Bethany: A few months ago, I got word from a family member that my paternal grandmother was found unconscious in the middle of the night and rushed to the hospital. She had suffered a brain hemorrhage and was on a ventilator as her heart rate began to slow. The doctors weren’t optimistic that anything could be done.

I didn’t know her well. I spent a summer visiting my father’s parents when I was ten but the rest of my relationship with them was quick phone calls throughout my childhood. As my grandma got older, she began to forget who I was, so our relationship dwindled in my teens.

Years ago, my dad told me that both of his parents had sexually abused him. When he was eight years old, they took him into their bedroom and taught him to have sex with his mother while my grandfather watched. What they did to him made me sick and angry with my grandparents.

My dad learned this sick addiction from them. The repercussions of their choices affected more than just their victim; it affected his victims as well. Because of them, my dad sexually abused me for the length of my childhood.

Every time I heard of one of my grandparent’s health scares, I hoped that they would die. I wanted them to finally rot in hell for what they did. When I first heard about Grandma being on her deathbed, I was thrilled that another child molester would be gone. I kept thinking, “Hahaha! One down. Just a few more to go!” Then she finally passed away and I was glad. I thought my mom would feel the same way.

Christina: In my twenty-one years of marriage to Bethany’s dad, I had a good relationship with his mother. The woman I knew was kind, gentle, generous, funny and hard-working. But I also knew another side to her. Early in our marriage, my ex-husband told me about the sexual abuse he endured for most of his childhood.

At the time, I thought of his abuse the same way I thought of my own sexual abuse by my father. I figured it was something that happened a long time ago and I tried to forget about it. With both my dad and mother-in-law, I reasoned that since they were nice people, they must be sorry. It seemed to make life easier to think about their better qualities instead of the horrible things that they did to their own children.

Over the years of my healing, I began to view abusers much differently. Healing required me to confront the truth. Before, I thought sexual abuse happened the same way hurtful words sometimes slip from my mouth. I never mean to cause any harm but when I do, I feel awful about it and take responsibility. But sexual abuse is never a “slip”. Through my new lens of truth, I saw that sexual abusers plan and scheme, seducing their victims to submit and to keep their secret. Not only do they blame their victims, but through their words and actions, they convince their victims to accept the blame. Child molesters are particularly interested in self-preservation and willingly sacrifice the child’s physical and emotional health to protect themselves. They are not “nice” people who simply do bad things.

If my mother-in-law was sorry for what she did, she never owned up to her abuse nor apologized for it. When she learned of Bethany’s abuse by her son, she never showed any concern for Bethany’s wellbeing. Even though she was abused herself, that didn’t change the fact that she destroyed her son’s life and nearly destroyed her granddaughter’s life. Being a victim of abuse doesn’t make someone a perpetrator, so her history is no excuse. Even though she had good qualities, they don’t cancel out the abuse.

I had an idea of what my reaction to her death would be. I thought I would see things rationally and logically with a little emotion (the “right” emotion) mixed in. In my mind, I would look on her death with a kind of satisfaction, knowing that she wouldn’t be hurting anyone else. I expected to feel relief that the Ruck Family had one less abuser in it. I thought I would feel detached from her death, as though she was a stranger.

Bethany was the one who told me Grandma Ruck had finally passed away. A wave of grief hit me in my chest. I was sad that her chance at life was over. I was glad that her suffering didn’t last long. She would be missed—not by me, but by her family—and I was sorry for them.

My grief was interrupted by the elation in Bethany’s voice and I wanted to get away from her celebratory mood. I understood her feelings, and acknowledged to myself how healthy they were, but I needed space to process my feelings.

Bethany: To me, this was a victory and I wanted everyone to celebrate with me, so I felt confused that my mom could feel sad about this horrible person dying.

Christina: I was confused by my reaction too. It certainly wasn’t what I expected. I was unsure if my compassion came from my old unhealthy belief system or if it was a result of my healing. Maybe I could feel compassion because abusers don’t feel like a threat to me anymore. Maybe working through all the fear and anger and pain allowed me to see more than just an abuser in my ex-mother-in-law.

My years of childhood abuse groomed me to identify more with abusers than I did with myself. I cared more about protecting them, taking care of them, guarding their feelings, much more than I did my own. Were my emotions an effect of my abuse? I was afraid that feeling bad for this dead woman was an indication that I was being sucked back into the abusive system that I’d worked so hard to escape. It felt like a betrayal of my daughter and of me and all victims.

Bethany: The next day I began to feel sadness—a sadness for the life that could have been. I couldn’t help but think that this sexual perpetrator was once a young, sweet, innocent girl, who was probably abused herself. I found myself asking, “Why did she have to choose that path? Why did she have to cause so much pain?”

Christina: My feelings alternated the next day too. I read on Facebook what other family members felt about her and it felt so unjust that they were praising her. I wanted to scream the horrible things she’d done and tell them what kind of a woman she really was. I hated that a person like her would be honored.

Bethany: My cousins’ responses to our grandma’s medical condition irked me, “Grandma was a wonderful person and I’m happy that she will be with Jesus soon. I pray she transitions peacefully.”

I was disgusted! I wanted them to realize that the grandma they knew as “wonderful” was actually a vile child molester. I was so angry that she would be remembered as a good person when her actions led to my childhood being ripped away from me.

Over the next week, I felt a flurry of emotions—sometimes alternating feelings came in little waves and other times they all came at once. It was confusing to feel both hatred and mercy for someone at the same time.

I had played out the scenario of her death in my head for years so I could process those emotions. What I imagined was both relief and indifference. My actual reactions involved a larger depth of emotion and that scared me.

The hardest part was feeling like I wasn’t supposed to have certain emotions. I shouldn’t be happy that someone died, but I shouldn’t feel compassion for an abuser. I wanted to be somewhere in the middle. Before I could get there, I had to feel both extreme emotions and not one way or the other.

Over the course of this emotional journey I began to recognize the emotional extremes as part of the process. Instead of being alarmed by how polarized my feelings were, I started to see them as indications of my process. There were many facets to my relationship with my grandmother, therefore, there would be a variety of emotions to go with them.

