I haven't touched this blog in months.
After writing 3 memoirs about the incestuous situation I lived with for 14 years, I thought I was finished, healed. Then this morning, the nightmare.
7:38 am! My eyes fluttered open. My heart was pounding and my mouth was dry. Where is he? He was just here in this room. I was screaming at him. How could he think I wasn't angry at him all those years he was molesting me? What an asinine question he'd just asked me! He'd asked if I was so angry at him, why hadn't I told him?
But he didn't ask. Not ever. Nor did he ever say he was sorry. I'd just woken from a dream. No, it was a waking nightmare, just like the one I'd lived with every day between the years of 11 - 24. My father never asked over all those years of sexual abuse if I was angry at him. What I felt or thought never mattered. I didn't matter.
My waking nightmare today really disturbed me. Where had it sprung from? Why now, nearly 50 years after the abuse ended, and after I poured all of it onto the pages of 3 memoirs?
It sprung up because you don't "just get over childhood sexual abuse" by a parent. Call it what is is: INCEST. Horrible, ugly word.
Doesn't sound quite as ugly when you call it CSA, does it. But it's just as bad for any child sexually abused by someone else, be the abuser an adult or even another older child. i know this for a fact: I've met and spoken with too many adults who are only just now finding explanations for their own sometimes crazy, even dangerous behaviour while they were growing up. They are only just realizing why they suddenly 'lose it' over nothing.
See, it doesn't matter how old you are. I'm 70 now and I still see and hear him regularly. He visits me, almost daily, just like he used to nearly 50 years ago. He still haunts me, hurts me and enrages me. I want to kill him, just as I wanted to then. But I couldn't do it then and it looks like I still can't do it now.
Writing 3 memoirs helped a lot. I got it off my chest. I no longer feel ashamed. I've gotten on with my life and had a very good and fulfilling one.
But am I truly healed?
©Viga Boland, author
Dear Viga,
ReplyDeletePTSD. No soldier in the thick of war ever endured the pain that a child experiences when a parent does not protect them and even worse, when a parent abuses them and makes them an object, stripping away not only their security but their identity as well.
When an enemy fires upon a soldier, the soldier does not think, "What did I do? I must be bad? If he wants to hurt me I must have done something wrong?" But a child who somehow intuitively knows that daddy is supposed to love and protect her can only reason that if he does not, it must be my fault.
I still dream, it still terrifies me, I sometimes drink too much to stop the tape from running. But you and I are the THRIVERS, not Survivers, Thrivers. We have planted new crops in the old toxic soil and tended each row until new life would grow. You are amazing and give me courage, power, hope. No, it never ends but we have stopped letting it stop us. Love you. Toni
Agree 100% Toni.
ReplyDeleteAgree 100% Toni.
ReplyDeleteFather, mother, uncle, grocery man & my first therapist. Im still healing at 67 from sexual and physical abuse. I am a thriving survivor even though the emotional pain can be devastating. Thankyou for sharing your story.
ReplyDelete