Child sexual abuse

Miscellaneous and Personal Stuff I Must Share
1

I don’t know if it is possible for this to stay out of the pit. If it needs to be moved, please move it.

I recently discovered that someone quite close to me had endured about four years of sexual abuse at the hands of her brothers. It was like a light went on in my head, explaining all of her seemingly strange behaviours. Very low self esteem, leading to a string of poor relationships and heavy drinking, etc. It was a secret she had kept from me for thirty years, and I had quite a bit of trouble processing it; it seemed that I had a worse time with it than she did. She simply says that she’s had all of this time to deal with it. I know who did it to her and even though they are also part of my life, she wishes for me to not discuss it with anyone.

If you have been affected by child sexual abuse, I’m very sorry for your pain. Nobody deserves that. What I would like to know, if you would like to share, is how you think it has affected your life, and your relationships. Any aspect of your life.

2

Wow. I’m probably insane to be posting this to your thread, seeing as how I may have to look you in the face at the next DopeFest and all, but. . .
Being the victim of sexual abuse as a child has definitely affected my life as an adult, in more ways than I could even attempt to say. But what fucked me up even more than enduring the years of abuse is the knowledge that my mother knew, and did nothing to stop it. As a mother, this seems so utterly wrong to me. If I knew someone touched my child in an inappropriate manner, they’d be finding parts of him (or her) all over the city. I know my mother knew, because I told her!

Your friend may say she’s had “all this time” to get over it, but believe me, there’s not enough time in the world to “get over it”! It took years of counseling, years of research, years of practicing normalcy, not to mention years of being married to a really good man for me to even approach being anything like “normal”.

There’s no way I can separate my abuse from my mother’s dysfunction, so there’s no way to separate the impact those two things have had on their lives. But I believe that my life time of morbid obesity is at least partly due to those conditions. I believe that I was set up to marry someone abusive/dysfunctional, and it’s a combination of luck and hard work on my part that I didn’t. I believe that, though the people who did this to me, or allowed this to be done to me, are now dead, I live every day with their ghosts, with the memories and after-images of what they’ve done.

How many times have I questioned my own right to be angry or sad or upset about something? How many times have I felt the guilt that my mother laid on me at every opportunity? How many times have I sworn to myself that I will not be the kind of mother she was? That I will not allow my children to suffer what I suffered? How many times have I questioned my decisions and rulings as a parent, because I was afraid I was swinging too far in the other direction and not allowing my children to suffer the disappointments and consequences that come with life?

I don’t know the answers to these questions. I do know that I have to talk to myself about my upbringing on an almost daily basis.

If your friend prefers that you not talk to anyone about this, I say respect that. But do let her know that you are there to listen if she needs you to, and that there is help available.

3

She has been in counselling on and off over the past fifteen years. She says she prefers to “let it go”.

My husband has been quite helpful in talking through this. He wonders if it is fair for me to judge the abusers based on something they did when they were six to ten years old. I really don’t know the answer to that, but I do have to wonder what happened to them to make them think that was ok to do. We don’t have any answers and I doubt we ever will.

4

Then Let. It. Go.

I was far more affected and much greater harmed by the well-meaning people in my life who tried to get me to “process my pain”, “work through the issues” that “this undoubtedly has caused”, “leaving me in ruins” because “this monster” had “ruined my life forever.” Obviously, I was going to “act out sexually” by becoming a slut or a prude. “Flashbacks are not uncommon,” I’d be told, “panic attacks, anxiety, depression, obesity…”

Well, enough people keep telling you stuff long enough and you start to believe it. You start to live it. You become it. Every one of those quotes defined my teens and 20’s - not because I was damaged by the abuse, but because I let other people convince me I was damaged. I took my cues for my responses from what they told me, because I was too afraid that being relatively unaffected would make it not rape.

It *was rape, according to him, 20 years later. He raped me, his words. But all those years I spent wracked with guilt because I thought that the fact that it hadn’t affected me all that much meant it wasn’t rape. I thought I accused someone falsely, and I hadn’t. But my reaction was normal - just not the end of the spectrum that was always talked about. The reactions of rape victims can be “broken forever” and can be, “well, that was inconvenient” and anything in between, and all you can do is believe someone when they tell you their reaction, even if you think it “should be” something else.

I do agree with this. My abuser was young, as well, and while it doesn’t excuse what he did (I wanted it to, for years), it certainly helps explain his poor impulse control. Add in the fact that he himself was abused, and frankly, I think I cut him a lot more slack than he does himself. In fact I know I do, because we’ve talked about it as adults.

