I was reading a post on Serial Insomniac’s blog ( http://serialinsomniac.com/2010/03/07/bpd-vs-c-ptsd/ ) where she was discussing BPD vs C-PTSD. This is not what my post is about, but there was one particular paragraph that she wrote which made me think about myself:
“None of these strongly apply to me; I don’t think he’s that powerful, we don’t have a special relationship and I don’t idealise him at all. However, I don’t dislike him particularly, and have been known to defend him despite what he’s done. I also rationalise his behaviour towards me on the grounds that I’m a slag who led him on. Whilst ridiculous, this is of course a genuinely held belief.”
The above paragraph was one she has written in reference to a man who abused her as a child. I too was sexually abused throughout my childhood by an older cousin, from the ages of 5-13. It made me wonder why I swing from denial to outright harsh honesty. What I mean is, why when my social worker talks about the trauma that I experienced as a child do I feel like rolling my eyes and saying “it wasn’t a trauma”? Why do I feel the need to go into denial and downplay it? Why have I too stuck up for him on occasion and feel a lot of the time like I deserved it and it was all my fault anyway? Does this just come from the ability abusers have through the whole grooming and abusing period where they almost brainwash you into believing that despite being a child, you really do deserve it?
Of course as an adult now, I know what he did to me was despicable. If anyone else told me they were being or had been abused I would call the abuser all the names under the sun and insist it was in no way the victim’s fault. So why is it that when it comes to myself I can have moments of truly believing that it must have been something that I did wrong, that I could have stopped it if I had only asked him sooner, that it was my fault for not telling him that I didn’t like it loudly enough? I said it on a very rare occasion, so quietly and timidly that there is no wonder he didn’t listen.
And then I can swing to the completely opposite extreme and say “no it wasn’t my fault, he was older, he knew better, he knew what he was doing was wrong and still did it anyway, I was a child, it wouldn’t have mattered what I had said, he would have kept on going for his own pleasure regardless of how much I had kicked off”.
It was when I started thinking about the abuse that I thought about so many other things that I deny to myself. On this blog I am very honest about how much losing my son hurt me, how much losing my ex fiance hurt me, how fucked up my life can be. But in real life I find that I very often downplay it as well, saying things like “well you know it’s been x amount of time now, I have to move on don’t I?” – but inside I’m screaming – “yes it fucking hurt, if I think about it for too long it fucking kills me, there have been so many moments where I have thought about and/or tried to take my own life over it, but I’m too much of a fucking failure to do the job properly!”
Why do we deny things to others? Why is it so painfully impossible to tell the truth? Why is it so hard to feel the real pain inside us? Why do we shut it all away rather than trying to deal with it in some sort of constructive way? Why are emotions so fucking hard to talk about?
I didn’t see my abuser between the ages of 13 when I told my parents about it and 19 when my grandmother died. It was quite a surreal experience, I was the only one at the hospital with her as the others had left and my parents were abroad desperately trying to get a flight back to the UK. It was pretty late at night and she was unconscious, I was sitting by the bed holding her hand and I heard the door opening behind me. I didn’t even recognise him at first, it took a good 30 seconds for my brain to kick into action and the feeling of terror to pass through me. He came in and sat next to me, he cried like a baby looking at our grandmother, he reached for my hand and apologised for everything he had put me through.
At one point we ended up going out for a cigarette together.
At my gran’s funeral it became apparent how much of an addiction he really did have to heroin as he was totally out of it. My dad hadn’t seen him for years either, and whilst my dad is one of the most gentle people on the planet, he had to stay well away from him for fear he would severely lose his temper. At the end of the funeral as everyone was leaving the church my abuser broke down in tears and refused to leave. He asked for me. I went to him. We held each other and cried.
A week later he popped round to my flat to see me. My parents found out and went mad, I said it was all fine, that he had apologised and I had forgiven him. That was so far from the truth, I hated him, I didn’t want to be anywhere near him, but even as an adult he had some sort of power over me where I was so scared to say no to him.
