit uncomfortably, that I am warm, gentle, sincere, honest (maybe even in response to my mom’s lack of truthfulness which always made me very uncomfortable) and have never even raised my voice to a child. I also have many faults, just like anyone else.
All that being said, I still fear that there is something inside me, something that will live what it has learned. Therefore, I remain childless at this time. But I am dreaming of children, for the first time in my life.
Sage Spencer
Next blogum: October 2008
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