Abuse in the Rearview Mirror

[Heather]

If and when it's been a while since you experienced abuse or assault, there are probably places where you feel like you have done a lot of your healing, or at least made serious headway, and things you have made a certain peace with.

At the same time, there may be some areas in healing you just feel like are still very raw, or where you haven't been able to move forward much. There may also be some things -- even if they aren't anything you yourself were in any way responsible for -- you just feel like you still can't make peace with and feel stuck in.

If you've got any of the latter, what are they? Why do you feel like they're so hard? And what do you feel like might be making those barriers for you, and what might do you feel like you need to bust past them?

On a similar note, how are you feeling now that you are away from or out of abuse or assault, and have been able to have some considerable time away?

[suburban_witch]

As someone who used to be on this specific forum asking for assistance, I'm really appreciating this as a space where people can come back and share their growth, since day-to-day it can be hard for us to see and observe for ourselves.

I can personally say I feel like I've grown a lot. I'm doing cognitive behavior therapy and I've been more actively logging and processing my negative thought patterns around relationships. I am also feeling like maybe I can begin to have friendships with men again, whereas a year ago, that would have felt really unsafe for me. It still does feel scary after my assault, but I'm feeling a little more comfortable with risk than I was a few months ago, or even a year ago.

Since I still commute a lot, there are a lot of areas I still feel stuck, including making time to stretch and take care of myself away from the computer, and about love and relationships. This is an area I'm planning to work on a lot more in therapy, and a lot of it is dismantling messages and narratives I've been telling myself about relationships and possibility my entire life. I also have an idea to write a zine about it as a way to process and move through these ideas. Finding a creative outlet is an important way to process and deal with things that still feel raw to me.

[Infinitea]

This question got me reading back through the old board archives and my really early posts on Scarleteen, which, for the record, are from four years ago now, holy cow! And the thing that really stuck with me from those posts was a conversation Heather and I had about control and feeling that I had lost it. About feeling that my experience in a sexually abusive relationship had taken over my life and how I could take my life back.

Looking back I can remember how strong that feeling was, how I had almost compulsive thoughts about that relationship, how my emotional stability and interactions with others seemed intrinsically tied to it. It was a point where I wasn't convinced I'd be ok again. A point where interactions I framed on Scarleteen as "sex I was ok with" were really sexual encounters I broke down about the day afterwards instead of during.

And the best thing about looking back and remembering where I was then is realizing I'm not there now.

I don't think about that relationship daily anymore, I don't even think about it weekly, and there have probably been months this year where it hasn't crossed my mind at all. My no's feel powerful again, and so do my yes's. And, perhaps more amazing to me than anything, is the fact I haven't broken down after, before or during sex in ten months. And in the past year, maybe a little more, it's only happened once. Not that much longer ago than that I remember feeling like I might never make it to a place where sex was just completely fun and easy, without the worry that something might trigger me. But for now it feels like it is, and it feels like it might be for a long time to come. Most of all though, and it took reading through those old posts to realize this, I feel in control.

[Heather]

Infinitea, I can't say how great all of this is to hear! I am so, so happy to hear about how things are really turning around for you. It's about time!

[suburban_witch]

I'm really happy to hear this too, Infinitea! I think when memories of the abuse take up less mental space, that's definitely a good sign.

[Redskies]

I'm a survivor of teen-on-child sexual abuse, and I'm very happy to say that it is very, very rear-view mirror. Things became absolute hell for me around the age of 16 (years after the abuse stopped), when I grew into my own young-adult sexuality, and the abuse came back to me vividly and powerfully. I could never, then, imagine how fuzzy and unimportant it would become; I haven't remembered clearly for some time now, and I don't need to. I got good help in my late teens and did a lot of hard, horrible work processing and accepting what happened to me and how I felt about it; I would not want to re-live that time for anything, but I'm extremely glad I did it, because I don't feel that that abuse has any effect on me as a person or on my sexuality. The things it's left me with, I think, are some personal awareness of what that hell feels like for anyone else in it, a lasting interest in healthy sexuality, consent, and recovery from abuse, and a commitment to doing my bit in trying to get everyone who might need and want it the right support, when they need it. The only thing that makes me sad is, it complicates and puts some distance in my relationship with a caring family member who is closely related to and remains close to the abuser; my family member was, as far as I understand, victimised too in other ways, and I consider my relationship with them another kind of victim of the abusive actions. Given that I feel pretty healed and no longer need anything (related to that abuse), I think my family member is in a more difficult position than I am: the abuser is no-one to me now, while I do not know how my family member lives with what they know one person they are close to did to someone else they care about (me) - they must acknowledge the situation because they never mention that person to me. I value my family member's commitment to knowing me, as surely it must take bravery to manage that kind of split reality without enforcing any kind of denial or "normality" on me. I accept the situation and I think we both do the best with it it's possible to do, but still, it's hard to find peace with that kind of result of someone else's abusive actions.

