Incest Survivors Support Group
Incest refers to any sexual activity between closely related persons that is illegal or socially taboo. Consensual adult incest is very rare. Incest between adults and prepubescent or adolescent children is a form of child sexual abuse that has been shown to be one of the most extreme forms of childhood trauma. If you or a loved one is a survivor of incest, join the group...
How does that happen for you?
I put it like this, I usually feel this building flood of feelings-guilt, shame, disgust, sadness, self-loathing.
I feel this for a few hours, then I get the why: the actual thing that is returning.
Like a scorpion, the sting's at the end.
I put it like this, I usually feel this building flood of feelings-guilt, shame, disgust, sadness, self-loathing.
I feel this for a few hours, then I get the why: the actual thing that is returning.
Like a scorpion, the sting's at the end.
Then slowly I recover over the next week or two.
Sitting in my therapist's waiting room, a woman smelled unwashed. Instead of being able to overlook it, it upset me so much that I had to go outside to wait. Sitting at the table on Thanksgiving day eating turkey with my husband and kids, I suddenly had a flashback to eating a turkey sandwich on rye bread with lettuce, tomato, and mayonnaise. I HATE mayonnaise and had no overt memory of eating a sandwich like that. Needless to say I was a bit confused and spent the rest of the evening trying to figure out what this sandwich memory was.
The next day, it all came flooding back. When I was fourteen, some of my school mates saw all the bruises on my body from where my Dad was severely beating me with a leather belt almost daily. Someone called child protective services. They interviewed both me and my sister along with my parents. They took pictures for the judge, but the judge refused to put us into protective custody.
I knew with absolute certainty that my parents would be killing me that day for having spoke to the people about the abuse. My sister (who my parents never touched, but was forced to watch everything that happened to me) couldn't handle the thought and tried to commit suicide. The judge then agreed to put her into protective custody in the hospital she was in, but would do nothing for me (the one with all of the cuts and bruises).
In all of the confusion and in the face of certain death, I did the only thing I could do. I ran. No one would help me or take me in for fear of legal trouble so I slept in the woods during the freezing, wet winter for over a week with nothing but a light jacket. During that week, a friend did allow me to drink a cup of hot chocolate on their back porch one rainy night and another friend gave me a turkey sandwich where I learned that my parents had agreed to let both me and my sister be adopted by my high school principal and his wife the following week.
That adoption fell through when my parents changed their minds at the last second. With no way to take a bath or clean myself, I smelled quite horrid by the end of my ordeal. For the first time in a long time, things were finally starting to make sense on why I refuse to go in the woods when it's dark, why body odor bothers me so much, and why I really don't like turkey.
Of course, it really messed me up to realize that I had forgotten something so basic and so public. I'm still trying to process it. Just when I think I get a grip on it, I get dunked by another memory I had forgotten. It's overwhelming.
I remember being in a survivor workshop with Ellen Bass years ago. We took a break and I went to sit on a rock. All of a sudden I saw a flash of wall paper. It was the pink rose wall paper in the bedroom where we lived when I was 15.
I fell into deep despair on the spot because that flash of information told me that the abuse had gone on much longer than I had thought.
It's like the images bring a "knowing" with them; a knowing that cannot be denied.
The most devastating memory left me undone for weeks. It returned when I was doing EMD-R. I had never recalled being used at orgies before but when this memory returned it freed-up something in me, and it explained a lot of my dysfunctional behaviors.
I have not recalled everything, including the abuse when I was 40, and I may not need to. Yet, as hard as it is, I welcome whatever memories come up because I know they make room for me to live my life more deeply once they are processed.
xx
SuzA
For me, confusion was more deadly than the memories because confusion was a daily thing; memories were sporadic.
xx