Childhood Does anybody struggle with not knowing who their abuser is?

[sprout]

Does anybody struggle with not knowing who their abuser is?

It’s funny because as I type this I both know someone did something to me and also doubt anything happened all at once lol. Anyways, I have these horrible flashbacks where I feel really small and feel a man touching me and hear and feel his breath on me. A new one has come too lately where I see him standing nearby where I’m sleeping and I’m scared and shut my eyes pretending to sleep. They’re super vivid and absolutely terrifying but I’ve gotten better at stopping them. The only problem is I can never see who it is. I shut my eyes really tight in response to them and it’s so dark and I’m too scared to focus my eyes in these “waking dreams” that I can’t make anything out.

I think deep down I’m scared of knowing. I’m scared of having the responsibility of telling someone and possibly causing some kind of tear in my family. I’m scared of finding out but not having the courage or confidence to speak up and having others be hurt by my silence.

I also might have been too young to really form coherent memories who knows.
Anyways it freaks me out to not be able to put a face to the terror but at the same time it lets me distance myself a little bit so I can bring myself back. What are y’alls experiences?

 

[Deleted member 8714]

I know my abuser was my father yet I don't his name. I grew up living with my stepdad and my mother for the most part, yet at times I was taken to visit my father. He even visited us in California and stayed in our house. Creepy. I know lot's of stuff about him; his allergies (genetic), his likes and dislikes in food (Tastes buds are genetic and I'm the only one in my family of origin who cannot handle spicy foods.), his eye color, his hair color, his height, a genetic mutation besides our eye color, etc., yet I've got no name. I did a search in magazines for a look-a-like to my father and found a picture of a man who looked fairly similar.

It took years to accept I had a different father than my siblings. Then it took me years to accept my father abused me. And finally years to believe what I remembered.

 

[Mach123]

Yes I'll probably never know. When I think about it I just can never remember a time when there was not something about sex going on? I know I learned certain things from an older boy. What happened before that may have made me vulnerable or attractive to him. I don't see what happened. I also know that thing about the girl next door and when my mother caught us and how that felt? There was something really wrong with all that. My mother probably had something to do with all this but IDK, I was very abnormally attached to her? So yes, I have always struggled with it.

 

[Skywatcher]

I know who mine was, but can only see his eyes briefly the wrinkles to the edges of them. The sound of his voice. A kind man the next morning in his driveway. His smile. I have actually drawn the nice version of him, but it took awhile before I realized it was the same person.

 

[Rani G2]

also might have been too young to really form coherent memories who knows.
Anyways it freaks me out to not be able to put a face to the terror but at the same time it lets me distance myself a little bit so I can bring myself back. What are y

Knew one abuser... but the next one? No. Only getting to know while ago that I was with some man, me being about 7 or 8 ?? Yrs old. This must have been for a couple of Days. Seems to be sexual abuse. A memory snapshot... that was it. Amnesia. Maybe there qas another man involved.

 

[NightSky]

Yes. :( I see the places it happened (if it happened. I’ll probably always doubt my “memories” since they came back in flashes 15 years after the fact, and I struggle to believe they’re real at all). But I can’t see a face. I can make assumptions based on who was around at the time, one of the people being highly mentally unstable. But i have so few memories of ages 0-10 I don’t think I’ll ever know for sure. Which is extremely frustrating. Not because I would say something and potentially tear my family apart (especially if I’m wrong!) but because for my own healing I would really like to know the details of my own story!

 

[Swift]

Yeah. I know my main abuser and sometimes who did other stuff, but sometimes not.
One thing that helped me with that sense of utter confusion was giving them a name. One I call Ratface, for example. My vague explanation for why that works is naming is a function of our frontal lobes where we store our critical thinking and our language skills. Body memories are stored (in trauma) in the hippocampus and the back brain, meaning we don't have a sense of where or when and the memories are physical in nature. Naming the perpetrator helps to bring it into a place in our brains where we can actually "think."
I dunno if that'll help, but it did for me.
The other thing that comes up for me is that I really, really don't want to accuse the wrong person, even in the privacy of my own head, because it's such a serious thing to accuse someone of.
It's a particular kind of terror not knowing who did it, though.

 

[The Bat-Fax]

Yes.

As a child, teenager, and young adult, I was sexually assaulted and raped by several men over the years. I don't know who any of them were.

There's not a lot I can do to find out who they were, so I've just kind of resigned myself to the uncertainty. It still does bother me a little, though.

 

[sprout]

I know who mine was, but can only see his eyes briefly the wrinkles to the edges of them. The sound...

I have a really hard time putting "opposite" versions of people together, too. I don't always realize they're the same at first.

 

[sprout]

Yes. :( I see the places it happened (if it happened. I’ll probably always doubt my “memories” s...

Same. I can only see that I'm in bed in a dark room but I can't tell where because it's so dark and only quick flashes :(
Sometimes I feel that I need the details to move on too but I try and tell myself my reactions are what's most important. I also don't even know how to begin talking about this with a therapist because how do you describe something you don't know??

 

[sprout]

Yeah. I know my main abuser and sometimes who did other stuff, but sometimes not.
One thing that helped...

Thanks I'm going to try this :happy:

 

[sprout]

Thanks to everyone who replied. It really makes me feel less alone and dumb.

I think another reason why not knowing bothers me is because in some weird way not knowing who it is makes everybody the (potential) bad guy. Which makes it feel hard to trust who anyone is and leads to me being suspicious and paranoid about everybody I interact with because in my mind who knows what they're capable of! I know this isn't healthy of course and I try very hard to come back from that train of thought but that's where my mind goes in those moments. I guess another thing is that I'm disappointed in how many potential suspects there were throughout my childhood. I feel upset that my parents didn't protect me better.

I'm sorry it always takes me so long to get back to a thread by the way. Every time I post I'm basically at the pinnacle of my emotions and feel like I need to tell someone and then I'm so exhausted I need to take a break to calm down and think things through. Thanks again I really appreciate everyone here :hug: