Abuse

I started talking to my older daughter about abuse today. She was saying she and her boyfriend were going to see a counselor and how good and healthy it was lately. Their issues aren't their abuse of each other but issues of abuse from their childhoods and just in life in general. So, this I find very healthy in working through all this.

Also, most people today would be horrified at what I had to go through from being born in 1948. Let me give you a few examples.

1. all my front teeth on top were pulled out because everyone had given me too much candy since I was born in competing to give me attention between both my grandmothers and my mother and everyone they knew. So, all my top front teeth were pulled at 4 years old without any anesthetic. And that was just expected of me at age 4 as a boy.

2. I was given my own 24 inch wheel bicycle to ride at age 5. I had to climb up on a block of wood to even ride the thing. I was also given a jackknife which I immediately cut my right thumb with which gave me a permanent scar across my right thumbprint. I also was allowed to go miles and miles away with friends on my bike without any supervision(which was normal then) and eventually I followed a friend off a 3 foot high dirt cliff and fell on the pavement and skinned off all my eyelashes and eyebrow on one side that grew back during the next year.



3. I was climbing with my father in Chilao at age 9 and I fell backwards about 9 feet onto the back of my head onto a rock. While I was throwing up and crying from the pain my father just said, "Get up! Let's go! or I'll leave you here."

So, I got up and walked behind him while throwing up and crying from my concussion. However, he never took me to a doctor or talked to anyone about what happened because he didn't want to be blamed by my mother and grandmother.

Eventually, I got blunt trauma epilepsy from this and almost died. But, I didn't learn the cause until my son was in Nursing School when he got a Bachelor of Science as a straight A student at a California state university when I was in my 60s.

So, I almost died partly because my father when I fell never took me to a doctor regarding my concussion. And I almost didn't have children because I worried that my epilepsy was heriditary which it wasn't.

However, in most ways I can't blame anyone because this was just how people were then. Times change and this is how people were then.  So, I can only blame the times not the people because this was perfectly normal then.

Abuse Tolerance

How much abuse will you tolerate?
For example, my wife has the best boundaries of anyone I have ever met and this has taught me a great deal because she was raised more wealthy and just won't put up with what most other people will put up with.

She has been a phenomenal example to me in regard to not putting up with things other people would in the course of their lives.

My daughter tells a story about a baby elephant that all it's baby life it was chained so it could walk away more than 12 feet. However, eventually when they took this chain off the elephant as an adult it still wouldn't move more than 12 feet away from where the chain was tied before no matter what anyone did.

People are like this too if they have been abused in some way. So, finding a way to break through those improper barriers is useful to a healthy long adult life. Otherwise many of us just die very young.