Dear Survivor,
“Because then I knew it was over.”
That’s what most strive to feel about the lingering effects of childhood abuse, although not about the actual events. Those are long gone, and often dissociated from awareness.
Rather, most want to end sleepless nights and startled awakenings; feeling as if they live in a parallel universe, outside the world inhabited by ‘normal’ people who lack histories of abuse; intrusive images, feelings, sounds, and smells; the desire to drink, smoke, toke, shoot up, sex to oblivion; the avoidance of intimacy because of a seemingly endless reserve of anxiety simmering below a brittle surface of civility; or fighting because the rage never seems to dissipate and you just want to push back, because the planet is not big enough to hold all your hurt, let alone the emotional needs of another person.
At the first inkling of the wish to heal, some try to barter with themselves as a way out of this paradoxical life of repetitive chaos. This often starts with a naïvely made promise with oneself to be good. This promise usually starts with the belief that by being good and trying really hard, one day life will finally, if not miraculously, turn out differently. This is not an easy promise to let go of; even when it’s obvious you are failing miserably at keeping it.
Even so, there will still be a part of you that keeps the promise. Why? Often because of the secretly held wish that if you finally get it ‘right’ the love that wasn’t there will materialize, or your savior will come and magically change everything (releasing you from both effort and responsibility), or the opportunity for revenge will become available, and there you have it: the transformative moment you have waited for has arrived.
This I can tell you is a colossal waste of time and the imagination. Even if the perfect love, the ideal savior, or the opportunity for the most humiliating payback becomes available, you will never become who you might have been had the abuse never happened, or get the time back that you have wasted waiting for your personal Godot.
You might think I am giving you that old song and dance about picking your ass up off the curb, brushing off the dust of trauma, stomping its dirt from your shoes, and manning up to life’s inevitable trials and tribulations. Not at all. Rather, I think childhood abuse is so life-threatening that it might as well be the antimatter to thriving and creativity and vitality’s dark matter. But because I know what it takes to heal — mainly courage, love, and lots of time — I’d rather not see you waste yours.
I grew up in Texas, in the middle of the Bible belt. My early mind stewed in New Testament ideology. It was impressed upon me, with great fear I might add, to avoid sin at all costs. As children in an Episcopalian Day School, we learned to hold our breath when we did something wrong, to look around and make sure no one was watching, to produce the image of being good for the fear of reprisal, sanctions, and shaming. If your childhood was anything like mine, it’s no wonder that for many of us the effects of childhood abuse linger in our psyches like a bad case of Candida, and only the strictest diet of goodness gives hope of salvation. But the truth is: it wasn’t your fault, and no matter how good you were or become, it still would have happened. Start loving yourself now.
Sometimes it helps to acknowledge there are a few ghosts hovering about that interfere with overcoming the impact that child abuse has had on your life. Who are these ghosts? The person who hurt you. The one who didn’t love you. The savior who didn’t come. The bully you are still afraid of. We all fight battles in our heads that our bodies never could defend against. Some of these battles are our own, others we’ve inherited from our parents and our ancestors. Sometimes simply through the act of belonging to a group we inherit ghosts. Humans are pack animals. Our psyches are permeable and inseparable. Sorting out was is yours and what is theirs is a big part of the process.
You know trauma by what it does to you. And there is an entire story I can tell you (and often do tell) about how the body responds to fear, how the amygdala gets activated, how the frontal lobes shut down, and a lot of other stuff gets tripped off, which is all true and matters if you want to get your life back on track.
But what often lingers long after the traumatic stress dissipates, or becomes manageable, is the confrontation with good and evil that child abuse initiates. What do you do with the reality that people can be so damn mean and thoughtless, selfish and cruel? What do you do with the reality that as a result of being abused you too have acted in ways for which you are not so proud, and sometimes deeply ashamed? For it really isn’t until we can hold our own humanity in its widest sense, and acknowledge the potential for good and evil in all of us, do the effects of child abuse fully relinquish their hold. And when you can fully accept this realization, then you are also able to give yourself the unconditional love that is your birthright and you will know that, whatever happened, you managed to keep your soul.
