I would like to welcome everyone to this blog for healing from sexual abuse and trauma. Please remember that no matter what you have been through, and no matter where you are now, you can still heal and have in incredibly wonderful life. I too, am a survivor of sexual abuse and trauma, who at one point in my life had no specific memories of the abuse but the symptoms of my life showed signs that something was terribly wrong. I was constantly running away from everyone, the only place that I found solace was to travel. That way I could meet people and leave before they could get to know me too much, I was scared that to know me was to hate me.
Then finally, after so many unexplainable pieces of my memories of the abuse had come to me, that I refused to belief, the very last piece came to me. This helped me to believe myself. I was listening to an audio recording where other survivors spoke about their experiences being abused by their parents and at that moment, I realized that I was not crazy thinking that my father had sexually abused me because he had. I took my father out to lunch and confronted him about the abuse. He never directly admitted it but instead said that the household help had done things to him and he thinks that his mother did things to him as well. (His mother, my grandmother used to kiss me in such an awful way, that at the age of six years old, I had to tell my grandma, “no kisses, only hugs”. It was that bad.)
My father then said that he did not want to talk about it, and offered me a new car.
Since that date many other memories and incidents from my childhood began to make sense for me. Although I had forgotten the abuse, I had never forgotten the incidents that surrounded the abuse. Such as why I had symptoms of PTSD including the startle response, which I displayed when someone walked into a room and I was concentrating on something else, I would frequently jump, startled. I rarely do that now. It also answered the question why so many people in high school and college mentioned that I acted like I had been molested and why I was misdiagnosed with proctitis around the age of 9 years old.
As I have gotten my memories back and allowed my body to detox from the trauma of sexual abuse, my life has gotten so much better. I have less drama in my life (except onstage, I am an actress) and that gives me more time to do things that I love and enjoy them. Before I got my memories back, I may be doing something that I loved such as hiking but would be thinking of the drama in my life or problem of the day, so I was not loving what I was doing. I get my needs met from a more grounded place rather than by being a victim (playing needy) and it feels so much more dignified and takes much less energy. If I don’t have tons of money, I realize it will come rather than freaking out and I know that the size of my bank account has nothing to do with who I am or how awesome my day will be. And as I heal my finances are getting better as well.
I am grateful to be healing and grateful to have regained my joy.
Please feel free to post your experiences in the comment box at the bottom of this page. Sometimes it may take a while to get your comment approved.
- Please DO NOT include any sexual details about the abuse.
- Please DO NOT include any sexual details at all.
- Feel free to write “…” when excluding those details. Thanks so much.
I was sexually abused by my older cousin with my younger cousin multiple times when I was growing up. I came clean to my parents about it a year ago mainly because of the severe bouts of depression I was going through. I got a therapist who told I was actually suffering from PTSD and a serious anger problem. I’ve never discussed the abuse with my younger cousin but he will tell me unprovoked that he hates that specific family member. I plan on confronting my cousin tomorrow. I sent him several itext messages over Christmas eve to let him know that we were going to have a serious discussion. There is a large part of me that just wants to f*** his world up in a violent public way, but I plan on looking this opie eyed dipsh** in his face and forgive him. I realize that he may deny my claims but I don’t have a doubt in my mind about what happened. Im ready to move on from this its over and its a part of my past but it doesn’t have to be a part of me I’ve never been more ready for anything in my 23 years of life. Its time for a new chapter.
Hi Al,
If you chose to confront you cousin over Christmas, I hope that it was an empowering experience for you. You might want to read my post about forgiveness at http://healingfromsexualabuse.com/ideas-for-healing-from-abuse/do-i-need-to-forgive-to-heal-from-abuse/
It may take me a few weeks to respond more fully, feel free to call 800-656-HOPE in the meanwhile but if the person is not helpful hang up and try again later or try another hotline at centers.rainn.org
I called him “a gutless turd” in front of my parents and his father. It was incredibly tense but by the time i made him leave i felt empowered and everyone in the room his own father included agreed with me. As far as forgiveness is concerned i spoke too soon. I told him that I would only forgive him when he can look me in the eye and say that he did it then he has to give me a piece of my childhood back. So no I won’t be forgiving him. He kept trying to hide behind the fact that he is a father. I immediately laughed in his face and said i was concerned for his children. Things got so out of hand that later that night his wife just barged into my parents house in tears with no prior warning and begged me not to destroy her family. I wanted to call the police but instead I gave her my word that I would stay away from them(as if that would be a difficult thing for me to do). I haven’t heard from them yet my uncle assured me that the conversation wasnt over but it will go no where until that lieing spinless prick can be honest with me.
You are right to be concerned for his children, sorry it will take me a while to write more but I will be wrting more.
Hi Al,
How has everything gone since then? Has your therapist helped you to detox and start to heal from the abuse? PTSD is a standard symptom from abuse and the anger is also most likely from the abuse and as you detox from the abuse both the PTSD and the anger that is popping up in the present should slowly start to lessen. The therapist should be helping you to release the stuck memories and emotions. Hopefully without using drugs or herbs which I believe interfere with releasing the stuck emotions because they just stuff those emotions back down. If you need additional help or are not getting the help you need please try calling the 800-656-HOPE 24/7 hotline which should connect you to the nearest rape crisis center in you area if you are in the United States. Most rape crisis centers have free counselling. If you are in another country usually googling the name of the nearest city with the words “rape crisis hotline” next to it should get you the center. You should always listen to your intuition when reaching out for help, if the person you re talking with is helpful, that is great, if not hang up and try again later or go to centers.rainn.org and call any hotline listed there. Same thing goes for when you are working with a therapist, make sure you listen to your intuition and work with a therapist that is kind and also has the tools to help you to heal. NEVER work with a therapist that plays the blame the patient game, an example being maybe they were late but they find a reason to blame you or something you said triggered a memory for them which caused them to be angry at you, etc.
It is very scary that his wife is protecting a pedophile, which means she does not care if her children are being raped by her husband, she is pro-pedophile. I am not saying that she is a pedophile but some women do sexually assault children also.
It is far more important to protect the children than to “keep your word” when it comes to pedophilia, so I encourage you to call the police or CPS if you think there is enough evidence to protect his children from his pedophilia. And you can still stay away from them which is “keeping your word” and make the phone calls that you need to make. You can also discuss what to do to protect his children with your therapist or the 800-656-HOPE hotline but before you discuss it with the hotline, you need to ask if the call is anonymous.
That is so great that everyone supported you (other than him and his wife).
I really think that you can heal from the abuse so that you no longer have symptoms of PTSD and the anger stuff but it does take time. As I healed my PTSD symptoms slowly disappeared, I rarely startle anymore and am far less hyper-vigilant. Also hopefully you will be able to advocate for his children so that they do not need to suffer as you did. Perpetrators rarely stop perpetrating unless they want to, and being how his wife reacted that is very concerning and in your story I do not see any evidence that he wants to heal. If there is any evidence that he wants to heal and make amends for what he did to you feel free to write that back as well.
So keep taking action to heal and things will get much better. It shows your strength that you were able to confront the perpetrator. Feel free to write back with any updates, questions or answers to my questions.
I’m a 41 year old woman. A year ago I was at a birthday dinner for me with some of my family and friends. My brother was there and what ever he or said triggered something in me. I went home with my husband. Instantly I was sick to my stomach, thought I had food poisoning. I ended up in the hospital for four days, vomiting for eighty five hours straight, not food poisoning. While in the hospital, my sister visited me. She and I were closest in our family. In the hospital, thinking I’m literally on my death bed, I dropped a bomb (I think I was having a break down) to my sister. In tears I tell her that I was molested by our brother. To this day I feel that it was a mistake to tell her. It has caused us serious relationship issues and we didn’t talk for a long time. Telling my sister about being molested was a very scary feeling. I was so scared how she would react because she is close to our brother as well. In the hospital bed I tried to explain to her when, where, time, how old I was…but she immediately went into her own issues and I was shut down, it was all about her. I cannot explain because they are her own issues. BUT at that moment, I was scared but I had this weird relief feeling. This has something that I had hidden for so long, over thirty years. Now for some history, I was raised in dysfunctional Irish Catholic family, my father was an alcoholic and my mother was vacant. I’m the youngest of five. I was always told we never speak about our problems outside the home, gotta paint that pretty picture… As a child when my brother molested me I was between nine and ten, I knew what he was doing was not right! I also knew I could not tell anyone. Fear of my family finding out secrets have been let out of the house, there would be repercussions, a beating for sure. I couldn’t turn to a teacher, the counselor I was seeing at school, no one. At the age of ten my parents divorced. My mother attempted suicide (she suffers from depression). When she came home from the hospital, I came home from school to my father packing the car and leaving, no explanation why. I was confused and scared, again no one spoke about it. After that there were many nights of him showing up at my mothers house drunk wanting to end her life. The last one was me waking up to the police forcing him to the ground on the front yard with a billy club and being put in the back of a cruiser. Still no one to turn or talk to. At this time my oldest sibling was/is a very nasty person, took on the role of disciplinary. My mother allowed it. The molesting still happening with my brother. My mother being a single parent of five had to work and I was left to be watched by a physically/mentally abuse sister. As I got a little old, maybe eleven or twelve I was being watched by my brother. God did I dread that, begging my other two siblings to stay home or take me with them. I use to lock myself in the bathroom. I also turned to food. Gorging myself made me feel good temporarily, I would endure the endless fat jokes at home. I think I though if I was fat my brother would leave me alone. I was wrong. I was angry too, shocking! When my father was younger he was a boxer. He taught us kids how to defend ourselves. I used this in school, I was picking fights in school, didn’t matter if it was a boy or girl, I just wanted to get the message out that don’t mess with me. Being overweight did not help me with self esteem. I was overweight for most of my life. I did not date boys at all, why would they come near me?? By the time my brother was in high school, I was a freshman. One day while in my mother’s kitchen, I don’t remember what happened or what was said. I can remember my mother being there, my brother and his girlfriend. I flipped out and beat the crap out of him. I think my mother new this wasn’t a sibling tiff because of my rage, my reaction. He was crying as my mother pulled me off of him. And she just dismissed it just as quickly as it started, we never talked about it when it happened and my brother left me alone. That did not make me feel better. I used to bring friends home and my brother would over flirt with them, sometimes asking me if I could help him “hook up” with them. My first suicide attempt was as a sophomore in high school. I failed (thank GOD!) but I can remember thinking to myself all these red flags through life and no one has noticed, not one person said anything or reached out.I had a good relationship with my father, my other sibling did not. He lived in the same town as me and my siblings did. I always wanted to tell him but I knew he would have literally killed my brother. I wish I had lived with my father but he was just not able to care for me, I know now as an adult that my father had mental health issues, very sad (God bless him). Going back to history, I graduated high school and lost eighty pounds. I also lost that edge of fighting anger, a little. My relationship with my father was awry, he had not come to my graduation because of other family members (and his mental health was declining). At that point in my life my mother was dating someone, he’s a good man but never lived with us while I still lived at home. It was only her and I left in the house. I started hanging out with a new crowd out side high school friends, I did not go to college I worked full time. I started going to bars (not of legal drinking age). Drinking at that time took the pain away, or so I thought. I became sexually active, giving myself to guys with no feeling, didn’t care that I was being used and didn’t care that about no connection. It just felt good to hear “you have a nice body, your sexy”. I also started using drugs, mainly pot. I met my now husband, there was something different about him. I as I got older I came to realize that the drinking was not for me, maybe because alcoholism runs in my family and that scared me. I continued to use pot. For a long time it dulled that pain and brought a temporary fake happiness. Through this all this time I had continued a relationship with my brother. I always made him out to be a hero and great guy to my friends, to my now husband. I never told them what he did to me as a child, I think it’s a mix of being ingrained in me to never talk outside the house and I didn’t want people to look at him like the bad guy. I moved into an apartment with my now husband. I still battled with depression but not knowing it was depression, self medicating. I attempted suicide again and failed again (thank you again GOD!). I never told my now husband that. Years later we got married and have two children. I have marriage issues and this year I almost lost the best man in my life due to my anger (and our “baggage”) and not dealing with my own issues. I have been in therapy but it wasn’t till after I ended up in the hospital for four days did I face that fear of telling my therapist what my brother has molested me. I also told my husband, my best friend (of 35 years) and her husband (I adore him). I know I suffer from depression and recently realized that using pot was not helping me, so I stopped. I have to say that my depression is better, day by day but I don’t need that to “make” me feel better. Just last month, on my birthday I had reconnect with my sister. We had made plans to get our families together on Christmas Eve. Today she asked if I was inviting my brother, totally triggered me. I have not spoke to him since a year ago (she knows this), I’m not sure I ready to have that conversation with him, I may never but that is up to me. She canceled the get together for Christmas Eve today and I’m devastated. There so much damage in my family, we are broken. I do not have a relationship with my mother or other siblings due to other issues, it’s so sad. I made a decision this afternoon that I’m picking myself back up, writing on this blog to share with the readers my pain and fear. I’m not staying quiet anymore! I will not feel shame or blame for this, I did not ask to be molested. I hope that someday I will not feel broken and this not be my full story. I will not let this run or ruin my life. I want to break down walls. Tonight as I finish typing this I’m going to bed with the hope in my heart that Christmas will be happy, as I will be surrounded by my small family and friends. My husband has hugged me and said that family is us. Thank you for taking the time to read this, I had to share and not live in shame tonight. Good night and take care.
Hi Jen,
It shows your strength that you are sharing your story. And the people who really care about you are the ones who support you, such as your husband and if I understand your story correctly your best friend and her husband. Your sister did you a favor by cancelling that get together because you do not need unsupportive people like her in your life. It may feel hard for you but healing is all about being around people who truly love and care for you and not being around people like your sister even though she is family. If your family is not healthy and loving then it is better not to be around them or even communicate with them. They do not deserve to talk to you, you sound like a caring person and your family who sounds cold does not deserve a caring person in their lives. Their loss not yours. Your husband is right when he said “family is us”. He sounds like he really loves you.
I will write more later but it may be a few weeks because I am very busy.
Hi Jen,
It is great that you told your sister because then you found out who she really was. If you had not told her you may have held onto a false relationship and trusted a person that you should not have trusted. Though it is painful to figure out the truth, inside a part of you probably already knew that you could not trust your sister.
When you talk about your mother’s vacantness and depression, I cannot help but wonder if she too was assaulted. And the question must also be asked who assaulted your brother and did that person also have access to assault you? In a family where bad things should be kept a secret, it is the perfect set up for child sexual assault, I am not saying that this happens in all families that says to keep the family looking good but it is not a good sign. Also where did your dad get all of that rage from that he wanted to end your mother’s life (or did I misread that)? I have repeatedly heard that 85% of all alcoholics and drug addicts have been sexually assaulted as children. Just something to think about. This by no means excuses how your father acted or what your brother did to you but it can help to understand that frequently abuse reoccurs for generations with the symptoms being alcoholism, depression, etc.
Frequently children who are assaulted have food issues, either trying to gain weight to protect themselves or starving themselves to try and gain control of their bodies.
Your brother did what many perpetrators do which is trying to be sexual with everyone including all of your friends. It seems that all he feels comfortable with is being sexual and almost as if he is sexually addicted. In a family where sexual assault occurs many times the family does not want to see the signs. Remember, we still do not know who sexually assaulted your brother, I am not saying that it definitely was a person in your family but often it is someone in the family or a close family friend.
Depression is frequently a symptom of child sexual assault, it is the sadness from the assault, trying to be heard so that it can be released. It is great that you are no longer using pot to numb out from that sadness so that the repressed sadness from the abuse can begin to detox from your body, hopefully you are not using prescription drugs or herbs like St. John’s Wort to deal with that sadness either because it needs to detox not be stuffed back inside. Telling other’s your brother’s secret has helped you to detox from that repressed sadness (depression), that is so important and shows your strength.
Writing your story also shows your strength and knowing that you no longer need to live in shame because the shame was always your brother’s shame and not your shame anyway.
Try reaching out and calling 800-656-HOPE they are there 24/7 and that hotline should connect you to your local rape crisis hotline that should have free counselling for survivors of sexual assault. If the person on the hotline is helpful then great, if not, hang up and try again later. If you are repeatedly not getting the help you need, then you can go to centers.rainn.org and look for other rape crisis centers nearby (if you want to get counselling) or anywhere if you just need to talk with someone. Only continue to talk with advocates who you feel supported by, and also only work with counsellors who seem like they really have tools to help you to heal.
You seem like you have done a bunch to heal by speaking out, writing your truth and acknowledging who your real friends and family are, keep going. Feel free to write back with any updates or questions.
Hi, thank you for responding! My father was a binge drinker on the weekends and not every weekend. I didn’t realize to much later in life, prior to him passing away seven years ago that he had mental health issues, he never got help for that. Looking back it makes sense, not making excuses for his behaviors. I think my mother was physically abused as a child, I’m not sure if she was sexually but she may have started the sexual abuse in my family starting with my oldest sibling. I talked to my Aunt (my mothers sister) years ago. We got into a heavy conversation about my mother. My mother likes to “pit” us siblings against each other and my mother is very very good with giving the cold shoulder treatment, she will just shut you out of her life in a flash. My Aunt told me that my mother used to say to her for years that she wished she stopped having kids after she had my second oldest siblings, that she hated my father for wanting more. I think that is where her “vacant” behavior comes from.
I have been seeing a wonderful therapist for six years now and has really helped me to get to where I am today. I saw her yesterday and told her about me telling my story online, the feeling of relief I got from doing it after. She was proud. Baby steps
I don’t use any kind of drugs at all, St. John’s Wart, nothing. I am a cig smoker. My next conquest! With alcoholism running in my family I’m very cautious about drinking.
I am 31 and this is strange how I stumbled upon these feelings, but to be brief my boyfriend was abused by a woman at a young age and I was researching how to cope with his sexual issues when he becomes insecure etc… It brought up some childhood memories. So first, I was raised by my grandparents, my mother was around when it was convenient for her, lots of men in her life, anyways, I can remember her taking me to her friends house…(edited by blogger) also I can remember doing sleepovers and asking my friends to play mom and dad or doctor, and lastly trying to kiss and touch my older cousin, he was always polite and told me to stop and would bring me down to my grandmother. I just cannot think of who or when? I am wondering if I am reading too much into this and was I so young I do not even remember or I suppressed these memories?! I have read that children (in general) are very sexual from ages 3-7, or something along those lines. I grew up without a father, and wonder if that was also the case, or if I saw my mother doing sexual things and that is what I was mirroring? How can I find the answer to this without torturing myself and driving myself crazy not knowing. I was very sexually active as a teen, and then after the age of 19, I was very angry and violent.
There were many more instances, I am just baffled?
Hi T,
A healthy child who has not been assaulted should not be very sexual from ages 3-7, unfortunately there is a bunch of misinformation out there about that sometime written by “experts” who are ignorant and other times written by people who are helping to cover up for child sexual predators. One of the signs that a child has been sexually assaulted is if they are very sexual at a young age. You might want to read this link http://voices.yahoo.com/sexual-abuse-toddlers-six-behavioral-signs-look-1503739.html?cat=25
I will write more later but it could take a few weeks I am very busy.
Hi T,
No you are not reading too much into this. Children who are abused frequently may repress their memories of the assault as a way of dealing with it and still being able to live their life. If the abuse is extreme then the likelihood of the memories being repressed is also extreme. A child will more likely act out on the abuse, if they are mirroring the sexual acts they saw, I would think it would be a vague acting out. But a parent who allows a child to watch sexual acts is being sexually inappropriate and would lead me to question in what other way are they being sexually inappropriate?
If you read my post “What to do When You Feel Triggered” at http://healingfromsexualabuse.com/ideas-for-healing-from-abuse/what-to-do-when-you-feel-triggered/ it has some tools to help you to gently remember and also deal with when you feel an overwhelming emotion in the present that does not seem to make sense. Your anger and violence could be emotions that were triggered from the past, screaming in the present to be heard and being sexually active could also be a sign of acting out.
Playing doctor and that being the same as playing mom and dad is also a big possible sign.
So what to do now? I recommend calling 800-656-HOPE and they should connect you to a local rape crisis center 24/7. The person that you talk with should be validating of the possibility that you were sexually assaulted because it is extremely likely from what you wrote and they also should be very supportive of you. If you do not feel supported, hang up and try again later or try calling any number at centers.rainn.org. Your local rape crisis center should also have free counselling. But again if you do not feel supported keep looking for other help.
You can live a great and healthy life and be totally healed from the abuse and it can also be gently remembered, if you feel in a bad loop as you start to remember rather than like you are detoxing from the abuse, back away for a bit and look for a specialists who can help you to gently detox. But most likely remembering should feel like you are detoxing from the abuse, you may still be sad or angry as you remember, but you will start to detox those emotions that became stuck when you were abused. So take action and make the call.
Feel free to write any updates or questions about healing.
Hi iam a survivor of sexual abuse at the age of nine i remember being molested by my uncle then at the age of ten i was molested and rape by…(edited by blogger) now that im twenty two years old i have many issues one being anger and also im having…other (edited by blogger) problems with the father of my two kids it hurts me because i love him but i just hate it when he…(edited by blogger) i cant help but feel anger i dont know what to do. im afraid for my kids and i just feel like i would kill anyone who touches my kids should i seek help and get therapy?
Hi Julisa,
Yes, you should seek help and get therapy. But finding the right therapist is extremely important. A great therapist can help give you the tools to detox from the stuck emotions and memories from the abuse. I edited your post a while ago, so if what the father of your kids is doing that you hate you feel is putting yourself or your kids in danger, than you must leave, if it is a trigger, than it can be worked on in therapy.
When you survive abuse you have a ton of stuck emotions and memories that need help so that they can be detoxed from your body and so you can have a great life and the abuse does not have a permanent affect on your life. Anger from past abuse can pop up in the present and scream to be heard.
You can try calling 1-800-656-HOPE 24/7 and they should connect you to the local rape crisis hotline who may even have free counselling for rape crisis survivors. If the person that you are speaking with is not helpful, hang up and try again later. Also you can search for a therapist who has the tools to help you to heal. Be picky, only work with a therapist who seems like they are healthy and can help you. Listen to your intuition. If they start labelling you with a bunch of psychiatric diseases then run. You will probably have PTSD from the abuse but that is totally curable if you work with a good therapist. Bad therapist are sometimes very emotionally messed up people who may have gone into therapy for all of the wrong reasons and going to a bad therapist is not helpful. When going to a good therapist, you should slowly see that your life is getting better.
So take action and make those phone calls, do not give up until you find a good person to work with and slowly you will see that your life is getting better. And it may be quickly also.
I was sexually molested by my driver when I was 9. I did not talk about it until i was 18. the first time i talk about it was with a boy which is very strange to me. I had strange feelings for him and every now and then they fade and come back alone. I can’t help it and I know he loves me so much. we visited a therapist and she talked to me and made me feel better but I can’t give this man my full trust. I always think that people would call me a bitch if I walked beside him in the college or so. At the same time I don’t want to torture him and I believe that he deserves a great girl which is better than me. He always says that he will not leave me and he is staying with me what so ever. I have low self confidence, a very low self confidence. I’m a weak person and I can’t help but always feel destroyed. What do you think I should do? I dont trust men and I think they’re all pervs and none of them is worth me healing for him. Is there anything I could do to get rid of all of these feelings?
Hi Emily,
Just because you were molested, does not make you damaged. There is nothing wrong with you because you were molested, there is something wrong with the perpetrator. It is time to heal. It may be helpful to visit a therapist alone, to deal with the abuse and to heal from it. Many men are great people, they are far from all bad. Your driver was bad, but that does not make all men bad and people who support rape of children or adults are bad. It is hard when you see people from your country supporting violence against women and children but here is an article about people in your country standing up to end violence against woman in Egypt. http://eipr.org/en/pressrelease/2013/01/29/1612
At the bottom of the page there is an email contact for the group, as well as a list of some organizations that help women who have been sexually assaulted. The article talks primarily about women assaulted during protests but I believe the resources at the bottom of the page can still be helpful and may be able to help survivors of child sexual abuse. If those organizations are not helpful you can try calling any hotline at centers.rainn.org (some may not help because you are out of the area while others will), there is also an anonymous online hotline at https://ohl.rainn.org/online/
This organization may or may not have some ideas or be able to help: Beit.Hawa.(House.of.Eve), http:// http://www.adew.org, adew@link.net Phone: (202) 3644324 -5118677
You need to work with an excellent therapist that deals with helping people to heal. Whoever would call you names because you were sexually assaulted as a child is very sick and supports perpetrators, so anyone calling you names because you were assaulted is not a person you should care about anyway or even want to be around. It is so sad that there can be so many pro-pedophiles around but there are also so many people standing for justice. Try to surround yourself with healthy people. Is this boy healthy and supportive?
