Filed under: Uncategorized | Tags: bugs, marital therapy, survivor of child sexual abuse, survivor of incest, therapist
So I’ve been shopping for a therapist lately. As my regular readers already know, I already have a marital therapist, and we determined that my fucked-upness is fucking up my marriage and possibility of having another baby, and so it would be best for me to find my own therapist. As most of you probably know, finding a therapist that you like can be difficult. I once read a study that said that no matter what else happens in therapy, when people like their therapist, their chances of healing are much greater than those who didn’t like their therapist. So, even if you have fucking Carl Jung himself as your therapist, if you don’t like him, you’re not going to get any better.
So, I called some therapists and left some messages. I have seen so many therapists in my life already, and 95% of them have been total crap. But I had two really great ones, and I am seeing a really great marital counselor now. So there’s hope.
Anyway, one of them calls me back, and this is how the conversation went.
Doc: “Hi, this is Dr. ThinkI’mGreatButReallyISuck. You left me a message. I need to let you know that I am not accepting new patients until November.”
Me: Oh. Well, I guess that will be okay, it’s only 2 months away.
Doc: I see. What are you looking for exactly?
Me: I need someone who has some expertise in the area of child sexual abuse.
Doc: I see. Is that because you are a survivor yourself, or is your child a survivor, or is it someone you know-
Me: (cutting her off) It’s me.
Doc: I see. Have you ever been in therapy before?
Me: Yes.
Doc: I see. And how long ago was this?
Me: (Starting to feel weird – do I have to tell her about my past therapists? I don’t know her at all, and I already had to tell her I am a survivor, and I feel vulnerable.) Uh, look, this is getting kind of weird. You’ve been asking a lot of questions, and I haven’t gotten to ask you any. I feel like I am telling you my life story, and I am trying to ascertain if you are even someone I should be seeing or not, and it seems like you are interviewing me before I have even made the decision to see you.
Doc: (defensive) Well, I am just trying to see if you need someone earlier than November, and you said you were-
Me: (cutting her off): I don’t think this is going to work. I’m sorry.
Doc: (pause) Okay. (click)
Now I guess I have to call some more possible therapists. But honestly, I already just saw one a few weeks ago who turned out to be an idiot (because she couldn’t keep up with the conversation, and I tend to go quick), and now with this last phone call, I don’t feel like it.
My marital therapist has offered to be my personal therapist. It gives me a weird feeling, and I am not sure what to do. On the one hand, she seems to really understand me. On the other hand, there’s the weird gut feeling I have every time I think of seeing her as my personal therapist.
There was a spider in my room last night. I think the Universe is trying to tell me something.
Filed under: Uncategorized | Tags: belief, disclosure, support, survivor of child sexual abuse, survivor of incest
I once read this study that examined the after-effects of child sexual abuse. This study found that when the victim disclosed their abuse to someone, and they felt believed by the person they disclosed to, they were more okay than the victims who weren’t believed (in terms of depression, suicidal thoughts, anxiety, etc.) Then, this study looked at whether the victim perceived an unsupportive environment. In other words, the study examined whether the victim thought someone would believe them if they did tell. The ones who perceived that telling would do no good because no one would believe them were a lot more fucked up than the victims who thought their disclosure would be believed.
In thinking about that, I guess I instinctively knew my mom would believe me. I told her about my brother, she believed me, and made it all stop for me. Thank G-d. Thank G-d. I guess that’s one thing about belief – when you believe what we’re telling you, you stop future crimes from happening.
Unfortunately, it doesn’t usually play out like that. In general, when a kid is in a family where someone is fucking them, the rest of the family turns a blind eye. The child perceives that they all kind of know what’s happening and aren’t doing much to stop it, so they also understand that disclosing isn’t such a great idea either. Why bring to the surface the fact that your own mother doesn’t love you enough to stop your dad/uncle/stepfather/brother/whoever from hurting you.
I recently read through a forum where a daughter disclosed that her mother was sexually abused and wrote an unpublished book about it. The mother has since passed away, and the daughter is painstakingly putting this whole book on her blog, so that her mother can finally have a voice for all those horrible hurts (after being silenced so long). The replies to this daughter, on that forum, were absolutely heinous. The whole thread turned into this disgusting back-and-forth of “should you believe a disclosure” and “can you support someone without believing them”. I don’t know why this shit shocks me anymore, but it does.
