Trigger Warning / Content Note

This article contains descriptions of domestic and emotional abuse, intergenerational trauma, and distressing family dynamics from the perspective of a child. The narrative involves coercive control, parental complicity, and emotional confusion, which may be upsetting to readers with lived experience of family violence. Please read with care.

Memory Seven: Don’t Use the Paper

She’d been home from uni for just a few days, and the screaming was back. It was bad, because she loved the oldest so much, but knew that if she tried standing up for her the oldest would snap at her to keep her inside. Being snapped at her was worse than him for some reason.

“Mum why is he mad at her about paper?” I asked.

“Just mind your business and eat your dinner. All you had to do was give him his drink and come back inside, just don’t look at him next time you do it.” she said, telling the older one.

“Or here’s an idea, how about he gets his own drink, or even better stops drinking?” the older one retorted.

The older sister was the best. It was so bad when she went back to uni because then it was months before she had a friend again.

The older sister took the brunt of everything, life was easier when she had a break from being the oldest.

It was a horrible thing to think..but why was it so true?

“Why do you have to do this? Every time you come home it’s not hard to just do as he says.”

“Just because he says it doesn’t make it right.”

Mum went quiet again. She knew she was right, but never said anything about it.

Once she went back to uni things would change, and everything he said would be wrong again.

Then it would be back to her turn to take the brunt of it all.

She wished she could be as brave as her older sister.

She wished she could be as fearless.

As smart.

As short…being short made it easier to hide, to be invisible.

“Such a wasteful family, just wastes everything.” he says loudly from outside.

I finish my dinner and go to my room.

Pulling the plastic folder under my pillow.

I hide under the bed, open it and look at the drawings.

Climbing the trees. Doing somersaults. Playing ball. Riding bikes. Playing with the dog.

It was so much fun having her home from uni.

Tears start falling, wrecking the drawings.

He gets louder from outside: “You just keep killing trees. Just a bunch of wasteful people.”

Introduction

In the field of trauma studies, much attention has been paid to overt acts of violence and their aftermath. Yet, equally insidious are the micro-conditions of ongoing, daily trauma that shape childhood development under coercive control. The memory shared above illustrates the emotionally ambiguous terrain of sibling protection, maternal passivity, and psychological fragmentation that often go unrecorded in legal or clinical assessments of domestic violence. Through narrative inquiry (Clandinin & Connelly, 2000) and a trauma-informed feminist lens (Herman, 1992; Gilligan, 2015), this article unpacks how children internalize, survive, and silently resist the roles assigned to them in family systems governed by patriarchal dominance and relational betrayal.

The Trauma of Being a Witness

Trauma is not limited to direct victimisation. In fact, witnessing violence and enduring emotional neglect have been shown to produce complex PTSD symptoms in children (van der Kolk, 2005). In this narrative, the narrator’s position as a younger sibling and a silent observer situates her in what Margolin and Vickerman (2007) term the “hidden casualties” of domestic abuse.

The mother’s instruction to “just mind your business and eat your dinner” operates as a psychological silencer. It reinforces what Judith Herman (1992) describes as the “organized forgetting” that survivors are encouraged to perform in order to preserve the fragile illusion of family.

More than mere obedience, this silencing embeds a lesson in the cost of visibility: speaking out results in confrontation, and confrontation leads to emotional abandonment or violence. Research into family dynamics under authoritarian abuse reveals a common theme: children quickly learn that safety lies in passivity (Fitzgerald & Seaborn, 2020).

Sibling as Buffer: Protective Mechanisms in Dysfunctional Homes

The older sister occupies a complex dual role: both a target and a protector. As Crick and Dodge (1994) explain, social information processing theory suggests that children assess threat and relational safety through modeled behaviour. The narrator reads her sister’s defiance as bravery and seeks safety in her presence. This is an example of “transference of trust” often observed in trauma-bonded family dynamics (Freyd, 1996).

In many families marked by coercive control, an older sibling assumes a parentified role (Jurkovic, 1997). They act as emotional interpreters, mediators, and protectors, absorbing the majority of the emotional fallout. This dynamic can result in lifelong guilt and burnout in adulthood (Hooper et al., 2011), while simultaneously reinforcing a dependency loop for the younger sibling.