© 2014 Laura K Kerr, PhD. All rights reserved (applies to writing and photography).
Written By Laura K Kerr, Ph.D
“Dear Survivor”: A Letter About The Hard Truths of Healing From Child Abuse was originally published @ Laura K Kerr, PhD and has been syndicated with permission.
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—I was so isolated from the world that I did not know I was being abused. I did not realize how bad it had always been until my Mom passed away and I continued to be abused by my brothers. There was physical abuse when I was within reach, but the mental and emotional abuse was worse, because even now, I don’t know why they all hated me so much. I will never fully recover but I have come to realize that it was NOT my fault,…I am still left hurting because this was my OWN FAMILY and Moms, especially, are supposed to love and protect you,…aren’t they?
Dear Rhonnda,
I am so sorry this happened to you. And yes, they are suppose to love and protect you.
It’s so hurtful to be the person identified in the family as the focus of all the negative, aggressive energy that isn’t being dealt with or addressed as it should be. And it’s so important to know, as you do, it wasn’t your fault.
Thank you for sharing.
From the heart, Laura. Posted and tweeted.
Thank you, John.
Yah, the betrayal you feel from family makes it all worse.
Hi Ed,
You are so right. I’m glad the mental health field is paying more attention to how difficult dealing with the betrayal can be.
This touched me in so many ways! I was sexually abused from the age of 5 till the age of 17 when I left the home. Not only was this a daily thing, I believed it to be natural until I was in my teens. I was told that was how a mother and father showed their children how they loved them and how much it meant to them. When I did find out that the way we were being treated was so wrong I tried to tell my 7th grade teacher just to be informed that I should not be telling lies on the only people that had wanted us enough to adopt us and put a roof on our heads. I felt as though I had no one that I could trust in my life not even God. I felt that I had to do this because if I did not I was not good enough for anyone else to want. After leaving home I married a man that would also physically abuse me, we were married for 11 years until the day he almost killed me. I ran from him and my past I kept running. It took me almost 30 years to get to the point that I could tell someone of my abuse of all the horrible things that went on in my childhood home. I have now gone back to school to become a Social Worker and working with victims of abuse. It took 4 years of counseling for me to be able to feel like I was worth living in this sad world of pain. I AM NO LONGER A VICTIM I AM NOW A SURVIVOR!
Teressa,
Thank you for sharing some of your incredible hardships. I am so inspired by your commitment to helping others. I imagine you have a lot of wisdom to share about healing from abuse.
At 68 years old, I finally told a therapist about being gang raped as a teenager. I finally understand why I have never been able to have a real relationship with a husband or any other man. I put men in boxes. You can be my friend and we can laugh and have fun together. You can be a sex partner and nothing else at all. You, I can love if you won’t try to touch me. I have been divorced for nearly 38 years. I haven’t dated in over 25 years. I don’t even let myself make female friends. I have found only isolation to be my safe place. I let myself feel with my children, then one died in an automobile accident and I closed myself off from the surviving child to my great shame. Only my grandchildren had access to the most loving part of my soul, and then they were taken away when their parents went thru a terrible, bitter divorce.
I have become very involved in the issue of child abuse and feel like there is little more important on this earch than keeping children safe.
I don’t want this to end up on Facebook or Twitter. Thank you.
Ingrid,
What an awful experience, and so understandable that it would have a lasting impact, especially effecting how you relate to men. I am so sad that there wasn’t someone to support you when it happened. Too many women, like you, suffer in silence. It’s wonderful that you can now share what happened to you and that you want to help vulnerable children.
With regards to Facebook and Twitter, usually people would click on the URL or link associated with this article, which would direct them to this page. If you decide that you would like to remove your comment, click on the “contact” button above and let the editors know.
