Chapter 1: Growing up
I grew up in an abusive home characterized by domestic violence. I would learn in graduate school, while studying to be a mental health professional, that my mother had narcissistic personality disorder. Growing up, I did try to figure out what was wrong with my mother, to try to predict when she was going to be violent.
We were not spanked. There were hardly any rules for that matter.
My parents, Bruce Martin Whealton Sr. and Kathleen Murphy Whealton. I have a brother named John Whealton and a sister named Carrie Whealton. I have been the scapegoat for some reason. I never knew why or how that dynamic developed. There was also a lack of emotional bonding between my parents and me.
Some people come out of homes like this and perpetuate the cycle of abuse and emotional deprivation because that is what they know or for other complex reasons. I, on the other hand, chose to embrace empathy, compassion, and help others, choosing to enter the mental health field (also called a helping profession).
I am getting ahead of myself.
My earliest memory is that of being a very young child, perhaps between 3 and 6 years old. I was at the YMCA and trying to learn to swim. The swimming instructor may have been in her late mid to late teens. I remember getting scared in the deep end and instinctually putting my arms around my instructor. I don’t know why I felt like I did something wrong or for that matter why I clung to the girl, who was almost an adult figure to me.
I don’t remember clinging to my mother or father for support. There has always been a sense that this was a unique action to believe that bigger people or adults would be there for me.
In fact, another early memory involves my sister and I getting lost in the woods near the first house that I remember living in when we were growing up. This was before we moved into a slightly larger house when our grandparents moved in with us. So, I was no more than 8 and my sister was about 5. Both our parents worked but my mother might have been home – we just didn’t have oversight or rules, as I mentioned.
The woods were not that deep at that location before we moved to the larger home, but we were just little kids. We might have been 7 and 4 years old.
The physical abuse began when I got a bit older. Our maternal grandparents lived with us for a short while roughly between the years when I was 8 until I was 13. They seemed to be a buffer and source of protection if they were aware of anything happening. My grandmother was 79 when I was 13 and my grandfather was 86. Grandma could not move without a walker and grandpa did not see too well.
Grandpa died in June of 1979 when I was 13 and grandma died about 6 months later.
I had come out of my shell after starting off very frightened and sensitive when I first started elementary school. When Paul moved to the neighborhood in 3rd grade that was when I came out of my shell at school. This didn’t last long as I didn’t have Paul in the same classes with me later. In the neighborhood, I was less shy because of the protection offered by Paul.
I was not bullied in school. At first sight of someone trying to pick on me, I would tell Paul who would protect me. I was very small and skinny.
During Junior High school and high school, I had an undiagnosed selective mutism. I realized that looking back as I NEVER spoke at all during class. I was almost invisible. As best as I can tell now, I had a pervasive sense of shame. How else can I explain what I felt. I would start out without speaking and then worry that if I were to try to speak later, all eyes would be on me.
One might think, so what? What would happen if a teacher called on me? What’s the worst thing that could happen? Eyes would be on me but so what?
I also gained a family when my mother and her sister started talking to each other again. For the longest time, early on, they didn’t speak to each other, and we were never given a clue as to the reason why that happened.
Maybe that is appropriate, but it imprinted a value on me that in my adult life, decades later, in the 21st century, when I started to love myself, I realized that the way to communicate the fact that the scapegoating of me and what they let happen to me, how they treated me, was to not speak to them. This advice is given to people who experience narcissistic abuse and toxic family members, but it was also supported by the pattern of how one acts when one is slighted or whatever. You stop communicating.
Physical abuse was very frequent and unpredictable and mainly perpetrated by my mother. I knew that there were two sides to Mom, the indifferent mother and the angry mother who had poor control over her temper. She would feel slighted, and it was not something that was predictable. Punishment is something where one knows what one did wrong and can avoid it. This was all about the feelings my mother was experiencing or something.
I would try to understand what mother I was going to encounter and to look for patterns. My mother didn’t work as late as my father but growing up, I spent a great deal of time in the woods, hiking, climbing trees and hanging out with friends. I occasionally got physics help from my father in 12th grade but that is all I remember. I was not told to study or do homework. I just knew that I should go to college.
My father’s side of the family lived in North Carolina while we were growing up in Southington, CT. My mother’s side of the family lived in the nearby cities and towns. Once my mother and her sister reunited, I looked forward to family gatherings and seeing my first cousins Linda, Sharon and Karen who were adults while we were children. Karen and Sharon had children. The two closest to myself and my sister (Carrie was almost 3 years younger than I) were Dan who was about 2 or 3 years younger than I was and Barbara who was about the same age as Dan.
I hung out with both Dan and Barbara. One might think that I would hang out more with the boy, Dan, but I enjoyed spending time with Barbara just talking to her. I liked Barbara.
It was nice to have these cousins and an aunt. I shared the abuse with Barbara, Sharon, Karen and Aunt Maureen (my mother’s sister). Barbara never said that this was normal, and her mother did things like that too.
I was assaulted by my mother in various ways, including being hit in the face. I learned to numb my feelings, and I even remember playing socker with my friend Paul, who was my protector and some other boys in the neighborhood. On one occasion, I was hit in the face with the soccer ball and the sound echoed against the house. I just kept moving on with the game. Paul, who was a tough guy, was surprised. I had never stood up for myself against any boys in the neighborhood even when a friend of the same age wanted to have a boxing match, I couldn’t hit him. I suppose I was used to being hit by my mother.
On rare occasions, my father assaulted me, e.g. punching me in the stomach.
When my grandmother from North Carolina said that being a big brother to Carrie, my sister, meant making her obey me and telling her what to do, I knew that the closest approximation would be that she should respect me and that meant fearing me. This was the closest thing I remember to how my mother acted.
I worked through the trauma and so many actual incidents are not easy to remember and hence I am leaving out details about the physical assaults by my father.
The lack of bonding, caring, rules, and any kind of positive memories is also very significant.
At some point, as a teenager, I was about to assert my domination with my sister. I saw fear on her face, as she saw what appeared to be me hitting or punching her. I did not follow through. That image of fear when I did try to get “respect” (as my mother confused those two words – I did recognize that fear and respect are different).
I had been thinking of that and the repeated times that I was assaulted by my mother and father. This event of seeing fear on the face of my sister made me vow to NEVER lose my temper. I have been able to honor that commitment for my entire life.
I had developed very limited social skills because most of the time when we were growing up was spent in school and I did not talk at all. I got almost all A’s and graduated with a ranking of 13 out of 565 where 1st would be the valedictorian.