I’ve been thinking about what’s going on with Ella, and the disapprobation she still receives on these threads sometimes.
I teach psychology to pre-U students - one of my many hats. I won’t go into axons and dendrons; but I think it’s important to bear in mind what happens to the brain as a child reaches adolescence. In short, it’s Armageddon. Grey matter decreases; white matter increases. The brain refolds itself, trimming away extraneous matter. Neurons and neuronal activity increases. Emotions run riot. A teenager’s social state reflects directly on her mental state, and vice versa. Lifelong tendencies to depression and addiction are established during the teen years. Ella has been going through years of hell. We only see the carnage of Casa Evans from a distance. Ella is in the middle of it.
Alice referred to the girls as her ‘life’s work’. IG, for the sake of his own sanity - and I don’t think it would be pushing the envelope through the sorting-office wall to say ‘existence’ - left Ella at the worst possible time in her development, because Alice left him no choice in so doing. She was on the cusp of young adulthood, where, as mentioned above, the brain goes through sizeable and unalterable changes. Physical development, menstruation - with its huge challenges, not the least of which means a young woman realises her capacity for fertility and has to guard against it, plus all the predatory behaviour from the males of the species it brings - and, as a Harvard study suggests, cycling through every single human emotion once every twenty four hours… plus the nightmare of a manipulative and damaging mother-figure who punishes where she should praise, and praises where she should punish.
Ella should have been allowed to follow the normal maturation process, i.e. begin to separate herself from the mother figure and explore her own identity. (Usually, this involves a lot of slammed doors, ‘I hate you’, and competition.) Instead, she was forced to believe she could ‘change’ and counsel her own father. She had to witness her mother’s incessant drunkenness, alarming behaviour, and experience foulmouthed abuse. Ella endured endless tales of her father’s apparent betrayal, to the extent she became brainwashed against him. Then, at a time when she should have been indulging in customary adolescent risk-taking and social interaction, she was pulled from school and wider society for an entire year and isolated with an abusive, substance-addicted woman. God knows how many hours Alice worked on Ella. And God only knows what Alice claimed, given her unfamiliarity with the truth. I wouldn’t be surprised if Evans claimed IG perpetrated the most vile and horrific crimes in an effort to get Ella onside.
What seems to be forgotten is just how young Ella is. Her shocking behaviour during the sleepover is not that of an adult, but a much younger child. Older adolescents may have indulged in a bit of arson and/or criminal damage. Ella threw around groceries and ran away. The account of her behaviour by the psychiatrist is more reminiscent of a nine-year-old - and the judge saw it.
Because she has been simultaneously infantilised and parentified, she has been forced into the position whereby she feels responsible for Alice, yet has absolutely no compulsion to mature. Her various crimes - hacking into his IG and posting infantile messages, stealing $400 for Christmas presents - are the actions of a much younger person. Her height is irrelevant. She’s a damaged, disturbed kid who has been kept in a near-hostage situation. She has had no chance to develop at her own speed, and her enforced isolation ensures she’s infantilised.
She’s not beyond hope, though. The therapist with whom she is working will be making sizeable changes. By appealing to her immaturity, they will hopefully be able to instill in her the foundations for responsible, mature adulthood. But it is incredibly difficult to undo that much manipulation, estrangement and faux-adoration. Pushing her down the model route, so that Alice can be a Kardashian-style momager, is a catastrophic mistake. While Ella is undoubtedly a beautiful girl, she has neither the maturity nor resilience to cope with the dark, cutthroat, shallow and insincere world of modelling.
I think IG knows all this, which is why he hasn’t given up hope. It may take years for Ella to grow up and wake up to what has been done to her, but he will always be ready to welcome her home. She is a desperately wounded soul who needs understanding and compassion, no matter how vilely she has behaved. It is best not to judge her by adult standards, but see her as the wounded, manipulated child that she is.
(Apologies for the essay. Returning to lurking - depression. Love to all.)