Grieving the Losses of Childhood Sexual Abuse

Welcome to the Overcoming Sexual Abuse podcast where you get the tools and inspiration to help you overcome childhood sexual abuse. I’m your host Christina Enevoldsen, certified coach, author, and incest survivor, and I’m here to help you heal and live your very best life. 

When you’ve experienced childhood sexual abuse, you’ve suffered profound losses. Until you acknowledge and grave the losses, a part of you remains shut off and shut down. I’ll share the five stages of grief you experience as part of healing from abuse and the mistakes to avoid at each stage. 

I’m experiencing grief right now related to the passing of a friend. Several friends are also experiencing serious losses in their lives and I’m reminded again of both the pain and more importantly, the power of grief. 

And the purpose of grief is to acknowledge the loss, to acknowledge the significance of your loss and to carry you from the way things were to the way things are. And grief is about reorienting yourself, reorienting your thoughts and behaviors and habits to a new way of being. And what is truly amazing is that there can be a process of letting go and accepting the loss, that there can be a pathway to future possibilities. And that is the seemingly miracle of grief. 

Grief allows you to let go of trying to control the past or the future or your emotions about them. And you can continue to both desire that something that you’ll never have again while looking with hope toward the future and opening yourself up to joy. With some losses that really feels like an impossibility, but grief is so powerful. 

Grief can feel disorienting, like you’re in this place of limbo, like you’ve been displaced, you’ve exited or been kicked out, not by your own choice, from one experience of your world, and you haven’t found a new one. And I think of grief like being in this corridor and I imagine myself like in a hallway banging on a door. It’s the door of the loss and I’m just banging on it, like crying, “Hey, let me back in.” And then as I move through the grief, I eventually find another door to another room. 

And yet, without grief, you stay anchored to a loss. It’s sometimes the feeling and the fear that if you move forward, you’ll lose even more. You’ll lose the attachment to what was so important to you. And it can feel like that. But the irony is that fixating on what you lost actually shuts you off from anything more. 

The symptoms of grief are of course painful and frustrating. There’s overwhelming exhaustion, confusion, difficulty concentrating. It’s called grief brain. Sleep and appetite changes, or even disturbing dreams and nightmares. 

When I was healing from abuse, I experienced pretty much all of those. It was really disorienting to come to the realization–to really know–how much the people who supposedly loved me did the most damaging things to me. It’s just so hard to wrap your head around. Just trying to comprehend that feels like something you can’t grasp and don’t know if you truly want to understand that. 

And that’s where this disorienting feeling, that’s where a lot of the sleep disturbances come from and the dreams and nightmares come from because It is a lot for your mind to sort out and so dreams help you do that. The emotions also that I suppressed all my life, they leaked out when I started healing and that was exhausting. Plus it was the exhaustion of not sleeping well. And that’s very typical of the healing and grieving process. 

When it comes to healing childhood sexual abuse, grief is such an important part of that. It’s your natural response to seeing this truth in the heartbreak of your experience, and it’s part of reconnecting with yourself. When you experience the loss of what you had to what you no longer have, you have something to grieve. And so maybe in the disclosure or the healing process, you know, that really shook up your relationships. So maybe your connection with friends or family isn’t the same. 

And when you experience the loss of what should have been provided to what you actually got, you have something to grieve. So things like your innocence, your security, your safety, protection, nurturing, guidance. 

And when you experience the loss of what you thought you had to what you actually had, you have something to grieve. So if you realize the reality of your childhood rather than the one you thought you had, the story that you told yourself, about the family that you thought you had, about the experiences that you thought you had, that’s something to grieve. 

When you experience the loss of what you desired to what you actually have, you have something to grieve. So that’s things like when you realize what other children got that you didn’t get. The basic needs that you had a right to, when you look at how much love you have for your children and wish your parents loved you like that. That’s something to grieve. 

And when you experience the loss of what you anticipated having to what you actually had, then you have something to grieve. Maybe you thought that if you disclosed you’d have more support, maybe you anticipated, maybe you shared and anticipated feeling the relief of being able to tell the truth and you didn’t get what you want. Not having that is something to grieve. 