The belief that it is torture for him to be with you, could be from old ideas that support rapists over victims, a rape victim is a human being that deserves to be loved and to love. The person who is “spoiled goods” is the rapist who heart is so tarnished that they would rape a child or anyone at all, he or she is spoiled goods. Stand tall, beyond old outdated and harmful ideas that blame the victim for being raped, you deserve a great life and you can heal from those thoughts and feelings that you have. There are so many good men and other bad ones. It can be hard when you see so many people around you support violence against women and children but there are many who stand for justice and a place where every child is safe from assault.
You need to call a rape crisis center in your area or find a therapist who you feel can help you and keep looking until you find one who is really helpful. You definitely can heal from the abuse and all of those feelings, you just need to find the right people to help you to heal. Do not give up until you find them and then keep working on healing. Only work with people who are helpful and supportive. In the United State we even have a bunch of men volunteering on rape crisis hotlines and helping men and woman who have been sexually assaulted. Tons of men here have stood up against violence against women and I bet if you look around Egypt you will find the men who stand up against violence against women there as well, they may be harder to find but they are out there. It sounds like your boyfriend could be one, but only you know.
You will heal, do not give up until you find the right people to help you to heal and you will see your life getting better and better. Feel free to write back an update or with any questions.
Hi Amy
I am a 40 year woman and I think I have repressed memories of sexual abuse.
I have been having a difficult time with my anger and frustration lately. I have had anger and frustration issues all my life, yet I have never felt there is any real reason for it. There is also a lot of rage with it. I am adopted and my adopted father is a child molester. My mother put a lot of effort into keeping me away from him. He made attempts on my sister inlaw, he was inappropriate with the girl across the road and got beaten up for it by the father, but no charges where laid. He got arrested for underage sex when he was 18 the girl was 14. Got fired from his pool job for inappropriate behaviour. He even admitted to my mum that he couldn’t help it.
I am a lesbian and am married to a wonderful woman. I went to a counsellor a few years ago before meeting my partner, as i was having issues with low confidence and self esteem (i was doing a drug and alcohol counselling course and wanted to improve on my own mental health), I was also having difficulty dealing with feelings I had had for someone for a few years, I felt addicted to this person. She did a thing with me where she made me feel pressured, and I just switched off and couldn’t remember what she was talking about. She helped me realize that I go numb to get away from stress. She wanted to know what had happened to me, but I didn’t really know. We discussed that my dad was a molester and he drank a lot and was very emotionally abusive to my mum. I told her he was emotionally absent to us kids. She did another thing where she got me to associate things in the room with feelings and memories…(edited by blogger).
My uncle has always thought I was gay because he thinks dad molested me. I just use to laugh because I don’t remember anything.
I sexualized everything growing up, and developed a love addiction. I realized this when I almost instantly developed a crush on my counsellor. I couldn’t believe it, so I told her about it as I knew this was very strange. Thats when she pointed out I was addicted to the feeling of being in love and I used it as a way to cope…(edited by bloger)
I always felt I was opened up to my sexuality very young…(edited by blogger) I have a strange memory that has stuck out over the years where I am about 8 or 9 and I am in bed and something changes and I am a different person. Its like I wake up the next morning and I am a new person and my life beforehand is no longer real. This memory or feeling has always been so strong that I think something may have happened that night.
I live in another country and only superficially talk to my dad. My main issue is the need to know the truth. I never thought I was abused by him because I have no memories, but I have had too many issues in my life that make no sense. My mum was great with me and I have 2 wonderful brothers, so I cant say my upbringing was horrible, just my dad and his perversions and emotional abuse towards my mum. I know people say not to drudge up memories, but I want to know if anything happened and if it did what. It is a part of my life I need to understand.
Hi Mary Jones,
Many times anger and frustration from abuse can be triggered by everyday situations and that can be very hard. Your writing about the anger and frustration and the abuse is a good instinct on your part, that can definitely be the reason. Did your adoptive mother try and keep her husband, your adopted dad from you? Is that the mom you are referring to? If so, is is very sad that she did not have the strength to divorce him? Or did she divorce him?
It is great to hear that you are in a loving relationship. It is great to have that in your life and can be considered a success because many survivors do not have that. Numbing out is a response that many survivors use to help them to deal with the abuse, or push the memories of the abuse away so that they can deal with what is happening in their life. Becoming addicted to others especially lovers can be our inner child’s logging for the love we never got from our abusive parent. Ever child needs love and if we get abused by a person who is suppose to love us, our inner child can desperately look for it elsewhere.
When a child is sexualized a reaction to his sexualization can be to become very sexual. The child is trying to tell a story of what happened to them.
I would recommend NOT talking with your father at all. You owe him nothing and talking with him the man who sexually assaulted you is not being kind to yourself. From everything you wrote it sounds like he did assault you. If you read my post “What To Do When You Feel Triggered” at http://healingfromsexualabuse.com/ideas-for-healing-from-abuse/what-to-do-when-you-feel-triggered/ it has tools to help you with triggers that come up and may also help you to remember the abuse. Your dad will most likely never tell you the truth but if you ask him his strange response may give you clues. When people say not to dredge up the past what they are not taking into account is that the past emotions are popping up in the present, so if you keep stuffing them back down, they only scream louder to be heard, such as sadness starts to scream as depression, etc. You need to allow yourself to remember to that you can allow those stuck memories and emotions to detox from your body.
Although you had great memories of your childhood, a truly great childhood would not have a father with perversions in it. A child deserves to feel comfortable and secure in their home and in order to truly feel that security, that home would need to have a protective parent who would not be married to a pedophile. Having a pedophile in the house is not ok.
Take time to take care of yourself, do things that feel nurturing outside of your home, things that you love to do. I say outside of your house because sometimes survivors can be inside way too much and not experience the things that are fun around them enough.
It is also important to reach out for help, you can try calling 1-800-656-HOPE and see if the volunteers there are helpful. There may also be free counselling at your local rape crisis center which is where the 1-800-656-HOPE should connect you to. If the person you are speaking with is not helpful, hang up and try again later. If you are continually getting non-helpful volunteers on that number try going to center.rainn.org and try calling any hotline there. A non-helpful person is someone who is not asking you what you need and trying to get you to do what they think you should do as opposed to asking you what you think could be helpful, or they tell you to forget about it or they are rude. Sometimes a person giving you suggestions can be helpful but keep checking in with yourself. Also a non-helpful person could label you with permanent “diseases” rather than help give you tools (not drugs or supplement) to help you to detox from your past and live a great life in the present.
So take action and reach out and keep reaching out until you get helpful help and you can live a great life.
Hi Amy
Thankyou somuch for your reply and your time. I will use the writing method to help. I am so use to blaming my frustration and anger on current things in my life. But it has always been over the top and I am too old for this. My mum didnt know about my dad until just after I was adopted. She didnt want to leave because she didnt want him to have unsupervised access to me. Plus there was no financal help etc, and her parents house was too small to go stay in. Back then the options werent great.
I wish I had not posted this information. Now I feel exposed and vulnerable. What does it matter? I doubt the owner of this site will take this post down. What do they care? I hope the above post is never shown on this website.
I did not post what you wrote before and I will erase it now. Call a hotline 1800 424 017 or 1800 737 732 24/7 and reach out for help until you get the help you need. Some people on hotlines are not helpful while others are very helpful so keep trying until you get the help you need. But in order to get help you have to stop putting people in the position to help you down or you will scare away all of the people who might have helped you. Like how you put me down, which I know comes from a place of victimization but still is not ok to put people you do not know down. I understand you have not had people you could trust in the past but keep trying. You might not want to mention that you are suicidal to people on the phone when you reach out for help or you could find yourself locked up again because of some really bad laws around the world, though I am not sure about Australia. But that choice is up to you.
Sigh. I’m scared to post. What I want to say is something I have never even written down for fear someone would find it. I try not to think about what happened for fear someone will read my mind, see it on my face, and hate me the way I hate myself. This is my deepest, darkest secret. Even now I want to erase this and get back to writing my paper for finals.
When I (female) was 5 I remember being caught under the covers with my 3-year-old cousin (male). It was not the first time we had done whatever we were doing. I don’t remember what we would do, only that it was sexual and that I was the instigator. After my mom caught us, she let my cousin go and asked me questions. I know my mom asked me a bunch of things because I remember being jealous that my cousin was allowed to play in the living room with my siblings. However, I only remember responding with one answer in which I blamed by cousin for “starting it.” In reality, I was the one who started it, and I don’t know why. At age 5 I lied to my mom about the situation because I knew I was wrong. So why did I do it? I feel like a pedophile, and I hate myself. Although I am 22 and my cousin is going on 20, I have never talked about this with my mom or my cousin, nor do I know if he remembers it, or if his mother, my aunt, knows what happened. I feel guilty and embarrassed, but part of me wants to speak to my cousin, aunt, or mom just so I can know what the hell happened. The pieces I have to the story are insufficient, and the mystery is killing me and my sexual relationship with my partner, who doesn’t know anything about this.
I read on your site that people who think they were molested probably were molested. I also read that kids who do what I did are coping with molestation in the only way they know how. I feel like I was molested, and my history says I was molested, but because I can’t remember any abuse or assaults, I can’t seem to help blaming what I did on my having some sort of intrinsic pedophile brain, which contributes to my self-hate.
Furthermore, I’ve been having bad dreams about my brother who is older by seven years. My brother lives in another state, and I hadn’t seen him for nearly two years until I visited him in October of this year, 2013. When I was there, I had a dream that I was sleeping and that he came into the room…(edited by blogger). In the dream, I hadn’t reverted back to child form or transported to the childhood house where we shared a room. It wasn’t a memory. It was clearly a dream. I was the same age, in the same room, with my partner, in the state my brother lived. It was like it actually happened where we were in time and space. I was scared in the dream. I woke up freaked-out. That was about a month ago. Then last night, I had a dream that I was talking to my mom and sister about my brother being a pedophile. We were all agreeing that he is one, and I brought up a childhood memory of my brother playing a game with my older sister and me when we were about ages 9, 11, and 16. My sister and I had to run around the house, away from our brother…(edited by blogger) One day, my sister and I innocently told our mom about the game, and she told my brother not to do that. He never did it again. As a tomboy around the same age, I also remember wrestling with my brother and him suggesting…(edited by blogger).
My point is that I think it’s possible that my brother molested me. Until writing this down, I didn’t realize how creepy my brother really was. As a child, I couldn’t fathom how a 16-year-old playing a game like that is indicative of a manipulator with a sexual agenda, but now, having been 16 and older, I know. If I had daughters, I would not trust him to be alone with them, which is so weird because I love him and think he’s awesome and I don’t even know if he did anything. How do I find out if he did? I might even forgive my brother if my suspicions were confirmed. I really just want to find out what happened to me so I can get over it. I feel like I will always be trapped for as long as I am clueless. What do you think?
P.S. My sister says she is not a survivor of childhood sexual abuse.
(THANK YOU for reading this post. I already don’t feel as scared.)
Hi C.E.V.,
This is your perpetrators deep and dark secret not your secret to keep at all. It is time to forgive yourself, you were a 5 year old little girl acting out the abuse that was done to you. You were probably blamed by the perpetrator who did that to you and you were only 5 years old. Stop hating yourself and start healing yourself. It sounds like as an adult you have not abused any child, so now it is time to heal. Pedophiles continue to abuse little kids when they become adults, this does not sound like you. You can ask your mom for clarification, if you want. When you do some healing, you cam talk with your cousin about what happened as well. He may have also been assaulted by the same person who assaulted you. Many times children forget the abuse as a way to cope with it. Children are not pedophiles at age 5, they are victims, you are a pedophile if you continue to assault kids. Look at a picture of a child who is 5 years old, see how tiny and innocent they are? They are not sexual at that age unless they have been violated.
It could very well have been your older brother or he is a cover memory for the real perpetrator. An example of a cover memory is when let’s say you have a memory of a sibling assaulting you but it is actually a parent. A child may think it is a sibling because that although awful is not as bad as a parent. This is just an example, I am not saying that is what happened to you. But even if your brother assaulted you, the question remains, who assaulted your brother and did that same person have access to you. It sounds like your brother is sexually inappropriate. But because children are not born pedophiles the search must continue. You can read my post “What To Do When You Feel Triggered” at http://healingfromsexualabuse.com/ideas-for-healing-from-abuse/what-to-do-when-you-feel-triggered/ which has some tools that can help you to get memories back.
It shows that you are not a perpetrator that you would protect your children from your brother. If he still is a perpetrator, you would need to protect both boys and girls from him because frequently perpetrators assault children of both genders. There is a part of your older brother who could be awesome and you love but if he is still assaulting children, a pedophile is at the core of who he is. You can even look at a picture of you when you were 5 years old and see how little you were. Forgiveness of the perpetrator is still perpetrators focused and to heal you need to forgive your little five year old self and also forgive yourself for carrying the shame of whoever violated you. You may want to also read my post “Do I Need To Forgive To Heal” at http://healingfromsexualabuse.com/ideas-for-healing-from-abuse/do-i-need-to-forgive-to-heal-from-abuse/
Your sister may have repressed her memories of sexual assault or for some very strange exception, she was not sexually assaulted but that game seems like a huge red flag. Many survivors never want to remember or allow the memories to come up so they don’t. That does not mean it did not happen to her and to you.
It may also be time to reach out and get help. You can also try calling 800-656-HOPE, but if any advocate tries to become a detective more than an advocate for you such as saying that you were at fault when you were five or they need to find and report the people who may still be perpetrators now, hang up on them immediately and try another hotline. It is their job to be an advocate for you not to be a detective or blame you for acting out on being assaulted as a 5 year old. If they are not helpful try calling other hotlines that are relatively nearby in your state by going to centers.rainn.org (you may not want to tell them that you are not right in their jurisdiction but instead that you are reaching out for help). If you want to be anonymous, call from a no ID Skype Number, if you do not have an account to call other phones you can get one for as little as $10 but do not get a number with it or it will defeat the purpose of it. You can also ask friends who have been seeing therapists who seem like they are healing for recommendations but remember that not every therapist is a good for every person so always listen to your intuition.
It shows that you are ready to begin healing when you said that writing this made you feel less scared, so take action and reach out and call someone. DO NOT give up, keep reaching out until you get helpful help, so you can fully heal. Feel free to write back any questions or updates.
Hi I’m 29 and when I was 11 I was molested by my sisters grandfather my two younger sisters and I were living with their grandparents it went on for a year and a half before I finally told my best friend at school who told the school counselor. Once it was out and everyone knew the police got involved a few weeks later he killed himself that hit me pretty hard he was my only father figure I didn’t know my real dad at the time so I wound up living back with my mom cause my sisters grandma didn’t want me there after all that I hated living with my mom cause she was very neglectful and I didn’t have a lot of clothes and there was never any food I cried all the time at 14 I met my real dad and step mom I wound up deciding to move to a different state and live with them thinking I was going there to have a better life. I was only living there 1 month when my dad started to sexually abuse me I didn’t know what to do I was scared to tell one reason being I was scared he would kill himself cause of what happened to me before. Eventually it became normal for me and instead of hating my dad I was attached to him for reasons I don’t know why I now hate that I didn’t fight harder and do something about it finally once I turned 18 it was still happening my boyfriend at the time which was the first person I told was 17 a senior in high school we got pregnant with our son on purpose so he could ask his parents if I could move in which they let me he wanted to get me away from my dad and it worked I moved in and stopped talking to my dad I could never go to the police still scared he wld kill himself and I didn’t want that on my shoulders again eventually thing took a toll on our relationship he could never get over what happened to me he didn’t understand why I never told anyone even though I explained it. After that I got depressed and I went through a lot of boyfriends giving them sex right away cause I could never take sex seriously part of me felt thats what I’m supposed to do give the guy what they want I’ve been with my boyfriend now for 5 years I now have four kids whom I love very much i have issues with cuddling which my boyfriend hates he says I should see a therapist besides the the cuddling issue I’ve been fine until recently for some reason I keep thinking about my past and what happened a lot and I hate myself for it for not doing anything about my dad sooner for just giving up and letting it happen for so long I should have just went back with my mom even though she was unfit but I didn’t and I wish I knew why. My question is should I see a tharapist do you think it will help me?
I should have time to write a response back in the next few days. Until then try calling 800-656-HOPE, they will connect you will a local rape crisis center and can be helpful to talk to but if you find they are not helpful, hang up and try again later, or try another hotline at centers.rainn.org
Hi M,
Yes, the right therapist could definitely help you. You need to be picky and interview your therapist first to see if they are kind and have tools that can help you. You want a therapist that believes that you can heal completely and not one who thinks that you are damaged and will be working on healing from this your entire life. I would also stay away from the labellers, example, you have manic depression, etc. To be labeled with PTSD is fine because it is definitive and 100% curable without drugs or herbal remedies and a group of coping mechanisms that survivors of abuse frequently have. But labels such as manic depression, bipolar, anxiety disorder are things that you are expected to have for life and simply manage with drugs or herbal remedies but never be cured and that is not true. You can heal from child abuse.
You also want to check in with yourselves and those around you from time to time to see if your life is getting better and you are healing. Sometimes those around you can notice the changes that you are going through to heal before you can. A therapist should also never play “blame the client game” blaming the client for what the therapist did wrong. They should be encouraging and never put you down (even as a joke). They should not tell you that you are crazy but in a good way, not ok. They should be able to see potential in you that you may not acknowledge or see. They should be your ally. They should never tell you to forgive to heal (you can read my post on that “Do I Need To Forgive To Heal From Abuse) at http://healingfromsexualabuse.com/ideas-for-healing-from-abuse/do-i-need-to-forgive-to-heal-from-abuse/ The only person that you need to forgive is yourself for blaming yourself for your grandfather’s suicide and your dad’s sexual assaults. They should never tell you to put the past in the past (because it is in the present with the cuddle issue which is why you are going to see them to begin with) and they should always blame the perpetrator for the abuse and not you the victim. And they should never say that you are making it up. They should be your ally 100%.
You can heal from sexual abuse and you can come to a place where you realize that it was your grandfather’s fault that he assaulted you and also his fault that he killed himself. Shame on him, perpetrators often want their victims to carry their shame and guilt and it is not yours to carry. He should have been put on suicide watch at the place he was being help but that is their fault not yours and he never would have been arrest if he did not sexually assault you, so it is still his fault.
And shame on your grandmother for not protecting you and blaming you for your grandfather’s suicide. That is not a real grandmother, a real grandmother would have been appalled that her husband raped her grandchildren. A real grandmother would have comforted you and reassured you that your grandfather’s suicide was his fault not yours. If he did not want to be in a situation to get arrested for sexual assault then he never should have sexually assaulted you.
It is great that you spoke out and I am sorry to hear that you did not have more support and assurance that it was all your grandfather’s fault. Remember that your grandmother raised your mother and she was most likely neglected her and also allowed your grandfather to sexually assault your mother. (That does not excuse your mother for neglecting you.) responsibilityYour grandmother does not protect children from sexual assault. Shame on her. Even if your mom does not remember, that does not mean that she was not sexually assaulted. But she had a responsibility to protect and take care of you and she did neither. Shame on her.
I totally understand why you were too scared to say anything when your real dad began to rape you. No one had been there for you before, it sounds like you received no support emotionally, after your dad was arrested. You should have been assigned an excellent social worker who could have helped you to heal and reassured you that it was not your fault that your grandfather killed himself. If he hadn’t assaulted you, he would never have been arrested. That he chose to kill himself, shows what a coward he truly was, he had no problem assaulting a little girl but he refused to face adults because of what he did. He could of at that point chosen to heal and make amends but instead he chose to die possibly hoping that you would carry the guilt that belongs solely to a perpetrator.
You had to normalize the assault it was the only “love” you received. But that is not love, shame on your real dad.
It sounds like you are a much better mom, than the people who “raised” you and that shows your strength, to have had such awful caretakers but still be able to love your children and your boyfriend. It also makes sense that you could have cuddling issues, because it could bring back memories from the abuse. You may want to read my post “What To Do When You Feel Triggered” at http://healingfromsexualabuse.com/ideas-for-healing-from-abuse/what-to-do-when-you-feel-triggered/ It could help when you feel triggered. You do not need to force yourself to cuddled at this point, once you heal, it will be healthy and nurturing for both of you.
To look for a therapist you can start by calling 800-656-HOPE, they will connect you with the local rape crisis hotline. Many of those crisis centers have free counselling for survivors of abuse. If those people seem helpful, great, if not hang up and try again later, the volunteers work different shifts. If not try another hotline at centers.rainn.org You can also ask friends who have been seeing therapists who seem like they are healing for recommendations but remember that not every therapist is a good for every person so always listen to your intuition.
Feel free to write back any questions or updates.
Hello M,
I have just read your post and it saddens me so much that such heavy emotional burdens were placed on you as a child. you were a child and a victim of your grandfather’s abuse and in no way caused his suicide…I was also sexually abused by my father from a young age through my teens and yet, even though it became brutal at times I still wanted his affection and love…it’s still very strange now when I think about it…I think as a child, he is someone you should be able to trust and somewhere in your heart you wish for things to be good and eventually any “caring” ( even though we know now it is far from caring at all ) you hold onto. please don’t blame yourself for what happened with you grandfather or father…it’s so hard being a child when there is no one to trust or turn to…
I have been in therapy for a few years now, he is a good man and it has been helpful to me…my abuse affects my relationship with my wife as well…it is sometimes hard for partners to understand how hard the road to healing can be and they can get impatient, but trust yourself, you can make it …as Amy says in her posts, there are many places to turn to (RAINN. org is a good one ) for help…you deserve to feel better the caring you show to your children shows what a good heart you have…you take care of yourself…Joseph
I am only recently starting to deal. Abused by my mom from infancy (physical not sexual) the abuse was ignored by my dad, but I believe he might have abused my mom.
From there, I left home at 17 Cuz I couldnt deal with my mom anymore. Got with a man at 14 and he was 21. I went to him when I left home…(edited by blogger) But I just was diagnosed with severe depression anxiety and panic disorder. I didn’t really know I was dealing with anything, until someone told me a few things…(edited by blogger because it could be hard for some survivors to read) I remember my life but only what I typed, nothing else. Like I can’t pull my thoughts together. I’m seeing a therapist, but I’m not having things explained, which drives me nuts. And I know there is so much more, but none of it I want to remember.
Hi Michelle,
I edited a bunch of your story because I do not want to traumatize anyone. But you survived and you can heal and live a great life. There is a great chance that the severe depression, anxiety and panic disorder are all of the sadness and fear that you repressed as you were being abused. You cab try reading my post at “What To Do When You Feel Triggered” at http://healingfromsexualabuse.com/ideas-for-healing-from-abuse/what-to-do-when-you-feel-triggered/ which can help you when you get triggered. If you start get memories back and begin to feel flooded, then back away from the work you are doing and look for an expert in that field of trauma to help you.
If the people you are working with are not helpful, then find another therapist or expert. It sounds like your therapist might not be helpful, so keep looking for a therapist, until you find a person who is helpful. If your therapist does not explain things to you, then how can they help you? If they are only prescribing drugs then the chances of you healing while working with them is slim to none. You need to keep looking for a therapist until you find a helpful person who has the tools to help you to heal. Sometimes a person’s inability to put thought together is because you still carry so much trauma inside. But trauma can be healed but only if you find a person with the right tools to help you. Sometimes going to a bad therapist is worse than not going to a therapist at all. Try calling the rape crisis hotline at 800-656-HOPE and talk with an advocate there. If the person that you speaking with is not helpful, hang up and try again later or if you keep not getting the help you need go to centers.rainn.org and you can first try calling the centers nearest to you but if they are repeatedly not helpful try calling any number at all. Keep calling and reaching out until you get the help you need. Do not give up on yourself.
I am interested in your advice/insight regarding severing a relationship with your abuser. I am 40 years old and have only in the last year and a half fully come to terms with sexual assault from my own father. I have been working very hard in therapy; both touch and talk, to even admit it out loud. His and my relationship for the last 15 years has been tepid at best. I have never brought the subject up with him or anyone in my family. I had a daughter very young who is now grown and married. Something about her own pregnancy has been a fierce trigger for me. I do not want to pretend anymore. I do not want to do the twice a year visit. I have not been for the last year and now he and his new wife are getting very pushy because I’ve moved and dropped from their radar. They hound my daughter about where I am and what my problem is. I don’t want anything from him except to leave me alone. I have basically said that in an email and he persists. I feel like I am being pushed to say it. You are a pedophile rapist and I want nothing to do with you. Which is terrifying for me. For no reason. He is now an elderly man. He doesn’t know where I live. Our contact was very superficial. Why am I confused and hesitant?
Hi Danielle,
You do not need to have a person in your life that you do not want in your life, even if it is your dad. He sexually assaulted you and that is unacceptable. Her pregnancy triggering these feelings is probable your concern that he may assault your grandchild. My other concern is if he assaulted your daughter. There is a huge chance that he did. Pedophiles rarely stop assaulting children unless they want to stop and get help and from your dad’s pushiness is does not sound like he got any help. You may want to work in therapy with a healthy way to talk with your daughter about this. Remember that even if she denies it, it is possible that she repressed the memories of the abuse or remembers but wants to protect her grandfather. When it comes to our family we do this strange protection thing that sometimes protects abusers rather than ourselves. And if he did assault her, your talking with her about it will give her the mommy support she did not have before. If she admits it but minimizes the abuse, that is not healthy because she is going to have a child that she will need to protect from perpetrators.
