Personal Essay

My Emotional Pain and Shame of Sexual Abuse

A small part of my story

TW: Sexual Abuse

I was only sixteen when my brother-in-law, fourteen years my senior, sexually abused me. My older sister, his fiancé, was in hospital with an ectopic pregnancy. Her first or second, I don’t recall. For years after that incident, I blamed myself and just accepted it as I was this wild child who crashed through an unstable life anesthetizing it as much as I humanly could. And along the way never for once saw the reality for what it sadly was.

It was not until becoming a mother myself to my daughter and watching her through her life, growing into a beautiful young woman, and the untangling of trauma I had worked through with my therapist, that I could understand why I lived with chronic self-doubt all of my life. The clarity opened my eyes to see how I had unknowingly permitted people to abuse me in so many different scenarios.

My father, an alcoholic, had at the best of times, a violent and volatile relationship with my neurotic mother. And when he was allowed to stay over, which wasn’t often — my twin and I thought life was good again. The only intimacy I understood was emotional and physical abuse.

I was fourteen when my mother first visited Israel, taking my twin. I had refused to go because I felt deeply embarrassed of her eccentricity. So, my older sister and her boyfriend minded me for two weeks. One evening they took me along to visit friends of theirs and these people were unashamedly into pornography. This was my first encounter with porn, and it felt horrendously sickening — they all teased me. My sister, who was only eighteen couldn’t see that she should have protected me. However, like me, we hadn’t been taught healthy boundaries and only understood co-dependency as love.

My siblings and I all left home by the time we reached fifteen. Our mother wasn’t at all maternal, although extremely fertile. Her mother had walked out on my grandfather when my mother was three years old. My grandfather was aggressive and controlling and refused to let my mother go and live with my grandmother. This affected my mother catastrophically; her rigidness, religiosity, and incessant demand for control through manipulation drove us all away. The whole family situation was one big fuck up.

My father hadn’t ever really wanted to know and did the least as possible when he remembered to turn up. He told me I was on my own when I reached the age of sixteen. He didn’t prepare me for life and took the only savings I had to spend on my school uniform. Both my parents are narcissists and damaged. My therapist banned me from using the word, ‘damaged’. However, that is how the insidious toxic shame that ran through my family, engulfed me. I didn’t have anywhere else to escape to, apart from my older sister and that came with a price.

So off I went to live with my ‘surrogate mother’, who was four years older than me. My mother, incapable herself, had made my sister look after my twin and me, from a young age. And she was still playing that role. She had a young baby herself, with the boyfriend, who eventually became the husband, and then became the ex after leaving my sister for another woman. He had been an emotionally immature, lazy, and sexist partner and father.

When I moved in, they had lots of friends visiting at all hours. I used to make countless cups of tea and coffee. Porn videos were played out on the recorder of an evening — accompanied by an audience of friends. An array of glossy porn mags stashed in cupboards. Conversations and situations were over sexualized and yet so normalized — I was sixteen, unworldly and crippled with a lack of self. The boyfriend would tell me he should have been with me, and not my sister. Even my own doctor and other close adults knowingly abused me. A young teenager — who had assumed she was a hideous unlovable girl.

My extreme self-doubt felt like a painful disability and created other abusive disorders. I began to rely on alcohol for courage and used drugs to anesthetize myself even more. After more emotional abuse from an ex-boyfriend and people where I had worked, I attempted suicide and was discovered; fortunately. I was only seventeen or so — but I had wanted to end my self hate.

I couldn’t imagine my beautiful and sweet daughter having to go through any of this. Yet when I look at my own younger self, I just didn’t know anything different. It was better than living with my mother who was neurotic, abusive, and seemingly insane. It makes me feel sad; even now when I have let her back into my life, she tells me that God has cursed me for the rest of my life. I have a small amount of faith and so this upsets me more than anything else.

I had tried therapy since my twenties to heal these demons, nonetheless, last year, I was blessed with an incredible therapist. He was able to help me safely unpack the trauma and abuse I have experienced since my mother was pregnant with me. Unfortunately, the trauma continued for a number of decades in my life as I was unknowingly stuck in a self-destruct mode. Nevertheless, I have now learned to understand the adult, parent, and child within me. And it helps me to see which one I am coming from, especially when I am triggered. Lately, I keep seeing my younger me flash before me and yesterday I saw her so clearly. Healing is happening after so many years of disconnection and disassociation.

I have found it difficult to find words because, after so many decades of chronic survival, one forms spiritual and emotional scar tissue. And scar tissue is inflexible and rigid. With writing, we can unpack and relive to understand ourselves with self compassion. Self-forgiveness is going to be the key for me as I blame myself for so many ugly scenarios that I got myself into. However, I do believe if we can find a place within ourselves to do this, we can find it for the people who have hurt us, knowingly or unknowingly.

I was eventually able to tell my sister the actual truth of what happened and even though I had been drinking that horrible evening in 1984, I was thrown back and raped against my will and I had frozen into the fawn trauma response. I had assumed for years it was my fault. I am able to discern, through loving my daughter, how easy it had been for me to accept the abnormalities as reality because that was the only reality known for survival purposes.

I grieve that my experience isn’t at all one huge failure and that somehow I can be a conduit for hope. For the last ten years, I have worked tirelessly on finding inner peace and self connection. It takes a long time to repair and I believe with family it takes longer. Especially when one learns about healthy boundaries, in how and what we know to be right for us, no matter how other family members get hurt by our newly formed boundaries. We have to find a huge amount of tender love for ourselves and forgive the past, no matter how horrendous, because every human is flawed and hurt. We need to find a way to heal mankind before the darkness gets too dark.

Much love

Chantal

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