The sister’s return to university represents a rupture in perceived safety. It signals a transition back into isolation for the narrator, who identifies her sister not only as a source of affection but also as a buffer from paternal aggression. Such role-based attachments often produce long-term relational impacts, including difficulties in adult identity formation and intimacy (Briere & Scott, 2015).

Maternal Silence: Complicity or Survival?

The mother’s silence and passive alignment with the father’s control are typical of what Kelly (1988) describes as “survivor collusion.” In this dynamic, the non-abusive parent may inadvertently reinforce the abuser’s authority out of fear or learned helplessness. The line She knew she was right, but never said anything reveals internal cognitive dissonance and suppressed maternal agency.

Crittenden (2008) asserts that trauma-exposed caregivers often operate from a place of attachment disorganization, struggling to reconcile safety for themselves with protection for their children. This leaves children in a loyalty bind, forced to choose between emotional alignment with a silent caregiver and moral alignment with what is just.

This maternal silence is not merely a failure of courage; it is often a learned response shaped by her own history of victimisation (Radford & Hester, 2006). When intergenerational trauma is at play, maternal figures may unconsciously repeat cycles of silence to preserve a sense of family unity, even at the expense of the child’s emotional wellbeing.

Everyday Objects, Everyday Surveillance

The paper. The drink. The dinner table. These mundane objects become infused with symbolic power under coercive control. Stark (2007) introduces the concept of “microregulation” to describe how abusers impose dominance through everyday routines. In this narrative, the father’s fixation on “wasting paper” becomes a proxy for asserting control, while the drink ritual becomes a test of obedience.

The concept of “symbolic violence” as theorized by Bourdieu (1991) is also evident here. The father’s comment about “killing trees” masks cruelty in moralistic language. This shaming creates a moral hierarchy where his authority is preserved under the guise of environmental concern, further disorienting the child about right and wrong.

The child’s drawings – tucked away under her pillow – act as a site of resistance and memory preservation. This echoes Cathy Caruth’s (1996) theory that trauma is both a rupture and a repetition; the act of re-drawing joy as it is remembered from fleeting safety becomes an attempt to reclaim narrative control.

Developmental Impact: The Long-Term Cost of Role Reversal

Children who grow up in such climates often experience what’s known as “parentification,” where the emotional or logistical needs of the parent or sibling override the child’s own developmental needs (Chase, 1999). The narrator’s admiration for her older sister coupled with her sense of inadequacy (I wish I could be brave… smart… short) indicates internalised self-minimisation, a survival strategy commonly seen in children raised in trauma-affected households (Garmezy, 1993).

This narrative is also a case study in what Daniel Siegel (2012) calls “interpersonal neurobiology” – the way relational experiences shape the brain. The narrator’s longing for invisibility and protection through physical smallness illustrates a somatic adaptation to chronic threat. Over time, such adaptations can calcify into anxiety disorders, phobias, and identity confusion.

Moreover, the narrator’s retreat under the bed is not only a physical withdrawal but a psychological dissociation (Putnam, 1997). This detachment from the immediate environment signals the activation of the nervous system’s freeze response, often misinterpreted as passivity or introversion in school-aged children (Porges, 2011).

Conclusion: The Silent Testimonies of the Unseen

What this narrative reveals is not only the emotional cost of being a child in a domestically violent household, but also the nuanced ways children locate temporary safety, meaning, and resistance in environments devoid of adult protection.

Each character in the story serves a narrative function that mirrors broader systemic failings: the abusive father represents unchecked patriarchy, the silenced mother embodies institutional complicity, the brave sister models resistance at a cost, and the narrator – quiet, watchful, artistic – is a stand-in for the child whose trauma remains invisible to systems designed only to respond to bruises and broken bones.

To understand the true weight of domestic violence, we must turn to these inner landscapes. The drawings, the whispers, the hiding under the bed – these are the archived records of trauma not yet entered into any legal file. They are the encoded memory of a child who made sense of danger through creativity, and found in paper the very thing she was punished for wasting: evidence of life.

References