In my step-brother’s case, he didn’t think it was ok to do. He knew it was wrong, he just didn’t care.

*Jesus, all those years of therapy and I never told anyone that. Now here I’m telling thousands of people all at once. That’s okay; it’s time to speak it.

5

Thank you for NOT posting in the Pit. I posted my story in the Pit once and it ended up being a total trainwreck. I was not in a situation to emotionally handle the consequences of being called a liar.

2 of my stepfathers have sexually abused me, the only really relevant one being from age 12-17. I ended up running away from home but more to escape my violent and insane mother than anything else. I didn’t tell anyone about my stepfather (he actually was legally my father at the time, adopted when I was 13) until I was an emancipated minor with (I thought) full confidentiality. I told a therapist who swore she wouldn’t tell anyone else, but turns out she had to report it since he had other children. So I had to tell my mother and my entire family the truth before social services contacted them, about 3 days after coming to terms with it for the first time MYSELF. Very few of my family members believed me.

It made my life a living hell for a very long time. I spent most of my senior year crying in the high school bathroom. When most other kids were passing out high school graduation photos, I was balancing my check-book and receiving screaming, threatening phone calls from my mother about what a horrible, selfish child I was for putting her in this position.

I had to work full time to support myself AND I was a straight-A student trying to graduate and apply to college. I remember a great deal of what my stepfather did to me and always have, but I never labeled it as ‘‘abuse.’’ It was just one of those things I had to do to keep my family together. He was always the one protecting me from my Mom, who had a really violent temper. He told me he would have left my mother if it weren’t for me, and that he wished he was married to me instead. My mother knew about it at least on a subconscious level and it felt like I was caught in a really icky love triangle. She was always jealous of me and him, and whenever I went out in public with my ‘‘Dad,’’ people thought we were a couple. He played my mother and I against one another a lot. My mother had hormonal imbalances and depression and would fly into rages at the drop of a hat. Her punishments were completely disproportional to the crime and usually resulted in property damage, maybe I’d get slapped and shoved around or she would threaten to kill me. My mother was a completely terrifying person to live with.

So basically the situation was fucked beyond measure.

I really don’t think anybody can imagine what that sort of situation is like unless they’ve actually been through it. My adopted Dad was my hero. He took care of me and we spent a lot of time together and was the first man she’d married to ever take an interest in my life. He even taught me self-defense, irony of ironies. When I realized that what he had been doing was not my fault and was in fact him betraying me, I felt like he died. It’s like having the most amazing, loving wonderful father in the world and then suddenly having him die–die, that is, about one month after I became a fucking 17-year old emancipated minor having to support myself with a full time job.

I ended up graduating 2nd in my class anyways, because I’m a badass or something :rolleyes: and then I went to college, and it was in college that I finally got the mental health treatment I needed.

I didn’t know there was a name for the fact that I hated myself and wanted to die, and simultaneously felt like I was going to die at any moment, but it turned out to be called complex-Post Traumatic Stress Disorder and major depressive disorder and X and X and X. I tried 14 different medications and they all pretty much annihilated any ability I had to concentrate on school. It got to the point where I didn’t eat or bathe. I ended up hospitalized at one point.

In the hospital, there was another girl my age in my room, and she was there for the 6th time. I decided that was going to be my last time in the psych ward. I ended up taking 2 years off of school because of all of this. I’ve since married, returned to school, and graduated, and I still have plans for graduate study. I consider myself happy. I’m off meds, and I don’t consider suicide very often anymore.

I eventually had to end relationship with my mother because she stayed married to the guy and was putting enormous amounts of pressure on me to forget about it and move on. The last straw, when I was 22–she talked me into having him help me move some furniture, and then invited him into my bedroom. Right now, I have a good relationship with my mother. She divorced my abuser 6 years after I told her, because he pushed her and she wasn’t going to tolerate that kind of abuse. She is very interested in my abuse story now because it corroborates her own theory that he is an awful, horrible person.

In terms of the impact this has had on my life–well, obviously there’s the fact that my academic and work life has suffered. I am a perfectionist and an overachiever, so I was humiliated to graduate with a Bachelors at age 25 with a 3.6 GPA and two medical withdrawals. I think ‘‘humiliation’’ pretty much sums up my life experience. I was almost fired from my college cafeteria job because of social anxiety disorder and I have 21 negative marks on my credit report because at some point I just stopped caring whether I lived or died or paid my bills.

