Thank you
@Sideways for posting this, I'm finding it really helpful for trying to think about this from other angles (other than 'everyone is out to get me' haha)
It's incredibly disempowering to force a victim of abuse into the position where they may be confronted by their abuser if there are no other children at risk.
Yes, I think what bothers me most about all of this is that it puts me at significant risk, does not benefit anyone, and was also forced on me. It has also meant that I have very unequal conditions of speaking compared to another patient with a dead abuser or one who is less identifiable. And in that way can reinforce the lessons of the abuse itself ' I own you and you can't grow out of it' 'You can't afford to speak badly about me'.
I think I'm becoming very clear that I will only
ever report him out of my own choice. And right now I need to fight for the right to not report him.
It's making me think back on the experience I have of handling other dangerous secrets.
I used to be a union organiser. And where I did that those are
always top secret for most of the organising process. You spend close to a year meeting secretly, talking openly about tactics with other members, speaking about hopes and struggles, slowly initiating people and swearing them to secrecy - planning how the company might retaliate and planning how we will support each other when it does. The secrecy is really important if you ever want to be a strong union - because otherwise you will be instantly crushed. You need to be able to weather retaliation and show power and unity.
I started doing that work when I was running away from my dad's last attack, broke and not allowed work legally, homeless, going to court as a witness for my friend's domestic abuse case, trying to withstand pressure to apologise to my dad from my family, and also trying to get over my fear of doing anything gay.
It helped so much with all of those things. Tactics. Strategies. How to build and wield power.
The union organising gave me a template I used to avoid the vulnerability of having to come out to people (having already lost my family the same year for boiling water to shower, I didn't think I could afford any more rejection from anywhere) :
1. Open a chapter secretly in your life.
2. Obscure that chapter everywhere else.
And it pretty much worked because it meant by the time I had to defend that to anyone - the identity was much stronger. I wasn't alone about it, I wasn't unsure of it- it connected me to others instead of dividing me from them.
With both the union and that, the strength came from having an in-group of other people who were also affected by the thing - so that defending yourself becomes defending everyone you know. Which for me, is much easier than claiming I personally have value.
I think what's so frustrating for me about this restriction on talking is that I've been trying to apply the same template to this issue. Open a chapter where it can be discussed but not published. And not mention that chapter anywhere else. And the system just doesn't allow for that.
If it were me? I don't think I'd be able to stop myself from reaching out to the management of the organisation that you're getting therapy from to talk to them about the impact of the way their policy is being implemented. But...that's me. A lot of people wouldn't go that route for a whole host of very valid reasons.
I have definitely thought about this. I'm scared that being concerned how identifying it is could be identifying though- as with every other relationship than a parent you potentially have more than 1 of them. However I do think it's a serious inequality and I can't be the only person it's affecting (which is where I would get the strength to fight it).
I might do it also because right now I'm telling myself a story that all of this is punishment for speaking about what happened to me - and that the system either hasn't thought about it or doesn't care.
It was helpful in that I did experience being treated like what was done to me was wrong,
This is something I've yet to experience. I don't feel like it's even possible. Asking people to think you matter is something I'm so reluctant to do.
It's also been helpful with me in terms of living with myself. My abuser did still have routine access to children through his work and volunteer commitments. I had a good idea that my report wouldn't go anywhere, but on the vague chance that someone else reports him at some point before he dies, I wanted my complaint to be on the record to back them up.
I very much understand this. I reported a creepy colleague for (minor) harassment against me because I was concerned that he had unsupervised contact with teenage girls in a refugee camp. We were temporarily working in a war zone, he was a powerful figure in the church in his home country and ran food banks, coached children's sports etc. The way he was with me felt so, so so so practiced, almost like a formula. But he must have had a clean background check to work where we were.
I reported him because I could not live with myself if I let him harm those girls in the refugee camp, but also because I have never been so sure of anything in my life that he has done that before- to people too powerless to complain. And I wanted to leave a mark on his record in case anyone ever wanted to complain about something more serious- so it would help their case.
It was also like this:
On the down side, it was also a humiliating and incredibly stressful experience, which I lost control of once it started.
And that has really put me off being forced into reporting as the price of speaking to a counsellor. I know how stressful the process was when I had real child protection concerns, had a complete recollection of all events, had good support from other workers, and initiated the process voluntarily.
by a family member. I doubt that I will ever report that. I feel like I should, but there would be too much kickback in my daily life (because...family!).
Good luck to the person who ever tries to convince me that I have to report something like this. Because no, you don't.
The priority of a victim of CSA is their own well-being and recovery. Everything is secondary to that (except if you have kids...which I don't). If reporting your abuser will be helpful to your recovery? Then do it. If not? Don't do it.
I was at a point in my recovery where I needed to do it, so I did.
Yeah :( I think I'm really struggling with this piece. So far nothing about this has been about me or what might be good for me (like a lot of us probably I haven't had much of that in my life). I'm really struggling to feel like I have any value at all.
It made me feel like I couldn't talk about it openly, for no other reason than they may cross paths with him. And that self-censoring would have significantly impacted the work I need to do in therapy.
Long term, though, I think it's potentially going to be important that you can work through your trauma with someone you can be frank with.
I think you might be right about this because there is a part of me that interprets this whole thing as 'I'm not worth listening to or caring about'