Christina: One of the ways I’ve grown in the past few years is in acknowledging and expressing my emotions. After so many years of being emotionally shut down because of my abuse, it was a luxury to feel even one emotion. Earlier in my healing, it never occurred to me that I could have two emotions at the same time, much less conflicting ones. As my feelings gradually blossomed, whenever I’d experience two seemingly opposing emotions, I’d go round and round, trying to sort them out so I could eliminate one and officially own only one of them.

Now I’m comfortable feeling a variety of emotions at the same time and I can accept them and express them without acting on them. The range of emotions didn’t bother me, but the softness I felt for a sexual predator did.

In my struggle to find the answers to this compassion question, I was forgetting that my healing isn’t about what happens outside of me. In typical abuse survival style, I was focusing too much attention on the abuser instead of on myself. Now I’m content knowing that even if I do have compassion for abusers, it’s how I feel about myself that is the most important. Even I if I discover some unhealthy motives for showing abusers compassion, I’m solid in compassion for myself and I’ll never act outside of that. I’ll never choose to protect an abuser over protecting me or anyone else. I’ll never think an abuser’s feelings are more important than mine. I may not be finished with this process, but I’m providing myself a safe place to work through it.

Now that you’ve heard our experiences and thoughts about this, we’d love to hear yours. Please comment below and don’t forget to subscribe to the comments so you can continue to partake in the discussion.

Related Posts:
Understanding My Abusive Parents Didn’t Heal Me
The Truth About Blame
My Parents Are Dead (To Me)
Forgetting About Abuse: Who Does That Really Serve?

Christina Enevoldsen is cofounder of Overcoming Sexual Abuse, an online resource for male and female abuse survivors looking for practical answers and tools for healing. Christina’s passions are writing and speaking about her own journey of healing from abuse and inspiring people toward wholeness. She and her husband live in Los Angeles and share three children and four grandchildren.

Bethany Ruck is cofounder of Overcoming Sexual Abuse, an online resource for male and female abuse survivors looking for practical answers and tools for healing. Besides helping abuse survivors see the beauty within themselves, she enhances the beauty of others as a professional make-up artist and has worked in television, film and print.

by Bethany Ruck

I had to cover my eyes during kissing scenes in movies until my teens. I couldn’t ride my bike more than two blocks away. All of my friends had to be approved. My mom would check all of my essays to make sure they were perfect before I even turned in a rough draft. I wasn’t allowed to date until I was eighteen. I was overprotected in every area of my life except when it came to sexual abuse. I was left completely exposed to one of the most dangerous threats a child can face.

My mom told me she knew about my abuse. She discovered blood in my diaper when I was an infant. Knowing that he had molested another girl, she confronted my dad about it and he admitted to sexually abusing me. I was told that instead of going to the police, together they went to one of the people they esteemed the most, the senior pastor at our church. After one counseling session and a quick prayer, my dad was sent on his way like nothing had ever happened. The abuse continued until my teens.

I recently found out that a few other leaders at our church were asked to counsel with my father during that time, but nothing came of it. They were told by the senior pastor not to report it and they complied. When I found that out, I was flooded with emotions. I already knew that our senior pastor, his wife, and my mom knew about the abuse, but discovering that two more people knew, overwhelmed me. How many adults did it take to protect a little girl?

In the last few weeks I’ve experienced a variety of emotions. First, I felt abandoned. I didn’t understand how all of these people who supposedly loved me could do nothing while my abuser was free to keep hurting me. I began making excuses for them: My mom was abused herself and in denial that the abuse had continued. And even if it did, she felt powerless to do anything about it. The two leaders who were asked not to report it didn’t know the steps to take and were fearful of loosing their jobs. I didn’t feel that they deserved me being mad at them. They were good people who did a stupid thing. I wanted to just erase it from my memory and go on with my life. But the more I thought about it, the more I knew I couldn’t suppress those feelings anymore.

Tears streamed down my face as I watched Gabby’s empowering moment. I finally identified with the emotion of anger towards those who didn’t come to my defense. I was under-protected and had feelings about it that were completely justified.

I wanted to scream in the faces of those who didn’t protect me, telling them, “What is your problem? Don’t you know that I was just a baby? I couldn’t defend myself, but you could have and you chose to do nothing! Isn’t allowing bad to happen the same as perpetrating it? The abuse could have stopped then, but instead I suffered for most of my childhood. Every day of my life was filled with pain. Why did you let me go through that? I didn’t get a childhood because you were cowards! My father stole my innocence and you let him do it!”

Anger was this big, scary emotion to me. I had always seen examples of anger that turned violent and I didn’t want to become that person. I didn’t want to act on the passion that I had, and I didn’t have to. I was angry that they betrayed me and it was okay. I had no plans of rubbing their noses’ in their wrongs. I wasn’t trying to hurt them back. I just wanted to express my feelings about it for the first time. Now, I’m now facing the pain that this brought. I was wronged by more than just my abuser, and have a right to the emotions that correspond with that.

I began this process by reasoning away my emotions before I even acknowledged them or expressed them. That kept me stuck. I had to feel those things and then I could sort it out. To reverse the order is to invalidate my feelings and my experience.

Although I’m not completely out of this stage, being angry at them is not a forever thing. And facing the truth about how I feel gets me one step closer to where I want to be: WHOLE.

Related Posts:
What Is My Anger Telling Me?
Confessions of a Child Molester’s Wife

[read Bethany's story here]

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by Linda Pittman

When I first met my husband, I was keeping a big secret—the story of my childhood sexual abuse. I couldn’t tell him until I felt safe and sure of his love—if that was possible. He is a good man, gentle, kind, intensely loyal and trustworthy. Sometimes it is still hard to believe that I have such a wonderful spouse.