It is healthy to not pretend. Pretending allows the perpetrator to continue to assault other children. Pedophilia is a very sick addiction. I am concerned about their hounding your daughter, they have no right to do that, shame on them.
It could be scary to you because of the little girl inside still sees your dad as a huge man who assaulted her. I think it could be healthy to speak your truth and in the setting that you want. For example you probably would not want your dad and his new wife in the room, you may want to make sure that your dad is alone (because it could become his wife and him against you) or simply write him a letter. You could also bring a ton of support friends who are on your side and not your dad’s side to be there for you. But since you do not want to see him a letter may be best. You can even tell him that he assaulted you, it is not ok and if he continues to harass you or your daughter you will be forced to file a restraining order.
It is confusing when a parent that we are suppose to trust does this to us. Many people in our society pressure us keep in contact with our family, even if you were assaulted by parents but all that needs to change. You need to take care of you and protect your grandchild. Speaking out could do that. Some states also have no statute of limitation on sexual assault, so if you want you can look into pressing charges also, it all depends on the state where the abuse occurred. That would make it very public.
Right now you are keeping your dad’s secret. Also do not think that because your dad is old that he will no longer sexually assault a child, that is simply not at all true. Also frequently perpetrators assault children of both genders.
The next thing that I recommend that you do is to call the 800-656-HOPE hotline. They are there 24/7 and most rape crisis centers have free counselling also. If the person on the hotline is not helpful, hang up and try calling again later or try another hotline at centers.rainn.org If you call a hotline that is not in your area, you may not want to tell them where you are located because some will not help people out of the area. Keep calling until you get the help you need. Always listen to your intuition when you are seeking counselling to see if the person you are working with has the tools to help you to heal. You can heal from the abuse but you need to take action.
Please feel free to write any updates or questions.
I am being sexually abused by my uncle…(edited by blogger) He keeps telling me that if I tell anyone he will hurt me. I am very scared. I really want to hurt myself…(edited by blogger so other readers will not be triggered) I would really like someone to listen.
Hi Rebecca,
You need to talk about this with someone that you trust. You have a right to not ever see your uncle again. Once an adult sexually assaults another person, even if they are a family member, the person who is assaulted has the right to never see that person again. As you reach out for help, the person that you talk with should be supportive of you and appalled by what your uncle did. If for any reason the person you reach out to for help tells you to keep it a secret or to not tell anyone or says that you made it up or that you are crazy, the person that you are talking with about your uncle is then NOT a good person for you to talk to about this. Even if that person who is saying those unsupportive words is your mom or dad. Stop talking about this with them and find a REALLY supportive person. A person who tells you any of those previous things is supporting a pedophile over a victim and that is wrong. There are supportive people, so do not stop trying to find a supportive person until you have found them.
You can try visiting http://www.orcc.net/ or call 613-562-2333 which is a rape crisis hotline in your area that is there 24 hours. They can be there to listen and help you to make a plan. Your crisis center also has free counselling. When talking with the hotline volunteer or counsellors, always listen to your intuition to see if you are getting the help that you need. If the person answering the phone is not helpful, hang up and try again later. If you are repeatedly not getting the help you need from that hotline you an go to centers.rainn.org and call any hotline listed there. Since you are not local for those hotlines, I would try and avoid telling them where you are located because some hotlines will not help people out of the area.
Do everything that you can to stay away from your uncle, if you are living with him, see if you have friends that you can stay with and reach out for help. The crisis center may also have a safe-house that you can stay at or be able to help you with alternative housing. You can get away from your uncle and heal from all of the abuse. The abuse taught you to hate yourself when in fact the anger should instead be directed at your uncle, instead of inward towards yourself. Shame on your uncle, what a horrible man. Assaulting his niece. Know that you can heal and get away from him. Keep taking action until you get the help that you need.
Hi, I’m 30 years old and the truth is I don’t really know if I’ve been sexually abused…but for the past couple of years I have a feeling that I was. I started researching it online because I was just …(edited by blogger) with my husband of 7 years and I ended it feeling completely disgusted with myself and taking a hot shower right afterwards shaking of disgust…(edited by blogger) Afterwards I sometimes feel dirty…(edited by blogger) It’s been a major issue in my marriage, rightly so.
My sexual problems aside, there are other reasons I think I might have been abused. One, I can’t remember most of my childhood. My memory has always sucked but there are large parts of my childhood and when I’m a teenager that I can’t remember. Two, my dad was physically and emotionally abusive and sexually abusive but not to me, to my brother. He went to prison for 10 years because of it and got out a couple years ago. (I read online of a report when my dad filed for an appeal. And what it said he did to my brother sickened me – I haven’t talked to my dad since he got arrested and I don’t discuss it with my brother). My dad is also bipolar. Three, there’s one time where my dad showed me…(edited by blogger) and apparently my brother was there too and I have no recollection that he was there – absolutely none. And I never told anyone about it but the police asked about it and I asked them how did they know and they said my brother told them because he was there and that is when the abuse started with my brother…I bothers me a lot that I don’t remember him being there and it makes me wonder what else I can’t remember. Four, when I was younger I was very sexual…(edited by blogger) when I was in elementary school. I don’t remember a lot about that but I know I did it…(edited by blogger). I felt very ashamed about it and never told anyone about it until now. Five, when my dad got out of jail I had two very realistic dreams of my dad …(edited by blogger) (this dream was a couple years ago). Six- I have been diagnosed as severely depressed a couple years ago – though now I feel pretty good though I feel bouts of depression and anxiety and I’m seeing a therapist. (But that’s the only thing that I suffer from – …(edited by blogger so symptom list will not trigger other survivors) as other sites say that our symptoms of childhood sexual abuse)
I don’t know…and you probably can’t tell me if I was or wasn’t. I don’t know why I wrote this or what I wanted to come from it. I just felt really disturbed by how I just felt so dirty when taking a shower to wash it off….(edited by blogger) I guess want to know if I’m crazy and making things up and making myself feel unnecessarily bad. Thanks for reading…
Hi Vanessa,
Normally when people get the feeling that they have been sexually assaulted, it’s because they have been sexually assaulted. If you start thinking of your reactions to being sexual as a way that you would feel after being sexually assaulted, then your reactions start making sense. Sometimes being sexual can trigger emotional and body memories of the abuse we suffered as children. Your conscious mind may have forgotten the abuse but your body did not. Your unconsciousness will always remember both. It is very common for sexual abuse survivors who have repressed the memories of the abuse to also forget big chunks of their childhood. It is a very common symptom of repressed memories from child abuse.
It is not uncommon for pedophiles to sexually assault children of both genders. What your dad did was inappropriate but pedophiles are inappropriate. Have you asked your brother if he has any recollection of your father assaulting you? He may but not have wanted to tell you for fear it would traumatize you, but knowing is healthier than not knowing. Though if your brother does know, I would ask him to tell you without any details at this point, so as not to traumatize you. It is important to be gentle when remembering abuse. Being overly sexual before you should be is also a sign that you were abused, though people can be abused and not be sexual at all. But a child having sexual knowledge before their bodies should know about that kind of thing is a huge sign.
Having sexual dreams about your dad is another huge sign, in nature that would not occur. When I was trying to figure out why I felt like I was molested and who did it to me, I went to a horrible hypnotherapist (some are great but she was awful). I told her that I was trying to figure out who molested me. So she had me picture a blank screen and ask what I saw. I told her that I saw myself having sex with my dad. I told her I was horrified, how could I be so sick and instead of her validating me that I was not sick and what I saw could be there for a reason, she said, “We can stop if you want.” So I left feeling very sick, thinking how could I have thought of such a sick thing. It turns out that my dad did rape me repeatedly, so I was not sick at all my dad was. That dream was probably your unconscious trying to tell you what your dad did to you, to keep you safe from him, because he was getting out of jail.
Frequently depression and anxiety for survivors is their body’s way of telling them about the repressed sadness (depression) and anxiety that you felt as a child is still stuffed inside. It can totally be healed but only by allowing your body to detox and release those stuck feelings. A post that I wrote that may help you is called “What To Do When You Feel Triggered” at http://healingfromsexualabuse.com/ideas-for-healing-from-abuse/what-to-do-when-you-feel-triggered/ This is also why my opinion is the same as the experts who do not believe that you should take drugs or herbs to deal with depression or anxiety because it only masks the emotion that you need to deal with and drugs can have horrific side effects. But if you are on drugs you need to withdraw from them very slowly and only under the supervision of an excellent doctor or alternative healthcare practitioner. A great article about the problems with antidepressants and antipsychotics can be found at http://www.motherjones.com/politics/2003/11/it-prozac-or-placebo
You do not need to have every symptom of sexual assault to be a survivor, every person is different, so their symptoms may vary but from what you mentioned it sounds to me like you are a survivor of child sexual assault. The good news is that there is help. You can heal but you must take action. You can call 800-656-HOPE and talk with a volunteer advocate who can listen and they are there 24/7. That 800 number will connect you with the rape crisis center that is closest to you. They can help you make a plan to heal. They also should have free counselling. If the person that you are talking with is not helpful, hang up and try again later. If repeatedly the people on that hotline are not helpful, then call another hotline that is nearby. You can go to centers.rainn.org and put in your zip code and you will see a map of all of the nearby resources and they all should have free counselling that specializes in healing from sexual assault. If you’re in a big city there can be many centers in the area. If you find one that is not in your exact area, you do not need to tell them your exact location. The most important thing is that you get the help you need. Always listen to your intuition when getting help. I know you said that you are in therapy now, if it is helpful and you are healing keep working with that person but you can work with more than one person. Some therapists hate that but the most important thing is that you get the help you need to heal. You are in charge of your therapy, not the therapist. The therapist is there to assist you in your healing process, they should be there to help you not the other way around. Rape crisis centers specialize in helping rape survivors.
You can also call the rape crisis line any time you feel triggered but always hang up if the person on the phone is not helpful. (Unfortunately it happens.)
You are not crazy and you are not making things up, you are starting to remember, having body and emotional memories. And you can heal and have a great life, do not stop until you get the help that you need.
Feel free to post any updates or questions.
I’m 33 I was molested by my brother im having nightmares
I get the startle jerks bad in my sleep and then
While im awake but I don’t remember everything please help me
Hi Valerie,
I am afraid that I do not have much advise on how to stop nightmares, you could try calling 1-800-656-HOPE and see if the advocate there can help you. If the first person is not helpful, keep calling until you get the help you need. If that hotline is not helpful you can go to centers.rainn.org and try calling any hotline (you may not wat to tell them that you are not located locally or they may not help you). They may also have free counseling that can help you to heal from the abuse and the nightmares about the abuse. When looking for help, always listen to your intuition to see if the person you are interviewing (lookig for a therapist) or talking with (hotline) is helpful. You can also try googling “help with nightmares from sexual assault” and you will see a ton of articles come up on that subject.
Wow, where to start. My mom and dad separated, my dad “stole” us away out of spite and my mother died a few years later. My dad was so angry at her because of how the marriage turned out, and even after her death would talk crap about her and her family. He was abusive to her though. It was hard growing up because I couldnt even remember her, and what little I did hear were bad things from him. He is the one who sexually abused me. As most abusers do, he isolated me from the rest of the family. He did not keep in contact with my mom’s side, and his side of the family did not know me and my brothers well. My dad also kept us in the house alot.
My youngest memories are at least age 5ish, and him having me sleep with him away from my crib (hmm crib, maybe it was younger than 5)… (details edited by blogger) and went on to about middle school where it started happening less. I always felt dirty afterwards, but in a strange way, up to that point it become my “normal.” During that time, my two cousins told me about him (my dad)…(edited by blogger) and I confronted him and he denied it. Then I got the courage to tell him I wanted to stop, and his comment was something along the lines of “the door will always be open.” He says he did it because it was a tradition, and all fathers did this with their daughters before passing them to their husbands. I get so ANGRY thinking about the manipulation! He has a Narcissitic Personality Disorder and everyone thinks he is so friendly, handsome and very educated, that you would’ve never thought that he would get off on little girls. We found years later that he even briefly molested my older sister, but when my brother and sister asked me about it I lied and acted like I never went through it…I cant believe I did that! But in hindsight, I was so manipulated. My dad would always tell me that ‘he doesnt need me, I need him’ and ‘no one would take care of me like him..that no one in the family cared about us’ which seemed true. Or the few who did take interest was more into my brothers. So in my mind, if I told and he went to jail, I didnt think anybody would take care of me. We were not close to any family, and I thought I would go into adoption, which couldve been even worse.
I remember in high school counting the days till graduation so that I could move out. His temper got worse and worse over the years, as he realized he was having less and less control over me. He even told me that he did not want me to have friends, which he later denied saying. High school ended and I moved out to dorm- went back one summer. My room was not ready so I slept in his bed, to wake up…(edited by blogger)…I havent really been back since. Why did I even get in his bed you ask? Because it was years later, and I thought that was over and that I had a parent back. Its confusing when the only parent u have is doing this to u. Strangely enough i still looked at him as my dad and if he could just stop doing that, he would be a pretty descent father. But that showed me that he will always look at me as a sex object- as ive discovered he is a womanizer anyway.
I always think about what life wouldve been like if my mom was alive. Would she have believed me? I literally read all of this stories here, and a lot of the moms did not, which breaks my heart. I had no one to turn to. And now, he torments me further by talking crap about me to my family, and getting their sympathy because I do not talk to him anymore. So it is like “aw poor man, y dont u go visit ur father.” If only they knew. I almost feel like I kept the secret because my brother would be so hurt that I didnt tell him the truth. Everyone’s world would be turned upside down because he is such a good actor. Now he lives alone and has one failed relationship after another. ……Before falling pregnant I already dealt with depression and anxiety. I always had different bf’s, jobs, friends and living situations. but after finding i was pregnant, so many emotions arose- depression, extreme anxiety, and borderline personality disorder. It got so much that I terminated the pregnancy of my little girl..(edited by blogger to avoid triggering other readers).
He reached out to me recently, and I got inspiration to write him a letter based off a letter that I found after googling ‘letter to father who molested you.’ I am hoping that it helps…Im almost hoping he dies from the pain of finally being confronted about his evil ways that only I seem to know the scope of. I’m sorry this is long, but I have never spoken about this. Im not looking for attention, or trying to “one up” anyone, I just want peace like all of u.
(Paragraph edited by blogger to avoid triggering other readers.)
Thank you all for listening. This feels great.
Hi Anonymous,
I am sorry that this happened to you. No person should ever have to endure sexual assault. You are correct that an abuser can isolate the child, so they have nowhere to go, they can also do the opposite. The isolation of victims happens frequently when it comes to domestic violence.
A child may normalize the abuse in order to cope with it especially because your dad was the only parent who you had to take care of you. If this is a tradition in your dad’s family, then you dad and his family are full of pedophiles. And it is important to note that woman can be pedophiles also, so his family could be full of pedophiles of both genders or he could have been lying and made the whole thing up about dads teaching their daughters… Yes, pedophiles are very manipulative and that is awful. He told you that he wanted to continue to be a pedophile with you, how terrible. It’s never too late to talk with your brother and sister about the abuse that you endured, it would probably be very validating to them to hear you tell them that he molested you also. It would help your sister also to know that she was not alone and your dad may or may not have also molested your brother. Your dad sounds very manipulative, there may have been people who cared about you, that he did not want you to know about so that he could have control over you.
Perpetrators also lie and say that they have not said things that they have said. They also (from their own childhood abuse) may be so torn apart that they have developed different personalities and may actually not remember saying certain things because it was a different personality who said it. A decent father does not look at his child as a sex object, a decent father does not rape his own child or rape anyone, so he can never be a decent dad, because sexual assault changes that, you cannot take that away from him, even though I am pretty sure that your inner child would desperately want a dad, it cannot be him. But you can learn to parent yourself. A post that has some ideas on self parenting that I wrote is at http://healingfromsexualabuse.com/ideas-for-healing-from-abuse/surviving-mothers-day-and-the-holidays/ though it was written for mother’s day, it still has self parenting ideas.
It is time to separate yourself from your family that is not supportive of you. It is your dad’s secret to keep, it is not your secret to keep at all. I really think that both your brother and sister will feel validated when you tell them the truth, and explain that you dad had control of you then and you were scared that you would have no one to take care of you if you told the truth. It is time to stop keeping your dad’s secret. When you tell the truth you will find out who in your family are good people (those who support you) and who in your family are pro-pedophiles (those who support your dad). You need to stay away from and cut ties with people who do not support you, even if they are in your family, what type of person supports a little child being raped by their own dad no less. Since your dad raped you, people’s worlds need to be turned upside down and RUN from any person who supports your dad, or tells you to forgive and forget, or that you are making it up. If your family gets torn apart, it is your dads fault for raping you, and NOT your fault for telling.
When you heal, there will be a time that you will intuitively know which people, men and woman that you can trust with a child and which ones you cannot trust.
Pedophiles rarely feel bad for what they have done. If he had reached out saying I am horrified that I hurt you as a child, I am getting help and healing from being a sexual predator because no child should ever have had to endure what you did your entire childhood with me. I am so sorry. I will pay for all of the therapy that you need to heal and you living expenses… then maybe there would be a chance but it does not sound like that is what his “reaching out was”.
It is time for you to heal from the abuse. A great first step is to call 800-656-HOPE 24/7 and see if you can get help making a plan to heal yourself from the abuse. If the person that you speak with is not helpful, hang up and try again later. The hotline should also be able to refer you to free counselling in your area. Even if the counselling is free you want to listen to your intuition to see if the person you are working with has the tools to help you. If you have a trusted friend that can also be helpful. When you tell your sister the truth, she may become an ally in your healing process. If she has done a bunch of healing from the abuse and is in a good place, then she may even be able to recommend a good therapist. If the hotline is repeatedly not helpful you can go to centers.rainn.org and try a hotline listed there that is not your local hotline. (You may want to avoid telling them where you are located because some hotlines only help local people.) You can heal and have a great life if you take action. It is great that you reached out and wrote your story, now it could be great to reach out by phone or in person to get the help you need to heal.
I’m also a victim of sexual abuse by my brother who was ten yrs older than me….it started when i was three ,so i was told by my mother but nothing was done about it . It continued on and off until i was 13 ,when it temporarily stopped because my family moved to another country and left him behind ……and then he moved to where we were living and it started again ….. i don’t remember my childhood, just bits and pieces ……when i was nine my brother got me drunk , i don’t know what happened that night …..i have some memories of walking into my brothers room but no memory of what happened next . He used to tell me that i was the most beautiful girl in the world and that if i wasn’t his sister he would marry me …..he also made me pretend that i was his girlfriend ….i started running away from home when i was fifteen yrs old and didn’t know why….. i also started abusing drugs for most of my adult life , all the while constantly hearing that i could be so successful if only i tried……..i left home when i was seventeen and went back to the country of my birth, and it was only until that point that memories started coming to me as i realized what had happened to me was really wrong but at the same time i thought i was going crazy. I was in and out of abusive relationships, a victim of rape although that really hasn’t phased me, it was like it was nothing to begin with …if that makes any sense. I finally told a close friend and my older sister and my sister told me that my mom caught my brother doing something to me when i was three ….but it didn’t end there ….years later i confronted my mom and she had no clue about the prolonged abuse by my brother ….. she put the blame on my father, for he had emotionally and physically abused all of us ….especially my brother . I confronted my brother as well through a letter and he wrote back saying please don’t wipe me off the face of the universe and to forgive him……i wanted to so i could let go of the hate . Im 36 now and i thought i had dealt with this all but it seems i haven’t …… i want to heal i just don’t know how …… i have two kids and one on the way …i have finally managed to actually fall in love for the first time to the most patient and loving man and i feel he deserves to have all of me and until i fully heal i don’t feel like a whole person . Thanks for listening and look forward to your response .
Hi Sadgirl,
I am so sorry to hear what happened to you, that is not ok. When your mother told you about the abuse, was she apologetic? Did she do anything to help you to heal from the abuse or to stop it? A real mother and father should be horrified that their children have been sexually assaulted, but unfortunately, there are a bunch of parents that do not act as real parents should and protect their children. I say children, because if your brother was sexually assaulting you someone must have assaulted him. (This does not forgive your brother for what he did, it is horrific bur he had to have been sexualized to sexually assault a three year old.) And the other question that needs to be asked is if the person who assaulted your brother also had access to assault you?
It is not unusual for an abuse survivor to have big pieces of their childhood forgotten. When the traumatized child forgets the abuse or pushes away the emotions of the abuse, other memories and emotions from other times can also be forgotten and/or numbed. If you do want to start remembering, you can try reading my post “What to Do When You Feel Triggered” at http://healingfromsexualabuse.com/ideas-for-healing-from-abuse/what-to-do-when-you-feel-triggered/ It also has other tools to help you deal with emotions from the past popping up in the present.
Getting you drunk, pretending you were his girlfriend, all to validate his sick sexual attraction to little girls, is not ok.
It is great that you did what you unconsciously felt you needed to do as a teenager by running away from home. It is not unusual that distancing yourself from the abuser(s) can help allow memories to come up so that they can detox. We are also unfortunately taught that when we feel extreme emotions or they come out when it is not socially acceptable, that we are crazy. We are not crazy, we are human and repressed emotions and memories need to come out so that we can stop holding them inside and heal. I believe that the rape did not feel like it fazed you because you were numb. It is possible that you stuffed the emotions of that rape the same place you stuffed the emotions from your childhood rapes.
Shame on your mother for minimizing the abuse and blaming your father for it, that is not ok at all. Once your mother caught your brother assaulting you, she should have taken immediate action to get help for both of you. It is the fault of both your mother and father (if he lived with you) that the abuse continued.
Your brother asking for forgiveness is kind of minimizing what he did to you. He is asking for something else from you when he is the person who should be saying that he is so sorry, what he did to you has tormented him. He should also be telling you what he has done to get help, ask you what he can do to help you to heal. He has no right to ask anything from you except “What can I do to make amends for the horrible things I did to you?” That is all he should be asking from you. You might also want to read my post “Do I Need To Forgive to Heal” at http://healingfromsexualabuse.com/ideas-for-healing-from-abuse/do-i-need-to-forgive-to-heal-from-abuse/ You do NOT need to forgive him to heal, but you do need to be gentle with yourself for all of the things that you did to yourself as not the healthiest coping mechanisms.
It is awesome that you have a loving spouse and a family. You can heal from the abuse, you just need to take action. The first thing that I recommend that you do is to interview social workers and/or specialists who can help you to heal from the abuse. Look for a person who has had success with helping other survivors of abuse to heal. And hopefully the healing is neither drug nor herb based but instead based on taking actions that will help you to heal. Abuse survivors do not have chemical imbalance (chemical imbalance is yet to be scientifically proven) but they do carry trauma and that trauma needs to be released and healed. I was not able to find a hotline in your country but there may be one. You may also want to look to find people who have done well healing from the war traumas in your country and see who helped them to heal. You can also call a rape crisis line anywhere in the world, numbers for rape crisis hotlines can be found at centers.rainn.org (US) and http://rainn.org/get-help/sexual-assault-and-rape-international-resources (International many numbers on this list are not updated), you can do this if you are feeling triggered and need instant help. Or if you want to make a plan for you to heal the abuse. Not every person that you speak with may be helpful, so if they are not helpful, hang up and try again later or try another hotline. (You do not need to tell them where you are located, if the person is helpful, because some hotlines only want to help people who are local.) When reaching out for help, always listen to your intuition.
You can heal, keep taking action to heal and even if you get frustrated, never give up. Everyone can heal and live a great life.
Thank you for your time Amy …. your blogs are very helpful , and i will keep in touch with any progress i have made . My brother just recently wanted to come and visit my mom and dad ,not to mention that my family and i had just recently moved in with my parentsand he hadn’t been here in ten yrs but all of a sudden he wants to come visit …. and my mom said it was ok and then we had a big arguement and i told her that just because dad treated my brother poorly its no excuse for him to have done that to me and that its not ok that he comes and visits …… and he said he wasn’t going to speak to my mom again but for once my mom had my back albeit a little late …. she told me recently that she was also abused as a little girl …… i still feel helpless but i have a little bit of light at the end of the tunnel …..i also feel ostrecized from my family and extended family as if they don’t take what im going through seriously ….thanks for listening Amy
You’re mother not taking your abuse seriously is not ok and a way of minimizing her own abuse but still not ok. And it is unacceptable for your brother who assaulted you to come and visit, the answer is absolutely not. I will write more in the next few days.
