Speaker(s):

Liz Hunter

Presentation:

All I wanted as a child was to feel like a “real” girl. Instead, I grew up in a society that inadvertently separated me with statements of “realness.” My foster parents were often asked, “Is she your real child?” I was frequently questioned, “Where are your real parents? Why doesn’t your real mom love you?” From the abusive and neglectful place I first landed to the rejecting world of foster care, I was unable to connect with the ideas of real love and family. Everything about my internal and external reality felt lacking and, therefore, inferior. I came to understand myself as an “other”—something not “real” or less than human.

As professionals, we intimately understand how attachment problems are created at home. Yet, we may not realize that victims of abuse/neglect are receiving disconnecting messages both within and outside the walls that house them. Sometimes, this disconnect is even perpetuated by the very profession that seeks to remedy it. Human helpers need to better understand how a sense of “disconnection” interplays with many of the behavioral and emotional problems we see in children from traumatic circumstances.

Children come to care about the impact of their actions on others through having a strong and healthy connection to people. But what happens when a child feels alienated from humankind? With my story, as well as my parents’ stories, I will seek to answer that question. I will explore both the interfamilial and societal dynamics that led to generation of dysfunction within my own family—dysfunction characterized by abuse, neglect, homelessness, substance abuse, mental illness, and marked parental failure. I will show how this cycle was finally broken by others simply inviting me back into humanity and showing me that I was and always had been a “real” girl.

Objectives:

• Describe the mental processes and environmental messages that lead a child to become/feel “disconnected”
• Explore how “disconnection” leads to negative interpretations of self
• Explore how disconnecting from ourselves leads us to disconnect from others.
• Show how our growth, connection, and learning needs can sometimes be met in the darkest of spaces by the most unexpected people
• Show how children born into the same home circumstances can have different outcomes because of connections they forge
• Show that the only cure for human connection problems is human connection.
• Show that our hope for reaching people is through our shared humanness
• Show that the people who changed my life the most were the people who simply identified a need within me, connected with the need, and met it