My husband responded to my history with the expected concern but he really did not understand the impact that this secret would have on him:

• I would need constant reassurance of his love. No matter how many times he would declare it, I could never believe it.
• No matter how hard he worked at the relationship, I was too afraid to let the intimacy happen.
• There would be others who would share our bed, my former abusers and my wounded child in my adult body.
• This adult child inside of me would not know how to control my feelings or my body and sometimes not even be present in my body.
• He would not know what an unworthy, shameful and dirty person he really married. (This is how I really felt.)

I couldn’t let my husband know everything because he would probably reject me if he really knew the real me. I needed him and wanted him so badly. I couldn’t be dishonest; I just would leave out some stuff—it wouldn’t matter—it was in the past anyway.

My sexual abuse does matter and has had such a great impact on all my relationships—especially my marriage. I realized that my husband would not be able to stay with me unless I got help and worked on recovering—serious recovering.

My first husband was physically and mentally abusive, making the damage to me even worse. He needed to leave because he was not healthy for my children and me. As a victim of childhood sexual abuse, I had a tendency to choose abusive, manipulative and controlling partners since I had not experienced any healing from my childhood sexual abuse. During my first marriage, I could only acknowledge that the abuse had happened to me.

I had to learn to drop the fairytale “happily ever after” crap and realize that all marriages are hard work. As an abuse survivor my second marriage would be even harder work, but it could work. I owed it to myself, and my spouse, to do the healing work.

I was sexually promiscuous and aggressive while in our courtship as a way of hiding, but the business of real closeness presented itself to me now. I couldn’t continue using the excuse of what happened to me as a way to hide from a sexual relationship or emotional intimacy. I truly cared about my husband and I needed to be honest with him. My marriage needed this to survive.

I went to therapy for myself and involved my husband later, to help him understand the impact this had on me, and to teach him how to help me. I even found counselors who worked on a sliding scale basis.

I became aware of the lack of intimacy in our relationship because we had settled into an “all or nothing” way of relating to each other. We got together to have sex but we were not taking the time to talk, touch and just be close without sex. We did not talk about joint goals and how to get to them together. We did not have that deep intimacy that we needed to strengthen our relationship.

I began to feel resentful of this “all or nothing” thing and I realized one day that it felt just like the way my abuser treated me. My abuser never wanted to have anything to do with me unless it was sexual. What a wake up call that was to realize that my husband was nothing like my abuser but I was relating to him as if he was.

I knew that all my talking about my abuse was not enough. I needed help to learn how to relate to my husband and I had to learn how to change my perception of him. I went for individual therapy because I realized that the problem was mine, and that he could not fix the damage from the abuse—only I could do that.

I became aware that my husband was not able to know how I felt because I could not say or show how I was feeling. I wore a mask that had been in place for years to keep others away and to keep me safe. This mask made me feel less vulnerable. If I didn’t show others my true feelings, I couldn’t be hurt so easily.

The trouble was I also did not know my own true feelings. I had learned to “feel” the way others thought I should feel or what I thought was expected of me. My feelings had not mattered for so long. I had buried them so deeply that they were hidden from me as well. I could not let down the wall to trust him or myself.

I realized that to let down the wall between us and to trust him was to take a big risk. I learned all the head knowledge of my abuse not being my fault but I hadn’t accepted it nor had I learned to love and accept my body or me either.

My past taught me that I couldn’t trust anyone. My parents had betrayed me and so I couldn’t trust them. My first husband was abusive to me and had broken my trust again. I stayed behind that wall because I was afraid to trust my current husband fully. This inability to trust my husband would forever limit our relationship to a superficial level unless I dealt with it. The one thing I wanted was to be able to love and trust deeply, and I was the one who kept the wall up.

I went to group therapy for incest survivors, which helped me to go back into my childhood and to heal the child inside myself. I had to look at the ugly reality of what was done to me and how I had adapted to survive. There were memories that I had to look at that were terrible, but I was able to look at them as an adult. I was no longer that helpless child. I also had to get over the shame I felt and the shame of looking at my body.

At the end of the group therapy my husband was given the opportunity to learn about how the abuse had affected my relationships and me. He was able to tell me once again how much he loved me and if I would allow myself to trust him, he would work on giving me the things I needed from him. I had to commit myself to this agreement too.

I also learned that it was up to me to let him know what I needed and wanted and how to communicate by talking in feeling statements. I had to say things like, “I feel scared”; “I need you to just hold me”; “I do not like that”. I finally felt safe enough to trust him.

From time to time, we fell back into patterns where we were not practicing this communication of needs and I would have to stop and talk about my feelings. Sometimes life’s problems would cause us to focus more on them than on us. In the bedroom, I had to learn to tell my husband what I wanted and didn’t want without feeling guilty about my feelings or needs. I had to stop worrying about what he needed and wanted all the time and concentrate on my feelings. I had to do this slowly with little steps, as I felt comfortable to move forward. I learned to let him look at my body and feel safe.

We practiced lots of touching, talking and holding each other that was non-sexual. That was what I needed to build the intimacy in our relationship. I learned that intimacy is not just sexual, but involves the sharing of my whole self with another. This building of intimacy was a necessary thing for me in order to be able to fully trust him and to be more open in sexual intimacy.

I found that my husband really cared about what I wanted and needed. His love and caring was genuine, I just needed to believe it. When we were going to be sexual we had to talk about it beforehand, plan it, and anticipate it. We moved slowly at a pace I could be comfortable with. With each little risk I took, I became less and less fearful of being hurt. I learned that sex is a two-sided encounter, not just what he wanted but my wants also.

I had to learn to experience the thoughts of the abuse and my former abusive marriage and to not allow them to interfere with what was going on in the bedroom with my current husband. When those thoughts and feelings came, I needed to look around me and remember where I was and whom I was with. I gave myself permission to start over with my current husband, to learn a new and better way to be sexual, than what I had learned before.

If my husband had not been willing to be right there with me, I would have had to look carefully at the relationship like I did with my first husband to decide what was best for me. My marriage benefited so much; opening up the communication and my relationship and it gave me the best chance at a solid foundation of trust. There are only two people in our bedroom now, my spouse and me.