Hi Sadgirl,
You’re mother not taking your abuse seriously is not ok and a way of minimizing her own abuse but still not ok. And it is unacceptable for your brother who assaulted you to come and visit, the answer is absolutely not. I will write more in the next few days.
Your children will be at risk for sexual assault no matter what their genders are from your brother. There still is the unanswered question of who assaulted your brother and do they have access to your children also. You can look into staying at a safe-house with your kids when your brother comes to visit. He does not deserve not even a minute with you and you must keep him away from your kids, not even a second to see them.
Your family and extended family are siding with a pedophile, if that is the kind of people they are, then them ostracizing you is not really a bad thing. A healthy family would take this extremely seriously and they would rally around you seeing how could they help you to heal. It would be like this supportive army and the only purpose f this army was to help you to heal from all of this abuse. You care about yourself and your children and those people minimize sexual assault.
When you feel alone call a hotline, anytime, day or night. They are there to be on your side and help you to heal and make good plans. They can be the army to help you to heal that your family was not. Remember though if you happen to get a person on the hotline that is not helpful hang up and try again later or try another hotline (there are hundreds in the US). DO NOT give up until you get the help you need.
I was sexually abused by my step-father from the age of 4 till I was 10. He stopped because I told my mother, yet to this day I believe she knew. When a door closed and noone….. You can guess. I met my real dad at 10. It was hard bonding. Today he doesn’t want anything to do with me or my children. I was blamed by the extended family for “causing trouble”. My mum stayed with that creep until he died in front of my sisters (his children). Mum moved overseas and I haven’t spoken to her in 3 years (even longer story). Many may not understand or willing to even try. Yes I have done thing I now understand why I did them. I still struggle with my weight. I grow stronger everyday. I may not have parents or one who protected me in the past but I have true guidance and acceptance with a handful of people. I am truly blessed. I will continue to fight no only to be truly happy but to make sure the cycle does not continue for them. Find the strength, listen and not judge. We can make it!
Hi B,
You sound very strong and it is great that you stood up for what you believed in. If your dad does not want to have anything to do with you or your children, then he is saving you the trouble of figuring out that he is not a good person for either you or your children to be around. An extended family that blames the victim of incest for telling the truth is a very sick extended family. You do not need to be around a pro-pedophile extended family and your children will not be safe around people who support the perpetrator and blame the victim.
You may also want to read my post “Surviving Mother’s Day and Other Holidays” at http://healingfromsexualabuse.com/ideas-for-healing-from-abuse/surviving-mothers-day-and-the-holidays/ It has ideas on self parenting and self care when you did not have real parents. (A real parent is someone who is loving and protects their children.)
Have you tried calling the Perth Sexual Assault Resource Centre hotline at 9340 1828? It is a 24/7 hotline and could be another resource to help you in healing. They may also have free counselling to help you to fully heal. As always, listen to your intuition, if the person on the hotline is helpful, that is great but if not hand up and try again later or try any hotline at centers.rainn.org
It is great that you are ending the cycle of abuse in your family. Keep doing the healing you need to do and feel free to write back with any questions or any updates.
I am only 15 and probably the hardest kid anyone has had to deal with, I have been in many schools and now am in a very successful one which Im findinv very hard to stay in, I’ve had mentoring for 6 months then counselling for a year and at Christmas I will start with an arts therapist, I am still uncontrollable in everyday I take class A drugs most weekends and seem to go raving a lot and mess up in school, anyway here’s what my story is ; for years I was just a crazy kid but incredibly difficult ,around a year ago I had flashbacks and memories from my childhood, I was sexually abused by my grandfather from as young as I can remember up until the age of 5…(edited by blogger) I am now even unsure of what exactly happened and how bad it was because I can’t think back that far which makes me feel ill. Years later me becoming a goodlooking teen did not help in any sense, I lost my virginity to the hottest guy at school who mentaly held me on edge for 6 months then carried on having casual sex with quite a few people I guess I’ve never really been able to say no, Ive also had someone slap me and spit on me during intamacy. I started recording the people I’ve slept with who why where, it diddnt help as it distressed me taking it all in at once also most if these boys are maybe 4 years older than me not knowing about my age. My mother is great and has a incredibly high up job in therapy but I find it difficult discussing it as it was her dad and also humiliating for me. I don’t see my dad much but I can see him when I want , I see him maybe every 3 weeks, I would never imagine discussing any of this with him and he is remarried. I am also very disturbed because in the last month I have had 2 sexual dreams relating to my very very close family members which makes me feel ill, I am begging anyone to send me some advice or help please.
Hi,
I am sorry to hear about the abuse that you endured, it is not ok. What is hard for me to read is that you were labeled as a hard kid to deal with rather than people looking for what really is going on with you. Your mother who is a trained therapist should have noticed signs that something was wrong, abused children always show signs of being abused. Your actions were screaming out for help, not being bad. Pedophiles rarely just start becoming perpetrators when they become grandparents, what usually happens is that they were abused and instead of reaching out for help and working on healing from the abuse like you are, they decide to victimize others. I believe that most people who are victimized, even if they do not get help, will not become perpetrators like your grandfather, but all perpetrators were victimized. (I have yet to see an exception when it comes to perpetrators, though some will not admit their victimization or minimize it.) There is a huge chance that your grandfather also molested your mother. She may or may not remember it, as you have discovered, traumatic memories can be repressed as a way to cope with them.
If you want to remember more memories and deal with the feelings that are overwhelming in your life, you may want to read my post “What To Do When You Feel Triggered” at http://healingfromsexualabuse.com/ideas-for-healing-from-abuse/what-to-do-when-you-feel-triggered/ This post gives ideas on how to identify emotions that come up in the present but are from the past and how to help and heal the emotions. You can also use the exercise to identify when you want to act out sexually and see if there is an underlying feeling there rather than just wanting to be intimate. You can ask yourself, what feeling go through your head before you decide to be casually intimate and ask yourself, what do you really feel emotionally in the moment that you are looking for the casual experience. Then take a moment and maybe even get some pen and paper out and ask yourself, if something triggered you’re looking for this casual experience and what were times in the past where you felt this triggered. Then write whatever comes into your mind down, even if it does not appear to make any sense or sounds ridiculous. Then keep asking yourself “What else?’ And when you feel you have nothing left to write, take a moment breath and slowly read what you wrote to yourself. This exercise can help detox stuck emotions and answer some questions about what you are really experiencing.
Your being a “crazy kid” was one of the signs that you were being abused, though not every “crazy kid” was abused. Also acting out sexually can be a huge sign that you were sexually assaulted also, though not every person who acts out sexually has been sexually assaulted but it is a sign that something is wrong, especially if you were very young when you started to do that. Tolerating abusive relationships are not good either but it is great that you only allowed that boyfriend in your life for 6 months, that shows your strength. Many people stay in abusive relationships forever.
I am sorry to hear that someone slapped and spit on you, that is not at all ok.
You have to keep telling yourself that no matter what you did, such as sleeping with a bunch of people or “acting out” the truth is that you were unconsciously telling the story of your abuse. Even doing the Class A drugs to numb out the pain from the abuse, is a way of telling that you were abused. Tons of survivors do the exact same thing. You are not bad and you are far from alone. Do not blame yourself for your dreams, they could be trying to tell you something. When I was trying to figure out why I felt like I was molested and who did it to me, I went to a horrible hypnotherapist (some are great but she was awful). I told her that I was trying to figure out who molested me. So she had me picture a blank screen and ask what I saw. I told her that I saw myself having sex with my dad. I told her I was horrified, how could I be so sick and instead of her validating me that I was not sick and what I saw could be there for a reason, she said, “We can stop if you want.” So I left feeling very sick, thinking how could I have thought of such a sick thing. It turns out that my dad did rape me repeatedly but this situation set my healing way back by making me feel sick.
There is nothing wrong with you, you were abused and you are reaching out for help. From your story, you sound like a great person, who is reacting to terrible abuse. I believe that you can heal. First thing is that you need to check in with yourself to see if you are getting the help that you need from your therapist. Are they helping you to heal, or not. Are they nice but instead of asking you what you need, try to get you to do what they want you to do. Ask your intuition. Also are they labelling you, which is rarely helpful and usually leads to be prescribed drugs or herbs to cover up the symptoms but not get to the root of the problem. And those drugs and herbs can cause all sorts of other problems. If you are on prescription drugs and want to go off (they have terrible side effects) it is important to only do that very slowly and with the supervision of an excellent doctor or alternative healthcare practitioner, because withdrawals can look and feel worse than the drug side effects before withdrawing. Sometimes, though an excellent alternative healthcare provider can help you to detox with less symptoms.
Have you told your therapist about the abuse or do you not feel safe to do that? If you have told her, what was her reaction? Anyone you tell should believe you and be supportive of you, no one should minimize your experience or say that you must be making it up. If they do that they are at the very least protecting a pedophile. That includes if you tell anyone in your family. Though it really is your mother’s job to make sure that you never see your grandfather again, I would do everything not to ever see him again, that will help your healing and remembering and detoxing the trauma out of your body.
If you feel that your therapist is helping you, great, keep working with them, but if you feel not you are not getting better, it is time to look else. remember, you can totally heal, so it’s your job to find a therapist that also believes that and has the tools to help you to detox from the trauma and live a great life. Treat yourself well. If you do choose to tell your mom and she is supportive that is awesome but if for any reason, she does not want to believe you or minimizes your experience, that is a very bad sign that your mother is more protective of a perpetrator than her daughter. It does NOT matter that it is her dad. Loving mothers will protect their children from anyone, including their own dad.
Another resource, even if you like your therapist, is you can reach out to is the http://www.rapecrisis.org.uk/ they have a hotline 0808-802-9999 which only operates 12 – 2:30pm and 7 – 9:30pm. If you want to call someone any other time you can go to centers.rainn.org and look up any hotline in the United States, almost all of them here are 24/7. If the person on any hotline is helpful, great, but if you are not getting the help you need, even if they are nice, hang up and try again later. People on the hotline work different shifts or try another hotline. Even if you have to make a ton of calls to get a helpful person, DO NOT give up. There should be free counselling for you in England. But again only work with a person that you feel is helping you. You can ask your intuition, if the person is a good person for you to work with.
Because you are under 18, you may want to remain anonymous because some people on some hotlines are mandatory reporters. If you can call from Skype with an anonymous number, that can help. Other people are not mandatory reporters, so you can play it by ear. Sometimes on the exact same hotline one person will feel the need to report, while the another person that you talk with will not. You can also leave out your age, if you do not want them to make a report about your grandfather. But the most important thing is for you to get helpful help, so that you can heal and have a great life.
Feel free to write back with any questions or updates.
Hi,
My main abuser was my father, from what I can remember it started around the age of 4 or 5 I believe, but nothing big he told me to…(edited by blogger), I told my mom for some reason and she ask my dad in a joking way and he said I didn’t do anything to that girl. When I was in first grade my dad abused me again…(edited by blogger) I just remember him telling me to wake my sister up and go get in my bed and don’t tell my mom, the next day I went to school and told my teacher, I went home and told my mom what happen, and she smiled, later that night I heard my dad yelling and saying he didn’t touch me, people had him removed from the home but no charges were filed, his family attack me verbal saying there brother didn’t touch me, my dad left and I didn’t see him again until I was in fourth grade, my mom found him and they got back together, when I got in middle school I started flirting with my dad to get attention and little items, one day I became angry at my father and in front of all my siblings and mom I yelled at him on how he molested me as a child he yelled back that he didn’t and later that day he moved out, my mom continue to have a relationship with my dad outside of the house and my siblings and I would often still visit as though nothing happen.
When I turn 17 I had another experience happen to me it was horrible terrifying I thought I was dying, I started screaming and crying that I was dying and going to hell. I then fainted and when I came to I ended up in a mental hospital diagnose with “schizophrenia” I lived in such fear of that terrible event happening to me for years afraid to sleep alone shower alone, afraid of the dark, and it did, I was with my dad one day and he had started smoking weed, and I tried to smoke the weed with him as well and I had another attack thinking I was dying and going to hell during the attack all kinds of thoughts came to my head fear of being trapped in a room with my dad and me begging for his forgiveness, that night I tried to run into traffic to get hit by a car thinking that GOD wanted me to kill myself for all the wrongs I did, I again I got sent off to a mental hospital were they again diagnose me with “Schizophrenia”.
I again lived in fear of a scary attack like that happening to me again, a few years later I got married to a drug addict abuser unknowingly who I had children with after I had my last child I began getting attacks every day they were so scary, I also starting remember other things my dad had done to me that I had forgot about, I was up late one night because I couldn’t sleep due to being afraid of attack of fear at night that I got on the internet an came across a young lady who had some of the same system of fear attacks I had over the years and her doctor called them Panic attacks, the next day I went myself to a local Mental Health and there I was diagnose with Panic attack disorder, and Manic Depression, Schizophrenia was ruled out, the medicine did wonders it help me regain my life back, but today I’m here dealing with depression so strongly I have no energy I really can’t deal with my kids I’m thankful for the help of my family helping in that area, and my mind wonders what all did my brain block of what my father did to me, I wonder If I could remember more would I heal better if I could recover lost memories, my mom and I don’t have the best relationship, she calls me crazy tells people I’m on medication, I subjected family therapy just so my mom can understand she has to take responsibility in why my mind is how it is, I don’t believe I was born like this I wish my mom could just get it. I also still see my father we still all just act as if nothing happen.
Hi Joey,
I am so sorry to hear that this happened to you. You never really had a family, mother and dad because those are the people who are suppose to protect you but instead your dad assaulted you and your mother did not care enough to protect you from his sexual assaults. Any woman who will not believe her child has been sexually assaulted and instead date the rapist, is a sick person.
Your panic attacks are very likely to be the panic that you were not allowed to feel as a little girl, trying to come up, be heard and detox out of your body. It can feel like what you felt when you were 17. Unfortunately, the drugs that you are taking can not only stuff back down the feelings that are trying to be heard and detox from the body, but all anti-depressants and anti-psychotics on the market, also have the side affects of depression and anxiety, not to mention liver damage and sometimes brain damage (Tardive dyskinesia). The drugs that you are taking can also be causing your lack of energy also. You may want to get a list of side effects from your pharmacist. The drugs are toxic. A great article about these drugs and people healing from the placebo is at http://www.motherjones.com/politics/2003/11/it-prozac-or-placebo
But a person detoxing from these drugs can also go through withdrawals which look like chemical imbalance but is actually the body detoxing from these toxic drugs. If you do decide to detox from these drugs it is very important to taper off the drugs very slowly and only under the supervision of a qualified doctor or excellent alternative health care practitioner. Also I do not recommend taking things such as St. John’s Wort or Valerian Root because it is time to help your body to detox from the trauma and not stuff the feelings back down. Also if you want to remember it is best to to it drug free. A post that I have that may help with getting your memories back is at http://healingfromsexualabuse.com/ideas-for-healing-from-abuse/what-to-do-when-you-feel-triggered/ (I would recommend first working on finding supportive help and detoxing from the drugs before doing it because the drug’s side effects are extreme emotions too and it will be hard to tell the difference between repressed emotions and drug side effect emotions.) But again do not attempt to withdraw from the drugs without excellent supervision.
That being said, I recommend finding an excellent social worker, who supports your process to heal and detox the traumatic emotions. They can be extremely hard to find. Although the mental health clinic can be very affordable, if they are not helping you to take steps to heal and instead only labelling you with mental disorders and giving you drugs, it may be time to look elsewhere for help. I would try calling 1-800-656-HOPE and talk with the volunteers who are suppose to be there to help. Some are helpful and others are not helpful at all. If the person is helpful, then keep talking with them, if not hang up and try again later. If that’s not helpful, repeatedly, then go to centers.rainn.org keep reaching out until you get helpful help. Do not be discouraged, even if a person at a hotline is mean (it’s happened to me) that is what the disconnect button is for. On the exact same hotline, you can have very helpful and not at all helpful people. Many rape crisis centers also have free counselling but again listen to your intuition and see if the person is really helping you with the core issues. An excellent therapist should never blame you for your victimization or label you with mental problems, they should instead be able to help you with getting to the core issues and giving you tools (not drugs) to heal.
There is a good chance that unfortunately your mother will never get it, she probably does not want to. (It may have happened to her and she does not want to deal with it and it most likely happened to your dad as well.) She was willing to continue to date your dad after all of the evidence that he assaulted you. But instead you can work on taking care of you. You can become the mom and dad to yourself that you never had. Having children can trigger memories of abuse, that is normal. Everything that you are feeling is normal, from a child who was as abused as you were. “Experts” may say that the trauma caused permanent chemical imbalance but there are no independent studies that even prove chemical imbalance, let alone chemical imbalance from trauma, an interesting article about this is at http://www.anxietycentre.com/downloads/Chemical-Imbalance-Theory-is-False.pdf
You were not born with this. I cannot see any reason to be around either your mother or your dad, because your mom sounds mean and your dad is a pedophile. I would also make absolutely sure that your children are NEVER around them either. Your mom, their grandmother thinks that pedophilia is acceptable and your dad is a pedophile, it is time to protect your children from them, if you have not already done so. Also pedophiles sometimes molest both girls and boys so do not think if you have a girl she would be safe around your dad (the pedophile) and mom (the pedophile supporter).
You can heal and have a great life but you must take steps to reach out and find real help and do NOT give up even if it takes tons of phone calls to get real help, you can do it. The hotlines are also 24/7. Feel free to write back with any updates or questions.
Hi Joey,
I was so saddened to read your story…you have had such a rough road…I was also abused by my father from infancy through my early teenage years…it was so hard for me as well…he was someone i should have been able to trust and like you there was a double sense of abandonment since my mother did nothing to defend me…I just wanted you to know you are not alone…there are people who care what happens to you and in no way are you crazy…such trauma as a little kid can make you “feel” crazy…remember how small and vulnerable you were…you have no blame for what happened to you.. you were the victim here…I know there are times I also doubt myself, you know, how could my father have really been so awful to me…but trust yourself, trust your memories you know what’s right and real…I have found a really fine therapist and it has been a blessing to me…I am also a member of RAINN ( rape, abuse, incest national network ) and they have a 24 hour online hotline…the people there are well trained and very caring…check them out if you want someone to “talk to” and they should be able to recommend places to give you further care…please don’t give up on yourself…there are many people who understand and care about you…I know how hard it is to trust again, others and even yourself , but you are worth it….you can make it…please, you take care of yourself,..
Joseph
Hi I was sexually assaulted by my father from a very young age to 9/12 years old. I have six sister who all state that he did it to them also. I found this site and am thankful that it is a safe place to express the outrage the incest has done to my life. I can never seem to get over the abuse. I have been through at lest 15 years of therapy, I’ve tried writing a book about the abuse, I’ve tried everything in my power to help me get over it and still I’m not. I keep redoing the same things and can’t seem to get my life on track. I want to have this abuse to stop controlling my life. Any help will help thanks. thank you
Hi Rick,
I am sorry to hear what you went through, no child should ever have to go through such an awful thing. Has the therapy been helpful, because if not or it is not helping you to heal from the core issues, it may be time to try and find another specialist or therapist who can help you to totally heal. Have you tried calling the 800-656-HOPE hotline when you feel triggered. The people who are there can either be extremely helpful or not in the least bit helpful and everywhere in between, but it is a good place to start. If a person is helpful, then you can write down their name and see if they are working when you need help or call because you feel triggered. There is also a good chance that the people on the hotline may have resources for free counselling to help to heal from sexual assault and also other specialists that deal especially with healing from the abuse. Remember that just because a person is a specialist does not mean that they are a good therapists for you, listen to your intuition and see if the person that you are talking with actually has the tools that will help you to heal and live a good life. You may also want to see if the post that I wrote “What To Do When You Feel Triggered” at http://healingfromsexualabuse.com/ideas-for-healing-from-abuse/what-to-do-when-you-feel-triggered/ is helpful for you when you get triggered. Keep looking for a person or people that can help you to fully heal and do not stop making the phone calls and meeting with specialists until you find them. Interview the specialists to see if they can really help. Unfortunately there are a ton of not very helpful specialists, so do not stop until you find the right person or people for you to work with.
You can live a fun and happy life, even though it can take some time to heal but as you are healing things will get better.
Dear Rick,
I an not sure if you are uk based? here in the uk there is a special centre with initial free help dedicated to make survivors of abuse called Survivors UK (Holborn, London )
Wherever you are, it’s important to see a specialist in S abuse. You need someone with a huge amount of compassion who is very very experienced.
I came from a background of abuse am still healing my abuse and now realising I may of also suffered S abuse. I went to an abuse specialist very compassionate and very exp and she also did a type of therapy/help called body work where I was able to release trauma and feelings from my body through her mirroring me and talking to me with cushions and other things so I could vent my rage and pain etc.
This all helped hugely and in over a year an a bit I have come HUGElY far. you need the right person and the right support
I am a survivor of incest by my father. Throughout college, I repressed the memories of him…(doing this to [edited by blogger]) me and other stuff that went on throughout my childhood. I didn’t live at home throughout college and I never really thought of what happened until I graduated (in May) and moved back home. I will never really understand how I didn’t think of these memories until now. i am living with my mother and father (and sister) at home now. i believe she was also sexually abused, but i will never have the courage to talk to her about what happened. i was also sexually assaulted in college but for some reason that doesn’t get to me as much as the incest does lately. everyday i feel so angry and hopeless. living with my father is a constant reminder of what he did to me. i could never talk to my mom about it. i doubt she would even believe me even though DCYF took me and my sister out of school one day to discuss the issue after i had told a therapist i was seeing at the time. that day i denied to the DCYF social worker everything that i had told my counselor. I have still yet to tell anyone what happened except one of my closest friends and my boyfriend, but they don’t really help me with this situation. I am not sure if my boyfriend truly understands how awful it is. I suffer from anxiety and depression. some days i feel extremely hopeless. …(sometimes when I am [edited by blogger]) with my boyfriend, the memories of the incest take over my head. is that normal? i dont know what to do anymore. i cant move out of my house until i can afford to, when i am done with grad school. i still feel very controlled by my father in different ways.. my entire life is being affected by this. i cant sleep anymore, sometimes i have nightmares of what he did to me. what is even more weird is the fact i seem to be remembering more and more stuff that happened overtime. Its weird that these memories did not come back to me until recently, and sometimes i wish they never did.. i wish someone would understand the pain, and i want to not have these thoughts take over me anymore. i think about it almost everyday…
oh i forgot to mention too, that what is even worse about all of this is sometimes i feel sorry for my father, he is going to be 76 in the spring and i just feel bad for him. he doesn’t really have anyone. and i dont even know why i feel bad for him after what he did
Hi Cathleen,
It is a very common occurrence to have traumatic memories be repressed. Many Vietnam vets returned, having repressed their memories of the atrocities that they saw. Any traumatic memory can be repressed. An interesting article about how the brain represses memories is here http://news.stanford.edu/news/2004/january14/memory-114.html
There is a group, the False Memory Syndrome Foundation, that was started by two pro-pedophiles who were approached by two parents, where the father,accused of sexual assault, but their myth of false traumatic memory syndrome has repeatedly been disproven. Plus the founding of their foundation is pretty fishy. You can see an interview of the pro-pedophiles who helped the accused parents to found the False Memory Syndrome Foundation at http://nostatusquo.com/ACLU/NudistHallofShame/Underwager2.html
We are taught to feel sorry for perpetrators and it is fine to feel sorry for your dad, but it is because of the kind of person that he is that he most likely does not have any friends. He thought that it was ok to rape his daughter, that is not what a good or loving father does. It is not your responsibility to be your dad’s friend or even to be there for him. Had he been a caring and loving father and not raped you and took care of you, that is a different story but he was not. This is not to say that at times he may not have seemed loving but he showed who he really was when he raped his daughter or daughters.
I am also sorry to hear that you were put in the position, where instead of DCYF believing and researching more, you felt the only way to be ok at home was to cover up for your dad. It was DCYF’s responsibility to look further. And just because your father is 76, does not mean that he would not violate another girl (or possibly boy) if he had a chance. Pedophiles rarely stop violating children unless they want to stop and get help.
What did your mom say when DCYF got involved, or did she not know about it? If your friends and boyfriend do not want to help you with this situation, that is not a good sign. Sometimes in the healing process, survivors will release old friends and other relationships and replace their friends with really supportive friends. Sometimes also during the healing process, there may be a point where your friendship list will be empty. But it will fill up with truly caring and supportive friends and relationships as you heal.
Depression and anxiety are frequently symptoms of incest and sexual assault but as you heal from the abuse and release the emotions that got stuck inside during the trauma of the abuse, you should feel better and better. You may want to read my post “What to do When You Feel Triggered” at http://healingfromsexualabuse.com/ideas-for-healing-from-abuse/what-to-do-when-you-feel-triggered/ because feeling anxiety and depression can be those emotional memories screaming to be heard and can be triggered consciously or unconsciously. The post has tools that you can use that may help you to release those emotions stuck inside from the abuse.
