Who Decides What Is Normal?

Not every parent lived through deep trauma as a child. But many did, even though they seemed normal to everyone around them.

And who decides what normal is? We do. A society decides. And we tend to fear what we don’t understand.

Picture a man walking down the street, talking loudly to himself. Everyone can see that something is wrong. Now picture a man who shouts whenever he doesn’t get his way, who can’t control his temper. Most people would find him less troubling than the first man. Anger is so common that we have learned to live with it.

If I had to guess which of these two men is more likely to be someone’s father, I would guess the one who shouts.

Both men are carrying something. But we notice one and excuse the other. Some psychologists describe anger as a shield. Underneath it, there is often hurt, fear, or shame that feels too dangerous to show.

For a long time, I asked why our parents kept silent. Now I ask a different question: What happened to them before they became our parents?

Reading The Body Keeps the Score by Dr. Bessel van der Kolk opened my eyes to how common childhood trauma is. Research on adverse childhood experiences, often called ACEs, shows that about two out of three American adults lived through at least one before age eighteen. Nearly one in six lived through four or more. The more of these experiences a person has, the higher the risk of serious problems later. Adults with four or more were more than four times as likely to suffer from depression. They also face a higher risk of serious illness later in life, including heart disease.

Some of the numbers are hard to read. At least one in four girls in the United States is sexually abused in childhood. About nine out of ten of those children are harmed by someone they or their family know and trust. Many never tell anyone, so the real numbers are likely higher.

When I learned that, I began to see some old family rules differently. The older generation often discouraged hugging, especially for girls once they reached a certain age. Perhaps some of them were trying to protect children from dangers they knew too well. And yet touch is one of the things children need most to grow, in body and in mind. What a painful thing, that something so vital had to be rationed for the very people who needed it most.

Seen this way, the question of why they kept silent matters less to me now. Some of them may have carried wounds so deep that speaking of them would have meant living through them all over again. If so, their silence was not only a wall. It was a way to survive.

That does not erase what we went through. But it gives us room for empathy, and a better understanding of choices they made that may not have been best for them either.