I found that to begin to heal my relationship with my husband, I had to start with me first. The most important thing I have learned is that as a survivor, I had to learn to know my feelings and myself. I had to accept myself and then begin to unravel all the false things I learned so that I could begin to heal.

It is hard work to get past all the ways I hid from myself and get rid the untruths I believed. Being honest with myself was the hardest of all because I spent years doing just the opposite. I found it is necessary to really have an identity apart from my abuse, it is there inside me and only persistence would help me find it.

Developing trust has been difficult but trust is mandatory for me in my relationships. I deserve to be happy, but it is up to me to choose happiness. Happiness comes from the inside of me and can come out when I feel safe, and can learn to trust. I have learned how to keep myself safe and to trust again. It is the most wonderful feeling in the world!

Related Posts: Dating After Sexual Abuse: Is This Love?
How To Support A Survivor of Sexual Abuse
Overcoming Sexual Abuse: My Healing or My Marriage?

Having experienced healing from sexual, physical and verbal abuse, Linda Pittman has found joy in encouraging others in their healing journey and tells people that it’s never too late to start. She’s been married to her husband for twenty-one years and has four adult children.  

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Christina Enevoldsen

by Christina Enevoldsen

Just a note: Sometimes I believe things because they are true; other times I believe things because an alternate truth would be painful. One of the indications that I’m invested in a particular belief as a coping method is that I defend that ‘truth’ as though my life is threatened. When I notice inordinately strong emotions about a point of view, I ask myself: “What purpose does this belief serve in my life?”; “Do I NEED to believe this?”; “What if it isn’t true?—then what does that imply?”’ “How did I come to believe this?”

My intention in writing this isn’t to convince anyone to come to the same conclusions I have. This issue isn’t just about this issue. I could have written this about many things stored in my belief system.

When I was about eight or nine years old, my mom told me that the bad things in my life were because I was meant to do great things. “Special” people had to go through special training. They had to endure hardships—more than “ordinary” people. They had to experience shame and degradation so they wouldn’t be puffed up in pride. They had to experience pain so they could learn compassion for others. They had to be broken so they could become stronger in those broken places.

It’s something she said on several occasions and it appealed to me. The abuse told me I was worthless, but my mom redefined it: The abuse wasn’t an indication that I was nothing; it was an indication that I was special. My mom had some kind of “higher wisdom” that provided a reason for my pain. I wasn’t suffering without cause; there was something noble about my abuse. I wasn’t a victim; I was a hero.

I learned from an early age to call it something else other than the violent and traumatic death of my innocence. My father also redefined my abuse. He told me that we were “having special time”. He said the abuse was love. I preferred his version since the alternative was that I was living with a monster and that my father abandoned me and his fatherly role.

I was terrified of abandonment—not only from my father, but from God. I thought the only possibilities were that God was either involved—and the abuse was meant as a good thing—or that he completely abandoned me. I preferred a God who passively or actively participated in abuse to one who abandoned me.

Believing those things when I was a powerless child helped me to cope so I could and would want to survive. But they weren’t the truth. The abuse gave me false messages about myself and to believe that my abuse was part of some bigger plan was to pile more lies on top of lies.

I wasn’t born to suffer just so others would be spared or comforted. My abuse wasn’t “worth it” just because I’m helping others now. The abuse devalued me, but I couldn’t earn my worth through being a savior to others. I had to deal with my shame instead of covering it with noble deeds.

I wasn’t selected by God or the universe to be abused. My abuse wasn’t about me; my abuser didn’t even see me as a person, but rather as an object. Masking my pain with grandiose ideas didn’t heal me. I was treated as though my existence didn’t matter except as an instrument of pleasure. I had to look at the ways the abuse told me that my existence didn’t matter and that I was only an insignificant object. Confronting those lies released me from the need to see myself as more important the “regular” people. I’m at peace knowing my true value instead of needing to have a “special” position.

My abuser wasn’t an innocent pawn in the universe’s hands. He had a choice. He wasn’t serving some divine purpose or serving me. He was a nasty self-serving pervert. I had to acknowledge and express the pain that my dad gave me attention to serve himself, even if it meant destroying his daughter. Believing that we are all just helpless participants in the hands of Fate prevented me from resisting more abuse. That belief robbed me of protective anger and of my boundaries. As long as I believed that it was all planned, I remained a powerless victim.

Even if I ended up being a strong, healthy, happy, compassionate person who helps people, my abuser gets no credit for that. The saying, “Whatever doesn’t kill you makes you stronger” is a lie. The abuse didn’t make me stronger. The abuse left me in a weakened state and it was only because I’ve worked on my healing for years that I’m functioning now and in a position to offer hope to others. Good didn’t come out of the abuse; good came from the overcoming of it. I don’t know who I would have been if I’d never been abused, but I know how many of my resources have been spent rebuilding my own life and I wonder how much more productive I might have been if I hadn’t needed to do that.

Some people point to the work I do now and say, “See, without your abuse you wouldn’t be doing what you love so much.” But my life isn’t defined by the sexual abuse or any other type of abuse. I consider my purpose to inspire and encourage people to be who they were created to be so they can find fulfillment and discover their own unique place in the world. Healing from sexual abuse is necessary to do all those things. If I hadn’t been abused, I would still be doing something similar to what I’m doing now—helping people get to where they want to be.

I was born with the gifts that equip me to inspire and encourage others. My abuser didn’t give them to me. They are ME. They are part of my uniqueness. No experience—good or bad—can change who I am.

Why was I abused? Because people have a free will and some people make horrible choices. But knowing or not knowing the reason why doesn’t settle anything or change the past. I still have healing work to do and I’m determined to continue.

Christina Enevoldsen is cofounder of Overcoming Sexual Abuse, an online resource for male and female abuse survivors looking for practical answers and tools for healing. Christina’s passions are writing and speaking about her own journey of healing from abuse and inspiring people toward wholeness. She and her husband live in Los Angeles and share three children and four grandchildren.

