Profile
Photos
Comments
Picture a young girl, maybe somewhere between 8 and 12 years old. Now, you let the image grow and develop...
The girl had two loving parents, four loving grandparents, a number of aunts, uncles and cousins that she genuinely liked, friends in school and from her neighborhood. She was always treated warmly by adults, including all of the adult friends of her family members and the parents of her friends. She went practically everywhere with her parents. Her grandparents, an aunt, and some good lady friends of her mother would be "babysitters" when one was needed.
She didn't cry or throw tantrums or argue or give anybody a hard time. She did rather well in school, liked her teachers, and loved to read. She liked certain shows on TV, including cartoons, she loved to go to Saturday matinee movies with her friends, and got around a lot on her bike. She knew a lot of songs and really liked listening and singing along to records and the radio.
She had a dog that she played with. She also had a cat for a short while and a big fat bunny rabbit. She loved ice cream, cherries, pudding, mashed potatoes with gravy, hamburgers, nectarines, and milk.
The girl, though, had a couple of problems, maybe faults is a better word. She liked to tell stories and could spin quite a yarn for anyone who cared to listen. She sometimes spoke of injuries or pains that she never really had, but claimed she did. She embellished on facts to make stories more fantastic, to capture attention even more. She tended to tell these stories most often to her friends, but she did slip a few stories here and there to adults.
She was already becoming aware and self-conscious about her appearance. She was fat compared to her friends because many of them had told her so. She wore glasses and, although she never minded wearing them, the glasses were just another thing that made her different. Her feet were a little big, but that wasn't really a problem...it was the corrective shoes she had to wear because of her fallen arches that were the problem. She couldn't even hide them a little when the only thing girls could wear to school and would wear to church and on holidays was a dress. And, maybe because of her different size, shapes were appearing on her body while everybody else's bodies still looked like kids' bodies. So, she had to make up stories to explain why she couldn't keep up in a race or why she didn't like playing sportlike games.
The girl may have been sub-consciously sensing something else, too. She was, after all, already starting to "develop", so what could that sensing be? If she was only eight, maybe nothing really, unless it was something from the past that she wasn't remembering. If she was nine, maybe something to do with physical appearances because she was already wearing a bra. If she was ten, then maybe it had something to do with suddenly not being an only child because she had just become a big sister to a baby boy. If she was eleven, it could have had something to do with "becoming a woman" but not knowing what that really meant, except she would know it every month and she shouldn't tell anybody about it. If she was already twelve, then maybe the sensing was developing from her already changed physical appearance, having a younger brother that had now made her aware of having a baby around and now a little child around, and being a woman for a whole year already but none of her girlfriends were. Were there natural biological "feelings and urges"?
It was sometime during this time, too, that she started playing "pretend" whenever nobody else was around. She pretended there were people with her and she had conversations with them, even acted out her role. Everybody had a name, including a character name for herself. Her character was 15 years old, both male and female "thinking" so she could have relationships with either boys or girls, and she sang in a band, was in a reform school, had kids of her own already, and would be forced to have sex as a form of punishment and because the residents of the reform school had to. Yet, the girl had never read or seen anything to lead her to these types of scenes, nor had she ever heard any stories about these types of things. Oh, and there wasn't "anything wrong" going on, either.
So, where did all of this "imagination" come from? Did it have anything to do with the sensing and/or the story-telling? Did they have anything to do with each other? Did she need the attention? Or excuses? Was she ashamed? Or proud? Did she feel different? Or superior? Or privileged? Or more mature? Or still a kid? Why was she acting out such as she was? And why that plot? Did she have an over-imaginative mind? Or did she really know about the things she used as a premise to her private, personal story?
I don't have a specific answer for you because I am not a psychologist or analyst or a behaviorial professional, but I can tell you that you have just read an example of an abused child's life. This is not an unusual or surprising account of a typical life and the typical behavior of an abused child, whether the child knows it or not. Faced with her own, personal challenges (her weight, her early development, her general appearance), as most kids will face at some point during adolescence, this girl had the added burden of being abused. Some of her behavior was being influenced by her own kid-like problems, but the intensity of confusion, the multiple characters being created in her head, and the conflict of glamorizing and/or dramatizing a "real life" as she perceived it should be was all influenced by the abuse she had endured.
Storytelling can be used in an attempt to draw attention to other things the child needs to "escape" to, from things to escape from, or to simply gain attention. Storytelling can be as big as outright lying or total withdrawn silence where the stories remain inside. Embellishments are used to increase the child's self-image, usually because the child feels dirty or bad, but sometimes behavior includes downplaying facts so as not to draw any extra attention, usually because the child is afraid or embarrassed. The role-playing, invisible friends, theatrics, performances, artistic creations, etc. are releases of everything the child holds, including things that may be influenced by things stored in the sub-conscience that the child isn't even aware of. Sometimes it's bad or evil things, sometimes it's dreamlike fantasy. Often it's a struggle or combination of the child being an adult in a less-than-ideal-or-realistic way, maybe a talented person who's a criminal, or an abuser with someone who loves him/her, and a number of possible sexual or abusive elements and characterizations where sex can be love, hate, reward, or punishment. And, as in this girl's case, all of this is what is going on in the child's world, what is happening in the child's life, and filling the child's head....and the child is no more than twelve years old!
Now do you want child abuse to stop? Would you, could you see or imagine this with a child you know? This was just an example. This was just about one child. Now think... there are an estimated THREE MILLION children abused each year! (And, those are just the reported ones!) This is when you must look closely at the statistics and THINK about what they mean so that you may be able to stop abuse from happening and/or prevent an abusive situation from continuing...and save a child from dying or living a life like the girl you just read about.
Abuse must be stopped and the abused must be helped! Would you want a child you know to face what that girl will be dealing with for the rest of her life? Would you want any child to suffer? Would you want an adult to have gone through so much and still be dealing with it as an adult? Would you want it to be you? So, take a good look at the following statistics, keep your eyes open, and report anything you feel is a sign of trouble or a cry for help!