A person’s mother died, and still people have to argue about whether it was truthful. I guess it is easier to argue about whether to believe or whether support is real if you don’t believe than it is to talk about what the fuck we should do about all the people who are fucking kids, and what to do about all the already fucked kids. That is one of the many reasons I keep this blog anonymous. I have seen it too many times in my life where someone doesn’t quite know how to react to my shit, wants to be supportive but wants to balance it with some sort of weird belief system that says that I am lying. My own aunt said “Things happen between brother and sister”. I said “Not oral sex”. She didn’t know what to say then. She probably believes some shit went down between my brother and I, but doesn’t understand at all why I would be fucked up about that.
Here’s what I say about this. Think about the last time you had adult consensual sex. Think about what you were wearing, what your partner was wearing, what they were doing, how it felt, where their mouth was, their genitals were, what they smelled like, what setting the sex was in, etc. Now think about describing that to someone. Think about what it would be like to describe it to a stranger. Difficult and embarrassing, right? It’s hard to disclose anything sexual, even when it is consensual. Child sexual abuse forces a situation where your introduction into sex is dark and weird and terrible.
If something wrong happened to you or someone you know: Keep telling until someone believes you. Keep telling. Keep telling. Keep telling. Someone will believe you. I believe you. What happened to you is wrong, and it is not your fault. If you encounter people who don’t believe you, it is because they are wrestling with their own shit, and it has nothing to do with you. Move on, and keep telling until you find the person who does believe you.
Filed under: Uncategorized | Tags: babysitter-child sexual abuse, color, OCD, survivor of incest, underwear
The funny thing about Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder is that unless you are actively attacking it, it will keep actively attacking you. Remember how I wouldn’t wear certain colors of underwear? Well, now I have expanded this mishegas into other items of clothing, and thus I won’t buy or wear certain colors of shirts or scrunchies (for my hair). Some of my wardrobe is now good for shit because of this newest development in my fucked-upness.
In Judaism, the color red is considered to ward off evil. So, obviously, red goes in the “can wear” pile. If I wear a blue shirt, or blue underwear, or blue scrunchie, I think something bad will happen. I feel like by wearing this color, I am telling the universe it is okay for something bad to happen. I don’t want to send that message out to the universe, so I don’t wear that color. Think about it – when people say they feel sad, they say “I feel blue”.
Green, I figure, is okay because it usually signifies health. Yellow is okay too – it’s the color of the sun. Orange seems kind of bright, right? Purple and yellow together are the colors of healing, a therapist once told me.
As you can see, I have given this color thing a lot of thought.
Sounds fucking nuts, doesn’t it? Of course it is fucking nuts. These attempts of mine to ward off evil are absolutely fucking nuts, because if I had to psychoanalyze myself, I would say that I am trying to create an environment where I am certain that nothing bad will happen to me. Or worse, that if something bad does happen to me, it won’t be my fault. It won’t be because I wore the bad color.
This is what happens when you fuck kids. We grow up believing that if we had done something differently, then we could have prevented people from taking advantage of us in the worst ways. We spend the rest of our lives trying to ward off the kind of evil that has already happened to us, even to the minutest detail of the colors we wear. The truth is, it wouldn’t have mattered what color I wore then, just as it doesn’t matter what color I wear now. But it makes me feel better to only wear the ‘good’ colors, and to eschew the ‘bad’ colors, so I’m going to keep doing that.
Filed under: Uncategorized | Tags: babysitter-child sexual abuse, bad dreams, nightmares, oprah, survivor of child sexual abuse
Last night, I dreamed about the babysitter. I was absolutely terrified of her. She was mentally ill, and I was an adult, but I was absolutely terrified.
The weird thing is, the crux of the dream was about my mom. It seems from the dream that my mom didn’t want to find her, or didn’t want me to know who she was or what she was about.
I woke up from the dream remembering that my husband was going to get up early today to go running, which meant I would be alone and afraid.
SwordDanceWarrior says that dreams are ‘free therapy’, just not as nice as a therapist would be. Obviously this dream is trying to tell me something, and I am grateful for every new piece of information I have about the babysitter, since I have no conscious memory of her. I could walk by her on the street and not know it’s her. I could be living next door to her for all I know, for fuck’s sake. As a matter of fact, this one time on Oprah, she had a man on there who just so happened to move next door to the guy who molested him when he was a child. Isn’t that just the most fucked up think you have ever heard?? I mean, you know how hard it is to buy a house, how much shit you have to get through, how time and energy-consuming it is, and how how filled with hope the act of buying a house is – and then you get there, and your molester lives next fucking door??? Horrible.
