Stop Downplaying It: That Was Your Childhood Experience

Stop downplaying what was… As a child do you remember when the parents lined us up against the kitchen doorframe? They’d tell us to put our heels against the wall and stand tall and straight. Then when we stood still, they would put a pencil mark against the wall to show how tall we were. Beside the mark, the height and date were added denoting the milestone. To me, it felt like such a treat. Funny as it is to say that, given it was just a measurement of height. A moment of parental presence, perhaps?

I did the same measurements with my daughters. As we moved homes I wrote down their names, dates and heights that were on the doorframe of the home we were vacating so I could keep track of them.

The thought of the simplest measurement we took during those years led me to think about what I had never anticipated I’d be measuring as a child.

At seven, I was all about dollies, pussy cats, fairybread and toffees, and magical stories. From eight years old, the trajectory of my childhood changed.

Extract from Chapter 10 Uncomfortable Truths; Stop Downplaying What Was, by Alice Perle:

One of the landmines on Rose’s sketched mind map was the book writing. Sometime later, in one of our sessions, Rose suggested I look at a memoir writing course to help me formulate an outline. I found an online course that resonated with me, short information sessions followed by exercises and journalling prompts.

One exercise was to write a poem about any challenging or life-changing experience. Immediately, this prompt brought to the surface of my mind a visual, an old black-and-white movie that was often playing right behind my eyes. I realised I’d never acknowledged it, nor said anything about it, this film clip that had played on repeat just for me for a very long time.

I sat with that writing prompt and wrote these words that I also had no idea were waiting to be written out from within me, but they came incredibly easily:

Alert, breathing, waiting.

Only she hears the quietest of footsteps.

No one else hears. Does no one else have ears?

Why does no one else ever hear?

Heartbeat drumming, tummy churning, mind empty.

Going limp, waiting to be trapped.

Dread as footsteps stop beside her bed.

Then, Dad’s cough from the next room.

Like playing ‘Marco?’ but no one responded ‘Polo!’

Dad’s subconscious screaming, ‘Wake up!’

Ah, uncertainty, now hovering, risk of capture.

She can’t hear him breathe.

It feels like minutes, yet parts of a second.

Slow, slow, slow; tick, tock, clock;

tick, tock, stop; please stop; stay stopped.

Her breath short, pretending to be dead.

Wishing for invisibility, to magic herself through the bed,

into the dark beneath.

His feet shift on the carpet.

Exquisite awareness, her every sense alert.

Hopeful, is he going to scurry away?

The tiniest movement, the carpet squeaking under bare feet.

He hesitates, uncertain, unfulfilled.

He’s boiling mad. Will he risk it?

She waits, praying for a sign that tonight she’s safe.

Then, dozing off, and, as if in a dream, recalls a shadow.

Alert, the shadow looming was gone.

Heart and breath return to an even rhythm.

Body loose, she drifts into childhood dreams of cloud lands,

of kittens and fairies and troll bridges.

The bogeyman fades from her mind.

Until next time. There’s always a next time.

~8-year-old Me~

As I finished writing the words of the poem, I stared at how I had signed it off: 8-year-old Me. My pen paused and then kept going as if it had its own mind or possibly its own soul. Be honest with yourself, the pen challenged as it wriggled in between my fingers. It’s okay now to see what it was.

Stop downplaying it: that was your childhood experience.

That film clip running on repeat behind my eyes wasn’t a fictional scene from a film. It was a memory of childhood nights in my little bedroom at the front of the house, a shared bedroom in which I was meant to be safe and soundly asleep. 

My pen added four additional lines:

9-year-old Me.

10-year-old Me.

11-year-old Me.

12-year-old Me got my first period.

The first draft of the book I’d done before finding therapy was fairly dry and fact filled.

Finally, this little exercise made me realise that acknowledging abuse was more than just saying, ‘When I was a child, or between the years of eight and eleven, my brother abused me’. This visual I’d been having showed me it was about more than just the nights and days I was actually abused. I was affected in all the moments in between too, as tension, vigilance and feeling unsafe became a part of my daily life.

That exercise only came about in the middle of writing, yet it was a life-changing milestone in my healing journey.

That exercise showed me that it was time to stop running away from what I needed to heal from. I quietened, I became present, and knew that it was time.

I think back to the good feeling of measuring my height on the doorframe of our childhood home. Then, the other measurement that was forced upon me in childhood, measuring the years that my brother’s sexual abuse of me continued to occur. It didn’t even end at 12 years of age.

By running away from what the abuse was, by downplaying it, for all the reasons that I did, forty-something years later, I realised I would have needed a giant’s doorframe to track the undercurrent of the trauma effect on my mind, body and spirit between the day the abuse began until that day when I wrote the poem.

I was in my 50s by then. It was time to walk towards recovery.

Shared with love,

Alice Perle

Resolve: A Story of Courage, Healthy Inquiry and Recovery from Sibling Sexual Abuse is now available globally. Libraries and bookstores can order copies. Please follow me on Instagram and Facebook as @resolvebyaliceperle. The audiobook is now also available via over 50 audiobook sites. If you live in Australia, you can purchase the book directly from me. I’d happily sign the inside title page ‘with love, Alice Perle’ before parcelling it up.