The Blackness of Darkness

Content warning: This post contains graphic descriptions of child abuse and domestic violence.

This essay recounts my earliest experiences of physical and emotional abuse — and how those wounds shaped my nervous system, relationships, and sense of self. It’s an unflinching look at what happens when love and violence fuse in a child’s world, and how those patterns echo across a lifetime. This is not a story of blame, but of understanding — of tracing the lineage of trauma so it can finally stop repeating. It ends where healing begins: with self-parenting, gentleness, and the slow reclamation of safety.

The publish button is so heavy with this post but I know I must let this out. I need the world to help me carry this weight; no one should ever have to do this alone.

"Darkness imprisoning me. All that I see absolute horror. I cannot live. I cannot die. Trapped in myself. Body my holding cell. Landmine [violence] has taken my sight, taken my speech, taken my hearing, taken my arms, taken my legs, taken my soul. Left me with life in hell. - James Hetfield (One)

My first memories from my childhood are of me cowering in fear that my dad will hit me. He would just slap me over the back of my head with his hand if I did something he didn't like. What he didn't like didn't make much sense to me then, it felt like a random thing. I didn’t wonder whether I deserved it — I didn’t have that capacity then. I just learned to be watchful of his moods, so I would know when to hide. I could tell by the sound of the way he opened the door, by the expression on his face, by the way he moved. I learned to be more attuned to him than to myself.

Physical punishment was not always necessary, often simple threats of violence were enough to put me into freeze fawn. When I was older, I learned to prefer physical punishment because it would diffuse the situation better. The pain didn't bother me so much. It was the scary emotions of anger, disappointment, contempt, judgement that would bring out the paralyzing fear in my bones.

Sometimes it was a slap, those were the scariest because they happened randomly. Sometimes it was a belt. It was never a stick, which I'm grateful for. My mom took part in the threats more than the hitting.

Once, when I was about three, my dad hit me on the back of my head while I was sitting at the dinner table. My head hit the edge of the table between my nose and forehead and I started bleeding profusely all over my face and body. Puddles of blood, you would find it hard to believe given the size of my body.

I always felt uneasy with that scar on my face but for most of my life I couldn't recall this memory, I only knew it second hand from my mom. I can remember it now though. My mom said that this was the only time she had seen my dad cry. He didn't cry enough, he kept on beating me afterwards.

The violence was gratuitous and profuse. It was an everyday thing. It was the only tool in the parenting toolbox that my parents had. It was used when I cried and my parents couldn't tolerate it, when I objected to anything, when I exerted my will and independence, or whenever my parents were tired, upset, stressed, anxious, also, when they needed to teach me anything: manners, reading, respect, obedience.

I remember my mom teaching me the alphabet when I was four from the cute little picture cards that she had made with magazine clippings of animals and whatnot, she was holding a belt in her other hand to motivate me.

To their credit, they were young. I was an unwanted child, born from a broken condom, when my parents were 20 years old and still in school. They were out of their depth, it was the USSR, there were no resources, they had a lot of generational trauma of their own. This is not about blame, I do believe my parents loved me and did their best. This is about the wounds in me that I'm still struggling with forty years later.

Between the ages of three and six my dad went back to medical school. He would come back during the weekends and my mom would keep a little notebook of all the ways that I misbehaved. She didn't want to punish me herself, so every Friday after dinner my dad would take me to a room and make me take off my pants and he would take off his belt and hit me the appropriate number of times to match my crimes.

I loved my dad, he would play with me sometimes, I looked forward to him coming back for the weekends. I was also terrified. To this day pain and love are completely fused for me, I still seek out romantic relationships where the pain feels familiar.

The trauma didn't end there. My parents had personality disorders. My dad is a narcissist with malignant tendencies. My mom has borderline personality disorder like me. They haven't been diagnosed and wouldn't admit it but I know enough. They had a lot of arguments and wild fights. My mom would routinely threaten suicide.

I have seen her attempt probably a half a dozen times: running over and opening the kitchen window saying she will jump (we lived on the fifth floor), running out of the apartment saying she will jump off the roof of the house (somebody actually did that so it felt legit to me), taking all the medicine in the medicine cabinet, etc. This was usually a threat to have my dad do something, mostly I think to keep my mom company instead of going fishing or hanging out with his friends.

I remember he would laugh at her and openly mock her, saying no one has ever died from whatever the medication she had swallowed, or that she doesn't have what it takes to jump. And he would always just leave.

I always thought it was heartless that he did that. Only recently I've come to the realization that he left me too. I was there watching the whole thing. Nobody came to comfort me, nobody explained what was going on. Sometimes my mom would tell me, “Tommy, your dad is a very bad person.” I thought my mom was hysterical, I guess that's what my dad had said. Now I know better.

I don't think my dad ever hit my mother, I was good enough of a punching bag to release his rage. But he was verbally abusive: mocking, threatening, guilt tripping, gaslighting, blaming, playing the victim, making fun of people, bullying them. I saw him do that to my mom, me, my brother, his colleagues, his friends. It was the typical narcissist toolkit.

At worst, he treated me as a threat, at best, an extension of himself, but mostly I was just a nuisance. I learned to hide and keep a low profile. My dad hasn't changed, to this day he openly tells me that it was good for me the way he raised me. He says they give you 10 unbeaten ones, for one beaten one. That's right, it's a slave trade saying.

I learned to be the perfect little boy, who never cried, always behaved and pleased his parents. The violence in my life was not just traumatic, it was systemic, it was torture, it was conditioning. It broke my spirit, it made me disown myself. It taught me that my needs and feelings are threatening and that they need to be suppressed. It taught me to disconnect, dissociate, distract as the main ways of coping. It made me rational and practical, but the price was empathy, compassion, connection and a lifetime of estrangement and fear of others. It taught me to be ashamed of myself, that I don't deserve to be here, that others will always betray and punish me. It taught me that love is self sacrifice, and that attuning to others and pleasing them is more important than attuning to myself. It turned me into a people pleaser and a performer, always chasing for external validation and vulnerable to abuse.

Worst of all it installed a permanent shock collar and gave everyone around me a remote trigger:

Whenever somebody in my circle is angry - shock.

Whenever they are judging or contemptuous - shock.

Whenever they are anxious or excluding me - shock.

Whenever I'm struggling and need help - shock.

Freeze, fawn: the prefrontal cortex shuts down, I can't perform any more. This undermined my social and professional life to a crippling degree.

Here I am 40 years later, parenting the way I wish I was parented. Cradling the inner toddler, still trying to calm down the amygdala, telling him it's okay, I got him, there's nothing more to fear. It's all in the past. There's only love ahead of us.

The collar is still there. But the remote is finally in my hands.