In her last post, Thriving on the Other talked about the trauma of being betrayed by the man she loved, and undergoing light therapy which brought memories of childhood abuse to the surface.
TRIGGER WARNING: This article or section, or pages it links to, contains information about sexual assault and/or violence against women which may be triggering to survivors.
I began to attend therapy sessions every week, sometimes twice a week. Now that the crack was in the dike, I wanted the whole thing to flood over and out of me. I figured I could spend a month, maybe two, and be done with this whole messy situation.
I laugh at that now, here on the other side. But it took three years and more devastating discoveries than I’d ever imagined to get to this place of power, a place I’m sharing with all of you now.
That EMDR session where I remembered grandma was only the beginning of a long and arduous journey into the truth about my life. Over the next months, I remembered everything I needed to remember to begin to heal. Sue calls my childhood nothing short of torture. It took me a long time to say that…but today I know she’s right.
My grandma was a sadist. She hurt me in ways I can’t even mention. One story sums it up. I was afraid of snakes, so she put me naked in a closet with a snake for the better part of an afternoon — her way to force me to heal my fear. My grandpa came home and found me screaming in the closet. When he opened the door the snake was wrapping around me and I was close to catatonic. He held and rocked me in his arms until the dam of tears broke and I poured out my story.
He never said anything to me other than to say I’d be okay and not to tell my mommy; he’d take care of it. But I can tell you he gave my grandma heck that night. And I was punished the next day for telling about our secrets. I never told anyone anything again for a long time; I thought I was going to die that next day before she was done with me. I prayed to die later — and so I never ever told.
A few weeks later in another EMDR session I would learn it wasn’t only my grandma. My dad was in on it too. He started in on me when I was about six or seven, first holding me as grandma punished me in her latest sick way. Later, he joined in, first with physical pain, then with sexual assaults of every imaginable form. Together they came up with new and scarier ways to punish me whenever I wasn’t perfect. They defined perfect, and that definition changed all the time.
So I didn’t stand a chance of winning. It wasn’t really about me being perfect anyway. It was about them controlling me, defeating my spirit, just as each of theirs was defeated long ago by another parent or uncle or grandparent.
I’ve learned something most therapists know but don’t share publicly. We don’t want to know the truth in our perfect world. But the reality is that sexual abuse, torture, and physically painful punishment are more common in our society than anyone wants to admit. Generational abuse is handed down through the best of families. No one suspects, and the behavior continues. There’s some sick stuff that goes around in families, yet we choose to look the other way, even as the established pattern continues from mother to son, father to daughter.
That’s what happened with my family. My grandmother was most likely abused by someone in her family; she abused my dad and they both passed it along to me. And no one would have ever suspected. My dad was a deacon of the church; my grandma was the organist and women’s group leader. No one would have guessed of the craziness they lived behind their perfect small town images.
Not even me. It’s taken me three long and hard years to come to a place of health and safety. Forty-five years of hiding the truth and then three long years of self-discovery and healing.
It’s been the best journey of my life, strange as that may seem. That’s why I want to share it, to help others have that same journey — to the other side of themselves, to their own truth, to their forgiveness — of themselves and their abusers. Forgiveness is one of the keys to Thriving on the Other Side.
Photo Credit
“Evidence of a child” Monroe Dragonfly @ Flickr.com. Creative Commons. Some Rights Reserved.
Recent Bel Brown, Thriving On The Other Side Articles:
- The Power of a Pause
- The Power to Change Our Story
- The Power to Co-Create
- Of Faith and Fear
- What’s in a Secret?
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