JD,

You are already brave. Anyone who have the courage to think about what happened is brave – and you not only thought about it, but also wrote about it. I congratulate your courage! I’m empathic with your pain and suffering… feel embraced!

I liked a lot of what Zenhen wrote… that healing is not sunshine and flowers, and her examples. Last year, when my memories came back for the first time, I thought that was some kind of challenge from the Universo to make me stronger, better, whatever… that I would “fight” this, win and then everything would be flowers and rainbows.

And so I did… I thought all I had to do was to forgive the abusers… So I put all my strenght in this. And I thought I had forgive them… But the pain was so unberable that I actually never let all the memories return. And I didn’t want to face the worst aspect of the abuse: that I felt pleasure and extreme guilt for feeling this.

Then… this forum thread made me realize I have a long way to go.

Anger came back. Fear. More than once, when I was coming back from work, I suddenly started crying in the street – and I knew that who was crying was that 5 year old child girl that lost her trust and faith in her parents at such a young age.

I know I am sabotaging myself. I know I must stop. I see I have been judging me so severely that this has become a way of self-punishment. I understand now that this healing is a process that may take a long, long time… I have accepted that it can be long.

I believe love heals. Love yourself… Please. Don’t give up on you. You’re here for a reason… Don’t ever give up on you! But be patient too. Don’t push yourself too hard… I’ve found recently that push yourself too hard on this things is one of the worse things you can do to yourself.

I believe the best we can do is go on living our lives, trying to share love, focus on the now… and then, if the bad feelings come, deal with them at the time, but no preassure.

I totally agree with what Zenhen and Matt answered to you about this. Hope my words may be of some use!

A loving hug,

Amelie

Hello everybody,

I wanna to share some of my feelings with you…

This forum thread made me look again at the abuse and see that I’m not healed yet…

A few days ago I started, for the first time, to read some scientific articles about sexual abuse in childhood. I didn’t wanna do this last year, when I first rememberd… but something made me go for it.

I made some devastating discoveries about myself… the pain was so intense that sometimes my life didn’t seem like it is my life… sometimes I felt like I was disconnected from the world…

The first thing was about self-injury. I don’t let my sores heal, I keep poking them… I do this ever since I was a child, and I never understand it, NEVER. My legs and armas have lots of white scars due to this… old scars. They don’t show very much because the are old, but they are here. I always had the feeling I did this to me as if I was trying to remove something inside my body that wasn’t supposed to be there… I never understand this feeling too. Then I read articles about how self-injury is related to sexual abuse in childhood. It’s an incredible pain to realize that this event is marked in my body until today…

Then I made another painful discovery…

I have never had many friends. I just can’t maintain friendship relationships. This has bothered me for years… I have always, always wondered what the hell was wrong with me. Was I a boring person?… Through out the years, I gave myself a lot of anwers: “people say I more mature than people my age, so that’s why”, “I have good grades and people envy me” and finally “I’m just like this, I’m different, there’s nothing to do about it”. But then… Then I saw that I’ve been pushing people away. My whole life… always pushing people away. People come to me, but I just don’t do what it takes to create a bound.

Because, deep down inside, I don’t want to.

I want to be alone. Hurting myself.

I discovered so many hatred towards me that scares me to death.

There’s a part of me that hates me, that is trying to destroy me… and a part that want things ending up ok.

A few days ago, the part that hates me was winning. I realized I had been sabotaging myself in a lot of ways since my memories about the abuse got back. But the scariest thing was that even though I knew this, the part that hates me was preventing me to do something to change.

I cried out for God. If I couldn’t love me, if I couldn’t make anything good for my own sake, who would?

Then… I spent the weekend in a spiritual retreat. I almost didn’t go – I was feeling so bad – but it made me feel so much better…

Ever since this thursday, the feeling I had lost some months ago of conection to the universe has come back. Stronger at some hours, in others it’s weak…My thoughts stops, my mind is empty. My past is gone, so as my future; now is everything that exists. I feel like there’s love around me. Like I’m being conducted by God. This is such a huge relief… at these moments, my past disappears and I feel a deep peace, or deep joy.

But I’m scared this feeling will go away (like happened before) and suffering will come back. I’m afraid the part that hates me will come back.

Zenhen, Matt, JD, Aria, Kristin… have you ever felt these things?

Dear Zenhen,

Thank you for your loving and emphatic words! I’m sorry I didn’t answered earlier, these last days were so difficult for me… I’ve been asking the universe to help me, to understand why so many things in my life aren’t the way I wanted (especially my professional life). And then, I run into this very forum thread and writing to you – I see now – was the first step to start looking in a now way at the abuse and how it has an impact in my life until today. I’ve been reading scientific articles and blog testimonies about sexual abuse in the last few days – something I didn’t wanna do last year. It’ve been discovering a lot about sexual abuse and about myself too… I decided to create a blog to share my feelings, emotions and conclusions – hoping it may help other people who have gone through the same situation. I’ll start the blog today in a few hours – I’ll put the link here 🙂

About rediscovering anger and pain… When I started doing that mentalization, huge waves of anger came! I felt more angry doing the mentalization than in my normal state, just remembering what happened. I was so angry while I was doing it, so angry that I had to control myself – I wanted to punch things, break things! Looking back now I see that the words somehow made me “extract” those feelings from inside. I also re-experienced many kinesthetic memories while doing this mentalization… it was extremely hard, but as I said, I was desperate… I decided to do whatever it take to get out of that misery I was in. So I did it… Today, now, I don’t feel anger anymore. But I can’t say that it’s all over – I know that there are memories I didn’t allowed to come up at the first time they began to emerge. But, please, don’t criticize or judge yourself for feeling angry, for not being able to forgive. Don’t judge and criticize yourself for nothing at all, please! Be gentle and kind to you.

“I did however see it as a form of love since it was the only type of affection and attention I received. So because of this I have made the ill interpretation that if a guy doesn’t want to sex me up 24/7 he doesn’t love me. However, when I am with men who physically want me all the time I just feel used and kinda disgusted.” I understand this. It’s a very positive thing that you are aware of the link between sex and affection. Any other person in your position would have made the same interpretation and “learned” in the same way you did… Same about the other feelings you reported. So, again, no judge on you please!

About your questions:
1) I’ve been feeling this about not being real in the last days… it’s weird, it’s painful like if I was screaming but no sound could get out… don’t know how to describe this otherwise… I haven’t really thought about how to deal with this. I’ll think about it and tell you.

2) I have already felt this tingling without being aroused… I believe it has something to do with chakra energy because I’ve had this feeling also in other parts of my body that I know are points of energy (like the palm of my hands and fingertips). I interpret sexual arousal more like a warm sensation together with the desire for sex.

3) I have many body sensations that are still a mistery to me – many times I cannot link them to a feeling. What our bodies feel are always reflection from the mind… So the way, I believe, is to start paying attention to your body and your emotions in a non-judgemental way. With time you’ll learn what message is your body sending you.

4) I grew up in a catholic family, where sex wasn’t spoken about… When I came to the age to learn about these things, I got a book from my mom, not a conversation. This “sex is bad and dirty” thing from our society is one of the things that messes up our minds – its a violence to make people feel that natural things are dirty and ugly.

5) I need to thing more about if nonsexual desires and needs make me feel guilty, but I have realized that I’ve been sabotaging myself in so many things… due to the extreme guilt of feeling pleasure during the abuse. This is so strong now that I’ve been feeling physical sensations in my body… it’s scary, but I’m facing it.

I have to go know, I’ll answer the other questions today, later!

See ya =)