[read Christina's story here]

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 by Bethany Ruck 

When my last boyfriend and I began dating, we would see each other once a week. The in between times were filled with hour-long telephone calls before bed, a lot of getting to know you time and even more of the sickening, “No, I miss you more” fluff.  One night the conversation led to just the right place, where I could tell him about my childhood sexual abuse. I remember prefacing it with a warning that I had something very serious to say; then I told him. He didn’t seem to have much of a reaction, so I assumed that he didn’t feel comfortable asking questions. Okay, change of subject. I guess he didn’t want to talk about it, so I went about the rest of the phone call as normal. The topic of sexual abuse didn’t come up again until much later in the relationship.
 
A year down the road, when I decided that I wanted to report my father for sexually abusing me, I sat my boyfriend down and told him my intentions. Our relationship had turned significantly more serious by that time, so I wanted his support. Instead of support, I was met with an attack. “If I would have known you were sexually abused I never would have dated you.” he said. I was shocked! I never fathomed that he would react like that, especially since I specifically remember telling him about the sexual abuse a year prior. The relationship soon ended, but not without further hurt.
 

Comfortable with Emotion
Crying is healthy. It’s an expression of emotions. Something yucky on the inside is trying to come out, so let it! My boyfriend did not see it this way. Instead of letting me cry he would yell at me, telling me to stop. We were living together at the time, so when I needed a good cry I never had a safe place to do it. I couldn’t express my emotions because he was always there. Finding a partner who is comfortable expressing their own emotion and hearing mine is a prerequisite for a healthy foundation. 
 
Supportive of My Healing
Healing from sexual abuse is not a quick fix. It’s a long road with bumps, low visibility and a whole bunch of people trying to cut you off. Embarking on that journey without a healthy support system is impossible. With my last boyfriend, I wasn’t looking for someone to hold my hand through the healing process. I just wanted someone to say every once in a while, “You can do it!  Great job. Keep going!” Instead of being my cheerleader, I got torn down for my efforts. He only saw how my past abuse affected him, instead of how beneficial healing was to both of us.
 
Isn’t Abusive
I know this sounds so obvious, doesn’t it? But it’s so often overlooked. I thought I knew how to recognize abusive behavior. All I had to look for was someone who didn’t molest children or didn’t give me that creepy feeling, right? WRONG! Perpetrators generally have patterns of abuse that span over several areas. In my case, my boyfriend used his words against me, manipulating and playing on my weaknesses. Every time the relationship turned south he would tell me that a few days prior he had been shopping for engagement rings, in hopes that I would see what a grand gesture of love he was trying to make. In one fight I remember being referred to as “damaged goods” because of the abuse I had no control over.
 
In the end, I didn’t get what I wanted out of this relationship. Instead of love, I got rejection. I firmly believe that love is an action, not some gushy feeling you get in the pit of your stomach when that special someone comes near. He told me all the things I wanted to hear, but his actions showed me that he was more concerned with himself than with loving me.
 
I wish I would have seen clearly going into that relationship, but I’m now better equipped to do so in the future. 

Related Posts: 
Sexual Abuse Invaded My Marriage
Is This Love That I’m Feeling?
Power Play: How to Recognize an Abuser
Prince Charming Was a Murder Suspect
Dangerous Men, Red Flags, Victim Mentality
Emotional Abuse and Identity Hunger  

[read Bethany's story here]  

Does this resonate with you? Please join in by leaving your thoughts and feelings about this topic and don’t forget to subscribe to the comments.

Bethany Ruck is cofounder of Overcoming Sexual Abuse, an online resource for male and female abuse survivors looking for practical answers and tools for healing. Besides helping abuse survivors see the beauty within themselves, she enhances the beauty of others as a professional make-up artist and has worked in television, film and print.

[read Bethany's story here]

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I took my bulldog Molly to the vet because she was getting skin blisters all over her body. The vet and I have been omitting different things from her in order to see what is causing this. When she has a breakout, she gets a shot and then she’s put on pills for a month. It heals, but within a month she breaks out again. The last time I took her I asked the vet if it could be a hormone imbalance and he said no, it has to be something she is eating because it was in her soul. I asked him what he meant by that and he said it was something that her whole body reacted to, not just her outward body.

This got me thinking about the different things that affect my outward body and things that have affected my soul—those things that I have tried to fix with a band-aid or with coping medication such as alcohol and drugs. It eased the pain for a while only to have it return again. This way of thinking made sense to me because there were many mixed messages that were fed into my soul as a child that I battled with for most of my life. It was those messages and false beliefs that I had to tackle during my healing. I had to go deeper than the sexual abuse, find the mixed messages, connect them with the emotions that were attached to them, and replace them with truth. Once I was able to put the healing truth in my soul, I was able to overcome them.

Respect Your Elders: I was taught this at a young age and knew that if I didn’t, I would be punished with abandonment. I would be sent to my room, omitted from playing with my friends and forced to apologize. I do believe everyone needs to be treated with respect when they deserve it, but this law in my home set me up for victimization from every adult who expected me to respect their unwanted touch. I was afraid to tell them no because the punishment would be more severe than allowing them to do it. I didn’t even squirm out of their reach. No matter what adult came through the door, I was told to give them a hug, allow them to kiss me, pinch my cheek, yank the curls in my hair or pick me up and sit me on their lap.

I remember being forced to sit on Santa’s lap one time. He smelled of alcohol and when he lifted me on his lap, he had his hand under my bottom, moving his fingers between my legs. I remember crying and screaming for my parents, but I was told to stop crying so they could get a picture.

• This taught me to obey others—abusive boyfriends, husbands, so-called friends.

Speak Only When Spoken To: I was taught that if you had something to say, especially when there was company over, it better be a life and death situation. I was raised on a farm and don’t remember ever asking a question about anything. I was raised to listen when spoken to because if I didn’t, there was hell to pay. I had many questions but learned at a young age to never ask them. I would have been told it was none of my business or made to feel stupid for asking. I remember the first day of kindergarten and my teacher called me Patricia. I didn’t know that was my name as I was always called Patty at home. Because I didn’t answer her, my first day of school was spent sitting in the corner. The next day she called me Patricia again and I told her my name was Patty. She slapped me across the face, pulled my ear and dragged me to principal’s office. I was sent home with a note pinned to my dress. I don’t know what it said, but I got spanked and sent to my room.

