The Suburbanite Witch Trials

          Lately, I’ve been thinking critically about my past, asking questions about patterns in my family that never made sense to me. Throughout my youth, my mom had very strong opinions about magic; even Disney movies weren’t allowed in our house. My father’s NPR-listening made him un-Christian; she’d spout the words “That’s secular!” as if it was the worst thing. Even more mystifying was when my normal childhood obstinacy was blamed on an outside force, an evil neighbor who had supposedly messed with my mind when I was two. “This is witchcraft,” she would say.

          Even though she’s a long way from the knee-jerk black-and-white thinking that typified her through the 80’s and much of the 90’s, I still don’t trust her perspective. For a better angle, I’ve talked to my eldest brother, who was born in 1970, 12 years before me. I’ve also found a book, “We Believe the Children: A Moral Panic in the 1980’s.” In it, investigative journalist Richard Beck describes the scare over Satanism during the 1980’s as being parallel to the Salem Witch Trials. The book also talks about how children were interviewed with a very strong bias, accepting only one answer to be correct. Unfortunately, something similar played out in my family in the 80’s, my mother charging neighbors with heinous and improbable crimes. But that’s not the whole story.

          My older brother tells me that one day my mom slapped him on the head with math book. At that moment, they saw a flash: mom thought the neighbors had had taken a picture. That’s when the neighbors became “evil.” Soon after, she cornered and questioned my four-year-old brother until he said that the neighbors had snuck into the house and done inappropriate things to us. The story somehow grew to include Satanic rituals.

          I’m no stranger to this driven and delusional side of my mother. Coercion came up again during my parents’ divorce, as she questioned my youngest brother about our father. With the suggestive-accusation, “What he did to you while alone in a bathroom?” my brother came up with, coloring on bear skin about the “guilty” party. At least, this time there was no trial involved.

         I believe that my mother had (and may still have) something called narcissistic personality disorder. Narcissists are unable to take responsibility: they see everything, even their own anger, as someone else’s fault. This was an insidious flaw, but in a way, the illusions she found—her fear of Satanism and witchcraft—gave her a focus that was mostly external to, instead of within, the family. Although she was intimidating and neglectful towards us, beyond my eldest brother, she wasn’t physically abusive, fighting most of her battles elsewhere. She founded a non-profit organization against “ritualistic abuse” and traveled to law enforcement and other conventions.

         In a way, I’m glad that I had to deal with her puzzling personality, resulting in my passion for psychology. I’m also glad that my youth and my introversion send me to insightful books with some very real questions in mind.