As for a place to live that is safe, you can try to call 1-800-656-HOPE and tell them what you are going through right now. Incest is domestic violence, so you may be able to stay at a domestic violence shelter. Those shelters can be a very healing place, with great resources for helping you to heal from the abuse and get on your feet financially. The shelter that you call may or may not consider incest, domestic violence, it all depends on the person that you speak with and the shelter that is in your area. The hotline that you call, should be able to give you phone numbers to domestic violence shelters in your area. To be safe, I would ask them for a few that are located in your surrounding area, so that if one is not helpful, you can try another, if you speak with one out of your area, I would avoid giving them the information that you are out if the area. Also you can try to call and speak with another advocate at the same agency, if one is not helpful. It is not a safe or healthy situation to be living with a perpetrator and you need to emphasize that when you are speaking with the domestic violence shelter.
Other ideas on places to stay, would be get a grant or loan to stay in graduate housing or an apartment, see if there are RA positions for graduate students, see if you can find a part time job that comes with housing, be careful when it comes to working only in exchange for rent with no pay because those are usually really bad deals (meaning if you were to work at $10 per hour you might be paying a ton in rent with your time). Jobs that come with housing and pay can be apartment manager, bed and breakfasts, youth hostels and other jobs, so you can brainstorm. You may also qualify for temporary disability, while you heal from the abuse.
Frequently perpetrators are controlling in many ways, so feeling controlled by your dad is not unusual.
It is healthier to remember than to forget. Because the traumatic memories and emotions fester and cause ton of problems, including anxiety and depression. I concur with may experts who believe in staying away from antidepressants and antipsychotics because they cause all sorts of severe side effect, including what they are suppose to treat (anxiety and depression) liver damage, brain damage, etc, they also push back down the trauma that is coming up and trying to detox from your body. I also believe in staying away from things like St. John’s Wort, Valerian Root, etc because they also stuff the trauma back down, where it will once again scream to be heard. But if you are already taking antidepressants or antipsychotics, it is important that you have a professional doctor or alternative healthcare provider supervise your withdrawals from those drugs because withdrawing can have terrible side effects as well and must be done very slowly.
Know that although you are going through pain now, as you heal, the pain can go away. The hotline that I mentioned above should also have free resources to help you to heal. If you repeatedly call that hotline and do not feel helped, try calling any hotline at centers.rainn.org Again, I would avoid saying that you are not local. You have already taken a few great steps to healing, telling others and recognizing that they are not supportive and writing your story here to reach out for help. The next step is calling the 800-656-HOPE number and seeing if they can help you, to heal and get out of your house. Do not stop making calls until you get the help you need. Remember, healing is possible, you can also go up to the success story tab to read stories of survivors who are healing and know that you can heal too.
Hi Amy,
thank you for responding to me.
the first thing is that i feel there is no other choice right now to live at home with my father. no one in my family knows what happened to me, i have not talked about with my mom or sister. there is no way i could go to a domestic violence shelter without being questioned and i could not just leave my home right now as much as i wanted too. plus, i have none around where i live. my dad would stop paying for everything if i was to leave my house. right now the only thing he doesnt pay for is my gas and my tuition for grad school. he pays for my cell phone bill, car insurance, health insurance and all the other stuff which i would not be able to afford if i was to move out. i would be basically left on the streets if i was to leave..
i looked into every possible alternative to not living with my father… my school doesn’t offer graduate housing, neither can R.A’S be grad students. i could not afford an apartment because i cannot afford rent. i only received so much financial aid to cover my school tuition. i am currently a full time grad student working 2 part-time jobs and that basically takes care of my gas and money i am saving up to buy myself a new car since i am driving something that should not even be on the road right now :/
so basically i dont think i have other alternatives to leaving my house. i get so angry sometimes because i feel my boyfriend is very insensitive to my situation. he lives with his parents and moving in with him is not an option.. i do not think he will ever fully understand how terrible it is to live at my house and think of what happened every single day of my life.. the anger and depression i feel most days leaves me feeling hopeless and alone..
for your question about the DCYF situation.. my mom took it in a different direction.. she used it against my father. when i was a child, all my mom and dad did was fight, all the time. both physical and emotional abuse was included in their relationship. my mom cheated on my father and sometimes i feel like he took it out on me and my sister in the worst ways. anyways, back to the point. my mom ended up using it against my father in their fights. she would say stuff like “i have stuff against you, DCYF has you in their file” .. rather than actually concerned about the situation itself..
besides that my mom i feel would never really believe me. i told her once that i thought he did something to my sister because he was in the room with her for hours and she was crying and screaming but she always just said no your father wouldn’t do that. …but i never mentioned anything about me.
i wish i could get more support for this situation and i am so thankful for your support Amy. i even had a recent therapist tell me that my abuse was “something we shouldn’t discuss” until im out of my house, which makes me scream inside with anger because i just need someone to talk too and support me..
also thank you for explaining the part about repressing memories of abuse. it makes more sense now.
Hi Cathleen,
I know that it can feel like there is no other choice but there are frequently creative solutions. Part of the there is no choice might be the part of you that feels stuck but beyond that there could be a part of you that can be creative, so another possible question could be “if I made the decision to leave and to get all of my needs met, HOW could I do that?” It can feel like a very scary thing to think because since you were little, you had no choice. The first thing is to believe that you have options and then to figure out what you need to do to get what you need.
To figure out what you can do that feels nurturing to yourself. You can be the mother and father to yourself that you never had. There is always a way that is healthy for you but the scared little girl inside you still feels that there is not a way. Picture if a little girl, let’s say 7 years old came up to you and told you that her dad was doing yucky things to her, you would want to do everything in your power to help that little girl, you if you had any say in the situation would try to figure out whatever it took to get that girl away from her dad. You have an inner child inside of you that got frozen because of the abuse, you need to get her away from the perpetrator.
If you got let’s say one better paying flexible full time job (instead of your two part time jobs), such as an apartment manger, you could afford, what your dad is paying for now. Also you may very well be eligible for Medicaid under the new affordable care act (which is close to free) or to get government subsidies to help pay for your health coverage if you do not qualify for medicaid. They also say that you may be below the income limit, with allowable deductions, even if it appears that you may be over the income limit. There is always a way to get away from a perpetrator. You can also possibly apply for emergency housing or section 8 or other programs that could help you get out. You need to take this situation of living with a pedophile who raped you seriously.
If your boyfriend is not supportive, it may be time to consider if staying with him is healthy for you. Being around people like your boyfriend and dad keeps you in a victim situation. It perpetuates the victimization cycle for you. Being around those people helps you to stay depressed and angry. And shame on your mother for not believing and protecting you. Real moms protect their children and believe them. You need to get away from this bad situation. You need to believe it is possible. Call the 800-656-HOPE number and get help to make a plan. If the people you talk with are not helpful, keep calling there or another number from centers.rainn.org Even if the first 20 advocates that you speak with are not helpful, keep calling till you get help. DO NOT give up on yourself. Keep picturing that you are saving a little girl from being around a rapist because you are saving that little girl inside of you and you.
By your mother saying the DCYF stuff to your dad she was acknowledging that she knew he raped you and I am sorry to say, she did not care. She is no more of a real mom to you than your dad was but remember, you can learn to reparent yourself and take care of yourself.
If your therapist does not want you to talk about it until you leave the house and you need to talk about the abuse now, then maybe your therapist is not a good therapist for you now.
Be creative, do not say that you have no options but instead ask HOW can you get out, do something for work that is kind to yourself and take care of yourself. So call 800-656-HOPE and keep reaching out until you have a healthy plan. You can even take some time writing ideas of how to get out. There is a way out, you need to believe it and then brainstorm on how to get out.
Feel free to write any updates or questions.
I recently moved back home where a family members spouse tried to hit on me when I was a minor. I confronted her when it happened and she asked him to apologize and that was that even after he continued doing it. I was later told that he had done something similar. I only moved back in because I had nowhere else to go. I am an adult and I blame myself for even being here but I am not in a financial situation to live on my own. An incident happened about a month ago where I overheard him saying my name and doing things to himself, I wont say anymore because I am not supposed to on this site, but I have been weird ever since. My boyfriend keeps saying that he knows something is going on with me and I want to tell him but I don’t know what he will do, plus he is in a financial jam as well and we have been having our own issues as a couple. I only work on call. I have been filling out job applications, I am also setting up for selling jewelry. I have money saved but very little. I think I should probably tell him what is going on. He would probably be more angry if I didn’t tell him and kept telling him nothing was wrong. I’m not his responsibility and don’t want to feel like a burden. I recently graduated college and really want to be independent and out of this situation, but I don’t know how to tell him. Any advice?
Hi Mary,
That situation sounds really awful and scary. An apology means nothing if a person is continuing to be a predator. I would tell your boyfriend what is going on because he probably senses there is an issue. This situation shows once again how people who are sexual predators, continue to be predators unless they want to stop and get help. From your comment, it does not sound like he wants to stop being a sexual predator. If you tell your boyfriend and he truly cares about you, he will be supportive of you. The two of you may also be able to brainstorm about ideas of where you can move to that is safe. It is also possible that you may be able to go to a safe-house for domestic violence because being sexually assaulted when you were a child and sexualized now is domestic violence (some may domestic violence agencies may be willing to help, while others may not be willing to help).
Other thoughts, you may be able to work as a nanny or at a bed and breakfast, hotel, or even a resort type job that comes with lodging, even possibly a youth hostel. Be careful of jobs that are straight work exchange with no pay because I’ve found that frequently those jobs the employees wind up paying a ton with their time so if you were to figure it out at $10 per hour, you could be paying as much as $800 or more for a shared or run-down room.
Do not blame yourself for the financial situation that our are in, instead, try being gentle with yourself and brainstorm some ideas that might help you with your finances. You may also want to reach out and call the 800-656-HOPE, hotline to discuss your situation about the past sexual assault and also what currently happened. They may have ideas and resources or even vouchers for a place to stay. I would try to stay away from homeless shelters but domestic violence shelters are normally a lot safer and may even have resources to help you get back on your feet and earn money. As always when reaching out for help, listen to your intuition to see if the people you are talking with are supportive or not. If you do not feel supported hang up and try calling again later, volunteers switch shifts I think every 2 to 4 hours, so if you do not like the person you are speaking with, someone else will be there later or even try another hotline at centers.rainn.org
Feel free to write back with any questions or updates.
My younger brother recently opened up about being sexually abused by our brother from the age of 6-14. Both of my brothers are younger than me, but a 5 year difference between the two of them. My younger brother is now 27. As soon as he told me it drudged up all of these suppressed unclear memories for me. As a child I remember ‘playing’ pretend sex with my sister who is 3 years older than me. I don’t know how long is went on for, but I remember feeling dirty and yucky. I also have vague memories of such play with the older of the two brothers, who is 18 months younger than myself. I dont know how old i was, but I know that it probably ended before I was 12years old. I have jolted memories of my brother pressuring me into this sort of play, and at some point, i had put an end to it. My first reaction to my younger brothers admission was complete guilt. I kept asking myself, was it my fault that our brother abused him? I was the older one..I should have known better. Am I the abuser? I can’t look the older brother in the eye anymore, I am disgusted and I keep asking myself if he did this for so long to his brother, can he do it again or has he? Can he hurt my children or his own? Or now that he is married, are his sexual desires fullfilled? My younger brother confronted my parents a few years ago and my mother shed a tear, and my father nearly strangled him, warning him not to tell a soul. The older brother has always been a favorite of my father, being that we are a family of 7 girls and only two brothers. My younger brother has opened up to a handful of us girls, but we have all continued to keep it a secret, except for one sibling who is having major doubts about not confronting the abuser. She feels like we need to make sure we do everything in our power to ensure that his kids are safe from harm. Deep down I agree with her, but when it is your own family, its so hard!! If we dont confront him and tell him to get help, can he do it again?? How can he be so stable with a good job and family and live with such a secret?
Hi Mary,
I am very sorry to hear that that happened to you and your brothers. It is not unusual to suppress traumatic memories, it is a way that our bodies sometimes deal with trauma. It is not your fault that your brother was assaulted, it is the fault of the brother who did the assault. It was also your parent’s job to pick up on the signs of abuse happening in their own house. The questions also needs to be asked is who assaulted your brother. Children do not start to assault others unless they were assaulted. And did the person who assaulted your brother also have access to assault you?
Your father’s reaction to the assault is horrifying. It is an extremely unhealthy reaction. He was blaming the victim and telling him to keep it a secret. But it is not your brother who was the victim’s secret to keep. A healthy response from your dad would have been to feel horrible and sad for your brother who was the victim and ask what he could do to help him to heal. But instead your dad supported the perpetrator. Your dad does not sound like a healthy and caring person. He may be in other ways but when it comes to something as deep and as important as helping your child who was assaulted, he would prefer to blame the victim and keep the abuser safe.
Yes, your concern about your brother who was the abuser, assaulting other children is valid. Perpetrators rarely stop perpetrating unless they get help and want to stop. A good test to see if your brother has healed would be his response to being confronted about the abuse he committed. If he feels terrible and wants to do anything to make amends, that is a good sign, but if instead he denies it or says that your brother wanted it, that is a bad sign. There is a possibility however, that it could have also been traumatic to your older brother because of the abuse that he suffered and then he may not remember the abuse. Listen to your intuition.
Marriage does not stop an active pedophile, pedophile are attracted to children. I agree with your sister who feels it is important to protect other children from harm. Many pedophiles hold great jobs and are well respected in their communities, but the truth is that they still are pedophiles. Even if you confront him, he may still abuse other children but confronting him will make it harder for him to abuse children. Your brother who is the abuser may not even want to get help. He may be happy being an abuser, as sick as that sounds. It is hard to believe such horrible things can happen in your own family. It is very important that both you and your younger brother get help to heal.
You both may want to try the 800-656-hope hotline, though you each may want to contact them alone. The hotline should be anonymous and helpful, if you feel that you and/or your brother are getting the help and support you need then that is great, if not hang up and try calling again later. The advocates change shifts every few hours, if you still do not get the help you and/or your brother need try calling any other hotline at centers.rainn.org (if it sounds like they may not help you because you are out of the area, you do not need to give them where you are located at). If you are concerned about remaining anonymous, you may want to call from Skype with your caller ID turned off.
It shows your strength and the fact that you care that you wrote this. I encourage both you and your brother to take the next step and reach out for help, both you and your brother (the victim) can release the burden of holding onto the shame and the secret that belongs to your brother the abuser. You can even consider telling a trusted friend, every person whom you tell your story to should support you and your brother who was the victim, if they take sides with the perpetrator or want you to keep the secret, or put the past in the past then they too are supporting a pedophile, you will begin to realize who your real friends are. I believe you can both heal and live great lives despite what happened in your childhoods.
Feel free to write any questions or updates.
hey im 13! i was sexually abused by my dad from the age of 5 until i was 12….i havent told anyone. but yeah. i remember it completely clearly, im not like some people who dont remember anything. i think about it everyday, but i still love my dad, in a really wierd way. everytime he did it, he was drunk and mum was out at work. it happened like every other month and i was so scared whenever mum went out. he told me not to tell anyone. so i havent. now i self harm and according to the internet i have post trauma depression-or whatever its called- i cant remember PTSD maybe? i think i might have anxiety too. i want to stop cutting… i just want to know if there is any way i can get over the abuse? without telling anyone or confronting my dad? thanks x
Hi Becky,
I am so sorry to hear what happened. That is not ok. Some people do forget as a way of coping with the trauma, while others never forget. It is hard to believe that people could forget such a horrible thing when you have not forgotten the trauma, but it does happen.
What your dad did is horribly wrong and not ok. A dad or mom should never do that to any child, including their own child, that is terrible and not ok. It is very likely that you are taking out the abuse that your dad did to you on yourself, in a way that is blaming yourself for what he did to you but it is his shame and his secret that you are keeping, not your shame nor your secret.
Some survivors of abuse try to cope with the abuse by cutting, but that only causes more shame and more guilt but it can continue because the survivor deeply feels that they are to blame for the abuse. It is always the perpetrator’s fault, in this case your dad and not at all your fault. Your dad had no right to tell you not to tell anyone, he violated you. When a dad violates a child, it can bring up so many conflicting feelings, there was the dad that seemed loving but then the dad that did this horrible thing. It’s confusing but it is important to take care of you and know that what happened was your dad’s fault and not yours.
Because unconsciously, you are blaming yourself, to help break the cycle of self blame, it is important to reach out and find someone who is helpful in breaking your self blame. There are also people who are can help you to heal from PTSD and anxiety, which is a common coping mechanism from sexual assault. There many hotlines that you can call and be anonymous.
It is important to reach out, I am not sure if the hotlines in the UK are anonymous or not. Some in the United States are anonymous, where others are not at all anonymous. The UK website is http://www.rapecrisis.org.uk/centres.php It says that it is confidential, so it may be anonymous, the number is 0808 802 99 99 and they are open from noon to 2:30pm and 7pm to 9:30pm. If you have Skype, you can turn off the caller ID and it should make your call anonymous, try calling your cellphone from Skype first to see if that works. It should show a phone number that is not yours. If you are on a shared computer, you will want to erase the history of Skype after calling, to make sure your dad does not see. Volunteers on hotlines change, so if one is not helpful, you an try again later and you will most likely get a different volunteer.
You can also tell a trusted friend. Whoever you tell, they should be supportive of you and your healing. If anyone, tells you to forgive and forget, or it never really happened or it was your fault or anything that blames you and does not validate you, stop talking to that person about the situation immediately. If it is on a hotline or on the phone, hang up, if it is a friend, teacher or even someone in your family, say that you do not want to talk anymore and try and find a really supportive person. Sometimes finding the right people can take a bunch of calls but it is worth it. Unfortunately, sometimes even the authorities side with the perpetrator. Anyone who takes your dad’s side is wrong, no matter who they are. I am not saying that this will happen to you but I am saying listen to what people are saying and if it is not supportive to you, then the person saying it is supporting a person who hurt you and not supporting you the victim.
The other thing that is important to say is that even if your dad said that you were the only person he did this to or felt this way about, it is likely that he has or will assault other children the same age that you were when he assaulted you. And perpetrators, like your dad may also assault children of the same gender.
I concur with other psychiatrists who recommend staying away from things that will further stuff down your feelings from the abuse such as anti-depressants, antipsychotics or herbs such as St. John’s Wort, Valerian Root, etc, your feelings are screaming to be heard and released not stuffed back down. There are some specialist who help people who cut, some of those specialists are excellent and others are not good at all. This is true in every field and I have not researched any specialists in the UK, so I do not know. Always trust and listen to your intuition when you reach out.
I want to commend you on the courage that it took to reach out and write your story. Many adults never write their story and keep it inside, the choice that you made was much healthier and shows your strength. If you reach out and keep taking action to heal and do not give up until you find helpful people, I believe that you can heal and stop cutting. You already took the first step by writing your story.
Feel free to write back with any questions or updates.
I have never told anyone, ever…my older brother by 3 years started taking advantage of me, sexually, when I was 7. It didn’t stop until I was 13…when my mother walked in on us. My father said he would “kill” us if it ever happened again. So I have continued to live my life as if it never happened. I’m 37 now, married w/ 3 kids. As I get older, I’ve noticed an increase in my emotional breakdowns; I place blame on my husband by saying he’s not helping out enough around the house or the kids are just driving me crazy. My brother has a family of his own and lives closer to my parents. We spend holidays together and chat occasionally but he acts and treats us like we are inferior. For me, it makes family gatherings very awkward and strange. To make things worse, he is married to a woman whose family is very controlling and thinks that we are inferior as well. My mother is constantly complaining that she feels left out and that they just use her as a babysitter. I can’t take my silence anymore!!! I just can’t go out and tell my husband…he would flip! In my mind, it would destroy our families. How do I deal with this constant burden and turmoil?
Hi Anonymous,
Part of the healing is telling the truth, that it did happen. Shame on your dad for not getting you and your brother help. That is a very sad thing that your dad screamed at you and then ignored what happened. It shows that you are starting the healing process by saying that you are blaming your anger on your husband and your kids and that you wrote your story. The “emotional breakdowns” are just your unconscious and your body’s way of trying to detox from the past. If you read “What to Do When You Feel Triggered” at http://healingfromsexualabuse.com/ideas-for-healing-from-abuse/what-to-do-when-you-feel-triggered/ it has a bunch of tool to help you let yourself detox from the past abuse and the emotions that are stuck inside from the abuse.
Neither your brother or his wife have any right to treat you inferiorly. No one deserves to be treated inferiorly. It is not ok. You do not need to have someone in your life who treats you like you are second class. Even if it is your brother. You deserve to be treated first class. Every human being has that right. You do not need to go to family gatherings that your brother will be attending, you do not need to put yourself, your children or your husband in those situations where you are being treated badly. You, as a family, can think of fun things that your immediate family can do alone or with your friends or husband’s friends and/or family for the holidays. If your budget allows, you can go on fun trips, which can easily eliminate your brother.
Keeping the silence, keeps a false illusion of a loving family, but it is only an illusion, it’s not real. In truth, your brother sexually assaulted you and your dad did nothing to help. It is time to make a plan about telling your husband what happened to you. Telling your husband is part of the process of having a real relationship with him. He knows something is wrong, he just does not know what it is. You can talk with a supportive friend about it, or try calling a hotline so they can help you make a plan to tell your husband. You can even tell him the reason that your emotions are flooding out of you sometimes, is because of the stuck emotions from the abuse your brother did to you. If your husband is supportive, then you know that you have a truly loving husband. If he is not supportive of you, then there are other things that you need to look at. He should be angry that a person did something that horrific to a person he deeply loves, being angry at your brother is a healthy response. Do not allow yourself to be identified as crazy. You are not crazy, you are detoxing from suppressed emotions from sexual assault.
There is also a good chance that your children are not safe around your brother either. Perpetrators rarely stop perpetrating, even though he stopped assaulting you, that does not mean he is not still a pedophile. Pedophiles look for any opportunity, even just for a moment to sexually assault children. And it is possible that he would assault children of both genders.
The other important question to ask is who molested your brother and did they also have access to molest you? And do they have access to your children? People do not just start molesting siblings unless have been molested. We live in a vengeful society where people want to believe that pedophiles were not at one time victims so they can hate them but this simply is not true. Now even if your brother was molested, it still does not make it ok that he sexually assaulted you, it is not ok. It is horrible.
Now it might be time to start catching yourself blaming your family and apologize to them for taking your emotions from the past, out on them. Reassuring your children that you deeply love them and are sorry for blaming them for driving you crazy because in truth, you are having feelings from the past come up, you’re not crazy and it is neither your children’s or your husband’s fault that these emotions are coming up.
In the future, you may want to confront your dad about how he handled you being sexually assaulted in front of him and tell your mother also. Perpetrators want you to believe that telling the truth can harm your parents but your dad already knows and your mother probably has some intuition about it. How your parents react, will also tell you the truth about your family. If your dad feels horrible and apologizes that is great, if he blames you or acts like it never happened that is a bad sign. If your mother feels awful and wants to support you now then that is great, if she minimizes the situation or denies it or says you made it up, bad sign. Whatever happens, when you tell your truth and break the silence you will learn what is really real. Who really loves and supports you and who does not. It can be hard, but living with false illusions is harder because your intuition knows the truth. Then you can build on the relationships in your life that are loving and find new relationships to replace the fake ones that you have been living with.
You can call 800-656-HOPE and they should connect you with the local rape crisis hotline. If they are helping you to make a plan or get the help YOU WANT, that is great. If they say they cannot help you with making a plan or they are helping how they want to help and not how you need to be supported, hang up and try again later when another volunteer is on the hotline. Hotlines frequently have free centers for counselling for victims of abuseIf. If you call back and they are still not helpful, try another hotline, anywhere in the country at centers.rain.org, keep calling until you get the help you need. Avoid the where do you live question, by repeating that you are a survivor and need to talk and hope they will listen. It might take tons of tries to get a person who is helpful, but its worth it. When reaching out for help on a hotline or in person counselling, always listen to your intuition, if they person you are talking with is really helpful or not.
As long as you keep taking action the turmoil and burden will slowly begin to lift. Remember, that the shame belongs to your brother and by staying silent, you are keeping his secret. You will notice your life getting better, just keep taking action and taking care of yourself.
I’m 18, I managed to stumble upon this forum, and I don’t know if it’s the right place as I haven’t exactly been sexually abused. When I was 15, I…(had) a boyfriend who continued to use sex to manipulate me and who occasionally cajoled me into…(it), but I don’t think it was outright coercion. Just recently, I managed to get out of a relationship that was emotionally abusive, but not sexual. I can feel these experiences have scarred me – there’s a professor here with almost exactly the same name as my abuser whose class I had to drop, and…(edited by blogger). Now, there is someone I would really like to become involved with…(edited by blogger), but I can tell I have some healing to do before I stop feeling so hesitant and scared…(edited by blogger). Any advice would be greatly appreciated, and if I have misused the forum I sincerely apologize.