Childhood abuse just causes so many losses and then it leads to so many other losses. Things like being able to trust yourself, being able to hear yourself, to know who you really are, to identify your emotions and be present with your emotions, to feel safe in your body, to feel safe with another person. It’s the loss of agency. It’s the loss of personal power and boundaries and self-worth and, oh, so many other things. And those losses are absolutely profound and they need to be grieved. 

Now grief isn’t a once and for all process and it’s not this perfectly ordered checklist. We could talk about the five stages of grief but that’s just something to kind of give us something to hold on to. Grief is experienced in layers rather than stages and each part comes with its own depth of intensity and timing and order, so you’re only able to process the loss as you comprehend the loss. 

And I’ll just pause here. That’s why I am not against forgiveness. I want to make that clear, but I am against forgiveness before you acknowledge what kind of losses you experienced. And if you want to forgive, then go ahead and forgive after that, but forgiveness can often be used as spiritual bypassing, as a way of coping, as a way of just avoiding the pain of experiencing the loss. All right, I’m done with that part. 

So let’s go to what those stages or layers of grief are. 

So denial. That’s things like, “That couldn’t have happened to me.” “I’m making this up.” “I came from a good family.” “I must be crazy.” And it is absolutely normal to go in and out of denial a little at a time. It might be like one day, you’re firm in the reality, “Yep, I was abused”, and the next day thinking you just imagined all of it. And that can be really frustrating, but the great thing about it is, is it gives you the chance to accept the truth a little at a time. 

But here’s the mistake: Don’t think that denial is because it didn’t happen. It is just your way of protecting yourself from experiencing all of it landing on you at one time. 

All right, the next one is anger, like “How could they do this?” And there’s a lot more to the anger, but there’s a lot of things that–oh boy, I went through quite the anger! And the anger in healing is so good. It’s this process of getting back on your own side. It’s this expression of love for yourself. Abuse causes self-abandonment. So this is you saying that you do matter and they had no right to mistreat you. And it’s the beginning of you advocating for yourself–from protecting yourself. That is so good. 

And you might find yourself objecting to present mistreatment along with past mistreatment. And you might not have the same level of tolerance for people that you used to have. Oh boy, did I go through this. I was triggered by very insignificant things. And of course, it was the buildup of all the times from childhood on through my adulthood that I had no voice and I didn’t object to anything. And so it all came out. 

And it wasn’t just the insignificant things that I objected to. I wasn’t just angry about the things that were minor. I was also appropriately angry. The anger signaled me to start using boundaries in relationships when I needed them and that was really helpful because with my new boundaries I had more capacity to invest in my healing and in healthy relationships. 

In this anger stage there are two mistakes that I see. And one is to actually confuse the people in your present life with childhood abusers, to overreact and mistreat someone because it feels like someone from the past. 

The other is expressing anger toward abusers, which itself is very healthy. I did a lot of talking it out of journal writing, letter writing to express my anger, to name a few. And I wrote some very angry letters. Ooh, I wrote a scathing one to my dad. And most of them I didn’t send. They were for me to process my emotions. They were for my benefit. But I did share some when I wanted to. And that isn’t to say that there’s not a time and a place for confronting your abusers. I did actually confront both my mom and my dad, and I’ve written about that, so I won’t talk about that here. 

But getting back to anger toward abusers, the mistake I see is in putting all the focus on how terrible the abuser is while abandoning yourself. So going on this crusade to make sure everyone knows your abuser’s name and what they did or making sure they’re punished. And those in themselves aren’t bad or unhealthy, but they can be distractions or replacements for actual healing. And anger feels really empowering. And after feeling so powerless for so long, that can feel really good. And it might be tempting to continue to stay in that powerful feeling. 

And the issue there is there’s also under that anger are vulnerable feelings under that and they need to be felt too. So let that mama bear energy come out and own your fierceness but also remember that part of the mama bear also comforts and cares for her cub who was hurt. So don’t forget there’s a hurt cub inside of you that needs attention too. 

