I can try this. I can write about that which I dare to speak of. How stupid of me. For it is nothing. Nothing to make a big deal of. “Stop being so melodramatic, Julie” says the voice. A voice so scathingly like the mother’s voice. I know it isn’t anything big. It seems so stupid for it to bother me?, bother us to some degree or another. And yet it does. But as I write this, there are no feelings. They are held deep within, away from my heart, lest I actually admit that it IS a big deal. Lest I fall apart as the shame succumbs me and the utter self-disgust rots my insides out.
So what is it? What could be so vile and so intrusive that would mark such a meaningless post of melodramatic neediness and speaking of abuse that really isn’t real abuse.
The neighbor boy (R)- he was only at most a year older. Although he had an older brother (D) several years older than that and some inside say also abused them. And yet, in the young girl’s eyes, R appeared and seemed so much older than her. So much bigger than her. How silly and stupid of her to view him that way, and yet she insists that he was bigger and older than her.
To tell this dumb “secret” in public, to an open audience, is so much harder than it should be. The fears that if the details, the additional information, the whole picture, if all of this is written about, given, portrayed accurately, that anyone reading it would surely know that it really is her fault (my fault? our fault?). And I suppose one of the bigger issues, is that it would utterly be true that she was and is making a big deal out of nothing and being melodramatic and needs to shut up and get over it.
And the sad thing is, the more this is written about, the greater the build up of intensity of “what is it?; what happened?” and of course this all leads to such a stark contrast to what really happened. Not much and yet, enough to imprint itself deeply into this young girl’s heart and mind forever.
Can I do it? Can I write it? I can’t really begin to tell the memory piece without providing some general history information to provide a better understanding of how it affected her.
The walls have come down hard and come up hard. The switch happened and it is locked shut. How many times will we do this before we write it? Before we just tell it. Not to only our therapist. Not to perhaps a trusted friend, though only pieces of it.
Another attempt gone by. Perhaps inching closer to the reveal. The reveal wherein the fear and belief is so strong that this will indeed prove it was nothing at all and we made a big deal out of nothing. That somehow this has haunted us always– for we have always remembered pieces of this memory… parts of it were never forgotten. We always knew it happened. The shame constantly eating away at us. It is hard to believe there is anything left of us after all these years. The self-hate and badness looming and proving that it is so much greater than anything we could ever do to overcome its truth.
And truly, this is in many ways, a “mild” memory. I mean, worse things were done, and yet this affects us. It is the emotional content and dynamics that have left scathing wounds.
And so it lives on buried within.
One of the first things I see in this post is a little girl responding to abuse by someone she saw as an authority figure. Once the trust of authority has been so ruthlessly violated, as in your case and the case of many other survivors, our ability to see true authority figures becomes blurred. the other thing is, he may not have been much older but even young people can be so dominant, so slick in their abuse that pre-conditioned abuse survivors fall prey to them without much effort on the part of the abuser.
What one abuser does certainly lays path for other abusers to come along and take advantage of their work. In this way, abusers are on the same track. They abuse and then leave their work open for other abusers to take advantage of the mind altering, conditioning and lessons in guilt that they started.
This is my fault, I’m making too much of this. Self respect isn’t something they taught us. When we say, he was wrong despite his age and this has affected me we go against all we were taught about self worth.
As explained, when it comes to DID self worth is a given. Our mind split to help us survive. I fully believe had we not, in the beginning, had we not seen our worth we may not have been able to continue to split to protect the core self, the valued self, the one worth protecting. I know every person in my system knew from the beginning that I was worth protecting. That gives me a measure of comfort. It doesn’t add order to my life but it adds a measure of comfort to know from the beginning I was worth saving. My mind split to make sure I was around. It’s a natural response to un-natural stress and abuse but I believe it is also evidence of a persons core belief in their self worth. I was worth saving. My mind made sure it helped me stay here, divided but still here. (the above is not scientific proof, just a strong belief about why my people continue w/out ceasing to protect my mind.)
Austin