Childhood sexual abuse. Can they be overcome?

Sonia came to my office for the second time at the age of 31 and a few relationships in which the abuse was reproduced. She could not feel, nor trust nor love. When she had sex it was as if she came out of her body, as if she were not there. Memories of childhood abuse surfaced… This is her story

A testimony of overcoming abuse

“I didn’t expect these memories to come upI was not aware that they were inside me. And they scare me a lot. In fact, sometimes, I doubt if it is really real events or if it is something that I have imagined.

They appeared to me while we were making love with my partner. Right now, when I’m in the prime of my life. Now that I have felt that he loved me and that I loved him too. For the first time he was enjoying himself both in bed and out of bed with someone. And suddenly the nightmare appears.

This has taken me to hell and it has completely removed me from myself, and, at the same time, it is as if these memories had been split from me. I can’t believe this happened to me. But it was like that, I look like she was a girl of about 8 years old.

At that time my mother’s partner already lived at home. He seemed to me a kind and good man, perhaps because he appeared after my father abandoned my mother and me. My father was an alcoholic and next to this man my mother was happy, content. Everybody was happy.

Everybody was talking about how lucky we’d been finding someone good to help us. So, little by little, I became fond of him and then my sister was born as a result of this relationship. My mother worked every night and my sister and I would sit on the couch watching TV with him.

One night he moved closer to me and took my hand. He caressed me over and over again and I laughed. I don’t remember that she made me feel bad, although I did feel a bit ashamed. I would even say that at first I liked the game and felt a certain excitement”.

When memories reappear

This is how Sonia came to my office. It was a patient that I already knew and with whom we had had other sessions years ago. All these memories of her were clear to her forever. But suddenly others had appeared that were new and had been so disturbing to her that she had decided to come to me again.

Sonia remembered how one night her stepfather was on top of her rubbing his genitals over her body as a constant panting rang out. The memory was accompanied by a terrible fear and a lot of shame. The image that she saw most clearly was of a corner of the room’s ceiling.

As a defense mechanism, he had learned to dissociate, as if leaving his body while everything was happening.

Like many other patients I have treated for abuse, when he explained the scenes, Sonia had a lost look as if she were in another place far from herself; the one that she served as a refuge to cope with what she could not understand and was beyond her. She had her gaze fixed on a point in the room as she surely had when everything happened.

That image was followed by others. And, above all, after a body job in which he moved the hip area a lot, she began to cry: she also remembered how he forced her to put her hand on her package, forcing her to masturbate it, while her sister slept.

He threatened her that if she told anyone anything, he would hurt them. That surely lasted several years, although Sonia did not know exactly how many or how many times it had occurred.

“I also know that he touched me asking if I liked it. I said yes but I felt dirty. Later my mother scolded me because she spent long periods of time in the shower. I was not able to explain anything to him as he demanded.

“I felt guilty as if I was responsible or I was cheating on my mother or I had provoked it”

He told me it was our secret. Fear still runs through me and at the same time the desire to be discovered, that my mother would appear; the fear that she would hurt me because at some point her gestures were very violent and her seriousness imposed a lot on me and she scared me “.

Take away the guilt, recover the innocence

But, like I told you, she was the little one. Although it wasn’t easy for her to understand, her parents were the ones who had the duty to have protected her and, for whatever reason, they hadn’t.

We did a job so that he could regain his innocence. We started from one of the images that I had remembered. One day when she had come home after school and there was no one else but him, and he, completely drunk, pushed her to her room, closed the door and, pulling down his pants, forced her to put his penis in her mouth and suck it

She still felt great disgust at that. First I asked her to see herself at that moment in the scene that was taking place, and then leave the room and continue contemplating what was happening in it as the adult she was today, staying away from there. I had her describe to me what she saw as if she were someone outside of it all.

With this exercise she was able to look like a little girl next to someone adult who forced her to do things and managed to see the girl in the scene as an innocent girl. In the end, she understood that she couldn’t control the situation or do anything different from what happened. She somehow she forgave herself.

Sonia explained to me that being at home without her mother was synonymous with terror.. The worst thing was the uncertainty, the feeling of insecurity in which she lived for years, the fear that something terrible could happen at any moment…

For this reason, as soon as he could, he left home, getting as far away from his mother’s partner as possible. The first boyfriend she had took advantage of it to run away. There he began a series of abusive relationships.

frozen feelings

We advance little by little in the therapeutic work. We started a job in which she could contact her emotions and managed to express all her frozen feelings: loneliness, isolation, fear…

Until he also contacted anger towards the adults who were then around him.

We got him mad at the abuser, but it was much more difficult for him to connect with the anger towards his parents. She continued with the body work, moving, and in that way new sensations appeared hidden in her body memory that we were working on.

One day, moving the pelvis continuously For a long time, Sonia connected with shame and fear: the fear of feeling. And she was brave, and she lunged through him, and she kept moving until fear gave way to rage.

It is incredible to hear how the rage that arose from his very bowels gave him so much strength and power.

She could feel the energy coming directly from her vulva and she was released. The feeling after that transit was enormously light. I suggested reading the book The goddesses of every woman and that allowed her to connect with her most divine part, recovering power over herself and also her value.

He learned to see his sexuality as a source of pleasure. Afterwards, he took a tantra course and, in the end, the surrender was able to come without pain. The orgasm was no longer a goal, but sexual relations became a way of making intimate contact with the other.

Your process is still ongoing and one of the great dilemmas that he still has to resolve is when he will tell his mother and sister what he experienced; with the family consequences that this will imply. Another pending question is whether she will ever denounce her stepfather.

5 guidelines for liberation

Child abuse is more prevalent than we realize due to our violent patriarchal culture and the vulnerability of children. That it is a taboo does not help to leave it behind. But it can.

1. Detect abuse by the family

It is difficult because almost all the members, unconsciously or not, make a denial, they all have a pact of silence and maintain normality. Many times the abuser believes he has the right to do what he does or finds it justified.

An example: the forced and public sodomization to which Bertolucci subjected Maria Schneider in the name of art in the harsh scene of Last Tango in Paris.

2. Drug and alcohol use

The abuses are very often closely related to alcoholism. and the drugs. They serve to hide what happened and also to cope with everything that has been felt.

3. Unconditional acceptance

To help someone who has been abused The unconditional acceptance of his word when he tells us is crucial, as well as accepting all the emotions that arise from the story, no matter how incredible it may seem to us.

4. A space for emotional expression, always next to an expert

These people feel a lot of guilt, shame, and fear. All of them are emotions that must be expressed, transited and released through acceptance:

5. The importance of bodywork

It is essential to incorporate because the abuse is registered in the body and it is the body that must be healed. It must be done by an expert who brings up memories that can be difficult to navigate and sustain. Often, people who have been abused have a complicated relationship with their bodies, they are separated from him, they reject him and mistreat him suffering from eating disorders.