Finding my voice
I shouldn't have had to give up my voice (TW: suicide & abuse)
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Today I want to talk about a topic that is tricky, messy, and somewhat dysfunctional. This is a deviation from my normal topic of neurodivergence, although I hope you allow me the liberty to share this other thing with you, something that is also of great importance to me.
Today I want to talk about families, and in particular, dysfunctional ones. I think I always knew that my family was dysfunctional, and over the past five years or so I have done a deep dive into a lot of topics that come under the umbrellas of dysfunctional family dynamics and abuse. Although these topics would normally be talked about in therapy, I’m not trying to be anybody’s therapist here - although, as luck would have it, I'm in training to be one!
I’m not going to delve into my whole family history, but for the purposes of this post I’m going to outline some common dysfunctional/abusive/toxic tactics: gaslighting, triangulation, and smear campaigns. All three things I have experienced first-hand from multiple family members which contributed to me being ‘silenced’, or, having cause to lose my ability to speak up for myself. It is very hard to speak up for yourself when you are being put down all day long, and it is very hard to have a voice when you are gaslit into believing that you don’t even have one (or that you shouldn’t speak up).
In basic terms, gaslighting occurs when someone tries to make you believe something other than the truth. It could be that you overheard two people talking in a hallway and one of them said something unkind, but they deny it and insist it was you who misheard. If they are extremely manipulative, they may even insist that it was you who said the unkind thing in the first place.
Triangulation occurs when someone involves or enlists a third party in their dysfunctional dynamic with you. It could be that they avoid direct communication with you and instead communicate by ‘proxy’ via a third person, or they might try to turn the third person against you by telling lies to them about you.
Smear campaigns often occur in narcissistic dynamics when the relationship breaks down. Someone wants to discredit you, so they go around telling anyone who will listen ‘their’ side of the story. The trouble is, their side of the story probably has very little truth in it, because it’s designed to discredit you. You also don’t get to have your say on the matter because they’re either telling people you don't know or talking behind your back (or abusing/gaslighting you if you have the courage to speak up).
Last year I took my cousin to see the live-action film The Little Mermaid. I hadn’t seen the animated version and knew very little about the story apart from that it contained a mermaid called Ariel. At the end of the film, King Triton, Ariel’s father, says to his daughter: ‘You shouldn’t have had to give up your voice to be heard.’
This is in reference to the fact that Ariel had given her voice to an evil sea witch in order to have the chance to live on land like humans. Her father had always told her to stop wanting to be human, but she had decided to disobey him and jumped at the chance the sea witch offered her. The only problem was, the sea witch took Ariel’s voice captive so Ariel had, effectively, given up her voice in order to have her desire heard.
I liked the movie enough as it was, but the added line of wisdom from King Triton at the end was what made it for me. I sat in the dark little cinema and felt like my family experience had been summed up in one single line, and later it prompted me to think about the ways in which the abuse and dysfunction I had experienced first-hand in my family had led me to ‘giving up my voice.’
I had turned inward as a child and teenager, my emotional landscape pouring itself out through writing songs and poetry, feeling suicidal and blaming myself because I was made to feel like I was the problem. Family abuse has a way of cutting you to your core: they’re the people who should love you and look after you, so when they don’t it’s very easy to go down the rabbit hole of thinking that you’re to blame. That’s easier than facing up to the sad reality that your family don’t treat you as they should.
As a child, you’re the vulnerable one - you need to be taken care of, but dysfunctional family dynamics don’t allow for that. You may have been cared-for physically, but maybe emotionally you were left feeling unloved. A child who feels unloved is more likely to believe that they’re unlovable than face up to the fact that their parents or caregivers were incapable of loving them as they ought because they’re unable to. It’s too much for most children to process and understand.
In my family, there is a distinct lack of feeling towards anyone who goes against the grain or dares to speak up about the family dysfunction. It is laughed off, laughed at - and one of the unspoken rules of dysfunctional families is that we don’t talk about the dysfunction or else we exclude you or make your life hell. I have experienced this first-hand many times and it’s been a major cause of ‘losing my voice’. When you’re dependent on your family you learn not to rock the boat or you’ll reap the consequences.
The dysfunction and abuse in some families, including mine, is so insidious that you might not even realize you’re experiencing it until someone else points it out to you. At which point you’re like: “Oh yeah!” Suddenly the veil is lifted and all the stories you’ve been telling yourself to excuse their behaviours are recognized as what they are: smokescreens. You suddenly realize it’s not normal to be ostracized for speaking out about the dysfunction: your family is abusive, and there’s no denying it. Someone else sees it too and recognizes it; names it, even, and you’re left floundering like a stranded mermaid, not knowing what to do next.
At one point in The Little Mermaid, Ariel sings a song called Part of Your World. In it she sings these lines:
Bet'cha on land they understand
Bet they don't reprimand their daughters
Bright young women, sick of swimmin'
Ready to stand
As the daughter in a dysfunctional family, I have been reprimanded many times. Most of the time it’s for things I didn’t even do or things that my family misconstrued: as the scapegoat, the whistle-blower, the truth-teller in a dysfunctional family, you get used to being reprimanded. As ‘the black sheep’ of the family, you get used to being reprimanded. As a cycle-breaker, you get used to being reprimanded.
Finding my voice again has been quite a long and hard process, and writing this Substack has been healing to me. Being able to talk openly and honestly about topics that are important to me with people who ‘get it’ is a welcome change.
My family readily accepts that autism and ADHD are valid diagnoses and they even go so far as to accept that ours is a neurodiverse family. But that’s really where their helpfulness ends. They aren’t interested in making lasting changes to their communication or behaviour in order to help themselves or those who are neurodivergent in our family (not just me), and they’re certainly not willing to discuss the dysfunction that continues to this day. On a day-to-day basis we’re civil and we get along, but I’m not particularly close to any of my family and I am learning that I get to live my own life, unencumbered by the dysfunctional patterns my family keep choosing.
Dysfunctional families make you feel crazy for calling out the dysfunction - the manipulation, the backstabbing, the addiction, the enabling, the co-dependency, the lies. It’s not normal or healthy to be gaslit by your own family, to be emotionally manipulated or mentally abused. Can we stop the normalisation of such things?
I want to end with these words from Alex Elle: “It's painful to watch the people we care about remain stuck in the same patterns, especially when we know they deserve better. We want to step in, fix, and heal what's broken. But here's the reality: their healing is not your work.” As she says in this post, “Making peace and letting go is difficult, especially when we're watching the people we love and care about sink into despair, delusion, and dysfunction—but we must.”
All I know is that, like Ariel, I am ready to stand.
Thank you for reading - subscribe for more on neurodivergence and other topics that are special interests of mine. I look forward to seeing you in the comments. Til next time, J x
Thank you for speaking about dynamics that are so often hidden because victims of abuse blame themselves--generally because of the gaslighting and verbal/emotional abuse you describe. I appreciate your labour in helping me to better understand, and I will try to use this understanding to be a better ally.
You're going to be such a good therapist, both because of your lived experience and because of the wisdom you have acquired through your education and self work.
This is so well done, thank you for writing <3