We talk a lot here about how in our dysfunctional family systems a lack of boundaries brought on things like incestuous sexual assault. I'm a childhood sexual assault survivor from a perpetrator outside my home. But though in my home there wasn't sexual incest, there was violence incest. Let me explain.

Being the family protector was my role as a kid in my dysfunctional family system. It got way out of hand.

My father traveled 28 days out of 30 every month for his job, and my mother was very fearful, justifiably, because we lived overseas in a country at war with combat in our neighborhood. So I had to assume the role of husband protector for her and father protector for my little sister when my dad was gone. But when my dad came back home, my mother had a strange habit of "betraying" me to revert roles back to more traditional ones.

So she would "sick" my dad on me after he got back home, making up stories that I had misbehaved while dad was gone. She did that rather than giving me credit for being much more than a good boy, for being her protector. Sometimes to prove he had returned to be man of the house my dad would beat her when he got home for a few days, too. So that doubled her move to "sick" him on me like an attack dog. That way she could divert his violence onto me to shield it away from herself. They was no self sacrifice in my mom as a parent.

TW

When dad got home from long trips, mom would tell him some lies about my behavior in his absence and get him worked up. I would walk on eggshells hoping to avert an attack by even more good behavior, but it didn't work. He would attack me out of nowhere raining blows down on me to put me in my place.

Even though they weren't fueled by alcohol, dad's attacks were like a drunken rage. My therapist believes he had untreated PTSD from his travels through war zones. The attacks were really over the top, involving kicking my bedroom door in like a SWAT team was storming my room, and literally ending up with my blood smeared on the wall.

This went on for 8 years and wrecked my relationship with both of my parents forever. It was an issue for me as an adult when I got married, too, obviously. Twice I chose the same kind of partner as my mom, one who wanted protection but then would "betray" her protector. Guess it's a thing.

It took therapy to point out my self destructive protector pattern in volunteering to repeat that role. I couldn't see it because I was in deep denial since I couldn't imagine there could be anything wrong with being a protector of your loved ones. But my therapist showed me it was possible. I guess people who are dependent on a protector resent that in their minds it reveals a weakness in them. Therefore they get revenge attacking the very person who helped them so as to "restore" their strong self-image.

When I was a hospital chaplain I saw some of that behavior in patients, too. Sometimes a patient who had needed a lot of help from our nurses would turn on them inexplicably when they got well. By then, though, my own therapy had shown me that dynamic in my own family so I recognized it. I also saw that sometimes in church congregations. The slang among ministers is to call them "clergy killers," people in congregations who confess their deepest fears to their minister in a crisis and then turn on them.

When they recover from the crisis, these folks will lash out at the very person who helped them through it. There's a book by the title "clergy killers" about that phenomenon. I faced it last month when I spoke at a church about DS PTSD and our peer support here. Inexplicably, a lady in the church got really angry with me after I spoke, and made some very mean comments about me and about all of us here at DS PTSD. Other members of the congregation later told me she was the one who organized the firing of the last minister of that church. A clergy killer.

It sure was hard to recover from the PTSD I as a kid was getting from living in a war zone when the adults in the house weren't protecting me from it. It was even harder when they were actually attacking me when I went beyond my child role and protected them from it.

Since we lived overseas I as a kid spoke the language better than my adult parents, so they took me as their translator on errands through combat zones in the city when there were cease fires. That way we could get to the bank, buy supplies, get our mail, etc.

But the cease fires didn't always hold. I, the kid translator, would be stuck out there in the streets in combat when most parents had their kids sheltered away safely in their homes. That's how I was once in the car downtown instead of in safety when the family car was hit by a bomb.

The car bombing was my first deep trauma outside the home that gave me combat PTSD on top of the domestic violence PTSD I already had. There were more combat traumas to come in the ensuing years. So I wasn't safe in the house because of my parents' violence, and I wasn't safe in the streets out there because they needed to take me along through war zones.

It was a dangerous and a thankless job being an unprotected protector kid in my house.

Was anybody else asked in their home not only to play inappropriate roles as a sex partner to a parent, but also as too much of a protector role for a kid as well? Did anyone else experience that shift in boundaries back and forth in their dysfunctional family? Like they were always moving the goal posts on you in a game they were playing with you and you could never seem to win the game?