Healing After Control: Breaking the Cycles We Don’t Talk About

By Tom Marazzo

On August 17th, 1985, my mother, Dawn, was killed on the side of the QEW, at the Lake Street exit in St. Catharines while hitchhiking to Toronto, at 12:10 am.
She was struck by the first car and run over by three more.

I was 12 years old. My sister, Deanna, was 14.

People sometimes think tragedy hits like a lightning bolt, fast, unexpected, random. But that day did not come out of nowhere. It was the end of a road we had been walking for years.

A Child Raising Children

My mother was pregnant with Deanna at 15.
Pregnant with me at 17.

By then she was already married, already in the role of a wife and a mother before she had even stopped being a child herself.

A month before I was born, she became a single mother. Eighteen years old. No high school diploma. No job skills. No driver’s license. A child with two children of her own, standing at the starting line of life without a single tool for the race.

She had her own history, an abusive childhood, including rape, that she never really escaped. I did not understand that at the time. I just knew that whatever she was running from was still right there with us.

The Custody Divide

When I was nine, I went back to live with my mother. Deanna refused. She stayed with our grandparents, and a custody case followed. This was the 3rd and final time living back and forth between her and my grandparents.

Deanna’s refusal was not about rebellion. It was about survival. She had already been through one stretch of chaos and malnutrition, vicious spankings that bruised her to the point where she couldn’t sit down. She knew what to expect with my mother and she was not going to do it again.

That choice divided us, not in love but in reality. We were now living in two completely different worlds.

Life With My Mother

Living with my mother meant you never really knew what the day was going to bring. You did not know if there would be food in the fridge or anyone home when you got back from school. Sometimes the day ended in laughter. Sometimes it ended with a coat hanger across your ass or deafening silence.

On my 10th birthday, I woke up in our apartment at 5216 Ontario Street in Niagara Falls. The place was empty. No note. No explanation. No one came home. I did not see her for two days.

Her parenting style was… unconventional, to put it politely. When I was nine, she told me it was time to learn a “life lesson” that I could do whatever I wanted as long as it was not behind her back. That night we smoked marijuana, a pack of cigarettes, and split a 12-pack of beer. She even pierced my ear with a hat pin and an ice cube.

That was her idea of preparing me for the world.

The Night She Died

The night my mother died, she was with my sister at a bus station.

The plan was for her to go to Toronto for the weekend and leave 14-year-old Deanna alone in our apartment with her friends. I was visiting my grandparents, abruptly, because of raspberries I did not share with my mother, but that is another story.

At the station, they fought. My mother blamed her for abandoning her when I had moved back three years prior and Deanna had refused to. She told her it was her fault. Those words, that blame, were the last my sister ever heard from our mother.

Hours later, she was dead on the highway. Her remains only suitable for a closed casket.

Deanna never recovered from that night. The guilt my mother placed on her in those final moments stayed with her for the rest of her life. Things only got worse for her as time went on.

Back to the Grandparents

When she died, I had to go back to my grandparents, the same place my sister had stayed all along. It was not a homecoming. It was a reluctant arrangement. They had not planned for another child in the house and they made no secret of it.

I loved my mother. But she was a tormented soul, a child raising children, and the life we had together was never built on anything stable. I’ve often wondered what my life would have become had she lived, yet I’m afraid of the obvious answer.

The Cycles We Inherit

My fiancée, Joanna, recently read me a line that stayed with me:

“If you don’t deal with your demons, your demons will raise your children.”

That was my mother. She did not deal with hers, so they raised us.

On August 5th, 2000, my sister, carrying just as much unresolved pain as my mother, died suddenly in her bedroom while her own two children slept just feet away.

The cycle does not just pass from one generation to the next. It compounds.

The Mask We Wear

I am not unique in my familiarity with loss or trauma. But I have made a choice. I do not live as a victim.

I have two children of my own now and a beautiful, loving woman to share my life with. I have built a home that is stable, predictable, safe. From the outside, most people probably think I grew up in a well-adjusted middle-class family. That is intentional. I learned to project stability even when I did not have it. That was what survival looked like back then.

Where COVID Comes In

When COVID hit, I recognized the pattern immediately.