I hate having bad dreams, but I am grateful for the information. Part of surviving the abuse with no conscious memory means trying to reconcile myself with the fact that my memory might never return. It might never feel safe enough to come back, which would mean a lifetime of figuring out why I’m fucked up. A lifetime of terrifying dreams that are cryptic and have some basis in reality. That’s why you shouldn’t fuck kids.
Filed under: Uncategorized | Tags: brother-sister incest, camp, predators, school, survivor of child sexual abuse
The huz and I were talking about how shitty the day before the first day of school is. There’s that weird horrible glum feeling of impending doom. I was thinking about my son, and how after some time of vacation, he will go back to school/daycare. He’s so young, I wonder if it will be shitty for him. I wish I could save him those shitty feelings.
I thought about it, and suddenly said to my husband “The year my brother molested me, no one liked me.” My husband was kind of startled by this sudden admission and said “How do you mean?”
I said “No one liked me. I didn’t seem to fit in anywhere. I think I was eight years old when he molested me? I was in 3rd grade. After doing fine in kindergarten and 1st and 2nd grade, suddenly no one liked me in 3rd grade. My teacher didn’t like me. Then about 3/4 of the way through the school year, my teacher got sick, and another one replaced her and she didn’t like me either. My grades that year sucked.”
I thought about it some more and said “I had no friends in school that year. My great grandmother died that year, and I remember the teacher telling the class that my great grandmother died, and this little shithead next to me said “Don’t expect me to be nice to you just because your great-grandma died.”
My husband said “Wow. What a dick. I’m so sorry sweetie.”
I said ” I felt incredibly unspecial that whole year, unloved and unloveable. I had no friends at camp that year either. The counselors didn’t like me, and it was like every day was just something to get through instead of something to enjoy. We went on this day trip to a baseball game at some famous stadium, and they left me alone in bleachers far away from the rest of the camp, next to two adults who weren’t even part of the camp, while the counselors sat off somewhere else with the rest of the kids. If that happened to my son now, I’d be fucking PISSED. But when it happened to me, I never said a word to anyone.”
The year my brother molested me, no one liked me. Maybe people did like me, but I didn’t feel like anyone did. I felt like the worst piece of shit on earth, and in my mind, every time no one liked me was like evidence that my inner feelings matched my outer self.
In the wild, when an animal is sick and dying, sometimes the pack leaves it to die alone. The reason for this is that predatory animals come for the sick, and the rest of the pack is smart enough not to be there when predators come. Maybe it was like that for me. Maybe everyone sensed I was fucked up, and didn’t want to be around me. I was fucked up, and arguably still am. That’s why you shouldn’t fuck kids.
Filed under: Uncategorized | Tags: babysitter-child sexual abuse, brother-sister incest, Judaism, victim-victimizer cycle
“The righteous man quickly finds the world aligns against him.”
I was watching a re-run of “The Good Wife” today, and an Orthodox Jew said the quote above. It got me thinking about righteousness in general, and fighting the good fight.
I started this blog as evidence. Evidence that fucking kids leads to serious, persistent, long-term, harmful consequences. There have been at least 187 times in the last two years where my being abused as a child has fucked me up, or made me react badly to an otherwise normal situation. Let this serve as the 188th time. Is the keeping of this blog a righteous act? Are all of us righteous, by virtue of survivorhood? Do we become righteous when we do not cross over to the dark side, and do what was done to us? Do we become righteous when we fight against evil?
I can’t even count how many times in my life I have felt like I was fighting this fight alone. Just this last week, I was talking to my aunt about the abuse my brother and I suffered at the hands of a babysitter, and my aunt said “But your brother said he enjoyed it.” I was so taken aback by her line of thinking that I couldn’t even answer her. Finally I said “He was 7 or 8 years old.” At that young age, he had already bought into the rape myths that state that all males enjoy sexual contact with females, even when the male is a child and the female is an adult, and the male doesn’t have the power of consent. And at that old age, my aunt apparently believes this shit too. She has the privilege of living a non-traumatized life, I guess.
I don’t have that privilege, so I know all too well what the cost of his being abused was. We both slept in mom’s bed after that babysitter fucked us. For years, we slept there, and we were scared of the dark together. That’s why you shouldn’t fuck kids. Somehow he transitioned into abuser, and I stayed as victim, and we are both trying to learn from whence we came and where we are now.
“The righteous man quickly finds the world aligns against him.” I guess righteous women find this too.
Reasons You Shouldn't Fuck Kids 