Hi M,
You need to check in with yourself and listen to how you truly feel about those incidents. It is easy to minimize things but if you are so traumatized that you needed to drop out of a class, there is either something about the person who you feel you were abused by or it reminds you of some abuse you may have pushed into your subconscious. I do not know which. It is time to reach out for help and explore your trauma. Also it might be helpful, to look at emotional intimacy in your life and relationships as well as the other things. Check in with yourself to see if you are allowing yourself to be emotionally available and if not, you may want to work on that also.
What was very helpful to me was doing the exercises in the book “Artist Way” by Julia Cameron, completing that workbook, helped me to live a more balanced life, get some repressed memories back from the abuse that I suffered as a child and enabled me to be more creative. The book also helped me to get over writer’s block, have better time management and write and produce new plays and publish my poetry.
I would also recommend seeking a really good therapist to work with, always listen to your intuition and if the person seems truly helpful, then work with them, if not keep looking. Unfortunately, good therapists can be extremely hard to find but worth the effort to find one. But do not settle for a bad or mediocre therapists, they can actually make things worse rather than better.
Hi there I am a survivor or incest and sexual abuse now aged 45 residing in South Africa.
I was physically and sexually assaulted from the age of 2 to 7 by my father and my uncle and male friends of my parents during parties where I recall lots of booze and porn…after the abuse, each time they excused their behavior by saying that there was something bad/evil in them that made them do it and that it wasn’t them. That they love me. I have blocked the shame, fear guilt and pain for so long but finally as a result of much self reflection, soul searching and help from beautiful earth angels in my life I am facing the pain and the emptiness inside. I have good days and bad. Days when I feel I just want to end it all…
Both my dad and his brother suffered sexual abuse as children but the doesn’t excuse what they did. I fear for other little kids (grandchildren, nieces and nephews) in their vicinity left in their care…
I want to know if its normal for me to want to meet my uncle (my dad has committed suicide) and face him as my perpetrator after all these years? Is it recommended? I just feel I need to look him in the eye and get closure….Your advice will be greatly appreciated
Hi Savnola,
I am so sorry to hear that. Saying that there is something bad/evil in them is no excuse, it was them. They chose to get drunk, they chose to buy porn and bring it to the party and they chose to rape you. Nothing made them do it. That is only a lame excuse for something that is inexcusable.
Parents who love their children protect them from pedophiles, they do not rape their own children.
The shame that you are carrying belongs to your father and uncle and not you. They need it back, it is their shame. You were an innocent child, they sexually assaulted you. That is a shameful act. The guilt that you carry also belongs to them, they know deep inside that what they did was wrong. The fear is most likely the little girl inside of you who is still scared of these people who were so much bigger than you abusing you. But you are much bigger now and you can try to help to heal the little girl inside of you who is still scared and still holds the pain from being abused. You wanting to hurt yourself, is what the perpetrators wanted and its not ok that your dad and uncle wanted that. They wanted you to hold all of their pain, but it is their to own not yours.
It shows your strength and intelligence that you know that their being victims does not excuse them from assaulting you and it also shows your strength and intelligence that you are able to reach out for help and write for help.
You are right to fear for the little children around your uncle because perpetrators rarely stop assaulting unless they get help to heal and want to heal.
It is absolutely normal for you to want to confront your uncle about assaulting you. Whether it is recommended all depends on what you hope to achieve. If you think that he will admit it and apologize for it, then there is a good chance you will be disappointed. But if you want to confront him because you want to speak your truth and do not care if he admits it or apologizing for it, then it could be healing. I would check in with yourself about what you expect from your uncle by confronting him and if confronting him feels empowering no matter what his response is. You might also want to set up a situation where you have people with you who support you and believe that what your uncle did was horrible. Or at least check in with them for support both before and after you confront him.
You might also want to get support from the rape crisis line in South Africa at 083 484 9409 (24 hours). They can support you to heal from the assaults and also they can help by listening to you when you make your decision whether or not to confront your uncle. Their website is http://www.crisiscentre.org.za/ and another website is http://rapecrisis.org.za/ with other support numbers there. They also have free counselling and they have an office in Observatory and a few other locations.
Always remember that when you are reaching out for support, if the person on the phone or in person is helpful, that is great, keep talking or working with them. But if a person on the phone or in person is not helpful, then hang up or if you are in person, ask to talk with another person. You deserve to get helpful help (whether or not it is free).
I truly believe that you can heal from the abuse and live well, so long as you take action to heal. As you heal, you’ll find that you’re having more fun in your life and smiling more to. I believe the process can take a little bit but I DO NOT believe it is a lifelong process.
I WAS SEXUALLY ABUSED BY MY SISTER. There i have finally said it after almost forty years. At this moment in time I hate her. My family think she is the fantastic successful one as she is now a fully qualified primary school teacher. I know a more sinister side to my sister. She sexually abused me as a 9 year old child.
I cant describe the feelings of why is she making me do these things to her and why is she doing these things to me? I just wanted to sleep because i was a 9 year old child and i was so tired. Now i understand that she is disgusting and should be kept away from children. I am unable to tell my mother for fear she wont believe me as my older sister has always been the apple of her eye. I feel sorry for my mother because she is now in her late 70′s and if there is an afterlife she will understand why i have no love towards my sister. Then she will feel absolute guilt for blaming me for not getting on with such a perfect sister. Her feelings that my older sister is so much more successful and a better all round person makes it more difficult for me to ever tell her what she did to me and i feel so alone. I hate having to spend xmas with the family because my sister is so controlling and she goes out of her way to make me feel inferior. I hope my parents die before her so that hey don’t see my secret relief if she were to die first.
Hi Sab,
I am so sorry to hear that happened to you. It shows your strength that you are able to write what happened to you and to not keep the secret any longer. The way that you describe your sister sounds like she could still be a perpetrator. It is scary to me that she is a school teacher because she still has access to little kids. She has no right to make you feel inferior.
There is no rule that you have to spent the holidays with your family. You can choose to not be around your sister. You can choose to be around who you want to be around. You can also consider telling your mother, knowing that there is a possibility that you may not be believed but your mother’s reaction will tell you who your mother really is also. People who are abused are frequently taught to believe that if they tell it will kill their mother, destroy their dad but this is rarely true. By not telling you are continuing to hold onto your sister’s secret and her shame.
The other question that must be raised is who molested your sister and did they have access to you as well. Children and adults, I believe, do not just start assaulting others unless they were assaulted. This does not excuse what they did but it does help explain it. The person who assaulted your sister could possibly be a person in your family or a family friend and they could possibly have done the same thing to you. Memories that are traumatic sometimes get repressed. I am not saying this happened to you, but I am saying that it is something you need to checkin with yourself about.
The next thing I recommend, is that you take care of yourself, reach out and talk with someone else about this and help your inner child who was assaulted to start to heal. The hotline in your area is at 0808 802 9999 but they are only there 12 – 2:30pm and 7 – 9:30pm. Their website is http://www.rapecrisis.org.uk/ If they are helpful that is great, if not hang up and try calling at another time. Always listen to your intuition when you are reaching out for help. If they are not helpful, you want to call at another time, try calling a hotline in the United States. There is a huge list at centers.rainn.org. If you call from Skype you can remain anonymous (I find overall the hotlines in the west of the US do not care if you are calling from out of the area, if they ask where you are calling from, state that you rather not say but need to talk with someone now be persistent with that response.) Always hang up if the person on the phone is not helpful, also listen to your intuition when meeting with a person at any agency and check in with yourself to see if they are helpful.
Remember, you can heal and have a great life and you already took the first step by reaching out and writing what happened to you. The next thing to do is to call the hotline. By taking these steps to heal, you will find yourself having more fun in your life and being happier.
Hi there I am a survivor or incest and sexual abuse now aged 45 residing in South Africa.
I was physically and sexually assaulted from the age of 2 to 7 by my father and my uncle and male friends of my parents during parties where I recall lots of booze and porn…after the abuse, each time they excused their behavior by saying that there was something bad/evil in them that made them do it and that it wasn’t them. That they love me. I have blocked the shame, fear guilt and pain for so long but finally as a result of much self reflection, soul searching and help from beautiful earth angels in my life I am facing the pain and the emptiness inside. I have good days and bad. Days when I feel I just want to end it all…
Both my dad and his brother suffered sexual abuse as children but the doesn’t excuse what they did. I fear for other little kids (grandchildren, nieces and nephews) in their vicinity left in their care…
I want to know if its normal for me to want to meet my uncle (my dad has committed suicide) and face him as my perpetrator after all these years? Is it recommended? I just feel I need to look him in the eye and get closure….Your advice will be greatly appreciated
Hi can someone give me advice I need answers…. My 5 yo is a victim of sexual abuse and I really want to heal her in every way possible :'( she’s five and I guess my question is would counseling really help her at this age!!? Or would it trigger things… Can someone with experience help me please!!!!!!
Hi Rye,
I am so sorry to hear that. Yes, I would definitely get counselling for your 5 yo. I also need to say that not all counselling is equal, so listen to your intuition, if the counsellor seems helpful to your child then that is good but if you do not feel like they are helpful or they are belittling to you then find another counsellor. There are counsellors that specialize in helping little children to deal with this type of abuse. Please make sure the counsellor does not try to put your child on drugs or things like St. John’s Wort, your child does not have chemical imbalance, she is coping with sexual assault. If a counsellor talks about chemical imbalance from the abuse run.
The right kind of counselling can help your child to release the trauma from the abuse and heal from it so she can live a happy and normal life. Children can fully heal from the abuse. If a child does not get good counselling they can carry that trauma for the rest of their lives. The counsellors should of course know how to work with children that age. You can interview the counsellor and ask questions like how do you work to help children to heal from sexual abuse? What are some of the successes you have had when working with 5 year olds? (They cannot give specifics but should be able to give you some general stories.) A good place to start is to call the 800-656-HOPE hotline and it will connect you to the nearest counselling center that helps with rape survivors. If they are not helpful, search other rape crisis centers nearby or even ask them for people they know who specialize in helping little children to heal from assault. You can also call therapist who may specialize in therapy for little kids and see if they specialize in sexual assault as well. I would tell each therapist that you are interviewing a few therapists, so that of they turn out to be really bad therapists, you can get away from them. (Not to scare you but some therapists are pretty messed up.) But there are some great therapists too.
Your child can heal from this trauma but they need professional help to do so. Please feel free to write back any updates, or questions you may have.
I need some one to talk this over with as I’m having very strange and conflicting thoughts. when I was younger, can’t remember what age exactly. but I was a child. my brother (who is two years older than me) and I had sex. I don’t remember it being a bad thing at the time, I believe it was mutual, there were no tricks or physical abuse or anything. and I have remembered this has happened before but have been able to forget about it and move on and live normally until recently. it is now all I can think about. and I want to move past it and let it go like I have before. I love my brother and he and I have a good relationship. I will never want to bring this up with anyone in my family. so I guess I’m just so confused as I don’t think it really was ‘abuse’ and it’s only recently turned into ‘trauma’ for me. any advice would be much appreciates.
Hi,
It is probably what you are thinking of frequently because you are ready to heal from it. Forgetting these experiences before you have healed from them is rarely, if ever, a healthy thing to do. And I do not think that when you heal you will forget about it but it will be something that you are rarely think of because you are living your life and are happy. It’s not healthy to forget, which is probably why it is screaming to be heard now. A child, unless they have been assaulted, the child is not going to have sex at a young age. If you look at a child around the age, you think you were when this happened, ask yourself what you would say to them if they told you that their brother who is 2 years older than them, had sex with them. A child who is having sex at a young age is usually acting out the sexual abuse they experienced.
Also, the fact that you forgot the memory or are trying to forget it is also probably a bad sign. I am not saying that your brother is a bad person, from your comment, I cannot tell. He may have been sexually assaulted by another person who may or may not have had access to sexually assault you also. This does not excuse it but it does explain it. Which if it did happen, it may have also been forgotten. Your brother may have healed or be horrified by the experience of having sex with you. He may want to apologize and think that you forgot it and does not want to traumatize you by bringing it up. Have you ever spoken with him about it? By your comment, I am assuming you have not. I believe if you cannot talk with him about this, it may not in reality be a close relationship. His reaction to what you say, will tell you a lot about who he really is. He may also have forgotten about what he did. It probably was always a trauma, you probably minimized it and pushed it away. But burying the memories of abuse always has consequences. The emotions and memories scream to be heard, which can be sadness coming out as depression, anger coming out as rage or feeling bad emotions that seem to pop up out of nowhere. If you really have a healthy family they will be supportive of you, but if, in truth, your family is sick, then they may blame you, tell you to forget about it or say you are crazy. There is nothing for you to be ashamed of were a little girl, it is NOT your fault.
If you want to talk with someone about this you can call 1800 424 017 or 1800 737 732 both hotlines are 24/7. If you want to make sure to stay anonymous, you can call from Skype with no caller ID showing, so that it will just show as the Skype default number (I am pretty sure that will keep you anonymous). If you want to use an online help that will be anonymous you can use the one in the United States at http://www.rainn.org/get-help/national-sexual-assault-online-hotline because the online hotline in Australia does not look at all anonymous. You can also feel free to call any hotline you find at centers.rainn.org You can avoid the question about where you live saying that you do not want to talk about it and what you really need is help. (If they persist keep repeating the previous sentence. Always check in with yourself to see if the person really feels helpful, if not, hang up and try again later or try another hotline. Keep calling until you get the help you need.
As you heal the memory will no longer traumatize your current life but you must take actions to heal which can be any of the things mentioned above or other ideas that feel like they will help you. I concur with the experts that recommend staying away from prescription drugs because they cover up the feeling you need to detox and stuff those feelings back down, not to mention the horrible side effects that could include depression, extreme anxiety and liver damage (to name a few). Even taking things like valerian root and St. John’s Wort can still cause problems because you are stuffing down what needs to come up and out in order to detox.
Keep taking action and you will heal. Feel free to write back with any questions, comments, updates or further information about your situation.
Hi, I am 19 years old. I was sexually abused by my older brother who is now 21. I can’t really say when it started but I do remember around the age of 9 till 11. Which makes him 11-13. Anyhow I’m having some difficulties. Once the abuse stopped I never thought back on it. I didn’t know it was abuse, but I knew it was wrong. My brother would hold me down, threaten me with physical abuse or tattling. Recently my boyfriend of one year asked me if I’d ever done anything with my brother,(because of a dream he had) which any other time I would deny. But this time I decided I would be truthful and trust in him. He asked me quite a few questions into detail. But since I have tried so hard to forget, I have literally forgot! I hadn’t had any problems with my past secret till yesterday. Now my world is upside down. My bf and I live with my abuser brother. And since I have told my bf he has been so confused and upset. I don’t feel anything. I need to give closure to my boyfriend. He is having a very hard time. (Suicidal) I even confronted my brother about the abuse. He apologized and said we were just little kids. He also changed the story and said I was in on it too. But I remember the threats. He even told my bf that. I knew my brother would be this way, because he is very manipulative. Now my boyfriend hates my whole family. He hates my brother (who they used to be bestfriends) and he is second guessing our relationship. I don’t know how to help him. Plus all the empty holes in my memory make me wonder what really happened. Anyhow I can’t handle this. Ive only asked my sister who is 16 now and she remembers the abuse because she endured some too. But she told me she didn’t want to talk and she just wanted to forget. I need any help I can get for both of us to have closure. (My bf and I) thank you.
Hi C.N.,
(I reread what I wrote last night and changed and added a few things.)
I am so sorry that this happened to you. No one should ever have to go through that.
I truly believe that trying to forget the abuse is not a way to heal from the abuse because the emotions and memories of the abuse keep trying to get released and be heard. Other emotions that have been stuffed down from the abuse can also scream loudly to be heard, sadness can come screaming as depression, anger can come screaming as rage, etc. It is so important to heal from the abuse rather than stuff it down. Your boyfriend must have picked up on something unconsciously. A post that can help you get started to acknowledge and release those feeling and memories is called “What to Do When You Feel Triggered” and is at http://healingfromsexualabuse.com/ideas-for-healing-from-abuse/what-to-do-when-you-feel-triggered/
You can heal from the abuse rather than stuff it back down. I do realize that you said everything was fine until you told your story yesterday but the truth is that keeping the abuser’s secret rarely lets people live happily because they are spending a ton of energy repressing memories and emotions. You probably do not notice how much energy you are using but after healing for a while, you may notice that you feel lighter and have more energy and are truly happier.
Your boyfriend is probably having a hard time because he feels that a person he trusted (your brother), has violated a person he loves (you). Being angry at your brother is a healthy response to what occurred, Your brother abused you. Your boyfriend may be questioning himself on how he could have trusted your brother as a friend and feel betrayed because your brother is a perpetrator. Also his being angry at your family for not protecting you is also a healthy response, though as he gets more information, his anger towards your family may change, if he fonds out they are supportive of you.
When you choose to forget the abuse, you are allowing a perpetrator to assault others and you also may have a hard time protecting your children (if you have children later) from also being abused, if you do not want to deal with your own abuse. It is time to heal. It is great and shows your strength that you told your boyfriend the truth and it also shows your strength that you could reach out and write your story.
I do not think it is healthy to live with a person who assaulted you as a child and is not wanting to heal or take full responsibility for what he did. It is unacceptable that your brother lied about the abuse making you responsible for it and that is also a very bad sign. When a perpetrator truly wants to heal or has healed he/she will admit guilt and then do whatever it takes to make amends.
If both you and your sister do not talk about the abuse then what child will be the next victim? Choosing to remain silent allows other children to be victimized by the same person. Another question that must be raised is who assaulted your brother, perpetrators rarely, if ever, start to assault children unless they were assaulted. And did the person who assault your brother also have access to you? Do your parents know and if so, what was their response? Listening to your parent’s response can tell you a lot about what has happened in the family. They should be appalled, want your brother to get help and take responsibility and want to do anything to help you and your sister to heal from the assaults. Blaming you and your sister or saying things like put the past in the past are both unhealthy responses.
It is time to work on getting a place to live away from your brother, even if he did not assault you and was just manipulative, that is enough to not live with him. But he assaulted you also. You deserve to live in a place with only healthy and supportive people. I assume that your boyfriend may want to move also?
Your boyfriend turning his anger inward, being suicidal, is not a healthy response, although being angry at your brother is a healthy response. He can also try reading “What to Do When You Feel Triggered” because suicidal thoughts are a way of being triggered, though he may not have been assaulted, it’s obvious that he is triggered because he is having self destructive thoughts rather than figuring out how to care for himself and you despite what he learned. Sometimes people believe the lie that suicide is an answer to their problems, but that is a lie and that does not come from a healthy place. Both you and your boyfriend taking action to heal and take care of yourselves is an answer to your problems.
Do not doubt yourself that the abuse happened, traumatic memories are frequently forgotten and repressed, that does not mean that they did not happen. Abusers take advantage of that to make their victims feel crazy and doubt themselves.
Also you can try calling the 800-656-hope hotline and they may be helpful, if the person you are talking with is not helpful, hang up and try again later or you can also try a hotline in a bigger city nearby. Only stay on the phone with people who answer who are helpful because not everyone who is on a hotline is helpful. Many of the hotlines have free counselling centers, for survivors and their loved ones. Again only work with a counsellor or therapist who is helpful, always listen to your intuition.
I truly believe that both you and your boyfriend can heal if each of you takes action to heal. But remember that a huge part of healing is taking care of yourself, which means surrounding yourself with healthy people and staying away from people who are not supportive, even if those people are a part of your family.
Feel free to write an update or ask any questions.
Somehow I stumbled to this forum. I’m a 24 year old gay male. My boyfriend is 19. Last month my boyfriend told me that his older brother had molested him when he was in the 3rd grade. At the time his brother was I think a junior in high school. My boyfriend told me the incidents happened on a few occasions. He remembers the last being in the laundry room…(details edited by blogger)
When my boyfriend told me this he broke down in tears and told me he had never told anyone except me. I assured him I would never judge him and that my love for him was the same and that he can tell me anything. I could not help but feel disgust and anger toward his older brother. Robbing the innocence of my boyfriend at an early age. Fast forward it to now and I feel more anger toward his brother. His brother lives in the same city as both of us. Since moving here my boyfriend has only visited his brother once because of the awkward way he feels.
The incidents of what happened in the past happened for awhile and then they stopped. It wasn’t on going after my bf was weirded out the last time and made him stop. Now we are in a sticky situation because my boyfriend’s lease will be up soon and he has said he will be moving in with his older brother. He said it will work out for the best because it will be cheap.
We are currently not living together. I can’t help but feel confused about the whole situation because I care so much about my boyfriend. I told him how it made me feel and how I’ve been feeling lately when his brother texts him. My boyfriend tells me he doesn’t want me to hate his brother and that he’s trying to forget about everything. He rather me just never to bring it up again.
His older brother is also gay. Will this be healthy for them? I don’t know what to do. I’ve talked to a few people about it and most have said just to support him even though I disagree with his decision. Even though the abuse happened so long ago it’s like it was never talked about again. I just have mixed feelings about the whole situation. I feel like things are being put together since finding this out. Some things my boyfriend isn’t comfortable with in the bedroom. My boyfriend will often…(details edited by blogger) I know I’m not trying to save him but trying to be there for him. I care about him a lot and I love him very much. I can’t help but feel the way I do toward his brother. And I will eventually have to meet him if he does move in with him.
Hi Aj,
I am so sorry to hear about what happened to your boyfriend, that is horrible. It is very hard to hear when someone you love has been violated. I believe that your instincts are correct in this situation. It is not healthy that your boyfriend is moving in with his brother who sexually assaulted him. In this case, it is irrelevant that his brother is gay. Both straight and gay men assault children of the same and opposite sex. The most important thing is that his older brother is a perpetrator and it is not healthy for your boyfriend to live with a perpetrator. It is healthy that you feel disgust and anger towards his older brother, that is a normal feeling to have about a perpetrator, especially one who violated someone that you love.
Trying to forget about abuse does not work and can cause so many problems. All of the emotions from the abuse get stuffed back down with the memories and these feelings can scream to be heard: such as sadness; screaming out as depression, anger; screaming out as rage, and self blame;screaming out as self hatred. I am not saying this will definitely happen, but it does occur with some people. (My post “What to Do When You Feel Triggered” at http://healingfromsexualabuse.com/ideas-for-healing-from-abuse/what-to-do-when-you-feel-triggered/ can help if those repressed emotions get triggered.) And you already noticed the strange acting out which can be a person trying to let their subconscious tell their story of being abused and sexualized at such a young age. But the thing is that everyone wants to have a healthy family who loved them. So frequently survivors will try to ignore or forget that they were abused so that they can have the dream of every person which is to have a healthy loving family.
The other question that can be asked is who abused his older brother and did that person have access to your boyfriend also. People rarely start abusing someone unless they were abused, though many people are abused who never become perpetrators. This question can be asked at a much later date because the most important thing now is addressing your boyfriend moving in with his older brother.
Have you discussed other options about places he can move to? Are there good affordable options of places to live in your town? Does your boyfriend have a job that could pay for a good place to live? Or does it feel like he is super attached to moving in with his older brother? Moving back in with his brother could be part of his denial in wishing for a completely loving family. Even if he winds up moving in with his brother, you can choose to not meet him, that is your choice. It would be hard for me to meet a perpetrator of someone I loved and not say anything to them but I also am a very vocal person. It does not sound like his older brother ever apologized or made amends. If he did then it could be a different situation. Some people who were perpetrators as children, realized that what they did was horrible and have made amends and done everything that they could to make up for the abuse, they have gotten help and have healed, those people are ok but from what you wrote it does not sound like his older brother did that.
It is hard to support someone to be around a person who caused him so much harm but in the end it is his decision. Maybe moving in with his brother will help him to get out of his denial or it could also have the opposite effect and have him embrace the denial even more. It is hard to support someone in a decision that is obviously bad for them, though if it helps him to get out of the denial about being abused, it could be good for him.
You can try calling the 800-656-HOPE hotline to talk with them about this situation, but make sure that the person you are talking with is listening to your needs and helping you to come up with a solution that works for you, rather than telling you what you should do or not being helpful. This is what the hotlines are for, if you get a person who says they only help victims, they are wrong (hotlines are suppose to be for all issues dealing with sexual assault) hang up and try again later. If you keep getting bad help after speaking with a bunch of advocates, try another hotline. If the person is not helpful, hang up and try again later or try any hotline at centers.rainn.org (If you are calling a hotline not in your area and they ask you where you are calling from say that you would rather not state where you are but you need help with this situation. If they keep pushing your location keep restating that you need help with this situation.)
You may also want to go to a quiet peaceful place and take time to write down your thoughts about this situation and how you can best and honestly support your boyfriend in this situation. Supporting your boyfriend does not have to mean supporting his decision to move in with his brother but it means being honest with your truth and honest with him in a way that feels right to you. Your intuition in this case seems right on, so listen to yourself. I hope this helps. Feel free to write back any updates or questions.
