You all know the concept of chunking: a Grandmaster doesn’t so much look at each piece on the chessboard, he remembers chunks, discrete pieces that are assembled to form a coherent whole. Tough ordeals are often chunked, like when the Army makes a whole bunch of hard stuff in basic training into “this week”: Just get through the week.
But what happens when bad things get chunked? When I was a kid I would have called the cops without hesitation had some random grownup grabbed me and slammed my head into the wall. When my mom did it “again” it was just another time among thousands. Part of how things were. I didn’t think of it this way but I had normalized it. Many, many individual felonies were chunked together into “my life sucks” and “I hate her”. I didn’t think of each bad thing as a bad thing unto itself that needed to be treated as a bad thing. It was just part of a pattern. A bad day. I classified it that way. I thought there were okay days, bad days, really bad days, and horrible days. It should have been: not really okay days, terrible days, and “someone should put Joan away for 20 years right fucking now” days. I could have tried to make that happen. My sister could have. Our dad could have. No one did anything because “it’s just how it is”. Part of the pattern. It’s funny the way our minds work. One time my brother was approached by some perv trying to get him into his car. My brother ran home and told our dad, who was a cop. Our dad grabbed his shield and gun and they got in the car to go after that guy. Yet he did nothing at all to prevent my mom’s abuse or to lock her up for it. Her abuse wasn’t a shocking isolated event but just part of how it was.
I wish I could say that my habit of chunking bad things ended then, but no. It usually doesn’t for victims of abuse. They repeat the patterns. One of these is that they tolerate things. Put up with things. Another bad relationship. They, we, don’t usually put a stop to things right when the first thing happens. We stop thinking of each bad thing as a reason unto itself to stop dealing with that person or situation. Don’t do like me. When something bad happens, don’t put it in a pile with “all the other stuff”. Once is enough. More than enough. Don’t let the fact that it’s a regular thing change how you feel about it, or what you should do. What would you do if it was the first time? What should you do now, based on their past words and actions? What if it’s you doing the bad things? You don’t get a discount on the harm done if you do it to yourself, either. It still does harm. Each time does. Do not make it into one big chunk. Each and every bad thing is a bad thing — act accordingly.