• 💖 [Donate To Keep MyPTSD Online] 💖 Every contribution, no matter how small, fuels our mission and helps us continue to provide peer-to-peer services. Your generosity keeps us independent and available freely to the world. MyPTSD closes if we can't reach our annual goal.

My T Thinks I May Have Been Sexually Abused As A Child.

Status
Not open for further replies.

Llith

Confident
I will start with I have NO memories of anything like this. At all.

HOWEVER she has some undeniable logic, and that's without some things I am too ashamed to tell her. I will be clear I grew up in a violent childhood home anyway, a lot of threats and chasing etc. However I have realised that although I know I was punished various ways I do not REMEMBER any of them. Also around the time I started displaying very obvious sexual behaviour (9 or so) I also have a completely black spot in several parts of the house. One of them including my parents bedroom.

I barely remember anything of my childhood home. I don't know if I am just overreacting to what she said, but I have already uncovered one very significant sexual memory for when I was 17 that I had completely blocked from my mind. In that way at least it seems possible to me.

I remember being fascinated with the humiliation Oliver Twist felt when he was made to wash outside naked from a very young age. Infact I used to read and re-read the paragraph over and over again.

Finally both my sister and I show very similar symptoms.

I don't expect anyone to know true or false, I don't even know! But I was wondering if this is even a possibility. Her asking me straight out has really upset me and I am freaking out.
 
I have memories where I have no feelings, so they seem meaningless. I also have huge feelings with no memories. Being sexually abused really messed with my head.

For a long time I tried to believe that anything could have caused this dissociation and that I wasn't necessarily sexually abused. . Now I'm not questioning it.

Regardless of whether you were sexually abused or not I know what you are going through is frightening. The big gaps, the "black spots", are full of feelings that are hard to negotiate. There are reasons you blanked those places out. Be patient and kind to yourself as you go forward.
 
I don't expect anyone to know true or false, I don't even know! But I was wondering if this is even a possibility. Her asking me straight out has really upset me and I am freaking out.
It could be possible that you endured sexual abuse, it could also be possible that you didn't. It could also be possible that you witnessed things your child brain couldn't sort out...

I'd suggest focusing on the trauma you do remember in therapy, and finding ways to feel safe, here and now. If there was other trauma, you can recover from it without remembering, and once you do feel safe, you might be more likely to make heads or tails out of this and remember what you need to know.

It was hard when a therapist first suggested such things to me. Some of what they suggested could be possible, was something that happened, and some of it didn't happen. It was upsetting to face, and it got easier in time.
 
I have memories where I have no feelings, so they seem meaningless. I also have huge feelings with no...

I guess that's the thing, n1 I have no way of knowing right now, and I don't want to force it and start making things up. But n2, there are very specific blank spots in my memory. To have something like knowing the rest of the house, but not being able to even place the doorway to my parents bedroom is just strange to me. I guess it's something I have always wondered, but I also don't want to know the answer to. I think a few months ago I may have thought this was ridiculous to forget something that could be huge, but I have always known there were a lot of black spots in my memory, that feel forcibly erased.

Oh well you are right, it is pretty frightening, just trying to hold myself together and relax to let my mind figure it out when it wants to.
 
It could be possible that you endured sexual abuse, it could also be possible that you didn't. It co...
Thanks for the advice, I think at the moment these kind of things are where my therapy is going. My childhood is one kinda dark mess and it obviously affects how I act now and things I have done. I have been in and out of therapy for 10 years, nearly half my life now, and only in the last few months have flashbacks appeared of things I have very evidently forgotten. I may just dial the sessions back and see if I can make head nor tail of this on my own, I doubt pushing it in any way is going to help. Apparently memories appear when they feel like it.

I think I was largely shocked by what the therapist had said, for some reason it struck a chord somewhere, but that may just be because it is a very upsetting thing for anyone to think of as a possibility. Who knows, guess I will or will not find out in time xD.
 
I'm also in a place where I have a laundry list of symptoms that are often caused by or seem to point to sexual stuff (including some possibly-body-memories). But I have no memories that carry a time stamp, or any certainty that the possibly-body-memories actually happened.

For me, this has been on the back burner. I have had other things to deal with, and I find this very difficult to work on.
In the future, I may be able to heal from the symptoms I experience without ever learning whether they have a cause. Or I may remember things. And for now I am just trying to acknowledge and cope with my symptoms, and be at peace with not knowing.
 
Thank you for starting this thread. This in particular rings very true for me.

My childhood is one kinda dark mess and it obviously affects how I act now and things I have done

I'm also in a place where I have a laundry list of symptoms that are often caused by or seem to point to sexual stuff (including some possibly-body-memories). But I have no memories that carry a time stamp

I'd been in and out of therapy for over 20 years, and nothing had seemed to help. After the last lot in the late 2000s made little difference, I nearly gave up. Then I happened on Peter Levine's "Waking The Tiger" and he could have been describing me; it seemed to me that the symptoms I had coincided with those of PTSD, so I sought out a trauma specialist here in the UK.

I felt strongly that something which had happened in my early years lay at the root - maybe hospital trauma - but never suspected sexual abuse. I can't quite remember when the possibility that I had been sexually abused as a child came up in therapy, but my therapist is 100% convinced it happened, although she has always been very careful not to suggest things.

Much of my childhood was, and is still, a blank, but the emotional flashbacks, the overwhelming eruptions of fragmented memories and the laundry-list of symptoms that chime exactly with those of CPTSD [even though it doesn't have the "status" of an "official" diagnosis] are strong evidence that something happened, and it was sexual. In my adult, aware times I can accept this, despite the amnesia, but am sometimes assailed by [very] extreme self-doubt, which always coincides with my darkest moments.

I just have trouble believing it sometimes. That people could do that to children. But I guess the evidence that they can, and do, is there in the daily news for all to see.

The following is really helpful advice for me. Patience and kindness with myself are the things I easily forget. in my darkest places

Regardless of whether you were sexually abused or not I know what you are going through is frightening. The big gaps, the "black spots", are full of feelings that are hard to negotiate. There are reasons you blanked those places out. Be patient and kind to yourself as you go forward.
 
Status
Not open for further replies.
Back
Top