Sexual abuse

In my last post I already mentioned the first attempt of an EMDR session in my last therapy session. Was it a failure? I don't know, it depends a bit on what failure means. It's true that we didn't manage to work with EMDR, and that I was again terrible, with many difficult emotions, with frustration, fear, anger at myself, shame, as I already wrote on Wednesday.

Since my last blog post on sexual abuse and emotions I have been on an emotional rollercoaster. At the same time I notice a change: I have made a decision to fight back! In fact, I made this decision the day before I wrote my last blog post. On this day I made several decisions:

Note: As this text references mostly English language sources and quotes extensively from English language sources, it has been first written in English and then translated into other languages, such as Spanish and – maybe – German.

“What are the words you do not yet have? What do you need to say? What are the tyrannies you swallow day by day and attempt to make your own, until you will sicken and die of them, still in silence?”

Audre Lorde, The Transformation of Silence into Language and Action, 1977

Since my last blog post about sexual abuse 9 days ago, I have been having a permanent internal dialogue, which in one way is not moving forward, or at least not very much. It is a dialogue between a part of me that does know, that does want to come to terms with the sexual abuse in my childhood in order to move forward, and another part of me that resists a resounding yes to the question of sexual abuse, that wants to continue to protect me, as it has done for decades.

Since my episode of feeling suicidal at the beginning of the year I am getting to the point of assuming a resounding "yes" as an answer to the question of sexual abuse in my childhood. Clearly my new narrative - this "most likely something happened in my childhood, something at least bordering on sexual abuse, I don't know what, I don't know how bad, but something happened" - doesn't work for me either.

Last weekend I came back to a memory from my childhood that has been tormenting me regularly for decades, but I will never have an answer to it. In this case it all starts with a memory, but the question I ask myself in relation to this memory has no answer. Once again I have to live with creating a narrative for myself - another narrative that I have now revised, just as I recently revised my narrative on the subject of sexual abuse in my childhood.

The memory, as I described it 5 years ago, is this:

Living with uncertainty about possible sexual abuse is a crappy. It is difficult to manage the pain of an unknown past, especially when emotions from your past start to haunt you.