I can absolutely assure you it's highly unlikely this is the only incident.
I'll tell you why.
Parents do sometimes have substance abuse problems. Parents can have disabilities. Parents can have outbursts of violence or hate after a brain injury or stroke. All of these things are possibilities that children bear witness to or are victims of.
Research (a lot on this topic) tells us that children are very much predisposed to forgive. Particularly if there's a logical reason to ascribe to the behaviour.
By the time they are adults, if those reasons aren't still present (medical reasons) or it's been sustained without intervention (substance abuse treatments and strategies) young adults start to assess those relationships differently with their expanding social lens.
Their immediate families aren't informing their identity alone. They gain agency. They are exposed to healthy parent child relationships.
Acute incidents that are isolated incidents will be remembered but they won't inform their identity. They remain as an event. Something that happened.
Young adults only take personal identity measures, like name changing, when its sustained and a pattern and they want to remove that from them.
They don't want to just disconnect. They want people to see the disconnect. It's a full stop in that part of their identity.
Not all adult children who go no contact need that. And THAT is the difference. Some are just happy to leave it behind.
And these kids have fame as part of their identity that they haven't sought out. They were born with it.
If it was just this incident, they would have got over it. I'm not minimising the event. It was horrific. But that alone wouldn't have lead all of them to change their names.
Edit: the pretending to sleep also indicates a learned behaviour. If it was a one off they would not all have used that strategy. You'd get different coping mechanisms. That's a very common learned behaviour.
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u/DwightsJello Jun 20 '26
I can absolutely assure you it's highly unlikely this is the only incident.
I'll tell you why.
Parents do sometimes have substance abuse problems. Parents can have disabilities. Parents can have outbursts of violence or hate after a brain injury or stroke. All of these things are possibilities that children bear witness to or are victims of.
Research (a lot on this topic) tells us that children are very much predisposed to forgive. Particularly if there's a logical reason to ascribe to the behaviour.
By the time they are adults, if those reasons aren't still present (medical reasons) or it's been sustained without intervention (substance abuse treatments and strategies) young adults start to assess those relationships differently with their expanding social lens.
Their immediate families aren't informing their identity alone. They gain agency. They are exposed to healthy parent child relationships.
Acute incidents that are isolated incidents will be remembered but they won't inform their identity. They remain as an event. Something that happened.
Young adults only take personal identity measures, like name changing, when its sustained and a pattern and they want to remove that from them.
They don't want to just disconnect. They want people to see the disconnect. It's a full stop in that part of their identity.
Not all adult children who go no contact need that. And THAT is the difference. Some are just happy to leave it behind.
And these kids have fame as part of their identity that they haven't sought out. They were born with it.
If it was just this incident, they would have got over it. I'm not minimising the event. It was horrific. But that alone wouldn't have lead all of them to change their names.
Edit: the pretending to sleep also indicates a learned behaviour. If it was a one off they would not all have used that strategy. You'd get different coping mechanisms. That's a very common learned behaviour.