I was reading about the author and explorer Sir Laurens van der Post recently, and came across something that he wrote during his captivity in a Japanese prisoner-of-war camp.
Once, depressed, he wrote in his diary:
"It is one of the hardest things in this prison life: the strain caused by being continually in the power of people who are only half-sane and live in a twilight of reason and humanity."
Van der Post’s words summarise his experience very well; they are of particular interest and significance to me because they could also be used to describe some people’s experience of childhood – as seen in retrospect rather than at the time though.
Van der Post was an adult at the time of his internment; he had experienced freedom; he had seen a different world and lived a different life; he knew what reason, sanity and humanity were.
He had gone from the normal to the abnormal.
It is another matter when we are born into what seems like imprisonment and into the power of people who are more like prison guards or hostage-takers than caring parents. There is an extra dimension to deal with: we need to put everything into context and learn from first principles how decent human beings behave, and what reason and sanity are.
Carole Nelson Douglas summarises this stage very well in Cat in a Midnight Choir:
“...no anger, no fury is stronger than the final, unavoidable realisation that the protector has betrayed his role and is really the destroyer. But it takes a while to find out that the unthinkable is not the status quo, and that your daily 'normal' is very abnormal to a larger world.“
People from dysfunctional families need to go from the abnormal to the normal.
It certainly does take a while, perhaps because after living so long in the twilight zone we can only take the truth in small doses and need to adjust to reality very slowly. We need to deal with some devastating realisations.
Our lives may indeed have been as far from normality as Laurens van der Post’s life in the prison camp was.
Once, depressed, he wrote in his diary:
"It is one of the hardest things in this prison life: the strain caused by being continually in the power of people who are only half-sane and live in a twilight of reason and humanity."
Van der Post’s words summarise his experience very well; they are of particular interest and significance to me because they could also be used to describe some people’s experience of childhood – as seen in retrospect rather than at the time though.
Van der Post was an adult at the time of his internment; he had experienced freedom; he had seen a different world and lived a different life; he knew what reason, sanity and humanity were.
He had gone from the normal to the abnormal.
It is another matter when we are born into what seems like imprisonment and into the power of people who are more like prison guards or hostage-takers than caring parents. There is an extra dimension to deal with: we need to put everything into context and learn from first principles how decent human beings behave, and what reason and sanity are.
Carole Nelson Douglas summarises this stage very well in Cat in a Midnight Choir:
“...no anger, no fury is stronger than the final, unavoidable realisation that the protector has betrayed his role and is really the destroyer. But it takes a while to find out that the unthinkable is not the status quo, and that your daily 'normal' is very abnormal to a larger world.“
People from dysfunctional families need to go from the abnormal to the normal.
It certainly does take a while, perhaps because after living so long in the twilight zone we can only take the truth in small doses and need to adjust to reality very slowly. We need to deal with some devastating realisations.
Our lives may indeed have been as far from normality as Laurens van der Post’s life in the prison camp was.
