(The Nationalist, 01 June 2007)
An American called David Pelzer was abused physically and emotionally as a child by his mother. She burned him, stabbed him, threw him down the stairs, starved, poisoned, and humiliated him. The greatest harm she did was to his self-image, making him believe that whatever went wrong in the family was his fault. The details, which he spells out in A Boy Called It, the first of his six books, are staggering.
His neighbours, teachers, school nurse, relatives, and police knew about this in varying degrees, but did nothing. In the Seventies, such matters were “domestic.” How a parent chose to “discipline” her child was considered her business and no one else’s.
Eventually, social workers took action, and David was taken into foster care by a loving and intelligent couple. After he left home, his mother turned her fury on his younger brothers and repeated the process unchecked.
But it was more difficult than David had anticipated to shake off his past. He went through his teens and twenties apologizing for himself to everyone, accepting the blame for all sorts of things for which he was not responsible. This was the line his mother had fed him. Even as an adult, away from home and enlisted in the US Air Force, he was still controlled by her, though he thought he was free. She was his reference point in everything. He kept going back to visit her in the hope of a word of approval, although every time she manipulated and abused him further.
Then he married a woman from a background similar to his own. Neither of them was fully honest with the other, and their marriage was unhappy. The rift between them widened, and after eight years, they divorced. David blamed himself for that also.
They had had a child, a boy called Stephen. David was determined that Stephen would have a good life, and that the family history of abuse would stop with himself. (His mother had been abused by her mother.) That determination was a major factor in enabling him to move forward from the past, and he was successful in giving Stephen a happy childhood.
A major element in the transmission of abuse from his grandmother to his mother was lying, covering up, and pretending that everything was fine. We are as sick as our sickest secret, and remain sick as long as it remains secret. The major element in bringing the abuse to a halt with David was his being open and truthful. That was something he had to struggle hard to achieve, because his mother had trained him in lying to cover for her.
He went on to spend his life speaking and writing about abuse, and working with organizations that help the abused.
His story is not about being a victim, but about overcoming the victim state through the indomitable human spirit in us all. He didn’t allow himself to stop at the stage of self-pity, but took up the struggle each day to make himself a better person. He said, ‘What doesn’t kill you makes you stronger.” If you are strong enough to survive the abuse, you are strong enough to build a new life, he would say. Faced with the choice to be bitter or to be better, he made the choice to be better.
He was given many US and international awards for his work. There’s more about him on www.davepelzer.com