Reclaiming Life after abuse

I’m a survivor of child sexual abuse.

But even after decades I still can’t say that completely without shame. That’s the nature of this kind of abuse. Logic tells us we were children. We had no choice.

But the wounds go deep and are so hidden that for me, and many like me, that feeling of shame becomes as much a part of who we are as our eye color. We just learn to live with it somehow.

We survive. But once innocence is lost, it can never return.

I believe many survivors of childhood abuse are drawn to spiritual traditions. Those of us who manage to fight the low self-esteem and the numbing lure of drugs and alcohol still need to make sense of what happened.

How do we explain the levels of cruelty and selfishness humans are capable of inflicting on the most vulnerable members of society? How do we become better and more whole humans through and in spite of it?

We know we need to forgive in order to move on and heal, and that’s something most of us can’t do without help. Even with a solid spiritual foundation, forgiveness can take a lifetime for something like this.

When the abuse ended, and I was able to grow up trying to live a relatively normal life the best I could. Except nothing is ever really normal again once you’ve been ripped of your pureness.

The silence around my abuse was nearly as damaging as the assaults themselves. As a young child I didn’t know how to talk about it. When I was 15 is when I finally broke my silence.

Are you a survivor of child sexual abuse? If you’re not, chances are you know someone who is.

Some statistics say one in four women and one in seven men have been molested, raped or abused before they are 18. That’s a staggering number.

And most survivors keep it quietly to themselves. We want to believe society won’t blame us, but experience tells us otherwise.

But healing is possible, and while no one would ever wish abuse on any child, I hope I can turn my pain into a powerful tool of transformation. 

When experts say the scars of child abuse last a lifetime, they mean it. In my teens, when I first began to deal with my abuse, I talked to counselors about it but by then with the response of those I told already had laid a foundation within me.  

Today, I see it as yes, it did happen and there is no going back to change the events. It does play a part in my life and who I am today. I often wonder what I would say to those who did that to me given the chance to open up about it. Would they deny it? Would they admit to it? I sometimes think that if they did admit to it and allowing me to express to them what it has done to me mentally and emotionally would it make me feel better or make me angrier? What if they apologized, would I feel satisfied? I suppose I may never truly know.