“He abused me from 9 to 12 years old. It was our secret”

I am 32 years old. I work as a nurse in a hospital. I suffered during my childhood sexual abuse that has caused me a very deep wound and have hindered my development as a person. They have been very traumatic experiences.

How does something like this come to pass?

From the age of 9 and a half to just over 12, my mother’s partner abused me. This plumber came to my house after the death of my father, who died young leaving my mother alone with 6 children. He knew how to earn our trust. He seemed interested in my mother, but deep down his interest was me and my sisters. He became irreplaceable and took his place in the family.

It usually happened like this. My mother would put us to bed wishing us good night and so he would come and do a ritual: he would enter the room when he was in bedhe would put his hand under my nightgown and on my back and he would kind of tickle and massage my back, something that all children usually love.

Then he started with the touching. Every night it was the same. There are things that happened at this time that I remember very well. Others I don’t remember so much, they are like a mist. I have hazy memories of what he did to me and what he made me do to him. I find it so amazing that sometimes I can’t believe it, that I even doubt if all that really happened.

My mother finds it hard to believe that anyone could do this, and even more so that it happened in our family, although she believed me from the beginning.

Humiliation, confusion and guilt

He has never taken responsibility for what he did. It was as if he told me: “your body is mine and I do what I want.” and when I feel like it with him. And when I don’t want to be with you anymore, he left you. When he wants me too ”.

Among the attentions and affections that he lavished on me included the fact of bathing. He loved to do it, I suppose to be alone with me. When she was done, she would take me out of the tub, wrap me lovingly in the towel, and carry me to bed.

From those moments very blurred memories come to mind and I suspect that on one of these occasions he even got into the bathtub with me and raped me. It must have been a day when we were home alone. This is a unique memory along with another that occurred in the basement. All the other memories I have are of touching.

I felt very confused, emotionally unstable and I did not understand anything about his behavior during the abuse or after. He did all this to me at night, while during the day we looked like a normal family following an idealistic upbringing. It was as if there were two lives: one in the dark and one in the sunlight.

The manipulation

He manipulated me make me feel little by little his accomplice. In this way he kept “our secret”. No one else, only him and I knew.

I tried to erase what was happening so I could be normal the next day. I always tried very hard not to show anything. She was a good student and I was good at school. After two years of quite regular visits to my room -he came almost every night-, Suddenly he stopped coming and taking an interest in me. It was just when I started to enter puberty. that confused me and left me in a very depressed psychological state.

Consequences of abuse

There’s a part of me that wishes these memories weren’t true. Some were more traumatic, but less repetitive: they are the ones that emerged later with therapeutic body work. That is to say, I was not aware of them before. They were so violent and traumatic that I deleted them. The most repetitive ones had always remained alive in me, although perhaps I didn’t remember the details and these too emerged later in the therapeutic process.

Years after the abuse I started to suffer from insomnia; in fact I had never slept very well either as a child or in my youth. When I started having sex with boys, the fact of coming into contact with man and sexuality made me connect with that shadow And with that huge wound. I started having destructive behavior against me and against my life. I was taking drugs that made me disconnect more from myself.

As a result of separating from my partner, I stopped eating and lost a lot of weight. I entered a very strong crisis. She had insomnia, panic attacks, fear, and was distraught.

Of course, It has affected my sexuality, since I was unable to ask for what I wanted. Rather he had to serve the other. There was like a lack of awareness of what my body felt, my needs and my desires. He was unable to speak and say what he wanted. My need was never important. This is what happened to me with all the couples.

Sexual abuse during my childhood has affected every aspect of my life into my adulthood.

But the worst thing about the abuse is the feeling of guilt that you have left: I felt dirty, my body disgusted me, I reproached myself for everything. And so it was easy for me to end up being the culprit in many situations in my life. I was not valued and I was not valued. This has marked many situations in my life. I have also often experienced the feeling of not being seen

“I had disassociated myself from my body.”

After the lived experience, I had to connect with my body. feel it. Process emotions and trauma, process pain. It helped me to go through that black hole consciously, to cross the threshold of recognizing one’s own body, of entering it when you have been ignoring it. You can’t do it alone: you need to be well accompanied and very understood. I did this process through diaphreotherapy. For two years. Biweekly.

When I started the sessions I didn’t feel comfortable in my body at all, it was like I had erased everything. I had closed myself to the perception of what was happening: from the neck down I did not feel. That had been my method of survival –although each one will have their own– because while you are not in your body, you cannot set limits either. That is why a person who has been a victim of abuse often feels a constant transgression energetically and emotionally.

The struggle is to befriend your body again and reconnect with it, to re-inhabit that temple. It cost me sweat and tears.

The path of overcoming

I performed different therapeutic techniques: Gestalt psychotherapy, bioenergetics, acupuncture, art therapy, singing, family constellations, osteopathy…

then i connected with an abuse psychologist who recommended that I confront my abuser. He told me: “On this one occasion you have to be the one to take command. You have to put yourself exactly on the other side: you are the executioner and he is the victim. This is important”. So for two years I trained until I felt I was ready to confront him.

I went to see him with a friend who by age could be my mother to feel protected, just as the psychologist had told me. I took the opportunity to tell him everything the abuses he had perpetrated meant to me, the consequences they had had for me and my family. “Now you can get up and go. And I don’t want to see you anymore,” I told him. After this meeting I felt very good.

It has helped me a lot to look, feel and order what happenedand also put everything in its place and give each one the responsibility that touched him: the one that corresponds to my mother, the one that the man who abused me has, my own and even that of people around me, such as the teachers, who never asked me what was happening to me.

As it happens with a tree that does not receive light and bends to look for it and to survive, my development had also stopped evolving in a straight line to adjust to the traumatic experience of abuse. I had to straighten that out. I learned that in order to move forward I need to place myself in the essential being, but it is still very difficult for me.

Connect with that part of me that is capable of learn something from what happened and contribute something to the world with that experience It is the attitude that has allowed me to overcome it after many years of therapy, suffering and pain… Instead of saying to myself every day “What a horror and what a bad time I have had”, I have learned to ask myself questions that help me get out of that self-pity loop from consciousness and understanding.

Now I often ask myself: “What have I learned? How has it been? What I can do?”.

There are still things to heal regarding my relationship with others. I feel afraid and I don’t know if I’m capable of opening up. I have an open wound and I take responsibility for it, but I need to find someone I can trust, someone who won’t run away when I tell them about my traumatic childhood. My biggest fear now is not knowing how to protect myself.