As you may have seen from Sunday, I am using the book “All are Free to Write” by Sheila Allee to help me to feel inspired and to write. The second prompt was about discussing trauma that you have gone through. I made a list of 5 traumatic experiences from my life or general trauma areas that have occurred within the scope of my life. I have also stated that I am going to be very honest during this week and these posts. This means that these posts may come together on the same day depending on how I am feeling writing about the trauma or they may come later on in the day depending how I am feeling.
I have struggled with this being the next area to write about this week. It is taking more time to write these then it did last week. I will also be doing an update for the physical abuse section as well because more information came to me that I remembered after the fact. I think this section came at the right time though. I am doing a lot of healing and even attended a very important retreat focused on well-being this week from my work, so it feel very organic for where I am in life right now.
I also realized I needed to reorder slightly the list. Due to this, the verbal abuse section came earlier, so there is some reordering that is still occurring. The fifth and final trauma area I am going to discuss is:
Sexual Abuse
I don’t know if I have ever been upfront about this. I don’t know that I have talked to many people outside of very close people about this, so this is the one that is going to be harder to do. Based on the nature of the conversation, I am excluding names here of the individuals. This is so that I can actually feel safe to post it for myself, but also because I am not looking to stir up things for them in their current life. This isn’t because I am trying to be nice, it is just where I am at in life currently. I need to be able to be honest about it, but I don’t need to point the fingers fully at them in their direction. It is going to be close enough for me, as the survivor of this.
A family member that took care of me growing up, he used to have me use the bathroom with him. I didn’t realize until I was in adulthood that he was doing this to look at me. He made it a game at first, crossing streams. It made me laugh. I didn’t think about what it was, I was a child. I remember he told me not to tell anyone, but it didn’t register that it was something wrong at that age. It wasn’t until one day when Granny was mentioning things that she missed and I casually stated that I missed using the bathroom with this person that I understood what was occurring even slightly. I knew that it wasn’t this happy thing that I thought it was. The way my child brain worked was that it was just something that people did together sometimes when they were both males. I know now that this is obviously not how it should be. There will be more with this person.
There was another person I was raised by. This person used to make me touch him. My brain tried to protect me from this for years. I remember distinctly that we used to share a bed and finally one night I told him that I was going to tell that I wanted to move out of the bed with him. He said he would like to see me try and that there wasn’t anything I could say. I said, “I will just tell them that it is because you wet the bed.” It worked luckily for me. I got away. I don’t recall him doing anything further to me once I moved.
There were years between me knowing that things happened in my youth, sex was always around me though. I recall seeing pornography often because of the person that I first mentioned. He would leave it around in his place, which I was not intended to see. I did though obviously. The other kids did as well. They were impacted, I think, more by it. As one of them tried to do things with the other kids. I recall this a lot. There was a time where I went into this person’s house, I used to go in to see pornography. I was your typical young male in that I was at least interested in understanding it. I quickly realized who I was drawn to in it, which is obvious now. I would go into the house and take some. I recall there being a locked filing cabinet that I never got to see what was in it before. Until one day, it was finally unlocked for some reason. To this day, I do not know why the person had it unlocked that day. I saw pictures of children. I won’t be graphic for anyone that may read this that has their own history, but I saw things that I never wanted to see in my life. Then I saw pictures I wish I could unsee. Pictures of myself. I began to recall a time when this person lived with another family member and I visited him. I remember next to his toilet there was pornography. I remember him having me bounce on his bed. I remember watching “Attack of the Killer Tomatoes.” I always wondered why when I heard about this movie I got uneasy. I got distressed, but I stopped questioning it after this. I understood it finally. I thought it was sick that there were still these pictures when I was about 16 or 17 at that time when I saw them. It really impacted my life to suddenly know this had occurred. It also made me bitter for years against family members, like Granny and my dad. I wanted these family members to have protected me. I wanted them to have been upset with this person, but I don’t even know that they knew. I don’t even know if they truly understood what had occurred to me. I think they just were so busy trying to survive that they overlooked what this person was doing. I hold them accountable for a lot of bad stuff that happened in my life, but I do not hold them accountable any more for this. The person is the sick person, not them.
I may not be giving as rich details about this area of my trauma history because it is harder to be completely transparent. The fact that I am even putting this out there finally into a public space that anyone may eventually see it, even the person I have talked about is a lot.
I am putting this memory here because it feels attached to all this. I used to have this dream about a weird place that looked like a trailer park, but instead was houses. Maybe a Cul-De-Sac. I could tell it was for poor people. From childhood, I would see this place in dreams and memories and feel ill at ease. I thought in my 30s that I had to have made the place up, but I could see so many details of the place. It felt so real. I discovered it was. My boyfriend at the time took me to a lake area in Muncie that was on the outskirts of town. As we were going there, we drove by the place. I looked at it and immediately I started crying and screaming. My partner didn’t know what was going on, but luckily he knew there was trauma. I had never had this visceral of a reaction before in my life. The reaction let me know that something had occurred at this place. My mind does not let me recall what occurred there though, I imagine I was very young at the time. If I guessed though what occurred there, it would be attached to the pictures that were taken. Whenever I say that to myself, I feel a truth that I dislike. As a result, my brain pushes it back out.
Due to the sexual abuse and trauma that I have had, my brain tries to dissociate at times. What this means is my brain goes into a weird fog. It tries to disconnect me from realities and memories. This occurred a LOT when I would be in a therapist’s office trying to discuss what occurred to me in the past. I also have moments of dissociative amnesia, which is where the brain tries to keep details or memories away from you in real time. It is hard when you know that the brain is doing this to protect you, but another part of you just wants to remember everything when you want to remember it so you can understand your entire life. I know I didn’t give full details of what occurred with these sexual abuse situations, but this is where I am comfortable with talking about them right now, please respect that. I also have no desire to be sexually graphic when it comes to my trauma around this. It is painful to recall, but I survived. I am able to work with other people that have had horrible things happen to them. I help them heal as well. Even though it is hard to talk about, I know in my heart I am a survivor. I remind myself of this every single day of my life.
HOW I FEEL AFTER: This is the first one that I feel scared. I feel like someone is going to come after me and hurt me again. Sexual abusers make us feel this way. They make it where we believe if we tell something bad will happen, even after you have done some substantial healing it can still feel like this. I want you to know you are not alone. There are so many resources out there to help trauma survivors. Google is your friend!
Leave a Reply