My sex life is interesting to say the least. I am only okay with sex if I am the initiator–and let me tell you somewhere deep inside I am a kinky little pistol! I can be really free and open and demanding when I’m in the mood. But if I’m sitting on the couch watching TV and my husband kisses me or makes some kind of move, I want to punch him in the face. I feel sick to my stomach and I know it’s him and this is different, but all the feelings just come right to the surface. I feel so resentful when he makes his desires clear. Fortunately we have an incredibly strong relationship that can survive the complete and total wreck of a sex life we have. I just started a new therapy that is supposed to resolve a lot of these issues anyway.

Obviously now I am doing much, much better, and I credit my husband, for his steadfast and unwavering support through all of this (we’ve been together almost 6 years now, met when we were 19.) I also credit myself, because for 6 years straight I have made therapy my full time job and my number one priority. It isn’t sufficient to be a survivor of this disaster–I have to thrive. I will not stop until I have found out how to be happy.

And I DO consider myself happy now. I still have anxiety and depression but it doesn’t disrupt my life as severely as it did in the past. I am doing very well at my new job and people who meet me probably don’t even have a clue what I’ve been through. I’ve also gotten over the ‘‘I feel depressed, therefore I’m not going to do X’’ phase of life. So people can snicker behind my back because I may sometimes be a little socially awkward or melodramatic, but all this maturity I’ve gained, I’ve earned myself through hard-ass work. Nobody was there to pat my back and make it all better. Nobody ever taught me what ‘‘normal’’ is. It’s something I had to discover on my own and to some extent am still in the process of discovering.

The biggest impact of all of this is that I never feel like a regular human being. People can be so fucking judgmental and for a long time, since nobody really ever taught me any social boundaries, I talked about this with just about anybody who would listen. Now the only people I discuss it with are therapists and Dopers. But every time I acknowledge this happened to me, I feel shame. I often feel like a waste of human space and the only reason people are going to forgive my existence is if they understand everything I went through.

But you know what? Nobody will ever fucking understand. The magnitude of hell that was my childhood is basically beyond even my own comprehension to understand. Sometimes when I haven’t thought about it for a long time, and I tell the story, I do a double-take – ‘‘Holy crap. That was really my life.’’

But you know what? Then I read about the Holocaust or the Inquisition, or hear someone bemoan the fact they haven’t found love, and I thank my lucky stars. Because I totally lucked out in the love department, I don’t live in a fascist government, and what I call the ‘‘poverty’’ of my childhood is really a joke compared to say, Mexico.

Not only that, but I am completely devoid of hatred for other people. I’m angry sometimes at my Mom, and you bet your ass I’m angry at my stepDad, but I won the Big Fight. I’m not a cynical, bitter husk of a human being. I am excited about my life and bursting with love for other people. I am not a little girl any more. I am a grown adult and there is no way I am going to let something as inconsequential as the past make me feel out of control of my own life. In my present life, I lack for nothing. I truly am grateful to have had the right mix of love, therapy, determination, and happy coincidence to pull myself out of that hellhole and into the real world.

6

This makes me happy to read.

7

Thanks. :slight_smile:

Basically I do agree with WhyNot. If your friend wants to put it aside, let her do so. Sometimes the trickiest thing is learning when to put it aside and when to pull it out and deal with it. Some people have these experiences and spend decades in misery because some well-meaning therapist tells them they should ‘‘process’’ it. I honestly believe it was this ‘‘processing’’ that led to me being in the hospital. I think initially, my therapy made me worse off, focusing on it took power away from the present, which is where ultimately I need to be.

And since I wasn’t ready to talk about it then, I assumed I wasn’t ready to deal with it ever. For the last year or so I had it shoved down so far in the back of my mind that anytime it came up I would think, ‘‘That’s totally irrelevant.’’ And maybe I needed to do that to become a member of the present world again. But very recently I started doing a little talk therapy again (with some CBT/EMDR thrown in), and I am SHOCKED at what a positive impact talking about it has made in my life. Now I can talk for an hour, put it away, go about my daily life, realizing how strong I am and how far I’ve come, and go back the next week.

So in general, there is not ‘‘right way’’ or ‘‘wrong way’’ to heal. There is what you need in that moment. One of my biggest breakthroughs was being able to say, ‘‘You know what? I’m at school/work/the supermarket right now. It’s not the time to think about this.’’ And I have just learned to go about life, go home, build a safe space and give myself room to feel all those feelings only once I am safe and don’t have anything more important going on.

Your friend might want to let it go, or she might need to talk about it. Letting it go is not necessarily denial and focusing on it is not necessarily self-indulgence. The trick is learning to discern when which time is suitable for which response. And in my experience that is a completely trial and error thing and dependent on the person.