• This taught me to not speak up for myself or ask for help.

Be Invisible: I don’t remember much family time except when we ate dinner. It was a golden rule that no matter where you were or what you were doing, you’d better be sitting at the table when it was time to eat. We didn’t have a specific time to eat, but I think we must have been like cattle out in the field. When it got close to feeding time, we started walking back toward the house. Other than dinner time, I was gone once the chores were done. When company came over, all the kids were sent outside or to other areas of the house. The rule was to just stay away from the adults and don’t disturb them unless you are bleeding. Don’t snitch, even though my older brothers would tie me up to the clothesline pole and leave me there for hours so they didn’t have to watch me.

• This taught me I had no value. Stay hidden in the shadows, don’t make waves.

Predestined Future: I was told from an early age that I could only be a wife and mother. I started looking for my husband well I was very young. I dreamed about being a nurse but I had the perception that in order to be a nurse, I would have to remain single. My older sister married at the ripe age of 14, so looking for my potential husband was acceptable. I always had boyfriends and most of them were abusive. I would beat them up if I thought they weren’t marriage material, but if there was even an inkling that they could possibly be my husband, I withstood anything and everything.

• This taught me to have no dreams of my own and that my value was in what I was, not who I was.

Boundaries are NOT Allowed: Being the youngest of eight children meant the pickings were slim for me. I slept in the same room with my brothers until I was 14 and took baths with my older brother to save water. Although my brothers never touched me sexually, being intertwined with them as much as I was made me susceptible to not knowing what a boundary was. We dressed and undressed together, used the bathroom together and I never had a sense of privacy.

• This showed me that my body was not valuable or worthy of protection.

These were a few of the false beliefs that I have had to re-examine. They were an open door for my abuse, even into adulthood. Going beyond my sexual abuse and recognizing my upbringing helped me recognize the reasons why I was so easily abused. Smashing these false beliefs and replacing them with healthy beliefs has helped me establish boundaries, listen to my inner voice, trust myself to make healthy decisions and have hope to live an abuse-free life.

Related Posts:
Emotional Healing & The Will To Go Forward

Patty Hite is one of five facilitators of Overcoming Sexual Abuse. A survivor of emotional, physical and sexual abuse, Patty has been tenaciously pursuing her healing for over thirty years. She’s a passionate advocate for all survivors and dedicates her life to inspiring emotional wholeness in others. As a former victim of spousal abuse, she’s delighted to find true love with her husband of ­­­­five years. She’s blessed with four children and six grandchildren.

[read Patty's story here]

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by Jennifer Stuck

I have come to believe that secrets are the enemy. They are the parasites that eat away at the human soul. We are meant to be social creatures, to share and express our complex emotions. Yet generation after generation of conditioning has taught us to repress our thoughts and feelings—to monitor every word that comes out of our mouths. We constantly worry about what we say, how we say it, and most of all, how others might react to it. So with all the influences keeping us from expressing ourselves, what are we supposed to do? How can we get it all out and clear our minds? For me, and many others like me, the solution has been writing.

What I love the most about writing is that it is always there for me. When I can’t talk to my family, when my friends aren’t as supportive as I would like them to be, or when it’s 3:00 am and no sane person worth talking to would be awake, I have writing to turn to. I can always grab a pen and paper and start pouring out my soul about whatever it is that’s on my mind. Writing always lets me say what I need to say. The paper never interrupts me to tell me something trivial about its own life. The sole purpose of the paper is to bare the weight of whatever I chose to write on it. No matter how shocking, no piece of information will be too overwhelming for it to hold. It will never throw my thoughts back in my face or use them against me. It doesn’t push me beyond my limits. It never puts its nose where it doesn’t belong, or try to direct the conversation where it wants it to go. The paper is my safest friend.

Most times when I begin writing it is not because I have a clear-cut image in my mind of what I want to say. Normally I only know that there is SOMETHING that needs to come out—some emotion that has been long trapped inside of me that is finally ready to surface. I can feel a voice deep down inside of me screaming, begging to be heard. When I write I provide a platform for that voice (my inner child) to speak out, to say all the things she was never allowed to say while being abused. After all these years she finally gets her chance to express the hurt, pain and anger that has burdened her for so long.

When I write down my thoughts I take what was a slippery, illusive memory and translate it into clear, undeniable fact. It’s right there on record in black and white. I can no longer forget it or push it to the back of my mind. Seeing my story on paper makes it feel more real to me. I’m able to separate myself from all the lies that I was told about myself during my abuse. I can see that what happened to me wasn’t nothing; it was something terrible. It wasn’t my fault; it was 100% the fault of my abusers. I was obviously the victim, and they were obviously the aggressors. Those basic facts that had eluded me in my thoughts became blatantly apparent to me once I wrote them out on paper.

One thing that I am particularly fond of is writing poetry. Now that I am farther along in my recovery process I find it fulfilling to look back at the things that I have written and the progress that they reflect. I recently started putting a date on every poem that I write. By doing this, I am making what I call a recovery timeline. I will always be able to look back and see what I was feeling last week, last year, or ten years ago. It’s amazing for me to be able to see how much I have changed in such a short period of time. Having that record of my progress makes me want to work even harder to move forward. It’s something concrete to show how far I’ve come and how hard I have worked. Every poem is like a trophy sitting on a shelf, a small reward for my efforts. Each one is something that I can look at and be proud of.

Writing has had many positive affects on my life. It helps me connect with my emotions. It allows me to express those emotions. It helps me remember new details about my past and to make sense of the things I already remember. Writing is freeing and empowering. Nobody can control what I write. I don’t have to second-guess myself, or worry that I might be saying the wrong things. I can just put pen to paper and let my thoughts flow wherever they take me. Sometimes I use my writing to express repressed grief. Sometimes I use it to share newly found joys. The important thing is that I never stop expressing myself.

