Growing up in a broken family has to be one of the toughest scenarios that could happen to anyone. Felicia( real name withheld) once narrated her ordeal to me.
Felicia grew up in a family that looked whole to outsiders but the internal conflicts were quite undesirable. She could never understand how everyone managed to feign happiness for everyone else to see and yet behind closed doors, they were all miserable. Felicia was always torn in between family members who were always arguing over her head.
Many times, there also occured fist fights and harsh exchanges. This only tore right through her heart. Why couldn't her family be like the other happy families she knew? Could it be that they were also just feigning the happiness she believed they had? There was actually no way of differentiating because even her own family looked admirable to others.
All that changed however when One family member, an aunt more precisely started leaking the family secrets to the nearby neighbours. She advertised how the family was indeed broken and striving. She said all things, true and untrue and in the end, one neighbour ended up telling another and another and news spread like a wildfire soon. The entire village now knew how truly miserable they were.
Felicia realised that it was better before when no one else knew and she was dying internally but now that everyone else knew, she was dying mentally and psychologically as well. Everywhere she went, heads turned and fingers pointed in her direction. They were the talk of the village. How was she supposed to deal with this?
Many families are like Felicia's family. They bottle up the storm inside the family itself and everyone believes they are a united and admirable family but still, once the World finds out what goes on behind closed doors, it is just as worse. There is no peace in a broken family but it is hard to unite a family.
Rumors, anger, revenge, hatred and betrayal are things that one can not just walk over. Sometimes trust once broken can also never be regained and that is why families today find it hard to re unite after a disagreement. Infact it keeps on growing and gets uglier.
But there are many victims of family violence just like Felicia. They are caught in between and never seem to see a solution to the wrangles they are faced with. In most cases this results into depression and sometimes suicide. There are also cases of psychological effects and in most cases they tend to believe they can never have families of their own due to the fact that they have not got the example of what a good family can look like. That is why family disunity is a silent killer to many of its victims.