I was incested by my father for six years from the time I was 13 up. I finally asked him if we could stop as it caused me so much confusion with dating. This was a great understatement. I saw a therapist because I always broke off with every boyfriend.
He was useless. I remember telling him my friend was gay and also abused. I married that friend. He was diagnosed with passive personality disorder when he was sixteen by a psychiatrist but never saw fit to mention this. I could handle him being mostly gay. I could not handle the passive aggression and his drug addiction.
I thought I forgave my father and brother. My husband knew how crazy I was about our daughter and everytime I left the house for an hour, he would take her to her parents. She was molested by his father. His father is a narcissist and so is my father. I kept having nightmares and after sixty years of being the good daughter I flipped out and lost my mind. I could not leave the couch. I had Post traumatic stress disorder and nightmares for years and my dad would appear amused and skeptical when I told him this diagnosis. My approach was to discount it for twenty long years.
I have been trauma bonded to my dad and mother for all these years trying to get their approval. My mother preferred my brothers, killed my healthy cat when I was already being incested by dad and dad never showed any attention to me until puberty. He admitted he fondled my niece and said she shoved her breasts into his hands. He told me my grown daughter could not stay with him because he was too sexually excited to have her around. I would never let her stay with him at any age and she is way too old for him at 26 anyway.
I can’t see my family. I can’t talk to them and my parents are very old. I have tried to write them but I just cry. I can’t do this. I know when they die, I will be the bad one. I will be the contemptuous fat sister who dropped out of their circle. I want nothing to do with any of my family. I can’t help it and this is not getting any better. It has been six months. No inheritance from daddy, folks. Just damage to my self esteem.
You are not the bad one, the perpetrators are the bad ones. I will be writing a full response to your post in the next few days.
Hi Sandra,
The first that that I want to mention is that you have so much more than anyone else is your family which is dignity and the willingness to stand up and protect children and to tell the truth. So while your whole family is protecting pedophiles, you chose to protect yourself and your child. No one in your family ever chose to protect children. Once you found out what happened to your daughter, it sounds like you chose to keep her safe. Your family of pedophiles and those who protect pedophiles, let children be raped in your family of origin so you are very strong.
It’s time to break the bond with your family which sounds like you have already started to do. Being written out of an inheritance may not feel great and as a survivor of trauma most likely, you could have used the money but let’s reframe this situation. Your father, a pedophile, could not stand the truth, all he could do was write you out of the inheritance. Your confronting him with the truth is so much stronger than his little baby statement of all he could do was to not give you an inheritance. I was also given no inheritance from my father after confronting him about him raping me as a child, I had a pretty good idea when I confronted him that I would not get the inheritance but speaking my truth was far more important to me than, getting the money. Now I was very low income and desperately needed money for basic necessities, but speaking my truth was far more empowering to myself then getting an inheritance. Being honest with myself and respecting myself has paved the way for me to live a far better life than any inheritance could have bought. I refused to live the lie with my family.
I see that it is possible your husband was raped by his father also which could have lead to the diagnosis of “passive personality disorder”. The reason I am saying that possibility is that his father raped your daughter and pedophiles can rape children of both sexes. Pedophiles rarely stop raping children unless they get help and want to stop.
Are you divorced from your husband? It is healthy to take care of yourself and heal and as you heal you will attract healthier and healthier people into your life. It is so easy as a survivor of child sexual abuse to fall into the trap of being a victim to get your needs met. (Meaning choosing to be around unhealthy situations and people rather than leaving those situations.) If you are still married to an unhealthy person or have unhealthy friends it is your job to take care of yourself and get away from those unhealthy situations. And that includes your family, your dad and your mother. Sometimes it feels easier to complain about the people around us, than to take action to take care of ourselves and get away from unhealthy situations. If you stay around unhealthy people, you are re-victimizing yourself. Once you get away from your family, you can start to allow yourself to feel the wounds of being abused and figure out how to take care of your wounded inner child.
I do not recommend forgiving perpetrators as a way to heal, it rarely works. Believing and taking care of yourself, is what really works. As a specialist that works with survivors said, “Healing may result in forgiveness but forgiveness does not bring healing, it only covers over the wounds allowing them to fester.” If you want to read more about forgiveness you can go to my post “Do I Need to Forgive to Heal?” at http://healingfromsexualabuse.com/ideas-for-healing-from-abuse/do-i-need-to-forgive-to-heal-from-abuse/
Once again your job is to stop talking with your unsupportive family. Why try to write or stay in contact with mean and abusive people? It keeps you a victim. When they die you might be the bad one to them, but who cares what pedophiles and cat killers think? Would you want such awful people to think you are good? Good to them is killing what we love such as cats and children’s spirits and raping children. If I were you I would choose to feel good about yourself for realizing those are bad people. It is time to be the parent to yourself that you never had. For ideas on that you can read “Surviving Mother’s Day and the Holidays” at http://healingfromsexualabuse.com/ideas-for-healing-from-abuse/surviving-mothers-day-and-the-holidays/ It has a bunch of self parenting ideas there.
You can always try calling the 1-800-656-HOPE (24/7) and it will connect you to the hotline nearest to you. If the person you are talking with on the hotline is helpful, that’s great, if not hang up and try again later or try another hotline at centers.rainn.org, keep calling until you get the support that you need. The hotline near you should also have free rape crisis counselling, which may or may not be helpful depending on the person who is the counsellor. Always listen to your intuition to see if you are getting the help you need and if they are supporting you to do what you want to do or are they trying to get you to do what they think you should do or worse telling you to forgive and forget?
If you keep taking action and check in with yourself to see if you are re-victimizing yourself or making sure to keep yourself from being a victim to get your needs met (meaning putting yourself in situations with people you do not like, rather than leaving those situations such as with your husband or family and putting yourself in situations that you enjoy), you will heal. You have a choice of who you hang around and the healthier you become, the healthier people you will attract) . You will heal, your life will get better and you will eventually celebrate yourself for having the strength to get away from perpetrators, even though those perpetrators were your parents.
Please feel free to write an update or any questions.
I was sexually abused by my brother when I was around the ages of maybe 10ish. I really can’t remember. He is 5 years older than me. I think it only happened for a summer over several occasions while he was supposed to be babysitting. I remember hating every minute of it but I wanted to make him happy. I am 25 now and was able to hid the events through my high school years. I opened up in college to my boyfriend, who is now my husband of 1 year and my sister. My sister has been supportive but still maintained a close relationship with the abuser brother, as did I or faked it at lease. My husband has always been supportive until recently(details later). After I got married and moved away from my “close knit” family, I started experiencing extreme emotions from my childhood trauma. I started disclosing what happened to close friends and eventually to my other brother(not abuser). He confronted my abusive brother and its been hell ever since. My mom found out and recommended I go to a therapist–I spent gobs of money and still feel insecure about everything. I was feeling pressure from my “close-knit” family to talk to my abuser brother so I was working on a plan for that with my therapist. But eventually stopped going and still haven’t talked to the abuser. honestly I don’t really want to speak to him. He’s been able to outwardly live a normal life. Married with kids, money, etc. I don’t get along with his wife one bit. I think she’s even said what happened was experimentation. Of course, I’d never want to believe my husband was capable of that either. My mom tells me my abuser was abused–so I guess that’s the justification for me to forgive and move forward. I’m struggling with the loyalty to my “close knit” family. I dearly love my parents. I have a sister who is my best friend. And obviously another brother who would do anything for me. My husband would like to move past this too. We haven’t attended any family functions because of the disclosure of what happened and he doesn’t want to hide out. He’s always been a “brush under the rug” type of person. I do feel relief from this all coming out but I still feel like I’m the one carrying the burden. I have trouble working, sleeping, and focusing. I find myself still emotionally attached to him and Im needing to learn how to break and not give a shit about my abusive brother and his wife. I know I should probably return to therapy and figure this out…
Hi Anonymous,
That is so horrible that happened to you.
Why in the world is your family pressuring you to talk with your brother who assaulted you? Why are they not confronting him about sexually assaulting you instead? Why are they not forcing him to get help?
You do NOT need to talk with a person who assaulted you, even if he is your brother. If there is sexual assault going on in your family, then the “close-knit” family could be a false front. That is not to say that you cannot be close with the people in your family that you want to be close to, but I would only be close with the people who really support you. I think it is a healthy thing that you have not attended any family functions. You can choose to only talk with people who really support and care about you. You do not need to be with family that did not protect you and still does not protect you by trying to get you to speak to your brother who assaulted you. If you attend the family functions then you will be around your brother who assaulted you and some people who do not support you. Have you asked your sister about why she is still talking with your brother who abused you? Have you ever asked her if he also assaulted her? He may or may not have and she may or may not remember.
The other question that needs to be asked is who sexually assaulted your brother and did that same person or people also have access to you? Did you ever ask your mother who abused him? Since you said that you do not remember all of it, it is possible that there could have been other perpetrators that you do not remember, I have no idea, but it is something that I wanted to mention.
I am very concerned that he has children because if he assaulted you and has not gotten help, there is a chance that he will assault his children also. Perpetrators rarely stop perpetrating, unless they get help. That is scary that his wife is saying what his assaulting you was experimental. Which is minimizing the sexual assault of a child. That is very sick. She could very easily minimize the assault of her own children, if she could minimize your assault.
It is not uncommon for abuse memories and emotions to come up both after a person gets married and when they move away from the abusers because they begin to feel safe to release the emotions. (Emotions and memories can also come up when the perpetrator dies or when your child is born or becomes the age that you were when you were abused. There are a bunch of other triggers as well see “What to Do When You feel Triggered” http://healingfromsexualabuse.com/ideas-for-healing-from-abuse/what-to-do-when-you-feel-triggered/ for more information on that.)
You probably feel like you are carrying the burden because some people in your family feel that you, the victim, should carry the burden and not your brother, the perpetrator. Again, I think the best way to deal with that is to, at least for now, stop talking with people in your family that do not support you 100 percent.
Did your mother recommend that you see a therapist to heal from the abuse or did she recommend a therapist because she was inferring that you were sick in some way for talking about it or making it up, etc? Did she confront your brother or did she brush it under the rug? Have your parents truly supported you or is that just what you have been taught to believe? I am only writing that because in what you wrote I can not tell if they are really supportive of you, (I have no idea about your dad or really much about your mother either.)
The thing about therapists is that there are great therapists, mediocre therapists and awful therapist, so you can go to a mediocre or bad therapist for years and not get better or sometimes even get worse. You also need to pick a therapist that works for you. Just because someone else had a great experience with a therapist does not mean it is the right one for you. Why were you working on a plan with your therapist to talk with your brother if you do not want to talk to him? Your therapist should support you in what you want to do, unless you previously wanted to confront him and now you do not. I cannot see any reason to talk with him as a friend unless he came to you to apologize about the abuse and tell you about the help that he has received to heal or is going to receive to heal. And has offered to make amends in any way possible and you can also see the sadness in his eyes because he feels terrible and is ashamed.
A suggestion to help break the bonds with your brother could be to write a list of two columns, one side keeps you bonded to him and on the other side what is not good about him, that you want to stay away from (you can include protecting your children from him [if you have or will have children]). By putting it on paper, it can help to make it more objective, also reading it out loud to someone that you trust could also be helpful.
You can always try calling the 1-800-656-HOPE (24/7) and it will connect you to the hotline nearest to you. If the person you are talking with on the hotline is helpful, that’s great, if not hang up and try again later or try another hotline at centers.rainn.org, keep calling until you get the support that you need. The hotline near you should also have free rape crisis counselling, which may or may not be helpful depending on the person who is the counsellor. Always listen to your intuition to see if you are getting the help you need and if they are supporting you to do what you want to do or are they trying to get you to do what they think you should do or worse telling you to forgive and forget?
It takes time to heal but healing is possible but it cannot be done in a moment. Is our husband overwhelmed by the situation because he can also call 1-800-656-HOPE hotline to get support in helping to support you. Sometimes spouses want to help but don’t know what to do and feel overwhelmed, I do not know your situation.
The post “What to Do When You Feel Triggered” could also help with the triggers that are interfering with you working, sleeping, and focusing. I truly believe that you can heal and detach from your brother and other unsupportive people if you keep taking action to heal.
I really appreciate your reply. It means a lot. I have reread it multiple times already to draw validation and support. To address your questions:
I think my family is pressuring me to talk to him because they feel like if I talk to him then things will go back to the way they were. (Because that’s what family do. They spend time together, holidays and only the real messed up families don’t do that. And no one wants the be the messed up family. Well, too late. And I think its been hard for me to break their hearts. And again, why am I carrying the burden for that.) My mom confronted him about it. He admitted to something, but not in so many words and he said he was around the age of 5. That would have made me a newborn. Which is not the truth. My mom was going to a counselor for awhile about all of this. Her counselor advised her and my dad to stay out of it and that we are adults and we can handle it ourselves. So my parents have continued on like nothing happened. My dad and I haven’t said a word about any of it. We still talk, we just don’t talk about that. I have no idea why no one has not forced my abuser to get help. Which I find interesting, because my mom and other siblings recommended I needed help… I must be the only messed up one.
I have talked to my sister a little bit about why she still talks and acts like everything is normal with him.. She said she still wants to be an aunt to his kids and its hard for her to understand how I feel because she didn’t go through what I did. I think everyone thinks I’m strong and have moved on from it all. Also, it happened so long ago that they feel like there’s nothing to do other than forgive, forget, and move on.
What my mom told me and what I think the true story is that my brother was the one who was assaulted when he was 5 by an older female cousin, probably 3 years older than him. I have no recollection of her ever assaulting me or any one else for that matter, except for him assaulting me.
I think the part I struggle with most is that I wonder if he is the same person he was back then.. He did nice things for me in high school and college, an even after college and for my wedding. But that shouldn’t erase the trauma he caused, right? I don’t think he would be a danger to his children currently and my family must feel the same way because they haven’t done anything about it, but the truth is that you never really know… Especially because he hasn’t been completely honest about anything that has happened. But yes, you are probably right that I feel that I am carrying the burden because they believe I’m the one who has to truly confront him. No one really wants to piss him off and call him out. Because then they believe the “close-knit, supportive family” front would be blown… As I write this, it looks like everyone in my family is minimizing what happened. I also don’t understand why I’m having to initiate everything. If he’s truly sorry for what happened, he should be banging on my front door asking to do whatever he can to make this right. But he won’t even attend a therapy session.
My mom recommended I get therapy to heal and to make me a better future mother and wife. No one has ever called me a liar or made any references to me making this up–other than my brother’s wife. My therapist told me she had experience in this subject, but I don’t think she did. I feel like she just took me through her 5 step program that she does to every client no matter what the issue at hand is. And obviously she doesn’t truly care because I haven’t heard from her in over a month. We were working on a plan to meet with my abuser because as I mentioned earlier, the belief is that you forgive, forget, and move on. So I just thought this is what you’re supposed to do. But honestly, that’s obviously not how I feel because I haven’t talked to him still. I did invite him to therapy a couple months ago, as recommended by my therapist, but he declined and only wants to meet one on one. I was unsure about the situation anyway and so was actually relieved when he declined. But I was just doing what I thought was protocol in this type of situation. Especially because my therapist was going along with it all and it was what my mom and sister kept talking about. My therapist told me I was a weak, little girl inside. So I thought by confronting him that would make me powerful. But I really should listen more to my intuition, as you mentioned.
I think my husband is overwhelmed by the situation. Sibling incest is such a silent form of sexual abuse that no one really knows how to handle it. He too is following the protocol: forgive and forget. Its probably my own fault because I don’t voice my opinions (intuition) as strongly as I should.
You’re taught blood is thicker than water, especially when you were raised in a religious home like I was. However, if it was anybody outside of the family who had done this, I know the situation would be treated differently by all parties.
Writing a couple letters to him (which I haven’t delivered) really did help get out emotions that I struggle to voice. So I appreciate your advice on helping to break bonds with my brother by getting it on paper.
That’s interesting that you say abuse memories and emotions come up after a person gets married and when they move away because they begin to feel safe. I always wondered why is this just now affecting my life so greatly. I was able to hide it and store it for so long. And I know that is probably my abuser’s biggest question, too. I’m learning that healing is a day to day thing. You can’t skip a day. You have to retrain your thoughts and focus on your needs. And if you don’t focus on healing, you can slowly sink back into your old thoughts and be easily swayed. For so long I catered to others needs and just did and said what I thought was what everyone wanted to see and hear. I think sometimes I even did that in therapy. And that did not get me far. But, its not like I’m not doing well for myself. I graduated high school and college with honors. I excelled in extracurricular activities. I am a professional now. I have strong friendships. So its easy to get thoughts and emotions distorted inside my head, and compartmentalize things.
Thank you again for your information, thoughts, support, and validation. It means more than you’ll ever know.
Your intuition is right on when you ask yourself why you are carrying his burden. Your brother, by assaulting you and mother by not supporting you are the people to blame if you do not want to be around unhealthy people, they are the ones who set it up to break their own hearts. What a messed up counsellor your parents went to see. Denial is not healthy. Yes, as you mentioned your brother should have been forced to go to counselling because he is the perpetrator.
Even if your sister does not remember being abused, there is still a possibility she was abused. I am not saying it happened for sure, but it is a possibility. Though I think you mentioned she lived somewhere else? But abuse can happen in a moment. It also concerns me that an unhealed perpetrator who will not apologize for what he did to you and make amends, has kids. It is not ok that your sister in not supporting you in this.
Did anyone hold the female cousin accountable for her actions? It is very concerning to me that in your family, abuse victims are not getting help to heal and perpetrators are being let off the hook. Why didn’t your mother do something to help your brother after he was assaulted? Doesn’t she and your father care about the safety and health of the children in their family? It seems like they prefer denial.
No, him doing nice things does not erase the trauma he caused. I met a guy who had abused his sister (when he was little) and he felt awful about it and would do anything to make it up to his sister. He had healed and wanted to make amends for the horrible trauma he had caused his sister. He tried to talk with her about it to apologize but she had forgotten the abuse. He is willing to do anything to make amends and apologize. Your brother is quite different, even though he has done nice things for you, he has yet to apologize and do anything to make direct amends. Your family, would not do anything to help his children even if they thought they were being abused because your family does not protect children from abuse. Look at what your mother did to help your brother after he was assaulted and what she did to validate and help you…nothing except put the burden on you about the abuse. You’re right it is only a front of a “close-knit, supportive family”. And you are also right that he should be banging on your front door.
The best thing to do with the paradigm of “forgive, forget, and move on” is to forget that paradigm and work on taking care of yourself and your hurt inner child. Shame on the “forgive, forget, and move oners”, their paradigm has hurt many survivors and helped the epidemic of child sexual assault to thrive. Their paradigm has allowed many children to be sexually assaulted. You may have never been assaulted, had your mother gotten help for your brother to heal. Your brother, as a person who should be trying to make amends to you for all of the abuse, should have gone to therapy with you, if that was your request but honestly, it may not have gone so well even if he did because it sounds like your therapist is really messed up. How dare your therapist call you a weak little girl inside, a healthy thing for her to have said may have been “I can see that you are a very strong person, look at how you have been able to stand up and tell your truth, despite a very unsupportive family, your little child inside who was hurt needs your strength to take care of her, so that she can heal and be as strong as you are…” or something like that. Because honestly, from your story, you are very string. So many sick people become therapists, social workers, etc. There are some great therapists and social workers but they can be hard to find.
When it comes to your husband, please do not take on the blame for him saying you should forgive and forget (that protects perpetrators so that they can safely assault children). That being said, it sounds like you are listening to your intuition more and more.
Good for you for writing it down, whatever helps you to take care of yourself and heal.
“That’s interesting that you say abuse memories and emotions come up after a person gets married and when they move away because they begin to feel safe. I always wondered why is this just now affecting my life so greatly. I was able to hide it and store it for so long. And I know that is probably my abuser’s biggest question, too. I’m learning that healing is a day to day thing. You can’t skip a day. You have to retrain your thoughts and focus on your needs. And if you don’t focus on healing, you can slowly sink back into your old thoughts and be easily swayed. For so long I catered to others needs and just did and said what I thought was what everyone wanted to see and hear. I think sometimes I even did that in therapy. And that did not get me far. But, its not like I’m not doing well for myself. I graduated high school and college with honors. I excelled in extracurricular activities. I am a professional now. I have strong friendships. So its easy to get thoughts and emotions distorted inside my head, and compartmentalize things.” -Anonymous. Your intuition and thoughts are great and show that you are healing. Eventually, you will have retrained your thoughts so that you do not need to do it consciously all of the time. Feel free to write back an update or questions any time.
^Same story for me. Didn’t tell anyone til I was years older, and my brother, the abuser, was later arrested for doing it to someone else about 15 years later. Before he was arrested I had finally told my mom what he did, she didn;t believe me. He got arrested and she called me to apologize for not believing me. The first words out of my mouth was “Now do you believe me about your husband (my step dad) and the words were yes but I was lied to. So not only was I sexually abused by my brother, my mother then went on to marry one just like him. I was old enough to know better by then but he still was extremly inappropriate… so when I told the truth…..He denied it. My mother is still married to him and we do not speak. Alot of ppl try to make me feel bad about this but I will never put my children in the same kind of shit I was put through. Its a DISGUSTING world we live in and I will do right by my children and let them live a life where sexual abuse isn’t ever happening or having the chance to happen. My mother should have taken the responsibility of a child more serious than just letting whoever watch me whenever and then calling me a liar when she sees fit. Thanks alot MOM.
Hi S,
It is so sad how parents do not support and protect their children. I am so sorry to hear what happened to you. Every child should be protected and cared for. You should not feel bad about not talking with your mother, if she is not caring and loving she in not like a real mother anyway. People who want you to talk with unsupportive parents are also good to avoid talking to. Let’s reframe this, the people who are telling you to talk with your mother are saying that it is more important to talk with your mother than to protect your children. Who are these people to say that. I have heard the same things from people about how I should talk with my parents but really in the grand scheme of things, these people protect pedophiles. Yuck. These people who are pro-pedophile should feel terrible about not protecting children from whoever the predator is, even if the predator is part of the family..
Good for you for protecting your children from a perpetrator. Your mother sounds like a horrible person, it shows how much strength that you have that despite being raised by a mother who was not a real mother you, are a real mom to your children.
Anytime a person tells you to talk with your mother, hence put your children in danger, walk away or say something like, I protect children from pedophiles, I hope you will some day make the same choice. Hopefully you will find yourself around these pro-pedophiles less and less.
If you ever need to talk to someone about this or need more support try calling 800-656-HOPE. It will connect you to the hotline nearest to you. If the person you are talking with on the hotline is helpful, that’s great, if not hang up and try again later or try another hotline at centers.rainn.org, keep calling until you get the support that you need. If you want to do counselling, many of them have free counselling for rape survivors but again listen to your intuition.
You sound really strong despite never having a real mom. Feel free to write an update or with any questions.
Everyone’s situation is different, but trust me, sometimes it is best to leave your abuser behind. You need to make it about you, not about them. Chances are you will never get an admission, much less an apology. When I cut a family member loose years back, I actually felt a little guilty – for five minutes – but I knew it was the only way for me to get a semblance of peace and resolution.
I think the biggest obstacle when it involves family – and it most very often does – is that we often feel obligated to love, much less LIKE people simply because they’re related to us. Biological family, adoptive family, that part doesn’t matter. It’s family, your first introduction to trust.
When I told this family member to never contact me again, it was prolific. I knew that he knew why I was doing it, no more dancing or weaving around the gorilla in the room.
You never truly ‘move on’ in the classic sense of the phrase, but you can transcend. Sexual abuse is not a stain on you, it’s a stain on your abuser.
Thanks so much for everything you wrote, it shows a ton of insight. I will be writing a response in the next few days. Been super busy lately.
Okay I’m going to try to keep this short. I remember being 5 or 6 and briefly remember being really uncomfortable when my sister taught me how to masterbate, she’s 7 years older than me. I remember thinking it was normal at the time cause we are both girls…(edited by blogger) but ever since that age i remember always wanting to…(do this in) public or in class, the majority of the time. As i got into middle school I realized that that is unacceptable so i hid that part of me… don’t think it counts as incest but i’m just starting to put things together. thanks for listening.
Thank you so much
Hi Samantha,
I am so sorry that this happened to you. As I looked up a bunch of dictionary definitions of incest and they vary but the most important thing is that you were sexually violated by a person that should have been there to look out for her little sister and instead she sexually violated you. And that is not ok. Your wanting to do this in public was your unconsciousness trying to act out to get help and tell others that you were violated. It is normal for a child who has been sexually violated to have sexual thoughts and even act out on them. The part of you that you hid was the part of you that was an abused and wounded child. The fact that you had those thoughts are not your fault, even if you had acted out on them it would still not be your fault. But the question remains, who did the same thing to your sister that she did to you and did that person also have access to you?
The question also needs to be asked, what do you need to do to help nurture and heal the wounded little girl inside of you? Are you eating when you are hungry, sleeping when you are tired and taking time to do things that make you smile?