Jennifer’s Poetry Collection

Related Posts:
If I Didn’t Write, I’d Have Died a Long Time Ago
Writing Is My Friend
Writing: My Power Tool for Rebuilding After Abuse

Jennifer Stuck is whole-heartedly pursuing physical and emotional health and is determined to heal the wounds of her childhood sexual abuse. She loves to write, especially poetry.  She is currently studying for a career in Physical Therapy. When she isn’t in school Jennifer is at home spending time with her two beautiful daughters.

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Christina Enevoldsen

by Christina Enevoldsen

For years, I didn’t realize how fragmented I felt and or how disjointed my life was. When I began to see the truth of my childhood sexual abuse, my world started to crumble. My personal history and the family I thought I had was an illusion; they only existed in my mind. I constructed them from pieces and parts of stories I read or television shows I watched, but it was all fiction. I hid the reality that was too much to face and now I was glimpsing the truth.

Seeing the truth was disorienting. For a few weeks and months, I remained in limbo, somewhere between my false past and my new reality. Was the behavior that I was seeing in my parents really happening? Was I imagining it to be worse than it was? Was I misunderstanding them? Or was I finally seeing what had been there all along?

Memories surfaced that made so much sense of my entire life, but how could they be real? I alternated between grasping the truth in relief and pushing it away in fear.

One of the main ways I transitioned into my new truth was to write about it. I started a special healing journal for things related to my abuse such as nightmares, recovered memories, and flashbacks. As long as everything was trapped inside my head, there was still something unreal about it. By recording my thoughts and feelings, I validated them. There was something about seeing it on paper—documented and recorded—that helped me accept what happened.

Sometimes I’ve had to force myself to note the ugliest parts of my experiences and feelings, but journal writing keeps them contained in a small, designated space instead of freely floating around inside of me. I can access them when I want, but until then, they are tucked away.

My past was revealed in little scraps, unconnected and without context. I assembled my history by writing my story from beginning to end (as far as I knew it). I saw how one event—and the feelings and beliefs I formed from it—related to the next. I made connections about how those things shaped me and forged a new identity through those revelations. Through those layers, I internalized more truth and became more ‘put together.’

Journal writing and recording my story helped me get started ( I still journal), but letter writing is one of the primary tools I continue to use in every stage of rebuilding. I’ve written letters to my abuser, to the public, to my body, to money and others. Each time, I am surprised by the depth of emotion that I express and the truths that are revealed.

The first letter I wrote was to my father, my primary abuser. I wasn’t aware of feeling much of anything toward him. I started to write the letter from my head, but as I progressed, my heart spoke. I didn’t consider if his feelings would be hurt or how he would take it because I didn’t plan to send it. Through the words, I poured out all the hateful feelings I didn’t know I had. The more I wrote, the more rage rose up. I imagined the hatred flowing from up within me and down my arms and hands and onto the paper. After that, the paper contained a little more of my anger and pain so I didn’t have to carry it.

Another significant letter I’ve written is to the people ‘out there’. I had trouble being in public and was always on guard. I felt defensive and angry when people invaded my space. I addressed my letter to “John Q. Public.” When I wrote that letter, it was eye-opening. I thought it would merely help rid me of some anger, but through it, I realized that I believed that the whole world was against me and I took every careless move or bump personally. I was still thinking like a victim in that area and it helped me confront that lie.

I also wrote a letter to my body. I thought of my body as a necessary evil, something I tolerated. I was disconnected from it as though it wasn’t mine. I started that letter by blaming it for how it had exposed me, shamed me and betrayed me and I transitioned into seeing its innocence and vulnerability. By the time my letter was finished (I wrote it over a period of months), I felt compassion and was able to nurture it and reconnect with it.

Another letter I composed was addressed to money. Money has been related to much of the abuse I’ve experienced beginning with my dad pimping me out when he lost his job. My ex-husband also manipulated me through money by punishing me with uncontrolled spending and shutting down his successful business when I refused to comply with him. An abusive church I attended also used money to control people. They preached that if you didn’t have a lot of money, then you were a faith-failure. All of those experiences led to a lifetime of money issues. Even though I’m a very conservative spender and at times even made a lot of money, but always seemed to have lack. By writing a letter, I worked out how threatened I felt by money and I’m starting to see the reasons why. My letter started out, “Dear Money, I think it’s time we worked things out….”

I continue to write as a means to tear down the false facades and rebuild my truth. I gain clarity about my experience, thoughts and feelings. I know myself better by getting more in touch with my past and how it shaped me. I’m building a more constructive relationship with my body and my money. Writing has repaired my relationship with the world I interact with. It’s truly been a power tool in my rebuilding process.

Christina’s Letters

Related Posts:
If I Didn’t Write, I’d Have Died a Long Time Ago
Writing Is My Friend
Paper is My Safest Friend

Christina Enevoldsen is cofounder of Overcoming Sexual Abuse, an online resource for male and female abuse survivors looking for practical answers and tools for healing. Christina’s passions are writing and speaking about her own journey of healing from abuse and inspiring people toward wholeness. She and her husband live in Los Angeles and share three children and four grandchildren.

[read Christina's story here]

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by Libbe HaLevy

My abuse began when I was very young, pre-verbal. I repressed my earliest abuse in total amnesia, not even suspecting anything had happened. But from about age three, I became obsessed with words, language, meaning. Even before I knew how to put letters and words on paper, my imagination took situations around me and spun them into safe stories. My mind took me away from the home I was stuck in to “somewhere else,” and I lived more fully in this dissociative, imaginary world than in the physical world around me.

By four, I had a large vocabulary and made up elaborate stories about my dolls, stuffed animals and toys. I couldn’t wait to learn how to read and write, something my parents considered inappropriate before I turned six and entered first grade. Once I learned the rudiments of reading, I devoured books far beyond my grade level and began writing little stories for class.