All right, the bargaining. It’s things like, “Maybe I could have done this differently.” “Maybe I could have done something to protect myself.” “I was too friendly or too trusting.” Or it’s blaming yourself in some way. And bargaining is really about trying to gain some sense of control of making this unhappen or figuring out what did go wrong so you can control it from happening in the future. And it could be about the abuse itself, but it also might be about the losses that happen afterward, like if you were ostracized from your family. It might be, “Maybe if I explain things better”, “Maybe if I forgive”. 

The mistake in bargaining is in not recognizing it for what it is, in thinking that there was something you could have done to prevent your abuse or in keeping your family from rejecting you. Because a big part of healing from abuse is recognizing there was nothing you did to bring it on yourself. You were left vulnerable by the people whose responsibility was to protect you. And there was a predator who exploited the vulnerability. You didn’t do anything to make that happen. And you can’t do anything to make that un-happen. And that is a terrifying truth and a very painful truth. You were victimized and completely powerless to stop it. 

And this leads to the next one, which is depression. “I’m too sad to do anything.” “I’m exhausted and just want to pull the covers over my head.” And depression actually comes from that admission, that acceptance that, yeah, I was powerless to stop the loss. And it often comes with a lot of exhaustion. It’s hard to do much of anything else or be interested in much of anything else. The exhaustion has a really good purpose, though, because while you’re grieving, it’s time to go inward. It’s time to connect with yourself. It’s not the time to be out conquering new territory, taking on the world. And though it might look like it’s the opposite, depression is actually preparing you for new territory. It’s just not the time right now for action. So let depression do its work, let the grieving process do its work, and then you can go on to do big actions. But depression, it’s a time for slowing down and really being present with yourself. 

However, there’s two mistakes in this and one is not working with it. So don’t shut down your whole life, but don’t exert too much of yourself physically or emotionally either. It’s a real time to be just gentle with yourself. 

And the other mistake is in being in this alone. You might feel like shutting out the world, but don’t shut out people who care about you. This is the one thing, if you’re gonna stretch yourself in anything when you’re feeling depression, let this be the thing that you stretch yourself in. The thing that you make an effort for is reaching out to people who care about you, reaching out and providing the support for yourself. 

All right, the next one is finally, acceptance. Grief has done its work and you can finally say, “The abuse will always be a part of my story, but I can create the rest of my story.” 

Now grief, the grieving process can feel frustrating because you don’t know where you’re at in the grieving process and you don’t have any control over where you are other than to do the work of grief. 

And some of the ways to do the work of grief, some tangible ways to express it, is to collect childhood photos at various ages. So if you have photos of yourself that happened before the abuse and ones that happened after the abuse, you can put them side by side and you can see in your face the change or you can not everybody has photos of themselves before the abuse. If your abuse took place so young then obviously you can’t do that but you can look at your photos and you can say, “What do I see in that little child’s face? What did she most want? What did she most need? What did she lose? What kind of pain was she in? What was she afraid of?” And you can use that to get in touch with the losses and express your grief. 

You could also keep a stuffed animal, a doll or other toy to represent the childhood that you lost, just as kind of a reminder. 

You could create a piece of art to express your feelings. It could be poetry or drawing or quilting or maybe photography or writing. You could journal, write letters, you could talk it out, crying, shouting. 

All of those are, and more, that’s certainly not an exhaustive list. Those are some ways to express your grief. There’s some journal prompts that I have and that’s, “What I miss most is…” or “The times it’s most painful is…” “The most painful thing about all of this is…” 

When you’re reminded of your loss, acknowledge your emotions and stay with them as long as you can. And over time, observe how it does get easier. Amazingly, it does get easier and how you experience the loss actually changes. 

Well, thanks for joining me today. I’m bringing you lots more on healing and boundaries and self-care and family dysfunction and so much more. So be sure you’re subscribed so you don’t miss any of it.