I didn’t see him again for a few years until I was about 22. I went to his mother’s for a new year’s party after it being promised to me that he would not be there. After I had sunk a fair amount of alcohol he turned up with his pregnant girlfriend. At first he didn’t say anything to me, an hour or so later he was pinning me up against the fridge in his mum’s kitchen and forcing himself upon me. I felt like a child again as I just stood there and took it. He forced me to swallow benzodiazipines that he had which mixed with so much alcohol made me pass out. When I woke up the next morning there were numerous naked Indian men lying around a room in a flat I had never seen before.
My purse and mobile phone were gone as well. I later found out that not only did he “sell” me to these strangers, he also took my purse and mobile to sell for heroin. Somehow I convinced myself that I did something to deserve it.
I always thought that if I saw him when I was an adult that I would stick up for myself. I couldn’t believe how much power and control he still had over me until I saw him in person, I would never have believed he would still be capable of making me feel such fear so many years later. But he did.
Is this a trauma? Am I in denial by saying it’s not? Have I dealt with it? No, probably not. It was pushed to the back of my mind and I have done my best to forget about it all. Perhaps my biggest sense of justice was that he died from a heroin and crack cocaine overdose a year later when I was 23; he was alone and wasn’t found until the smell of his rotting body attracted attention of neighbours two weeks later.
Sorry, this is turning into a bit of a rant here.
It has all just got me thinking about reactions to our own life traumas, the way we play them down over and over because they are just too painful to talk about in any detail. Sure I can say to those close to me “I was abused for 8 years of my childhood” but there is no way I could tell them the specific details, there is no way I could tell them about the flashbacks and the nightmares that I still have to this day, the memories I have that were so tarnished by his actions.
It makes me wonder why us as victims will and do stick up for our abusers. Why it can even get worse than that and “trauma bonding” can occur?
“Traumatic bonding is “strong emotional ties that develop between two persons where one person intermittently harasses, beats, threatens, abuses, or intimidates the other.” (Dutton & Painter, 1981)”
“The victim engages in denial of the abuse for emotional self- protection. In severe abuse (this can be psychological or physical), one form of psychological protection strategy is dissociation, where the victim experiences the abuse as if it is not happening to them, but as if they are outside their body watching the scene unfold (like watching a movie). Dissociative states allow the victim to compartmentalize the abusive aspects of the relationship in order to focus on the positive aspects.”
I would like to read more in-depth about trauma bonding, I actually think that whilst it is quite a scary concept in a sense, that it would also be very interesting to find out what goes on inside victim’s heads to make them see positive aspects of an abusive relationship. I would like to know why we can end up in the worst case scenario actually bonding so much with our abuser that we actively seek a relationship with them and for some people they can actually become quite distressed when the abuser does not want to know them anymore. It is a very deep subject and one which one day I would like to learn more about, but perhaps not at the moment.
I’m not really sure where this post is going any longer, I started off by reading the post by the great writer Serial Insomniac and thinking “yes I do that too, I have even stuck up for my abuser as well” and wanted to write something about why we down play and deny the extent of the trauma we experienced; I wanted to write something about why we go into denial even to ourselves about the seriousness of our abuser’s actions; I wanted to write about why being honest about our real emotions is so fucking hard.
Is it because we are scared of sounding like we are whining? Is it because we are scared that people will tell us that life goes on and we need to get over it? Is it because of the fear that others will down play our experience and talk about someone else whose abuse was a million times worse than our own? Or is it just that we have been so brainwashed and still hold those painful memories in a child’s brain that we truly do believe that part of it was our own fault, that part of us still has that child’s brain when we think about our abuse and is still trained to say nothing?
Some days I wish I could just break down and say yes it killed me. It hurt me so bad. I wish I didn’t still have nightmares about being raped when I was only ten years old. I wish I had stood up to him before he died. I wish I’d had a happy childhood in every aspect. I wish when my little angel son’s name is mentioned that I could just break down and cry and say I miss him so so much. I wish I could be honest with every person I get into such conversations with.
I wish I wasn’t an adult who is still in denial about my traumatic experiences.
But life is all one big learning experience and like everyone else, I’m still learning all about myself and who the fuck I actually am.
