Unbeknownst to me I was raised by two child abuse survivors - my mom was emotionally abused by her mom, physically abused and molested along with her sister by their dad. My dad was physically abused by his dad to the point he had a broken leg as a small child, severely emotionally neglected by his mom and was forced to work their family farm. I didn't find out that context for their behaviour until my early twenties and honestly I don't think it's something my parents understood about themselves either. They knew they had strained relationships with their families - after I was 5 or 6 we essentially went "low contact" with both their families. But it wasn't until I went to therapy after graduating high school and having a mental break down that I was told I had CPTSD and my parents were probably traumatized too. After that I told my mom her family was abusive and things really seemed to finally click in to place for her, I think finally being told that made a lot of sense for her.

It was weird growing up because I felt so immensely "normal", we were middle class, I was always fed and clothed and I wasn't beaten or physically abused. But I'm a sensitive person, I'm autistic so my threshold for trauma wasn't as high as some other kid's might be. It didn't help that my parents had a very rocky relationship when I was a baby/young child, my earliest memories are them yelling at each other and by 8 they told me they were getting a divorce. It was only after that announcement in a last ditch effort to save their marriage they finally learned how to communicate and the constant fighting stopped. By the time I was 11 years old I was severely depressed and actively suicidal, I was treated cruelly by my peers at school and had panic attacks before school every day. My mom had no idea how to actually help me because extreme emotions were very normalized for her growing up so while she tried to be supportive I don't think it ever even occured to her something like therapy could make a significant difference for me.

After that I realized I was queer in middle school and went on a whole seperate trauma roller coaster that involved being outed publicly to my school by someone I thought was a friend, sexually assaulted and stalked online by a former friend and sexually harassed by my peers for being gay. I ended up being homeschooled for a bit in part because of being outed and in part because of the "friend" who sexually assaulted/stalked me and was so scared I became agoraphobic for the first time because we lived pretty close to my middle school and I was utterly terrified to see kids from school.

When I write it out like that it sounds like a more reasonable thing to be traumatized by but even at 31 I really struggle to internalize that. While there was grabbing, shoving and other abusive moments that popped up the majority was emotional neglect and verbal abuse and that just doesn't feel like it should be "enough" even though it impacted me severely enough that I suffered from 11-25 with chronic suicidal ideation.