Been thinking about my journey through all this stuff a lot, because this is a good place to write stuff down and get your thoughts down, and because reading where other people are in their journey has made me very reflective!
I can't believe I've only been on this site just over a week, I can't imagine what I did those lonely days before I had you guys to share with. I avoided joining for ages, I guess I wasn't ready, so joining in itself is a sign of forward movement. What I hadn't expected was such warmth and connection and empathy. I just didn't realise so many people would share my innermost thoughts and experiences and be so ready to share theirs.
Discovering I was abused was actually a wierd thing, because I would have sworn blind I wasn't. In fact early on I bought a book about DID which was a collection of writings. One lady wrote about how she couldn't understand why she was dissociative, she was "only" ignored, ridiculed, abandoned and bullied; she related a story she'd read about a 2 year old boy being lost in a forest for 2 days, and the unimaginable desperate feelings he must have had, and related her own experience and dissociation to feeling like that. I thought, I'm with you lady, all these other people writing about their abuse and torment, and she and I both felt like pretenders. What's wrong with us so that we react with dissociation?
.......................I'll come back to the question of "only" ridicule, abandonment etc a bit later.
Even though my amnesia for the actual detail was total, a part of me knew there was "something" back there. All through the therapy i'd had,i'd felt it, even though the therapists I saw never seem to want to look back at that time! Iremember my first EMDR therapist, an expert in his own field of acute PTSD but actually not great at developmental stuf,f pretty much saying, well I think that's it now, ie you're sorted. Except I didn't feel sorted.
And there was a whisper in my head asking, did grandma abuse me? At the time I thought I was just searching for am answer, embracing a cliche.
What amazes me now is that I had no concious concept of what abuse does to a child's spirit, to her whole relationship with the world. I have worked with people who have disclosed abuse, and have seen how distressing that is for them, and understand it's a terrible thing - everyone knows it's a terrible thing - but I had no idea exactly how. And how crazy is that, someone who has been abused has no idea how badly they have been hurt by it.
My "hurt" to me was shame, inadequacy, wierd worlds I inhabited, issues I had that noone else had, struggles that I put down to "my stuff". It never occured to me to consider that perhaps there was a REASON for all this - and NOT that I was fundamentally wierd and inadequate. Part of me knew I wasn't - but I discounted that part. The bad bit HAD to be right.
And when I was searching to find any shred of memory that I had been abused I felt guilty for trying to find something to explain my inadequacy. I was scared, not of what I might find, as at this point it was still behing sealed doors, that I might not find anything. That there was no way out of the awful struggles I had. That this was me, and my life. That I really was inadequate, shameful, wierd.
That was frightening beyond reason.
The abusers teach us to label our pain and humiliation as shame and badness. Why shame? Well, imagine a little girl taking a beautiful flower to her dad, and have him turn round and hit her and tell he's she a bad girl, (that is just a random, made up, crazy example, but lots of abuse is just as crazy and random) she will feel so humiliated and angry and afriad and confused and ashamed and knocked back. She will blame herself and feel ashamed for something awful she must have done. If it happens enough, she concludes SHE is shameful. It never occurs to her that her abuser is mad, unhinged, evil, crazy, illogical. He is big, she is small and young, and noone tells her differently
Parts of ourselves then take on that role and continue to abuse ourselves with that same theme...you are useless, you are bad....... And we listen to it because it's all we've ever known. And, oddly enough, the shame we feel stops us going any further down - stops us from feeling the pain, the abandonment, the craziness, the fear, the life threatening terror. ( "only humiliation, abandonment, and fear") so, awful though the shame is, it protects the tiny tot from having toto ever get near the true horror of what it REALLY felt like.
That is what abuse does to a child's spirit. And a child's world. And lays lies and traps to make the healing so difficult
If anyone is reading this, and relates to any of this, all i can say is, the part of you that KNOWS you are more than your pain, listen to it, never mind how much the other parts of you pull you to pieces and make you doubt yourself.
All your parts are there for a reason, and however harsh and shameful they are, they are there for a reason. With time you will see it.
