I was "groomed"..... I remember I had always been scared of him, and I never knew why.
I was suppose to protect my sisters, what a failure.
It is not the natural order of things that a sibling at any age should have to protect a sibling from an adult relative. ND - that was part of the abuse, being conditioned. I was conditioned by my older brother, to do his bidding, even when it meant I had to hold the arms of another little girl while he defiled her.
When you've been abused your emotions become jumbled so that you don't feel the right things at the right times. Your laughter wasn't really what you were feeling about your sister.
The feelings of disgust - that is your normal self feeling guilty for doing what you really had no control over. Admitting lack of control, admitting that you were a victim, a puppet in the hands of your tormentor takes an incredible amount of strength.None of us wants to be or have been at the mercy of someone else.
By feeling disgust you imply that you had control over the events of your childhood and the forces of those choices on molding your adulthood. You didn't have control. Guilt and disgust won't help you NOT perform acts unless you always stay in your grown-up, normal persona. Which can't always happen, because when life begins to 'feel' out of control, we who were abused as children tend to revert to something that makes us feel like we have a choice and we are in control. For me it would be getting involved in an affair with someone who would abuse me - that would feel familiar and I would CHOOSE it, ergo putting me in control.
NDK - you may think you don't have time but I will tell you, you must take the time before something really bad happens. The last time I broke down, I wound up in an affair and eventually was attacked in the middle of the night in my home - I wound up stabbing the person nearly to death. But that was when I realized I needed help. Part of getting that help was realizing I WAS OUT OF CONTROL. That was hard. Hard to admit I wasn't in control of the situation or even my life: that my dysfunctional way of coping with horrific stress was to do something horrifically stupid and likely to result in my own harm.
Get help. I wish you terrific strength in obtaining the healing you want and need.
