Sexual abuse

Trigger warning:
This text contains images and descriptions of sexual harassment and bullying, among others.

In the last few days I have started to pull one more thing out of the pandora's box of my trauma: the bullying in my childhood. I was aware of bullying, especially in my teenage years, but what is coming up now is something new, and it is unsettling and destabilising. Intrusive images are coming back, this time of bullying.

“I wanna be an amateur
Back like I used to be
I wanna go down to the essence, down to the essence
Down to my clumsy childhood essence
I wanna be
Essentially unfiltered, free”

Ezra Furman, Amateur

Trigger warning:
This text contains images and descriptions of sexual abuse, violence, thoughts of suicide, among others.

About three weeks ago I told my psychologist that whenever I connect with my inner child I always feel something in my stomach that I am not able to identify. She suggested "why don't you let your child paint?" Easy to say, but at first I found it very difficult. Although I have done a lot of work with my inner child since the end of February, as I wrote a month ago, until then all my work with my inner child had in a way been done in my imagination. Now, how can this child, who exists in my imagination, actually paint in the real world? I understood clearly that it was not about imagining paintings, but about painting for real, through me.

Deviant Daeva writes in an article on complex PTSD and Healing your Inner Child: “Victims of complex trauma have often gone through long-term abuse, neglect and abandonment during childhood. That has left them with an extremely hurt and wounded inner child that has never felt the safety to just be a child, that has never felt the love and care they needed, that has never learnt about boundaries or self-protection.” How true.

A little over three weeks ago I wrote about coping (badly) with sexual abuse, and although I felt I was coping badly, at the same time it was the end of my permanent internal dialogue about sexual abuse in my childhood. I wrote:

A fortnight ago I started to accept the sexual abuse in my childhood as a reality. I wrote a fortnight ago about my difficulties in dealing with this reality - the sexual abuse. And, the reality is that I am still in a lot of pain, and more and more anger, more and more rage. But, my permanent internal dialogue is definitely over. I am beginning to heal these wounds of sexual abuse, by both, my father and my brother.

Rage!
What do I do with my rage at one o'clock at night?
I imagine going to my father's house. I guess he still lives in the house. I really don't know. I don't even know if he's still alive. I hope not. Although I'd like to know so I can celebrate.
Rage!
I imagine going to his house in Germany, I imagine knocking on the door, and when he opens it, pushing him inside, hitting him. Punch him until he's unconscious.
I imagine taking a hammer and smashing the windows of every window in the fucking house.

Sexual abuse? Sexual abuse! Fuck! I feel abused, violated. I feel disgust, fear, pain and anger. I feel... I don't know what. I feel that I inhabit a body used by others - by my father, my brother. I feel their invasion into my body, this body of a seven, eight, nine year old kid, but I also feel my "cooperation", my "participation" in my own abuse. I sucked the cock. An active act. With disgust, yes, with fear, yes, but I sucked it.