My first boyfriend repeatedly assaulted me early on, and then sporadically throughout the relationship, and ended by treating me badly - like I wasn't worth much as a person and was mostly a burden - for a really long time before finally leaving. It still hurts that someone I cared about a lot, who claimed to care about me and knew me well, could treat me so badly. I think maybe it's natural for something like that to go on hurting? I don't value that person's opinions or view of me the tiniest bit now, yet their behaviour and complete disregard for me still hurts. After the first few months of blur, pain, and utter "what the hell??!?", I started re-moulding pretty rapidly into the person I actually was, rather than the very reduced and monchrome version that had been his view. That felt great. I also reclaimed my sexuality by pursuing casual sex - I knew I liked sex, but at that point the only partnered sex I knew was sex with him, which felt crappy. My aim was to no longer remember what sex with him felt like, and, aim achieved! Obviously that's not the right route for everyone, but it felt good to me and really helped. Interestingly, a little after that, I stumbled across one of Heather's big casual sex surveys online, and filled it out, then looked at my answers; unsurprisingly, there were nearly all negatives about the sex in my relationship, and all positives about my casual sexual experiences (even the ones that were also a bit weird, or clumsy, or otherwise "imperfect" ). I was brought up to believe that sex was better (in any way you care to interpret that) in a committed, loving relationship; I already knew my own reality, but having it clearly laid out in front of me was a life-changer, and really helped me to see my relationship experiences for what they were and to move on. Honestly, I think it would be better if my feelings about that relationship took up less real estate in my head, but I don't know how to achieve that; I think I don't do well with injustice with absolutely no right of reply (never been allowed to see the guy since before he even said anything was wrong - not a good recipe, for me at least, to put it all in the past). I still want to see him, just to say "I think you are the pits, and you behaved abysmally, for no good reason, and there are no excuses. Piss off, goodbye and good riddance." I can't seem to stop wanting that, even if wanting it doesn't seem to do me any good.

It was always clear to me that my household could be a rough and scary place to grow up in, because of the state of my parent's relationship and where it left each of them. It's only fairly recently - a couple of years - that I realized many things done and said directly to me were abusive to me, and very recently - like, an ongoing process at the moment - that I realise that I experienced severe emotional abuse. I think that recent and current figuring-outs don't qualify much as having distance, even though it happened a long time ago. Even just the full (or mostly-full?) realisation is helpful, though, because Of Course if you treat a young kid like that you wind up with a scared, uncertain, confused kid showing a bucket-load of PTSD symptoms, who doesn't have half the toolbox for transitioning to adolescence or adulthood. I mostly felt that there was nothing intrinsically wrong with me, but it's so helpful to know it, and to know that there is no earthly reason or justification for treating any person like that, and doing it says everything about the person doing it and nothing about the person it's done to. In other words, I think I'm saying, in order to deal well with a problem, it's important to be dealing with the right problem: ie, "someone/s treated me very badly" and not "I am a problem". I tried treating "I am a problem" for a really long time, and got nowhere. Now I'm no longer doing that, I feel better about myself (the "getting nowhere even though you're Really trying" doesn't help with self-esteem, either - it loops back to "therefore, Clearly I am a problem"). I internalised "I am a/The problem" because I got told it so often and forcefully, and because some of the things I've struggled with because of the abuse would seem on the surface to be "I am the problem", and it's been hard to step away from. I think I'm very optimistic about treating "someone/s treated me very badly", because the education I have on abuse and abuse recovery, and my own experiences with different kinds of abuse and recovery, strongly suggest it's likely to be very successful.

(Oh, and yeah, pleeease can I have a different life history? Bloomin' shitty people. Bah, maybe I'm nearly unstoppable now.)

[kiki0802]

i was abused also and i was wondering if you could post some tips for how to forget my abuse

[Eddie C]

Abuse is something that -- saddly -- no one can just forget. Oh boy, if only…

Is more about healing. I know that it might sound like a life sentence but that's when asking for some help comes in handy. I know that sometimes sharing painful things can feel more painful and scary. It doesn't feel good, and really isn't fair, but most of times talking about what happened helps more than trying to forget.

[tos3]

I am a survivor of COCSA and a rape from this past summer...these two things are mostly behind me, although I have psychosomatic effects from the rape and my COCS abuser visited for Christmas...my dad's an addict and I love him but sometimes he gets really stressed/angry and verbally abuses me...and I still have to live with him, as a minor. My rapist also goes to the same summer camp I go to, and I really don't want to talk to her ever again. Right now I'm in the process of reclaiming my body, eventually so I can have penetrative sex again. I can't seem to do anything but hurt myself on accident while masturbating. I tried to put a tampon in and I had a flashback. I will survive, it's just difficult to get past it when my mind's in a certain place and my body's in another.

[suburban_witch]

Dear tos3,

I'm really sorry to hear that you have to be in close proximity to your rapist, and that, on top of that, you have to be around a verbally abusive parent. It can be difficult to be in that environment and not internalize those messages. I've found personally that immersing yourself in other things can quell some of that pain, like reading, or giving yourself positive affirmations to combat those narratives. Rookie Magazine has a great article about that here: http://www.rookiemag.com/2013/05/litera ... irmations/

May I ask what else you're doing to reclaim your body? What does your self-care process look like?

Do you have access to a local library? If so, I'd like to recommend Healing Sex by Staci Haines. She is a somatic therapist and speaks a lot about healing from sexual trauma, and how to deal with your body being in one place while your mind is somewhere else. As much as we may want to be healed now, our bodies are at a different rate when they heal from trauma, and they need some extra care. Please take good care of yourself.