Thank you for sharing your experiences.
This is so well written but then the ending is cheap and easy. What the is that supposed to mean? You can’t write something so real and necessary and then end it with positive thought new age crap. It’s a cop out. Only when you can hold good and bad in your mind at the same time? Give something tangible and real because the rest of it is brilliant and I was really looking forward to where it was taking me.
Hi Dominique,
Quite a heartfelt reply!
No, it’s not “cheap and easy,” by any means, to get to a point in which you are no longer blaming the world for how you feel or act. And I don’t think it’s “new age crap” to let go of a sense of entitlement, and the belief that life owe’s you something. Yet getting to this point usually requires dealing with the sense of self that results from being a victim, and letting go of seeing oneself as a victim, which often means honestly taking stock of one’s own character.
This piece spoke volumes to me. I am a survivor of horrific childhood abuse. My mother is borderline Mentally Retarded and my father is tested at genius, so of course he would use someone like me mother. My father raped me, beat me, emotionally tormented me, and used me as a child sex slave for his “friends”. I am now in my 30’s, blessed to be loved deeply by someone, yet I have placed enormous amounts of conditions on our relationship because of my fears. I have been in therapy for years & have been told numerous times that I am one of the most resilient survivors they know considering the horrendousness of what I endured. My life is lived in boxes and with many conditions. I strive for perfection in every part of my life and fail miserably. I work everyday at understanding that I am a SURVIVOR and not a victim, but the “ghosts” are everywhere for me. I have so much rage and anger inside that I scare myself. So thank you, for sharing this piece. Hoping one day to be whole again & not be fragments like I still am.
Rene,
Thank you for sharing some of your deeply hurtful experiences. I would add to your therapist’s correct assessment of you as resilient that you also have retained your goodness in the face of profound evil. This is readily seen in your desire to feel whole again.
In my training in sensorimotor psychotherapy, I learned to understand the rage as the defense part getting activated by some trigger – either in response to something in the environment, or even a thought or feeling that is a reminder of the abuse. Similarly, the fear of intimacy makes sense when people who should have protected you instead hurt you. Everything you are going though is understandable, although it certainly can be painful. Please know that your responses are considered “normal” give what you have been through – defense reactions on overdrive.
I wish you all the best on your journey to wholeness.
A great piece, thank you.
One of the greatest hindrances to my on-going recovery seems to be my propensity to minimize and, by extension, rationalize what happened to me. I guess such self-awareness doesn’t hurt but it is turned on its head when I recount all the things I did, and all the things that happened, since the trauma ended – drinking, other drugs, sex addiction, HIV/AIDS – a list sufficient enough to figuratively give my head a shake.
I am endeavouring to explore my relationship with my inner child but am in constant struggle with my outer adult.
Thanks again for writing this article.
Thank you so much for your comment. I just love this sentence:
“I am endeavouring to explore my relationship with my inner child but am in constant struggle with my outer adult.”
Perfect description of the work of healing!
It’s amazing how through early life trauma, we learn to dissociate our own emotional needs in order to survive, and yet can become very cognitively smart through the process — and even rewarded for this ‘smartness’ by society. But damn if those emotions and ‘younger parts’ don’t keep reaching for our attention, trying to integrate with the dominant, analytical part of the self that seems all grown up, and moves so fast through life. And good thing they do, because without the emotions constantly breaking through, we wouldn’t even know we could be more than who we are.
And as you suggest, that’s the work: learning to be with the emotions we couldn’t feel as a child, slowing down the defenses, being with the uncertainty and vulnerability. Since this work can be so overwhelming, we often need good, safe people to support us.
I sometimes think of healing from trauma as an internal journey that has all the risks that an external journey up Mt. Everest would take. There’s a true heroism to healing that rarely gets acknowledged.
As succinct a plan as I could ask for – thank you!