That was the first thing I recalled. I was asleep in my bed. I was 7 at the time. My father had crept into my room on silent feet. He wanted the terror he was about to inflict to be complete. Best not to wake me until the first blow fell. He unleashed his rage on the body of a sleeping 7 year old child. My crime, a bent towel rod in the bathroom. He assumed it had been me. He didn’t ask, he didn’t question, he didn’t go after my older siblings, he simply sought me out. He never needed a reason. Once he was done, he took the comb out of his back pocket, swept his hair back out of his eyes and left. He always did that afterwards.

I wasn’t able go to school that day. No one in my family came to check on me that morning.

Ever since, I have been unable to sleep soundly. I wake at the slightest sound. My dog sleeps on the floor next to me. I have an alarm system. My spouse knows not to wake me by touching me.

Growing up, I was continually the target of my father’s rage. I lived in constant fear that something would set him off and he would fly into a violent rage – unleashing a torrent of physical and verbal abuse. Inflicting pain was never enough for him. He had to also demean and belittle me constantly. There was never any reason for the abuse – there didn’t have to be.

I don’t know why my father singled me out. He never sought out my older siblings. Maybe in his eyes I had been born the wrong gender? Maybe because I was the youngest? Maybe I was just a bad child? Maybe because I stood up to him? Maybe something about me caused him to relive trauma he had suffered? Or maybe there was no reason at all. Research has shown that it is not uncommon for an abusive parent to single out one child as the target of their violence. This is often called target-child selection. In other places, I have seen it called the Cinderella Phenomenon. No one knows for sure why this occurs. There needs be no logical explanation for why one child is targeted over another.

Long standing research shows the Cinderella Phenomenon often involves redirection of anger that an abusive parent feels toward someone else. The targeted child may remind the abuser of a trauma he or she experienced, or even their own abuse. In my case, I later learned my father had suffered abuse at the hands of his father. He was also the youngest in his family. I don’t know the extent of the abuse that occurred in his family.

Alice Kenny noted in her book Crazy Was All I Ever Knew: The Impact of Maternal Mental Illness on Kids that many studies on the characteristics of abusive parents revealed abusers “tend to have: low self-esteem, poor impulse control, low frustration tolerance, inappropriate expression of anger, impaired parenting skills, depression and other mental health problems, and as mentioned previously, a history of being abused.” All of these descriptors could be used to describe my father.

The important thing to remember is that there is NEVER an excuse to abuse a child – no matter what the situation the abuser is in or has gone through. It is also never the fault of the child. If you have been the victim of this type of abuse, it would not have mattered if you were better, acted differently, born a different gender, looked differently… Nothing would have mattered – it was not your fault. No logic applies to an abuser. An abuser has got to be an abuser.