Survivors’ Voices
One in Four is a charity that is passionately and professionally committed to supporting people who have survived child sexual abuse (CSA) and to raising awareness of this challenging issue.
In 2015, they published Survivors' Voices. This report gave survivors a space, enabling them to document the long-term impact of child sexual abuse on their life, and reflect on what helped them survive. Too often, survivors are silenced. CSA is still a terrible taboo, but it is incredibly important we change public perceptions to help prevent this happening to children now and in the future, and to support and help heal those who are daily dealing with their survival.
The extract below is just one account from the report.
Ann
To my first abuser
I was six years old when you murdered my spirit, soul and childhood, left me with a carcass, a shell in which your parasite roamed freely to every corner. You were at least twice my size and unrestrained you stripped me of dignity and penetrated me time and time again. You took the flowers of my soul and replaced them with thistles and weeds. Shame, fear, anxiety, depression and anger were the worst of them, then you incarcerated me for the crime you committed. You changed my perspective and my approach to life. I didn’t want anyone else to know that my family didn’t look after me, that the garden of my soul was full of toxic carcinogens and that insects of misunderstanding, loneliness and mistrust in every day life would nourish themselves on desperately undernourished remains. You removed all sense of balance, boundaries, trust and love in my life.
After two years of silence, I tried to tell my mother what had happened. I didn’t have the vocabulary to articulate it and she dismissed what I had said. Shame wouldn’t let me speak of it again. Bereaved and betrayed by my most trusted person, the seeds of my once flowers tried to bud from time to time, but between the put-downs of slow learning and an inability to socialise with my peers, the deep thinker struggled to find anyone to engage with and those buds were crushed.
Disorientated, wounded, unarmed and left in an internal war-strewn territory without a map, I searched for something but didn’t know to look for a key to escape solitary confinement, it had became all I knew. A second perpetrator, a third. I had no idea how to accept love, and unable to trust, I never believed it when it was offered, so once someone had eventually nurtured a bud, I crushed it myself with low self-esteem.
I couldn’t read a book without my imagination being taken back to my own confused world. Flashbacks of your violations and perpetual cycles of catastrophic fantasy are frequent to this day, however I didn’t know there was any other way to live until recently. I’ve experienced trauma outside that of which one would expect in life. I live with a heightened sense of threat, grenades are frequently triggered and I have to manage symptoms of post-traumatic stress and redress weeping wounds. I need great nutrients and mighty tools to control your noxious debris.
You shrouded every beautiful thing with filth. It was as if I looked through a smoky veil and this removed my ability to experience any moment in the present without the ball and chains of my lifelong silent, shameful prison sentence. For most of my life I even believed I deserved it. I had no self-love and respect, I didn’t know what it was. You made sure I left my innocent child behind whilst my carcass grew. You carelessly and skilfully dismantled my human, emotionally asphyxiating me. Daily stress from that cauldron of tragedy, nearly 30 years on never relents.
You took more than my life, you took my life and made me pay the price. It would’ve been easier for me if you had physically murdered me, but the murder of one’s soul is intangible, particularly as you did it in my childhood where no one could see who I would become without the shame of your crime and the thorns you left me with. Pain, humiliation, guilt, injustice, hatred, anger, fury and betrayal. Words don’t come close to expressing the stratosphere of emotion I’ve experienced over this. I don’t know how I’m still alive and I don’t know how you could’ve been any more vulturous in my world.
Three years ago I broke the silence I thought I’d take to my grave. The response from the majority of my family was that of dismissal, trivialisation and ignorant assaults which crucified me at a time I needed most support of all. I’d felt disconnected from those closest to me all my life, then they confirmed it, it was my greatest fear. It seemed that I had traded agonising silence for further heartbreak of catastrophic magnitude. I had moved away at the age of 18 and currently the majority of my birth family are no longer in my life. I can’t heal and reach for emotional freedom whilst risking further injury by a family unable to love as I need love, nor acknowledge the violations, open wounds, unimaginable loss or complexity of what I’ve experienced, all of which has been compounded by their dysfunctional response.
I tell very few people my history. How could my friend ever stretch to understanding my pain if she’s never known trauma beyond a divorce? And I recognise the depth of this. No one hears my cries, no one hears how loud my heart hurts. I’ve needed every fibre of strength and more to function at work, pay for my house to keep myself safe and pay for therapy to get me to where I am today. I would love a family of my own, however there isn’t energy left for much else and sometimes I already run on a deficit. That demon which overwhelms my mind and spirit, that beast and the baneful response of my mother, my protector, my queen, that has shaped me.
I learnt that if I presented myself to the world the way I saw others, I could appear to function and keep myself safe. I learnt to make my own extreme needs appear invisible. I didn’t know that my external self would be so well-versed in acting to be functional, whilst my internal self was managing both a stalled bereavement and my screaming child within. Even in silence, I could hear her (me), no one else could, but I didn’t know how to find peace. I didn’t know how grey my life was until I started to see colour.
I know that the path to healing is long, I have only just begun but am thankful to be on it at long last. The only sense that I have made of this is that my fate is to help others. Acceptance has been a gift but only rewarded after time and great pain. For me, a combination of Parks’ Inner Child Therapy, acupuncture, physiotherapy, regular exercise, increased water intake and a nourishing diet with herbal and vitamin supplements were all part of re-establishing association of mind and body, which I had lost sense of. The greatest therapist I met was able to recognise key issues likely to be associated with child sex abuse and implement methods to address them. She and I set an objective, which was (and still is) to restore a healthy emotional balance. Re-association of myself with my inner child was critical in teaching me self-love, respect and boundaries. Rapid belief restructuring radically reduced shame and subsequently reduced my need for perfectionism. Visualisation techniques, and the re-scripting of traumatic memories, creating new neural pathways helped to reduce stress. Help with recognising my own resources now allows my adult-self to take care of things without responding with my inner child’s emotion, and this has led to better relationships at work and at home.
Meeting other survivors to rid myself of isolation has been equally as critical to my healing and I did this through the charity ‘Into the Light’ and on-going friendships with other survivors. I needed a holistic ‘spirit, mind and body’ therapy approach together with some life-coaching, but I only discovered this after years of misleading therapy which compounded my feeling of isolation and helplessness. It was time wasting and sent me into a spiral of debt at a time when I was least able to make decisions and feel empowered. I hope no survivor has to face this when they reach out to seek help, it’s a terrifying step to take, yet the insight and moments of clarity are worth it.
The full Survivors' Voices report is on the One In Four website here.
Thank you to Clarinda Cuppage and One In Four for allowing us to reproduce this extract.