To Protect Our Children, We First Need to Heal Ourselves

Note: this essay is the last of a 5-part series I wrote over a period of years prior to Election Day 2024. Part 1 described my personal experiences being groomed and the factors that continue to allow it to happen. Part 2 went into the role of generational trauma in child and intimate partner abuse. Part 3 described the failures of the "stranger danger" education I grew up with. Part 4 considered how our "hero" narratives keep us from solving the problem of (or healing from) child abuse. Here, I offer some thoughts on how healing our own traumas could help us protect younger generations.

If I were to sum up my experiences with “not that bad” abuse, I would say this: I’ve never talked about it, much less reported it, because I thought that not only was it not abuse, but also that it was a fact of life.

I was conditioned to set a low bar of expectations for the men in my life. The bar for strangers I encountered wasn’t much lower. Those who didn’t beat or rape me, in other words, were potential husband material, especially if they “put up with” me.

In fact, the term “coercive control” was only coined more than 20 years after I was born (during the same decade women finally were able to get their own credit cards) and a little more than a decade after all 50 U.S. states finally recognized marital rape as a crime.

Even still, the concept of coercive control would only begin to enter public awareness more than a decade after its naming. Society still, in my opinion, has a limited grasp of what coercive control can entail, which also limits people’s grasp of what grooming can entail.

This is what I believe a lot of adults misunderstand about “not that bad” abuse: its profound repercussions throughout the rest of our lives.

Such limited awareness may in part be willful. Remaining ignorant means people don’t have to do the hard work to heal their own assumptions — which may necessarily mean facing the same dynamics within their own circles, among people they love.

Indeed, in my own experience, undermining the social expectations I learned has been far from easy. Raising my two Gen Z boys, I myself often found it easier to address issues they had with peers and strangers than with other adults in their lives.

For example, it was easy to:

• Not hire babysitters we didn’t know very well, including who else was in their lives.
• Remind our sons, when they were little, that they had the agency to ask a friend to remove a video from her Snapchat they hadn’t consented to her posting.
• Leave the box unchecked on school and extracurricular permission slips that allowed posting of their photos and videos to organizations’ social media pages.
• Warn them when someone they met online offered, unsolicited, to send them a gaming computer.
• Counsel them on things their favorite YouTubers did and said in order to attract views, likes, and subscribers.

Those were the “stranger” examples, though — the clear-cut challenges. Much more nuanced and thus harder to navigate were the inner-circle conflicts with family members, friends, and coworkers. Were they matters that required cutting ties — the default I learned as a child moving states and schools — or only projections of my past that I needed to work through, the way adults with more stable modeling had learned?

These situations were where I fumbled, as I suspect we all do. In part, that was because I was playing out the same dynamics in my work life that my sons were at school. Wrapped up as I was in survival mode at work — navigating office politics as well as a workload that drove me to burn out more than once — I was only partly emotionally available to my sons.

That was how I missed the effect of a teacher who didn’t quite single out one son for shame and ridicule; but managed, nonetheless, to make him feel like he couldn’t get anything right.

In fact, I found it easier to tell him he’d encounter bosses like her — again, as I was finding in the workplace — than it was to try to switch classrooms halfway through the year.

Likewise, I found myself surprised into speechlessness when my otherwise always-confident younger son talked about the trauma he felt witnessing student-on-student violence that didn’t trigger a school lockdown.

This is what I believe a lot of adults misunderstand about “not that bad” abuse: its profound repercussions throughout the rest of our lives.

It was then that I realized that my approach — chaperoning some field trips along the way, aiming for experiences rather than souvenirs, and listening deeply when my sons talked about the games and YouTube channels they loved that didn’t interest me — only went so far.

The fact was, memory-making wasn't a stand-in for the kind of emotional intimacy kids really need.

Our fears of the worst outcomes are rooted in the knowledge that many things are beyond our control. But by fearing too much of the future, we box ourselves into a far more restricted present than is real.

As I knew from experience, kids who don’t feel they can be fully themselves around peers or adults want to prove to everyone, themselves included, that they, too, can be “special” or “chosen”: the right kind of “other,” the kind that is lovable.

In other words, I realized that perhaps we hadn’t created enough of the kind of environment I felt, based on my experiences, was so important: the creation of a loving safe space for my sons to tell me anything.

Thus it is only in the last few years, as my sons have matured to young adulthood, that we’ve been able to talk about, say, all the nuances of a friend’s challenges living with a drug-addicted family member, or befriending a Syrian refugee teen only recently arrived in the U.S., or for that matter, their feelings around my divorce from their father.

Those conversations are only possible because I finally began to do the work to learn to listen to myself, and why I believe now that a more impactful and sustainable way to deal with child abuse — not only to mitigate it, but also prevent it; not only for the worst cases, but also those we deem “not that bad”  — is to invest in healing it.

The rub is that “healing” is more complicated than it seems on the surface. As we learned during the COVID-19 pandemic, our culture is not set up to accommodate the copious time required to sit and feel and process our emotions.

But it’s difficult, if not impossible, to do this feeling work and remain productive; to pay the bills and maintain the home and complete the work. That’s likely why instead, we were asked to double down and work around the inconvenience.