When I was in about fifth grade, I secretly started writing for myself. I’d commit poetry, short stories, observations and thoughts to notebooks, then hide them behind the backs of radiators, under rugs, stuffed into drawers of desks that no one used. I sensed that it wasn’t safe to let my family know about the private comfort I found in what I was writing.

I’d been imagining myself for years as a character in westerns, usually a hermit or the adopted daughter of an Indian chief. This character always feared society, avoided it, and never seemed to have a birth family. The men in my stories were kind, sexless father- or brother-figures who saw and respected my secret pains. I never reached a happy ending, just moved from one set of western characters to another when I tired of a plot line.

At twelve, I took my favorite story parts and wrote a script for “Bonanza,” then a popular TV western featuring a father and his three sons. I actually showed this around to classmates and family members, proud of my work. But I didn’t understand why it upset my mother, or why she refused to help me get it to people who might buy it for TV. Ultimately, when the cast of the show changed, I didn’t know how to change my script to match their new needs, and so put it away.

As an adult, I worked professionally in the broadcast and film industries, as a freelance writer, and playwright. I was known for quirky works unafraid to look at the dark side of sexuality and human relations. An award-winning play and my first musical both featured female characters who had been sexually abused or were on the verge of it. Still in amnesia about the abuse, I simply considered it a strong plot device but felt no personal connection with the subject matter. I continued to write poetry for myself, some of it filled with powerful, dark imagery I didn’t understand, but which felt right.

I entered Recovery at thirty-four by attending 12-Step meetings that addressed sexual abuse. Suddenly, my writing became a lifeline. As I found myself triggered by the information shared at meetings, I raced home to write in the journal I’d started in my early twenties. I used this obsessive, daily writing to draw out the emotional toxins being released by my new memories and the healing process. I asked myself tough questions, puzzled through long free-associative answers, recorded life-changing breakthroughs in words, words, words. By virtue of my ability to touch type over a hundred words per minute, I could sit at my typewriter in the middle of a full-blown breakdown/breakthrough and narrate my pain with my fingers even as I sobbed and screamed. Words became the poultice that drew out and transformed my inchoate pain into solid statements of the truth I’d locked away as unacceptable to my psyche.

I did all the recommended Recovery writing exercises: letters to my younger self, future self, perpetrators, other family members – some of which I actually mailed; descriptions of my childhood homes; daily journal entries; gratitude lists; sub-dominant hand writing. I hammered out my Recovery like a blacksmith at an anvil, forging words with heat and sparks and rage and tears, tempering what I needed to say until it rang like a finely crafted sword. Words became my power, my strength, my allies, my friends. I saw the alphabet as sub-atomic particles capable of being organized into explosive devices that changed my world and had the potential to help others do the same.

And then I let those words out into the world. A play I wrote about incest and Recovery, SHATTERED SECRETS, ended up running 2-1/2 years in Santa Monica, California, and being published and produced internationally. Everywhere it appeared, survivors found and used it to empower their own healing. My articles on incest recovery were published in national magazines, survivor newsletters, duplicated for use in hundreds of Recovery meetings. I used my words to address the international media at a press conference that landed me on “60 Minutes” and debated the falseness of “false memory syndrome” on Los Angeles TV. Language, words, writing and delivery of that writing fired an activist response beyond my ability to predict.

With time, I was able to appreciate the true nature of my earlier writings and how they’d helped me survive the abuse I did not then remember:
• The “Bonanza” script featured a young girl who thought she’d murdered the old man she lived with after he came home drunk one night and started to attack her (no wonder my mother did her best to sink it!);
• A collection of my darkest poetry, which I’d labeled “You Should Be Afraid of This Book,” revealed itself as coded descriptions of abuse I was not, at the time of writing, strong enough to consciously remember;
• The incest themes of both a play and a musical revealed themselves as true representations of my relationship with my brother.
Through writing, I’d been relieving the pressure of repressed incest memories on my psyche before I even knew that pressure was there. Again, I state this and mean it: if I did not write, I would have died long before I found the ability to heal from my abuse.

I believe that for survivors of childhood sexual abuse, writing is not optional. Without words, we are trapped in the powerlessness of early childhood with no way out. It’s no accident that the true “incest taboo” is for the victims to talk — and write — about it. I consider writing a necessary healing tool, one that is free, readily available, and ultimately empowering not just in the moment but as a record of one’s personal journey. It need not have literary merit or even be in proper English; indeed, much of my most healing early work consisted of incoherent rage rants that deteriorated into scribbles and stab marks. The important thing is to use words, writing, scribbling, to get it out of you. Release the toxins through whatever language you can find. When words fail, scrawl, scribble, cry, scream (into a pillow, please!), and do what you need to in order to keep on getting what is in you out onto paper.

Then, when you are out of the heat of creation, find at least one safe person with whom to share what you have written. Read it to your therapist, a Recovery buddy, or find a safe writing workshop focused on survivors and our issues to read your truth in a community of others who will understand. I led workshops like that for years and watched the growing health, healing, strength and understanding of the brave women and men who dared to write and speak their truth.

The more truth put into words and released into the world, the greater the peace and power of each survivor. As each of us heals, we become part of a movement to break the cycle of abuse and pass healing on to others who still suffer. The true history of sexual abuse survivors and the impact on our world is just now starting to be written. We need all your stories to understand the truth of our own. I encourage you to have the courage to put your truth on paper/screen.

Whatever you decide to do, remember always: You are not alone, it was not your fault… and yes, it is possible to heal.

Related Posts:
Writing Is My Friend
Writing: My Power Tool for Rebuilding After Abuse
Paper is My Safest Friend

Libbe S. HaLevy, M.A., CAC is a Life Action Coach and an incest survivor with 25+ years of healing. She provides coaching for sexual abuse survivors, leads online writing workshops, and by late 2010 is launching the information/community-building site, Incest Survivor Healing.  She worked on the Childhelp National Child Abuse Hotline, spoke about incest on “60 Minutes,” and her award-winning play SHATTERED SECRETS, about survivors in Recovery, ran 2-1/2 years in Los Angeles and was produced internationally. 

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