Blooming Lotus

On my blog entry entitled Enemas, Tubes, and Object Insertion as Part of Child Abuse, a reader posted the following comment:

[My abuse] started when I was an infant, and continued until I was in high school. I always feel like its my fault, and I wanted it to happen, becasue even as I got older, I DIDN’T STOP IT–I LET IT HAPPEN–I DIDN’T SAY ANYTHING! For me, that only proves how much of a freak I really am! And it wasn’t just my parents that hurt me, there were others–a deacon from our church, and my brother–who abused me as a kid, and then raped me about 12 years ago. I asked my mother when I was teenager if she knew that my brother had done this–her response to me was ‘yes, but he’s my son!’ So what does that make me??? ~ Theresa

Theresa’s comment expresses the shame that so many child abuse survivors feel, even though child abuse is never the child’s fault – NEVER! According to Judith Herman’s book Trauma and Recovery, feeling responsible for the child abuse is a coping mechanism that abused children use to survive the abuse. As long as the abuse is “my fault,” then I can do something differently to make it stop. To accept the truth – that the abused child has absolutely no control over the abuse – would result in the child acknowledging just how hopeless the situation is, which would cause the child to sink into utter despair. It is actually easier for the abused child to believe that he or she is responsible because then there is at least some hope of making it stop.

While this shame might serve a purpose while the abuse continues, it is extremely damaging to the adult survivor of child abuse who is no longer being abused. When you judge your childhood actions through adult eyes, you are being very unfair to yourself. From an adult perspective, you can see different alternatives that never would have occurred to you as a child (or to any other child). This is because you were a child, not an adult. Also, it is easy to forget how helpless a child really is because, as an adult, you are able to take care of yourself. A child depends upon the adults in his or her life for food, clothing, shelter, etc., and simply leaving home and taking care of yourself is not an option. Also, those in charge are three or four times your size, so physically fighting back simply isn’t an option.

One truth that people don’t talk about enough is that abused children (without therapy or healing) revert back to being abused children in their heads when they are triggered, even if they are 80 years old. Whenever I tell someone about my mother sexually abusing me again after my father died (when I was 17), they inevitably ask why I did not fight her off. I didn’t fight her off because, when she awoke me and started hurting me, I “became” that wounded abused toddler again. It did not occur to me to fight back at age 17 because I was not 17 years old emotionally when she hurt me again.

The same is true into your 20’s, 30’s, 40’s, and beyond. Until you heal, you will perpetually stay the emotional age that you were when the abuse started whenever you are triggered, particularly if the child abuse was ongoing. This is why you hear about some incest victims who continue having a “sexual relationship” with their abuser even when the child becomes an adult. It’s not a consensual relationship – the twenty-something victim is still an abused child emotionally.

Photo credit: Lynda Bernhardt

Read Full Post »