8

I like this strategy a lot. Do you mind if I borrow it? :cool:

Those are really thought-provoking questions. I’ve often wondered what happened to my mother in childhood to make her believe it was acceptable to allow the things she did. For better or for worse, though, everyone with firsthand knowledge of her childhood is dead (well, all of them I have access to, anyway).

9

Something I might as well address here. Because of my experiences (not in spite of), I find the knee-jerk hatred of child molesters in the media/general public to be insultingly superficial. Who is the greatest monster in the world? The child molester. Lowest of the low, scummest of the scum, a barely human piece of filth.

This does not, AT ALL, jibe with my personal experience. My Stepfather was a whole human being. He cooked me pancakes for breakfast and talked to me about politics and WWII and had a very commendable life as a well-respected business man. He was not an evil person, he was just trying to cope with his own life and his new, crazy wife. Long before he started abusing me, he would break down and sob and tell me how helpless he felt to protect me from my mother’s violence. Sometimes, I still miss him. Listening to NPR makes me nostalgic, because he would be so proud of me for finally giving a shit about the Iowa caucuses. I’m still furiously angry at him, and it’s beyond obvious that he should never be in my life again, but it’s not like he freakin’ had tentacles or anything.

I have to believe, my family, upon hearing my story for the first time, must have thought, ‘‘Is she nuts? StepDad doesn’t look or behave anything like that skeezy guy who hangs out on the playground. She must be a lying slut.’’

I don’t believe child abusers are to be vilified. They are to be understood, so that the cycle can be broken. If they can’t be rehabilitated, they are to be jailed and/or kept from children, so that they can’t hurt anyone else. But the outrage and finger pointing and accusations in the media always strike me as incredibly one-dimensional and even personally insulting. I believe this contributes to the general public’s perception about what real abuse is like, and makes it MUCH more likely for the victim to be blamed. Because of this ridiculously melodramatic public image that child molesters have, the choice my mother had to make was very simple: ‘‘Either my daughter is insane or I had the terrible judgment to marry the biggest piece of scum on earth and expose my child to unspeakable harm.’’ If that is true, I really can’t say I blame her for choosing to side with him.

The same goes for her too, of course. I can be angry at her, but I can’t really judge her. Sometimes I think my trauma was hers too, that her rages were traumatic for herself. She didn’t know what to do, she was just doing what she was taught and what her father before her was taught. She really tried her best, and I love her with my whole heart. She wasn’t a monster either. She was just a child struggling to raise a child.

10

I was 12 when my mom remarried after divorcing my dad. From the very beginning, my stepdad acted like he part of a threesome. He treated me like a girlfriend that came with his wife–such a lucky guy! And my mom, whether out of fear or denial (hey, he wasn’t doing anything that left bruises, right?), let it happen.

It took years before I was able to realize that what he’d done was wrong, that it wasn’t my fault and that my mom had utterly abandoned me by not taking me out of that situation.

The insidious thing about it was that he didn’t rape me, he didn’t force me to touch him. But the way he talked to and about me, the way he let his friends treat me and way he acted around me all made it completely clear that if he ever decided he wanted to take it further, he would. And he worked hard to let me know that I could go to him any old time I wanted.

As for how it affected me, I have a hard time trusting people. I’ve struggled with low self-esteem for a long time now, and only recently realized that people like being around me–they don’t just tolerate my presence to be polite. I also have a lot of difficulty with sex, both with initiating and responding.

I’ve been working on all these things, though. The realization that I wasn’t somehow playing an active role in my own abuse helped me enormously. And being able to talk about it with close friends has made a difference too. My huz knew of course, but I had always carried it around like a dirty secret. It’s not something I share with everyone, but I also don’t hide it and pretend it never happened. It’s part of who I am, but it doesn’t define me.

And that’s the part I’m working on now. He doesn’t get to have control over my life, my body and my feelings anymore. Those things are all mine now.

11

With my experience I’ve become more upset with an outside party then I actually do with my abuser. Don’t get me wrong, I do have negative feelings and thoughts towards the person that did those things to me.

Long story short -

My mother took us to this babysitter that was close to her work. We went there from being an infant until I had just entered the 4th grade. During the time we went there, my cousins from both sides of my family also went to the same sitter. At about the age of 6 (?ish) my older cousin had told her mother (My aunt/ My father’s sister) about what was going on at the sitters out and the sexual abuse that was happening… (Sitter’s older brother was coming over…)

My Aunt pulled her kids from the babysitter but never told my parents or anyone else’s parents what was going on.

The abuse continued for 3 more years.