Thank you for stopping at this blog.
Before reading any further, there is something I have to say. It is the reason this blog exists, and an important request about how to read it.
A Subject That Cannot Be Smoothed Over
This blog uses the terms “mild intellectual disability” and “borderline intellectual functioning (the gray zone),” and discusses parent–child relationships in deep, and at times harsh, terms.
The first thing to be honest about: none of this is framed in a “positive” light. If you yourself live with such a disability, or have a family member who does, please know up front that some of what follows is hard reading.
These are extremely sensitive topics, and one wrong step in interpretation can feed discrimination and prejudice. Please read with calm, logical attention and a constructive spirit.
Why We Touch the “Taboo” at All
We ourselves keep wrestling with “is this really the right way to put it?” and write under that tension constantly. There is a reason we don’t stop.
It is that without facing the truth of “the perpetrator’s cognitive limits,” you cannot get out of your own suffering. Without knowing the cause of the parent’s incomprehensible behavior, the misreading you have carried — “it must have been my fault” — can never be fully undone.
Ideally, every abused child would be removed early and given a place that is warm and unshakeable. Unfortunately, present-day Japan does not yet have the social infrastructure to catch every child.
“You should have been protected, and you weren’t” — inside that brutal environment, you fought alone, and you have made it this far.
Waiting for society to change is a waste of your one life. It is not at all rare for an abuse survivor to take very long years before they ever connect with proper care. Some people, still blaming themselves into adulthood, finally arrive at care in their forties, fifties, or even later.
Many survivors compare themselves to “the children who died of abuse” and tell themselves “what I went through couldn’t possibly count as abuse,” “speaking up against my parent would be ungrateful” — and underrate what was actually done to them.
That is exactly why we want every survivor to recognize, as early as possible, that this is a state of mind and body that needs care.
To the Support Workers Reading This
If you are a support worker fighting this on the front lines, there is something we want to say to you.
Without taking the parent’s “cognitive limits” into account, applying textbook “general family support” can be deeply dangerous. The good intent of “I want to repair this family” can, in the absence of the right knowledge, push the people involved further into a corner — and become the trigger for the worst-case outcome.
Please look not only at the surface events but at the “traits” underneath them — and read them objectively.
What Cocoro Note Is Trying to Do
Some of what follows will draw disagreement. We still believe in this:
Knowing the actual nature of the “perpetrator” you could not understand as a child, and grasping the harshness of the situation you were placed in, calmly, from a safe distance — we believe that is the surest first step toward holding your past as “fact” rather than “victimhood,” and walking into a future from there.
(* This blog often writes as if the perpetrator is the biological mother, but it includes cases in which the biological father, stepparents, grandparents, or siblings were the perpetrator.)
This blog is the map for that journey.
So that you don’t have to keep getting lost.
So that you never have to blame yourself again.
It will be a long-running blog. With all of the above in mind, we hope you will stay with us.