Perhaps not coincidentally, even as official child abuse reports plunged during those years, other reports surged.

Moreover, every person’s healing process is different — differently intense, and differently timed — making it inherently less controllable than outcomes. Healing needs to happen in its own time, in its own way, on its own terms.

Perhaps that’s why the idea of “rescue” is so alluring: it has a defined outcome — even if it fails. Moreover, it gives the rescuer a sense of power in an otherwise uncontrollable situation. Healing, in contrast, takes that power out of “rescuer” hands and places it squarely back where it belongs: in survivors’.

Healing our beliefs about “not that bad” abuse

Both as a young person in my family of origin and later, as I made my way into the corporate workforce, I heard phrases like: “That’s just the way they are,” or “It’s better to catch flies with honey,” or “You just need to grow a thicker skin,” or “They had a hard life, you need to learn to bend a little.”

This is the nature of grooming. Adults accept it because on some level we believe it will elevate us. We’ll get the promotion or the business if we go along, complicit in pushing our own boundaries in the name of “getting out of our comfort zone.”

We put on our “big girl panties,” and put aside our misgivings with the bully coworker or manager or client. We let them push our boundaries in the name of relationship-building and customer service.

If we were to stand up for ourselves, we might be shunned: “quiet fired,” if not outright terminated, or for those of us self-employed, facing canceled contracts and bids awarded to competitors.

These forms of rejection appear to threaten our survival: how will we eat and maintain our homes if we can’t earn the money we need to do so?

Our fears of the worst outcomes are rooted in the knowledge that many things are beyond our control. But by fearing too much of the future, we box ourselves into a far more restricted present than is real.

The limited choices we think we have then lead us to become a little too accepting. We can start to take on too many things that we can control… to avoid thinking about the things we can’t.

Convincing ourselves that we’re “character building” and modeling the right way to our children, we keep stuffing our intuitions. We may even convince ourselves that we love what we do and couldn’t imagine doing anything else.

Remedy: Work on noticing what you say to other people — coworkers, kids, partners, friends — when they come to you with complicated feelings. Work on noticing what you say to yourself, too, as well as how your words make you feel: peaceful, or more agitated?

Healing generational power and control dynamics

For as long as I can remember, adults have pointed to research about kids’ brain development, focusing on impulsiveness rather than intuition, poor decisions rather than developing discernment, to “prove” that “adults know better.”

Too much adolescent brain research focuses on what isn’t there, rather than on what is. Kids may not have all the neural pathways they need to make rational decisions. But all that means is that those pathways won’t develop without practice. 

As with every generation, today’s children are experiencing life much differently than we did. They have different technology, cultural norms, social expectations etc.

I try to remind them that intuition is not just about situations that feel all wrong, but also about the warning signs that come before the situations.

To meet these challenges, they have to be able to speak up on their own behalf (as developmentally appropriate) and enter into a dialogue. Otherwise, "protecting" them is just another way of communicating they have no agency.

Counteracting this type of poor parenting in 38 U.S. states is Erin’s Law education, a good starting attempt at encouraging awareness, agency, consent, and bodily autonomy in all kinds of relationships.

That said, as of June 2024, 12 states still had not enacted Erin’s Law legislation. Furthermore, in my experience as a survivor of grooming, these types of programs are too little, too late.

By middle school, a child may have spent years experiencing and/or witnessing unhealthy dynamics. Their self image is already on shaky ground due to the onset of puberty along with social pressures.

If they believe they’re the problem, then the line between enthusiastic consent and mere compliance is blurred. It’s possible, in other words, to believe you want something because the person you care about or admire wants it. Including, and especially, your own parents.

That’s what makes it all the more important to heal the (sometimes hyper)vigilance many of us develop in response to abuse.

For example, my own trust issues could end up isolating my kids from the other adults whose perspectives and guidance they critically need as they grow towards their own adulthoods.

Thus most of what I talk to my sons — and their girlfriends — about these days is what I wish more adults had talked to me about 30 years ago: the need to honor your own gut feelings.

I try to remind them that intuition is not just about situations that feel all wrong, but also about the warning signs that come before the situations. For instance: that sense of feeling put off by a comment right before your brain tells you “they were just joking.” 

That they may see those signs even among people they love and trust. That their intuition is the same no matter what. That two things can be true: they can love a person, but no longer be able to trust them. And that their intuitions can guide them along the right path, because life cannot be all avoidance.

Being seen and respected for who they are as people — integrated as individuals, rather than forced to carve away pieces of self in the name of conformity — is what gives kids the self-confidence and assurance to observe and reject the false intimacy promised by grooming.

In turn, healthy emotional intimacy encourages community: a whole network of people who all see and respect one another for who they are, who will band together to protect those they love.

But it’s our avoidance that provides the scaffolding for the structures in which predators thrive. Thus to heal, really heal, we need different structures; ones that hold us accountable for maintaining real safety, not just its illusion, within our communities.

