actually come across many incest survivors on here. Most ive talked to was a father, not a sibling but ive also come across those of sibling incest.
When people think of incest abuse, I think they immediately think of a patriarch-type figure (father, step-father, grandfather, uncle). People abused by other elders (mothers, aunts, grandmothers, etc.) are not immediately thought of, but these things are recognized as a thing that sometimes happens, even if it's considered a rarity.
Sibling incest is different from the above examples, because it often (if not almost always) involves two minors. It is, in my experience, not taken as seriously as, say, a father abusing his daughter, and it is certainly not talked about as often as other forms of abuse here on the forum.
I had a nightmare several nights ago that I was yelling at my mother. I was telling her that she only loved me when it was convenient for her, that she didn't really love me, and that she needed to take responsibility for the consequences of her emotional immaturity. I was telling her that she needed to see that her actions as a mother caused fallout, and she needed to own her failings.
It was a really terrible nightmare. I woke up feeling exhausted and extraordinarily sad.
My T told me that it may be unfair that I'm doing all of the hard work in therapy, and my mother will probably never change. I told her that my mother didn't have to change, that I just wanted her to admit her shortcomings. My T told me that it was a very real possibility she never would, no matter how simple a thing it seemed to me, no matter how much it would mean to me.
"But it's not fair that I can have all of these nightmares about this woman, and she doesn't even have a clue."
My T got that glassy-eyed, nearly-in-tears look she sometimes gets when I can tell she really feels for me, and she said, "No, it isn't fair."
I hate that look. She looks so much like she cares, that she has all of this compassion for me, and it chips away a little at the emotional walls I keep up, and it makes me feel a little weak and short of breath and angry.
I told her, "I realized that a woman who would say, 'You're so obedient; that's what I love about you,' probably doesn't know me at all."
I explained that it really hurts to realize such things, because having PTSD, for me, is a bit like being emotionally near-sighted. It's like not being able to see things clearly, and everything around me is sort of fuzzy. And then, I get a moment of clarity, a peek through some emotional bifocals, and some things come into sharp focus, and I realize, looking at them, that they're not very nice things to see at all. That the emotions I'm suddenly exposed to, formerly fuzzy and innocuous enough, have clear definition, and they're horrible to behold.
I don't know whether or not it's the right thing to keep on harping about my mother in therapy, and I don't know why most of my nightmares these days center around her, but I do now that something seems to be slowly, slowly shifting, like psychological tectonic plates, and I'm not really sure I'm loving it so far.
