Abuse. My personal experience of realisation, decades later. (Trigger Warning!)

[stevemac]

---Trigger Warning---

Hi All.  I had a final straw moment with my mother, a single carer.   Subsequently, via various mental collapses and shenaginans, a new past emerged.

Memories of sexual and physical abuse when I was an infant came back. I can remember visits from older persons into my room, whilst I lay in a cot. I can remember being peirced by safety pins when I had diaper changes. I can remember the lazy Incompetence and my struggling to breath in and shrink my torso to avoid the piercing pain.

I grew up morbidly scared of the dark and regarded my home with horror and fear as if awaiting certain death. So I was physically abused and negelected from a very young age. Up until the age of 13, when I could finally fight her off it was a daily nightmare of abusive carer's, sadisitc 'uncles' and mental and physical torture.

On my first camp with the scouting organisation, I was seperated and drugged and raped by a 'helper' who thought he could help my bed wetting by ensuring that we spent the night together. I had always thought I had caught a virus, or mild pleurisy afterwards. I was seperated and consigned in my ilness. feverish, shivering and virually insane in the pitch black farmhouse room I had been abandoned in. Now I know, it was the physical 'comedown' after an overdose of some prescription drug or other.  I never pondered his demand for me to drink bitter coco, with just sugar and water.

That's the trouble, so many memories. So many bad memories and so many peices of jigsaw that continue to fall into place and make sense.

It gets, worse, much worse. When I was ten, I had a dog that I loved dearly. The only living thing that I could connect with. He was killed in front of me by one of my mothers jealous boyfriends.

Abuse at school, abuse at home, abuse by strangers and relatives abuse everywhere and the whole damn lot remained hidden from me until three years ago.

So, an awful lot of your supposedly normal life starts to make an awful lot of sense. The abuse of animals, the abuse of others. The random self harm, the drug over-doses and resusitations. The inapropriate relationships, behaviours, attitudes, isolation and pain. The whole carnival of classic c-ptsd has played out all of your life, whilst you desperatly try to 'do the right thing' always. Truble is, your pysche is defined by guilt and memories and tectonic feelings of inadequacy and self loathing.  Even when I changed at school, I hid the signs of abuse on my body. It was always shamefull to me when i might forget for a moment tha they were there and somebody would say. "bloody *, look at the marks on his legs"  And do you know what, I felt shame as if I deserved it.

Every day was an assault on my self. From the tenderest yaers, until when i was older it was a daily ritual of legelect. One of her many favourite tactics was to inform me that I was going to recieve a beating. This would be done in the best traditions of public school sadism. I would be sent and confined to my room. Say age 8. Then, I would have to wait. Sometimes it would be within a few minutes but usually, it could be all day. all the time here footsteps would approach and receed outside my door. Eventually, she would open the door and then it would begin.

She was merciless and sadistic, reducing me to tears quite quickly, making me feel nauseous and weak. Day after, day, after day. Year after year.


My life has been an un-coordinated muddle of missed chances, blown opportunities and confusion. All my life from the earliest days I have been wracked with introspection and existentialism, pondering Why?.    Well now I know and all I can say is that coping with the inate waste of it all is difficult sometimes. It is as if I have sat through a film all of my liofe and just as I am leaving, somebody says. "No, you have just sat through the wrong one"


Steve

[woodsgnome]

Dear Stevemac, you need this, first ... 

I found a lot of sad familiarity in your descriptions...especially you're noting that it came from all sides. And we all experience this a bit differently--you seemed able to shut it out of my mind, for instance; mine stayed with me, and I've been dragging that big ball around continuously.

I'm not sure you intended it, but I noticed you said something to end that is a useful metaphor I've used. You said:
   QUOTE:"now I know and all I can say is that coping with the inate waste of it all is difficult sometimes. It is as if I have sat through a film all of my liofe and just as I am leaving, somebody says. "No, you have just sat through the wrong one"".

This actually came to be via a book I've found useful, and the author suggested that our life is a movie, and like being in a theatre, we get wrapped up in the details 'til we feel we are in it ourselves, identifying (or not) with the scenario, or the people, or actions, etc. Even when the film ends, and the lights come up, we can be kind of stunned to be back in the now we never really leave.

The screen is now blank; the characters, scenes, action--all gone. We'll remember it, or not. And sometimes the memories will sear, burn, and we can't shake them. Then we look at the screen again--it's blank. Maybe the next show will even be a comedy. Or a tragicomedy, or even a documentary that's horrible, but now, there sits the big blank screen again.

That movie analogy sometimes can aid me, I've found. Mind you, when the memories flood onto my screen, there are times it's moot, and who cares about metaphors when the sadness overwhelms yet again. But remembering the blank screen again, then trying to find what's good right around me now (as the movie fades out), well I feel better if still horribly sad and broken about what came before this moment. May it be a moment of peace.