• 💖 [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.

Sexual Assault Possible sexual assault by father or someone else?

M

Meghan4115

When I was a little kid I had no memories of sexual events or being molested. However I was a weird child. I compulsively touched myself from the age of 5 and up. I was afraid to be alone in the bathroom, especially showering. And I often needed someone in there with me at least for showering up until the age of 12. Now keep in mind I might have been going through extreme anxiety of being alone. By the age of 3 I already had anxiety and by the age of 11 I for sure had cptsd and depression. It wasn’t until I turned 16 and had sex for the first time with my then boyfriend that things started to come up. I started getting these awful nightmares of my father raping or molesting me. Sometimes I would fight back in them (being of older age in the nightmare) and sometimes I felt like a little kid who didn’t understand what was going on and just “went along with it”. I often woke up repulsed of myself and terrified of my dad. My dad was sexually abused when he was a kid and he didn’t have the best boundaries. He would sometimes touch my inner thigh casually resting his hand between my legs or stare at my chest. This was by the time I was 18. I asked my mother if he could ever do that to me and she said no she was sure he would never do the very thing to me that affected his life so badly. He would never become that. Idk if that’s the case. Maybe I was molested by a male figure and my brain puts my dad in that position since he already affected me greatly growing up being emotionally abusive. Another possibility is that I just created a false memory “feeling” from all the emotional trauma. Every time I think about it, it bothers me a lot, making me feel like I’m forgetting something important or forgetting something I need to know. But I’ve searched my memories for years and even though I do have gaps I can never find a memory of anyone touching me inappropriately. Is it possible the nightmare could be telling me something? Or should I just chalk it up to false memories?
 
Is it possible the nightmare could be telling me something? Or should I just chalk it up to false memories?
Or perhaps option 3 - get yourself some professional support to work through the issues in a safe way. If the level of anxiety you’ve described having as a child has carried over into your adult life at all, get it sorted. Life doesn’t need to be this hard or this distressing.
 
Or perhaps option 3 - get yourself some professional support to work through the issues in a safe way. If the level of anxiety you’ve described having as a child has carried over into your adult life at all, get it sorted. Life doesn’t need to be this hard or this distressing.

“When we cannot find a way of telling our story, our story tells us-we dream these stories, we develop symptoms, or we find ourselves acting in ways we don’t understand.”​

Stephen Grosz

I agree with "get yourself some professional support to work through the issues in a safe way." But I am sure Sideways will agree, it's rarely that simple and finding the professional who is going to help you tell them your story takes a lot of trial and error. For what it's worth, personally I've tried about six one-to-one therapists once and stuck with only two of those for as many as four sessions before walking away: one of them touched me without my consent, the other blanked me and said nothing to the point that it felt like they were cruelly giving me the silent treatment, which was deeply unpleasant. On the other hand, a good friend swears by therapy and did it for five years, over 200 sessions costing a small fortune.

Five things come to mind that helped me that might help you, if you haven't done them before:

1. Reading self-help books. In your case, perhaps books about anxiety and CPTSD. There's that great line above in "The Examined Life" by Stephen Grosz. This may help you to understand your own story better.

2. Putting everything in your head onto paper, writing it out. It took me four months of re-drafting, it was very difficult but I finally wrote a four-page letter to my emotional abuser about what they did and why it was wrong, telling them that their own experience of abuse was no excuse. In the end I decided to send it to them. This is a kind of telling your story.

3. Family counselling with a parent to talk things through (when I was in my 40s and them in their 60s). This is a kind of telling your story too, and listening to someone else's. You get a chance to complain and to forgive, in a special room.

4. Give to a community, whether through a job and team you love, helping people less fortunate than you, or a good cause you care about. This is a way of building an entirely new story, nothing to do with our past.

5. It always helps to double exercise and time spent in nature, and to halve alcohol and sugar. These are non-intellectual additional approaches to our situation that are very useful indeed.

In a nutshell: Go tell your story. Go find some sustainable joy. I hope that helps just a little bit.

Love,

Applecore
 
Last edited by a moderator:
Back
Top