Finally admitting that I was abused in my youth, so what. Now what?

I have been out of work for two months now and I’ve had plenty of time to reflect. I’m finally admitting to myself that I was abused as a youngster, not just harassed or bullied but actual abuse. My abusers were my peers & my sister for the actual bullying and parents/teachers/authority figures for not doing anything to help/telling me to suck it up.

This abuse continues to affect my adult life w/ low self esteem, paranoia & distrust of other people, bad social skills, etc. In general I’m no longer angry (I let go of that back in my 20’s) and I don’t drink (much) or do drugs. I also try to seek out further abuse.

OK, so I now acknowledge that I was abused, so now what? I can’t go back in time and changed what happened. There is nobody in my life that I can confront with this information. I understand that self knowledge is good in helping to understand my motivations and actions but other than naming my issues nothing has changed.

If I got some more therapy and focused on this issue, what techniques would be used and what results could I expect? I’ve already talked/thought about this issue to death, I don’t really want to verbalize it to anybody else. I think all they will advise me is to let go of the past and live from today forward. To me that seems kind of simplistic and something I can do on my own.

My wife’s insurance will cover 6 visits but this is the kind of topic that I could talk about forever. I really don’t feel like diving any deeper into this, I just want to put it behind me. I know who I am and I know my strengths and weaknesses. I can’t undo the influence the abuse had on me. All things considered I think I handle daily life as well as can be expected.

Unless it is debilitating you in some manner, go on and handle daily life as well as you can expect.

You can accomplish a lot in six sessions of therapy if you don’t allow yourself to get sidetracked into endless recitations and recriminations. You need a therapist who can redirect you, and you need to be willing to take redirection, and that’s a hard thing to do. You have to decide for yourself that you will not dwell on these memories, but learn techniques for moving past them and getting into life.

A therapist doesn’t need details of the abuse you endured, just a sense of how badly it affected you and how you’ve coped with it since then. Then they can focus on teaching you ways to create your own closure and move on.

It’s doable, it really is, but you have to be determined to leave old patterns of thought and emotion behind.

I’ll start by saying that I am not a psychologist or a mental health professional of any kind, but I can walk you through a lot of the process that I’ve done and has helped me. People always say just let go and move on, but it’s vastly oversimplifying and not really helpful to someone who hasn’t learned a process by which to do it.

The first step is admitting it and, for most people, it’s actually one of the most difficult steps. I know I spent a while in some state of justifying why something bad that happened to me either wasn’t bad or wasn’t as bad as I remember it or whatever. But once you admit it, you can actually start doing some work to resolve it.

The next part is to actually more or less experience whatever it is. Really, it doesn’t even matter if maybe it’s not as bad as you remember it or you feel like you’re overreacting. If you’re angry about it or hurt by it or whatever, that’s fine. What matters is how you perceive it, not some concept of a truly objective perspective.

After that, you have to be able to reach a point where you’re done with whatever it is. I think this is a point where a lot of people get stuck. For instance, maybe a step parent was physically abusive and you get the the point of recognizing the anger for that person, but continuing to indulge in it. At some point you’re done with that and it’s no longer serving you and you have to just let it go. The key thing for me to realize was that it is in the past and I can’t change it, but I can learn from it and I can help others to learn from it. In that way, I can make a negative experience ultimately a positive thing. And I’ve found that once I’ve learned lessons from past experiences and been able to apply them to help myself or others, a lot of that charge goes away. Like finding out about a friend betraying you and getting hurt by it, but then learning to pick up on those warning signs and being able to avoid having those sorts of friends in the future. But the point is, if you’ve found a way to learn something from it and become a better person, you’re not going to be charged about the harm that person did to you.

Finally, you have to forgive that person. A lot of people think an apology requires a confrontation, and it certainly helps a lot when there is one because you can both get an understanding of where the other one was at the time, but it’s not really necessary. Sometimes, those confrontations can make it worse if one or both of you is adamant about whatever it is. If you can really experience the grief, get past it to the point where there’s no charge, you can forgive that person from your end, whether or not they ever apologize. Similarly, you may even find in some of these situations you owe them an apology, and though you can’t apologize to them, the important part is recognizing the wrong you did, feeling remorse for it whether or not they do or don’t accept it, and making a legitimate effort to be a better person about it from then on.

So from my end, I’ve had these sorts of things. Some people I was able to talk to, get a great deal of understanding about what happened, and forgiving and moving on was easy. For some I coudl talk to, but it didn’t go smooothly, and so it took me longer to finish with experiencing the grief, but once I did, I forgave them and moved on. And there’s more yet where I couldn’t talk to them if I wanted to, it takes some effort to come to a point of understanding without their input, but I could still forgive them.
Even with all of this said, that doesn’t mean there’s not some other lasting effects other than the hurt. If you were abused by parents or peers, it could certainly have affected social interactions. That’s a place where some form of therapy can really help. It’s like recovering from an injury. First you have to heal, then you can get therapy to strengthen up or relearn how to do things that you’ve forgotten how to do. But also from my own experience, part of it is realizing where you’re deficient and making an effort to fix it.

But if you feel like you’re handling life pretty well, you may not really have to do anything. Sometimes you can experience the emotions and forgive and move on without actually intellectually understanding why it’s bad or what exactly went on. Hell, I’ve had things from years ago I only really recently figured out how bad they were, but there’s absolutely no charge for me and I can see where it had that affect on me and I’m over it now.

If you do decide to pursue therapy, I recommend finding a therapist that does EMDR therapy. This involves remembering and talking about your traumas, while performing rapid-eye movements. It has been shown to be very effective in post-traumatic stress disorders. It’s something that can be done in a time-efficient manner and could be just the thing for you.

Therapy should help you deprogram yourself, un-learn the lessons you learnt and now follow automatically. Lessons like: “I should withdraw from groups of my peers” or “if I don’t take charge in a group, things become lord of the fly-like eventually” or “people can’t be trusted, I have to be stronger then them at all times” or “no-one wil help me if I need help” or “if mom and dad din’t help me, that means I don’t deserve help” .

Therapy should help you to identify such non-realistic and counterproductive rules, rules you are likely to still live by. To unlearn those rules, not just consciously but in the animal learning part of your brain (the amygdala), PTSD therapy, with EMDR, is very good.

Endless rehashing of your experiences is a waste of your time and money, or worse.

The idea is to identify what kind of life-lessons you would like to unlearn to lead a better life in the future, and to go with that.

ETA:What Alice the Goon said.

Maybe you should just get it all out at once. If you have to, pay a therapist just to listen. Then if you’re lucky, you can just put it behind you. If it’s not that easy, just grit your teeth and gather the determination to not allow this to control your life. Best of luck.

I’ve overcome a lot of trauma, and this is what works for me. When you feel like crying about it, cry. When you feel like being angry about it, be angry. Don’t push those negative feelings away, because they are a normal and healthy response to what happened to you. At the same time, don’t wallow in self-pity, either. There’s a thin line between experiencing the normal grieving process and ruminating endlessly on things that you can’t change, but eventually you’ll find a way to strike that balance.

As much as possible, try to stay focused on your present life. Now that you are more aware of where these hangups come from, you can learn to recognize them when they are happening and it has now become a choice whether you will continue mistrusting people or feeling badly about yourself or whatever. I’m not saying you can flip it off like a lightswitch, but being aware of these issues can sometimes give you more power over them. You can start behaving in more trusting ways, for example, even if you don’t feel it. Eventually you’ll start to feel it.