Another thing that can be helpful when trying to work things out is to call the 1’800-656-HOPE 24 hour hotline. They will connect you to the rape crisis center nearest you. Some hotlines are great and others are awful and also sometimes great hotlines have bad volunteers that just happen to be on call when you are calling. So if the person who you talk with is not helpful, hang up and try again later or try calling another hotline at centers.rann.org. A hotline that be there to help you figure out what would be helpful in your healing process. They should be there to listen and support you but they are not always helpful, so always listen to your intuition. Many of them also offer free counselling but again listen to your intuition when seeing therapists, counsellors, etc.
Many experts are opposed to the use of antidepressants, antipsychotics when it comes to emotional healing and I think that is great advice, I am even opposed to things like St. John’s Wart because all of those things hide the emotions that you need to detox from and release and instead stuff those emotions back inside. When it comes to prescriptions drugs the side effects are overwhelming, for example; you have to figure out if your depression or extreme anxiety is from the drug or your past, etc.
It shows your strength and courage that you were able to reach out and write this comment. It also shows that you are on your way to healing by questioning and trying to make sense of your past. I would try calling the hotline and talk with someone next.
Please feel free to write any questions or updates on how you are doing, struggles and successes are all fine to write as updates.
Thank you so much for your insight. I have already tried thiniking of who might have done this to her but we used to live in a different city most of her childhood, so i will probably never know. Its so hard to talk about so this is a huge step thank you for doing this for everyone who feels hopeless. You’re truly amazing.
Thanks Samantha. So many people have helped me in my healing process. The most important thing about the question who abused your sister, is if they had access to you and it sounds like there is a good chance because she was in another city that they did not. Feel free to post more comments any time.
Any advice on what to do when the abuser is still very much a part of your lives. I always knew my boyfriend had issues and a lack or respect for his dad due to the fact he always worked away for most of his life. He is now 32. However during an argument recently where I was complaining how he never showed emotion which led me to believe he didn’t care, he told me that his Dad used to…(sexually assault) him from the age of 7 to early teens. I’m still having trouble digesting this and gave gone through all the emotions, including guilt at thinking of myself when he is my concern. It seems the family, including his mother knew about all this and have all buried it very deep. I’m now scared that this will affect us at some point as I don’t think I can be around his father knowing what he has put my boyfriend through. I can’t talk to anyone (my normal coping mechanism) as its not my business to speak about. Any advice????
Hi Annie,
How you are feeling is a normal reaction to finding out that someone you care about was abused. It is horrifying. Imagine if this had happened to you and you told him about it, he would be horrified and not want to be around the person who abused you. He would be going through a ton of emotions, realizing that the person that he cares about has been abused. This is normal and healthy.
His family sounds like there is nothing healthy about it. There is his mother who enabled the abuse and his father who assaulted him. It is not healthy that his mother does not want to deal with the abuse. It shows the signs of a completely dysfunctional family. Has your boyfriend ever considered distancing himself from his family? That would be a very healthy choice. In our culture we are raised that we need to stay in touch with our families. But when there has been sexual assault and the perpetrator does not want to heal, then there is no reason to interact with unhealthy people. It can actually re-traumatize the person who survived the abuse by seeing and interacting with the perpetrator. The other issue is that perpetrators rarely stop assaulting children unless they want to stop and get help, so there is a good chance if his dad has access to any boys or girls, he may be assaulting them also.
You do not have to be around his family if you do not want to be. You can explain to him that what his dad did to him makes you not want to be around a person who would assault a child. Hopefully this will be validating to your boyfriend and maybe he will make the choice to also not spend time with his family either. Neither you or your boyfriend owe his family anything. You do not need to force yourselves to spend time around people who think that it is ok to sexually assault children. His mother by knowing about it and doing nothing about the sexual assaults is saying that it is ok to assault children and not protect them from abuse.
When you have a survivor of abuse in your life, it is important to not only listen to what he needs to say but to also make sure that you are taking time to take care of yourself. You cannot be there for another person, if you are not there for yourself. That could mean taking some time alone or with your friends doing things that you love to do and also still taking time with your boyfriend doing things that the two of you love to do together. If you want you can make time to support him but also make time to do things that the two of you love to do together.
This is not your boyfriend’s secret to keep it is his father’s secret and his father’s shame. There is a resource for male survivors and people who care about them at http://www.malesurvivor.org/ (I do not agree with everything on the website but it does show that he is not alone). Your boyfriend is not at all alone, one in six boys will be sexually assaulted by the time they reach 18 years and yet it is rarely talked about. You also may want to check out this film trailer called “Back on Track: Men Talking About Childhood Sexual Assault”, I just watched it and it made me cry but it seems like a hopeful trailer (I have yet to watch the film).
As a person who cares about your boyfriend, it is absolutely fine to call a rape crisis line to get advice on how to deal with the feelings that are coming up for you and how you can take care of yourself while supporting your boyfriend. You can try going to http://www.rapecrisis.org.uk/centres.php and finding a center near you. If they are not helpful keep calling until you get a person who is helpful or try calling a center that is not near you, feel free to even call a center in another country, keep calling til you get helpful help. Many hotlines have great people volunteering and not so great people. If you find the person not helpful, hang up and try again later or try another helpline, you have the right to get support for the secondary trauma you are experiencing and also so that you can be there for your boyfriend also. He can of course also call the hotline but always remember to hang up if the person is not helpful.
The below excerpt is from http://www.pcar.org/blog/common-victim-behaviors-survivors-sexual-abuse
“Many victims continue to have a relationship with their abuser.
Though it may be difficult for the public to understand, it is common for survivors of sexual abuse to continue relationships with their abusers after the abuse has stopped. Individuals react to trauma in different ways. For example, it is common for victims to maintain contact with their abusers because they may still feel affection for them even though they hate the abuse. This is especially normal when the abuser is a member of the family or a close family friend. It is also common for some victims to maintain contact in an attempt to regain control over their assault. Others may maintain contact in an attempt to regain a feeling of normalcy.
Additionally, offenders often intentionally build a connection or a bond that isn’t broken as a result of sexual abuse. The abuse is often one element of an otherwise loving or fun relationship. Offenders may intentionally maintain the non-abusive parts of the relationship to keep victims feeling close to them and thus less likely to report the prior abuse.”
I believe that your boyfriend can heal from the abuse if he takes action to heal and if it is right, the two of you can have a happy and healthy life together. Just keep taking care of yourself.
Feel free to write back with any updates or any questions.
Hi there! I am 32 years old and have always remembered the abuse I endured from my brother who is 3 1/2 years older than me. It started after my mom’s second divorce. She was never home, working literally around the clock. I was about 8 at the time. Things went on for about 2 years, then stopped. I was able to put the memories aside throughout high school until my senior year when the memories started to come back strong. My relationships with my family were affected. I could never get close to my mom or any other adult. In college, the memories resurfaced. I was so bothered by my memories that I told my boyfriend at the time who called me “sick” and broke up with me.
Family get togethers were never easy. I kind of just smiled along with everything. Two years ago, my already broken relationship with my mom came to a head. As far as I know, she knows nothing of what happened with me. I have always been a ‘problem child’ and my brother has always been the ‘golden child’. When my mom decided to move away, he moved with her. He lives minutes away from her, gets his mail at her house and does his laundry there, as well. After the falling out with my mom, I finally stopped talking to her. She can be very mentally abusive. After I stopped talking to her, my brother said he didn’t agree with what I was doing and stopped talking to me, as well.
My husband knew I had been abused but never knew who had done it. I finally came clean with everything recently. He was very supportive. I really got into the trenches of my brain and have been kind of simmering there for the past week or so…going through the most painful memories and now I’m just very very confused.
I’m left feeling very lost….I have a lot of questions that will most likely never be answered. I don’t know if it’s normal to feel as though I’ve lost my identity and kind of like I’ve been uprooted….I don’t know who I am anymore. I have considered talking with my mom and brother again. I don’t feel as though I want a relationship with these people and am just seeking some kind of advice. I don’t feel like I need to forgive…I don’t know what I need and I don’t know what is normal….
this past week has been full of anxiety, tears and confusing feelings.
I will be writing a response within a day or two.
Thank you 🙂
Hi Nicole,
I am so sorry to hear that that happened to you. Every child deserves to be protected, be loved and know that nothing bad will happen to them and have a mom around to protect her children. Good thing that you got away from the boyfriend who called you sick, he was the person who was sick. What a horrible person.
I think that it is very healthy that you are not speaking with the person who assaulted you (your brother) and the person who is emotionally abusive to you (your mother). It is very sad that you never had a loving family but to force yourself to talk to a family that is harmful to you, is abusing yourself. You no longer need to put a fake smile on your face, when you are around mean people. Your job is ti be the mother to yourself that you never had. From what you have written is seems like both your brother and your mother are mean people and because they are so alike (in a mean way), they enjoy being around each other.
It is great to hear that you have a husband, who is loving and supportive. It must have felt good to be able to tell the truth about who abused you and stop keeping your brothers secret. Because your brother is the abuser, by not saying it was him, you were keeping his secret (but many survivors are made to feel that it is their secret and their shame to hide, when it actually is the abuser’s secret and the abuser’s shame.
When you allow yourself to process those painful memories instead of pushing them back down, you slowly allow your body to detox from the trauma that you experienced. It might be helpful to read my post “What to Do When You Feel Triggered” at http://healingfromsexualabuse.com/ideas-for-healing-from-abuse/what-to-do-when-you-feel-triggered/ it may be helpful.
It can also be helpful, when you are healing to reach out and try and get support. It can be hard to find good support, so always listen to your intuition, when you are interviewing therapists, social workers, etc, see if they are validating and helpful or giving you a bad feeling in the pit of your stomach or simply not helpful. You can also try calling the 1-800-656-HOPE hotline, but again listen to your intuition and see if the person who you are talking with is helping you, or not really helping, they also may have resources that can connect you to a local rape crisis center that can help you with free counselling. Rape crisis centers specialize in counselling victims of sexual assault even if the assault happened years ago. But keep in mind that some centers can have great and awful counsellors so always listen to your intuition.
When you allow yourself to start processing the emotions from the abuse, it is called the “emergency stage” (because you are feeling the emotions you have stuffed down for years). During the emergency stage, it can feel like you have lost your identity, but this is temporary. What you are really loosing is all of your coping mechanisms of being someone else, in order to cope with the abusers and not really feeling how you feel. What you are actually doing is releasing a character you had to act as to get by and survive, so that who you really are can begin to come through.
There is no reason to talk with your mother or brother again, unless you want to confront them about the abuse. I would only choose to confront them for you but not to get them to admit that they did anything wrong, because chances are that they will blame you, say that you made it up or call you crazy, etc.
You are absolutely correct that you do not need to forgive them. I have found that people who force themselves to forgive perpetrators because they think that they need to do that to heal, quite often are in denial of themselves, are not allowing themselves to process and detox from the emotions of the abuse and frequently, even their voices sound fake. They may say “I am fine” but when you look at them, you can clearly see a very fake smile on their faces.
The emotions that you are going through right now are absolutely normal. Your body is detoxing emotions, you are releasing all of the anxiety, tears, etc, that you have held onto for years. That is why many experts would recommend that you do not let anybody prescribe you drugs for those emotions that you are finally allowing yourself to feel. Those drugs will stuff all of those feelings back down, plus they come with a huge list of side effects, including some of the emotions that you are feeling now. Side effects of those drugs can include; extreme anxiety, depression, suicidal ideation, liver damage, tardive dyskinesia (because it can damage the brain), etc. I also agree with some experts to not use things like St. John’s Wart, because you need to feel your feelings and even though it is natural, it still is interfering with releasing your emotions. I do agree with nutritionists that eating a healthy diet and drinking enough water so that your body will not be so stressed, can always be helpful.
I would recommend trying the hotline as soon as possible and see if they are helpful, if they are not, try again later when another hotline volunteer is working, if that does not work, then go to centers.rainn.org and call hotlines from anywhere in the country. Keep calling until you get good help. If you take action and continue to allow yourself to feel and detox from the abuse, you will heal. Things will get better
Feel free to write back with any questions or update on how things are going.
Hi! My boyfriend wants to know about my past history including some of the abuse I had suffered. Because I haven’t even processed or accepted about half of it………………….. I am getting “very” nervous about telling him. How much should I tell him? It’s making me a little panicky and I’m not positive exactly why. Maybe I’m afraid of flashing back or going into crying histerically….. risking of course acting a bit crazy to him. Either way, I just wish there was a way I can tell him some things without appearing crazy!!!!! It my own mind, sometimes I get lost in it…. and it takes me awhile to ground back into the present moment and reality. I don’t want to do that either in front of him. Anway… just though I’d ask for some advice on this….. because I never met anyone before that was interested in knowing some of my history. Honestly, I am doubting he will be able to the deeper abuse I had endured…………………… I will find a way to be OK though! I just don’t know ‘how’ to go about this…………….. in hopes of opening myself up to someone I do love. Maybe I’m not 100 percent in love with him yet, but I do love him! I just don’t want to hurt him …………. and I am not positive if he is strong enough to handle it.
Hi Anonymous,
Tell him only what you want to tell him. You do not need to tell him everything, unless you want to. You may want to take a moment to yourself, with paper and pen and write down your thoughts. Write down what you want to share with him and also write down what you do not want to share with him yet. You can always shred or burn what you write down but it can be helpful to write down your thoughts. Maybe the longer you date, you will want to tell him more. It is your experience and you can share or not share what you want.
Remember that the shame is your perpetrator’s shame and not yours, you did nothing wrong, you were the victim. And also remember that the secret is you perpetrator’s secret and not yours. You can also write down some helpful things you can do if you feel like you are going to have a flashback.. Have you ever had a flashback? Because if you have not had one in the past, though I am not sure, I don’t think it is likely that you will have on for the first time when you tell your boyfriend. If you have had flashbacks before, what have you done that has helped you with them?
Are you seeing a helpful therapist? If not, you may want to call the 800-656-HOPE line though I think one of the places in your area connects to a crisis line that is not very helpful. You can always go to centers.rainn.org and keep calling hotlines until you get a person who can help you to write a plan. Or simply listen to you as you come up with ideas, which is frequently far more helpful then them telling you what they think you should do. The hotline should also have resources for counselling for healing from sexual assault but always remember to listen to your intuition and if the person you are interviewing to see if they would be a good therapist, social worker, etc does not feel like the right person, keep looking.
You are not crazy, what happened to you is crazy. If your boyfriend thinks you are crazy from telling your story about your victimization, then run. That would not be a healthy person to date.
If he cares about you and is the right guy for you to be dating, then he should be able to handle hearing what you went through. If he cares, hearing about your abuse should make him sad or angry or speechless because of compassion for you. You survived, you were strong enough to reach out and ask these questions, chances are if he is the right guy, he will be strong enough to hear what happened to you, if he is not strong enough to hear your story, then he is probably not the right guy for you to date.
I hope that helped. Feel free to write back with any more questions or any updates.
Amy:
Hi! Wanted to respond and give an update. Thank you for all your comments. They truly helped!! I told him a few things with some deep breaths but with a shakey voice. He was Very supportive! Yeah he was angry at my abuser but thankfully not overly…(I can’t handly a person that’s overly angry). So it went well…. I fought though to stay present enough ….. Yes I get flashbacks….. I tend to lose myself in them and hate that. I didn’t want to do that in front of my boyfriend.
Now I’m tired and need sleep. Just wanted to add yes I’m still processing that it wasn’t my fault. I guess that’s what happens after being brainwashed.
Hi Anonymous,
That is such an empowering thing that you did. That shows a ton of strength.
Thank you! If I could do my life over again …… I mean– after it happened the 1st time, I would have sent him to prison to rotttttttt. The amount of damage he did– I am positive that man should not be breathing!!!! I an thrilled to have a wonderful man in my life ….. And i can only pray that he’s strong enough to handle something that’ll take me another few months to tell him
Please continue to be gentle with yourself and only tell what you want to tell. There is no time limit on when to tell. Remember to keep taking time to do things that you enjoy doing with your boyfriend also. Such as walking in the park, museums or whatever you like to do. Those are only possible examples. Keep taking care of yourself and listening to what you need to do for you. Such as eating when you are hungry, sleeping when you are tired, seeing a funny movie when you need a laugh is all part of reclaiming who you are and healing.
Trust me I was a grown man and when my GF 21 told me of her past history of sexual abuse by her father is made me sick to my stomach. I could handle it and I am strong but at times we had to stop as my brain had taken in too much that day. We use to get out of the house and go to a place we named Conversation Lane for her to start her conversation about it all. Sometimes we would be there an hour sometimes 8 hours. There were times we hugged and there were times we fought. It’s a hard thing when you care about someone to hear what she went through and with her after it was all over a huge part of it is self shaming where you start to do reckless behavior. That part of her life to me was the hardest to hear and understand. She even grew to the point she loved what her father did after years and being forced to take it. I asked her once HOW ? how could you grown to love it and she said He taught me I was only good to be a whore and me made me his whore. Also it’s the only thing I knew how so do after he went to prison. She said it was also a part of survival to learn to love it or you will kill yourself. It was really hard to hear so unless he is strong and I am don’t start telling him. I am the first person she has told the entire story to. He therapist would get mad she would tell me and would not tell her. She knew it was just someone to write it on paper in a medical file and what good would it do. She ask me once. Do you really think she can undo 5 years of being raped ? I don’t think so she said. Make sure when you go to let all this go you love this person with all your heart and he loves you back the same way. It was still hard on me and it still has me wondering about her and it put doubts in my mind about her that I did not have before but we are still together.
Hi Steven,
To hear someone you care about talk about such extreme abuse must be very hard. People have all sorts of ways of dealing with child and adult sexual assault, including minimizing and normalizing the abuse. It seems like she has tried to normalize the abuse. A part of her grew to love the abuse because it was the only form of “love” that she knew from her dad, which is very sad. And possibly, in desperation, she took on the belief that she was a whore, to try to get “love” from her father but as people can see from the outside, he father had no love to give, he was a rapist and a pedophile. She is saying how much she truly hated being raped when she said that she had to learn to love it or kill herself. “Loving” being raped was how she as a child or even as an adult, dealt with the sexual assault because she wanted to survive and not kill herself, suicide or accepting being raped she felt were her only options.
Unfortunately, there are a ton of messed up therapists and social workers and it sounds like she was seeing one who was pretty messed up. A therapist, if I understood correctly, should not be getting mad at a rape victim for being raped, that is pretty sick for the therapist to do. If a person goes to a bad therapist, most likely they will not get better and they might possibly get worse. Yes, I truly believe that a person can heal from 5 years of being raped and people have healed from even more abuse than that.
A good start for her would be to reach out and call the 800-656-HOPE hotline, it should connect to the rape crisis center nearest to you. If the person answering the phone is not helpful, she should hang up and try again later, keep trying until she gets the help she needs. If the local line is continually not helpful, she should try calling any rape crisis hotline, some can be found at centers.rainn.org (If the person answering asks where she is calling from, she should say something like she would prefer not to say and she is calling to get help because some hotlines if they figure out you are calling from out if the area will not help, but she does not need to say where she is, the most important focus is to get real help.) The rape crisis center near you should have free counselling, though apparently some rape crisis centers do not have free counselling. Even if she goes to a rape crisis center for therapy, it is important that she listens to her intuition to see if the person she is talking with is being helpful and can help her to heal. I do not believe that either medication or things such as St. John’s Wart are helpful to healing from abuse because they push down feelings that survivors need to detox from and medication can also have longterm harmful side effects as written on the side effect label. I wrote a post about some tools that can be helpful to healing from abuse at http://healingfromsexualabuse.com/ideas-for-healing-from-abuse/what-to-do-when-you-feel-triggered/
You can also try calling to get support for yourself. Again, if the person is not helpful or says something like they only help survivors, hang up and try again later. Good rape crisis lines should help anyone dealing with abuse whether it is their own abuse or the abuse of a loved one. And if you repeatedly do not get help from your local rape crisis center, then try calling one from the centers.rainn.org (Also no need to mention your location if they ask. It’s sad that the policy of some hotlines is to only help local people but it could be a funding issue, so if you do not say your location and they are helpful, then you can get the help you need and the volunteer gets to help someone which should be why they are volunteering in the first place.) It is important that you take care of yourself. You cannot help your girlfriend, if you are not taking care of yourself. This can sometimes mean doing what you need to do to take care of you, meaning sometimes spending time with yourself or your friends without your girlfriend or other things that are life giving to you. It is also important to spend time with your girlfriend doing things that you both enjoy doing without talking about the abuse.
I truly believe that your girlfriend can heal if she takes action to do so and is willing to detox from the abuse, also acknowledging how awful being raped was and to no longer have contact with her dad. It could take some time for her to get to the place where she is willing to cut off contact with her dad. To cut off contact with him, will mean that she is acknowledging to herself, that the abuse was bad, and giving up on getting love from a dad who has none to give. But she can also learn to be a parent to herself that she never had. I wrote some ideas about how to parent yourself in my post “Surviving Mother’s Day and the Holidays” at http://healingfromsexualabuse.com/ideas-for-healing-from-abuse/surviving-mothers-day-and-the-holidays/ There is hope that she can completely heal and have a healthy relationship, others have healed and had great relationships. But also you need to make sure that through it all you take care of yourself.
Hi so about two years ago my brother came into my room and sexually abused me. I was only in seventh grade and half awake and completely terrified. Now everytime he tries to hug me or anything i freak out and feel like im gonna throw up. The worst is when he comes into my room late at night and i feel so ill and shaky and wondering if he is going to do it again. I dont know how to tell my parents either cause my dad barely ever sees me and my mom is too busy with her new boyfriend and drinking. Please help its gotten to the point i dont want ANYONE to touch me. Also when i was in kindergarden my teacher told my parents i was being sexually harassed but she didnt say who and i dont remember any of it
Hi,
Your reactions of being scared that your brother will do it again is a normal reaction to being abused. He may try to do that again. Also you have a right to not have your brother hug you or even touch you. Your body is yours and you have every right to say no to any hugs or any touch you do not want, even if it is anyone in your family, including any siblings or parents. I would never want anyone who assaulted me to get near me, let alone touch me in any way including a hug. Also, since he assaulted you, his hug and touch is probably sexual and yucky. But even if it is not, you always have the right to say no.
It is fine for right now that you do not want anyone to touch you. As you heal from the assault this will change. But you always have the right to decide who can touch you and who cannot. Even if you do not want someone to shake your hand, that is fine and your choice.
You can also try and tell a teacher that you trust, who is nice to you. Or any adult that you trust. When you tell them, if they are supportive and want to help you, such as make a plan to tell your parents or reach out to authorities who can help you then that is good. If they tell you to keep it a secret, or just stay away from your brother (but nothing else), or your brother will get over it, or you are making it up or asked for sexual details about the abuse (some authorities or social workers may need to know details but a teacher or friend’s parent should not need any details and look at their face when they are asking to see if it is kind or creepy) or anything else that makes you feel creeped out (or even not helped) then you have found out that you need to leave there immediately and find an adult that is truly helpful. Be prepared for any response from your parents also. Hopefully they will be appalled and supportive of you healing and make sure that you are safe from your brother and whoever assaulted your brother.
Which is my other concern, who assaulted your brother and do they have access to you also. I do not know of a confirmed case where a child assaulted another child who was not assaulted first. This is not an excuse for your brother, because what he did is wrong, but it is an important question to ask yourself.
Do you remember your parents reaction when the kindergarten teacher said that? That can give you a clue as to how they may react, when you tell them about your brother. But no matter what their reaction was, it is important to reach out for help. You deserve to feel safe at home and everywhere you are.
I truly believe that you will be able to find help and you deserve help but always listen to your intuition to see if the help that you find is any good. I would call 303-443-7300 (MESA) rather than the one in Denver (or 800-656-HOPE because they will connect you to the Denver RAAP who is not very helpful in your situation) because MESA has more tools to help you and their counselling is free, if you choose to go that route. You do not need tell them that you are not in Boulder, if you do, then they will refer you back to RAAP, who will most likely not be very helpful (I have researched this). But they can also help you to come up with a plan and have resources to help you. If you ever do not feel helped hang up and try again later (they have different counselors on call) or try any hotline at centers.rainn.org, keep calling and reaching out until you get the help you need. Some people on the hotline are very helpful, others may be trying to help but they are so anxious to be helpful that they tell you what they think you should do rather than ask you what you need and a few are even mean.
I believe that you will heal from the assault and it is great that you took the first step to reach out and tell your story. It shows your strength and knowing that you deserve to be safe at home and everywhere. So your next step is to figure out which adult you want to talk to to get help and make a plan to tell your parents. (Do not give up if one is not helpful, keep reaching out til you find one who is). The hotline can be easy but you can also try a trusted teacher or your best friend, who can support you in this process. Remember that anyone who is not really supportive of you in disclosing or believing you, may not really be your friend.
Feel free to write back with any questions or an update.