The government stepped into the role of the controlling parent. The media became its voice. And the public was cast in the role of the obedient child.

Rules did not have to make sense. They just had to be followed. Dissent was not discussed. It was punished. Fear was not an unfortunate byproduct, it was the tool.

It was the same emotional structure I had seen as a child. Someone in authority controlled the rules, decided when they would change, and made sure you knew that your safety depended entirely on their goodwill. The threat was always unspoken but always there: obey, or something bad will happen to you.

And just like in an unstable home, the rules shifted. You could walk through a packed Walmart but could not sit alone on a park bench. You could buy alcohol from the government store but not clothing from the small shop on your own street. You could remove your mask once you sat down in a restaurant but had to put it back on if you stood up to use the washroom. These contradictions were not mistakes. They were tests. They measured your willingness to obey even when obedience made no sense.

Why Some Saw It and Others Didn’t

During those years, people would ask me: Why is it that some people could see what was happening, and others could not?

My working theory was that childhood trauma teaches you how to spot a dishonest adult. When you grow up having to read the room for your own safety, you learn to hear the tone, see the small tells, and feel the shift in energy when someone is lying to you.

I told this to a retired OPP officer friend of mine. He said he had just got shivers down his spine.

There were only two times this theory failed. Both were doctors. When I pressed a little further, I found something strange. It was not the doctors themselves who had experienced the trauma. It was their fathers. They had grown up in stable, sheltered homes. They had not developed that same reflex for spotting dishonesty in authority figures. And so they believed.

What COVID Did to Us

The pandemic years created three distinct responses in people:

1. Those who obeyed out of fear and are still defending what was done to them because admitting the harm would mean admitting they submitted to it willingly.

2. Those who resisted from the start because they recognized the manipulation and were not willing to give up their autonomy.

3. Those who went along at first but eventually woke up to the reality that they had been misled and coerced.

If you were in the first or third group, you are likely carrying unresolved anger, shame, or confusion, the same emotions abused children carry when they are told to love and trust someone who hurt them.

The Lingering Damage

Here is what people do not always see. When you live under that kind of control, it changes you. If you do not address it, it stays with you. The next time authority clamps down, you do not respond as an independent adult. You respond as the child you were trained to be.

That is why some people still defend what happened during those years, even those who were hurt by it. It is the same reflex I have seen in kids who defend a parent that mistreated them.

Breaking the Cycle in Ourselves

Breaking that cycle means first acknowledging what happened.
Call it what it was: coercion, manipulation, and in some cases, outright abuse of power.
Do not sugarcoat it. Do not dress it up as “mistakes were made.”

Second, understand the tactics so you can recognize them next time:

• Contradictory rules to wear you down until you comply without thinking

• Public shaming to make you police yourself and others

• Isolation to cut you off from alternative perspectives

• Guilt-tripping (“You’ll kill your grandmother”) to bypass rational thought

• Reward and punishment cycles to make obedience feel like safety and disobedience feel like danger

Third, rebuild your autonomy by making small, conscious choices in your daily life that reinforce your independence. This is not just about politics. It is about rewiring your own reflexes so that you do not default to submission when pressure comes again.

Finally, prepare yourself mentally for when government tries to do this again — because it will.

1. Question urgency: Authoritarians use “we must act now” as a tool to bypass thought. Slow the conversation down, even in your own mind.

2. Verify before complying: Make it your reflex to ask, “Who benefits?” before following a new rule or narrative.

3. Maintain parallel sources of information and community: Do not rely on a single channel for news or approval. Isolation makes manipulation easier; connection makes it harder.

Freedom is not just a legal state; it is a mental one. If you protect your mind, you are much harder to control.

As a Country, and as Individuals

As a country, we face the same decision now. We can keep reacting like children whenever government tells us to, or we can grow up, take responsibility for ourselves, and refuse to live by fear.

Healing does not mean pretending it never happened. It means facing it directly, naming it for what it was, and deciding you will not live under it again.

At the personal level, it means refusing to carry the emotional posture of the powerless child into your adult life. That is the real work. That is how you keep the next crisis from breaking you in the same way.

Because if you do not deal with your demons, they will not just raise your children. They will govern your future.