Remedy: Notice your tendency to believe the young people you know — even toddlers! — are too naive to know what they experience and how they feel about it. Be self-aware enough to recognize, and communicate, when your beliefs drive your advice. For example:

• Do we project adult assumptions and interpretations onto children’s behavior when we say things like "she asked for it"?
• Do we experience disempowerment at work and with our aging parents, to the extent we push it downhill by disempowering our children?
• Is it harder to spot "grooming" when so much manipulation has become normalized in adult dating?

Asking these and similar questions requires us to get past a “protection” mindset that keeps us from looking at our kids as equal partners in their own safety.

In turn, making these questions part of our conversations with our kids helps everyone to trust that our inexperienced kids can and will carry our lessons into their impulsive, reactive teenage years — and that they’ll be able to make good choices when we aren’t around to watch over them.

Healing our “stranger danger” conditioning

Everyone we meet starts out as a stranger. Healthy adults know that over time, people’s actions show us whether to trust or not trust them.

That’s the rub. Unhealthy adults, who themselves cannot be trusted, raise unhealthy children who learn that unhealthy behavior is “normal.” Attachment issues compound the problem, with children and adults both attaching to strangers far sooner than is safe or healthy to do so.

In my experience with child predators — not just the three from my teen years but also one or two I encountered as an adult — they really do seem to believe they're entering into a "relationship." Psychologists call this a “cognitive distortion.”

Other cognitive distortions include inferring sexual intent from innocent activities: a child sucking a lollipop or injured finger, for example, or in an even grayer area, a teen beginning to experiment with sexual power – “flirting” – without necessarily understanding where or how far it might lead, or the ramifications of their actions.

(In this latter example, “she asked for it” might appear to be valid, as might “I was following their lead” or “I was just offering guidance.” These excuses, however, come back to poor boundaries and an adult’s choice to prioritize their own baser biological urges over a child’s humanity.)

The fact is, child predators are people who learned to equate love with manipulation, power, and control, much like many of their targets did. When they offend, they’re reinforcing messages the victim has likely already received. Their connections are based on shame, not love.

Remedy: Take a hard look at all the influences in kids’ lives, not in general terms, but in terms of the level of access and influence they have over our kids, and the extent to which we trust them to do so.

This part is tough because it means potentially undermining the trust we all want to feel in human connections. Again, though, predatory adults understand this desire to trust. That’s how they’re able to twist it so effectively.

As a society, then, we need to be more vigilant: more observant, more communicative, more caring. It’s not “none of our business” and it doesn’t have to be a big deal; sometimes a “Hey, are you OK?” is all that’s needed.

(Yes, the same conditions that make a teen vulnerable to abuse — a quiet private space, a listening ear — are the ones needed for them to feel safe enough to disclose if something is happening to them. That’s why it’s so crucial for kids to know how to be clear about boundaries.)

We can also help our kids by looking out for — and showing them to look out for — the behaviors that might trigger their intuitive red flags. One example is the difference between reciprocity in a healthy relationship, and transactionalism in an unhealthy one. Another example is intermittent reinforcement. 

Finally, we can set guidelines around extracurricular activities, even “safe” ones, especially those where the power differential between adults and children is exacerbated — as it is in Explorer programs — by weaponry and/or social authority.

Healing our hero narratives

As important as it is for us to have people to look up to and emulate towards growing into our best selves, identifying heroes can also come as a result of feeling disempowered or out of control.

If “rescue” and “abuse” are opposite sides of the same coin, then so are “heroes” and “predators.” We scapegoat those who remind us of the negative traits that (we think) cause our problems, while business, political, and military leaders who (we think) solve our problems go up on pedestals.

Put another way, when the monsters are revealed to be hiding in plain sight, we tend to think it reflects on us. Somewhere, we think, we missed the signs. Somehow, we failed to notice — much less protect.

“Protectors” like police, prosecutors, and even predator catchers go up on pedestals. The monsters, meanwhile, are cast out, a stand-in for everyone who’s ever wielded power over us. Lock child abusers away, we think, and we retain some of our own power, so we can “move on” with our lives..

The alternative is that we scapegoat the child reporting the crime, especially when they challenge our illusions of our safety. Not only do they “not know any better,” we conclude, we might also project an outsize sense of the power they have in our lives.

Perhaps that’s part of why we turn a blind eye to exploitation dynamics because that’s just the world we live in and our kids need to learn how to go along to get along.

However, just as casting out a scapegoat puts them out of sight and mind, placing heroes too high above us can put them beyond our vision — and in some cases, our reach, as high profile child abuse cases indicate.

Remedy: Accepting these uncomfortable concepts might then encourage us to consider the institutions we tend to want to protect at the expense of children’s vulnerability. Child predators thrive in families, schools, churches, healthcare facilities, and other trusted places because of how badly we want to avoid admitting that “other” exists among us. 

But it’s our avoidance that provides the scaffolding for the structures in which predators thrive. Thus to heal, really heal, we need different structures; ones that hold us accountable for maintaining real safety, not just its illusion, within our communities.

So it’s on us, too, to recognize when we’re part of the problem. We may not earn ribbons or medals, much less a full “fruit salad” for our efforts. But we can take comfort in creating a legacy of healthy, unbroken adults who can live up to their potential in contributing to society the way they were meant to.

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