sexual abuse

Please, no

~ KJ ~ 9 Comments

I’ve spent the last hour laying in bed crying, trying to block out the flood of memories that have been bombarding me off and on since this morning.

It all started in therapy. My therapist and I were going over the stages of treatment worksheet I had done last week. We got to the section on medical care, which tends to be an issue for me, but I’ve been working on it decently the last couple of months. Primary doctor. Check. Dentist. Need that. Gynecologist. Initiate panic.

I started feeling sick. My stomach was queasy, my head was spinning, and I felt my chest getting heavy. I didn’t want to talk about it. Please, no, don’t make me go. The panic got worse, and then the memories started flashing before me. I tried to make them stop but they wouldn’t. I remember crying and then I drifted away.

I knew what triggered the memories. It’s the same reasons I’ve avoided going to that kind of doctor. I connect it with what my mother did to me. She said I was sick there, and she needed to help. But she didn’t help at all. She hurt me. Over and over. And it never got better.

The thought of someone being in that position with me is mortifying. I can’t deal with it. Fuck, I can’t even handle it in therapy. Imagine if I was at an appointment, what would have happened. I can’t. It’s not going to happen.

My therapist wants to work on it together a little bit at a time. But I’m scared. I’m so damaged. It’s not even going on anymore but the damage is done. I can’t erase the memories, I can’t forget how it felt.

And if that wasn’t enough, the memories have kept coming, even hours after my therapy session. Don’t tell anyone, they won’t understand. I’m just trying to make you better. I didn’t tell anyone. I was a good girl. So why did it keep happening? Why didn’t I get better?

Daddy is standing there. He’s holding my hand. But it still hurts. Why is he letting her hurt me? Does he know I’m sick there, too? I don’t understand. What did I do? I keep saying please, no but no one is listening. My voice is gone. I close my eyes but I still feel everything.

I don’t want to remember anymore. My heart hurts.

PAFPAC blog

~ Crystalie ~ 4 Comments

I have created a separate blog for PAFPAC: pafpacorg.wordpress.com

From now on, any PAFPAC-related posts will be on that blog, in order to separate my professional identity from my personal story.

I will also be focusing more on posting about female-perpetrated abuse there: facts and figures, research, education, etc.

I would also consider sharing blogs and posts from survivors who would like to be featured on PAFPAC’s blog.

(I will be deleting this post in a few days).

Tears on a Thursday

~ KJ ~ 10 Comments

I cried a lot today.

I cried at six o’clock in the morning. I had just woken up and I already wanted to go back to sleep. The amount of effort and energy it takes for me to get out of bed and go to the bathroom is draining.

The pain in my foot is excruciating in the morning, to the point that I cannot put any weight on it. I cannot even balance myself without holding on to something; as soon as my foot touches the floor, I am hit with enough pain to topple me over. One morning, I fell over and managed to at least fall into the wall, so I was able to push myself back to a standing position.

Since then, I’ve managed to slide out of bed and onto my desk chair every morning, roll myself all of the way over to the door, open said door, and take about three or four minutes to pull myself up and slide myself into the bathroom and onto the toilet. Sometimes I don’t even make it to the bathroom on time. That is how pathetic I am right now. I am 30 years old and can’t even manage to walk to the bathroom on time.

I couldn’t tolerate the pain anymore this morning. As I rolled myself back from the bathroom to the bed, I just started crying. I couldn’t stop. I just wanted the pain to go away, but I knew it wasn’t going to. I just have to deal with the pain. It’s what I’ve been doing all of my life.

After a while, I managed to calm myself down and stop crying. Then my mind started going into anxiety overdrive. What if I go to the doctor and it’s not a simple fix? What if I’m not able to work? I’m really fucked. Then I started crying again. I called several doctors in the last week trying to get an appointment. Every doctor I was calling had the earliest appointments at over a month out, until I finally found someone who would take me next week. But I am still so afraid to go.

I feel that this isn’t going to be an easy fix. I’ve had some really fucked up foot issues, including massive multiple bone spurs at the top of my foot. This, however, is by far the worst foot pain I have had in my life. That worries me. I needed surgery for something that was far less painful than this is, so what does that mean? Another surgery? How am I going to live if I can’t work? Disability takes (in the shortest) a month to get. I can’t financially handle not working. So I just kept crying, imagining all of the possibilities, imagining all of the horrible shit that could come from this.

I actually cried myself to exhaustion. I tried to distract myself from the anxious thoughts and I ended up falling asleep, which was probably a good thing anyway. I woke up and still didn’t want to do anything, but I knew I had therapy in the afternoon and had to get moving. I took some more pain relievers, wrapped up my foot, told myself I wasn’t going to cry anymore, and hobbled my way to the bus stop.

My therapy session started out alright. I knew the focus was going to be on my graduate school conundrum. I told my therapist before that I was likely going to drop out, as much for financial reasons as for the drama surrounding the anonymous reporting. I told her again that I just didn’t think it was going to work. I didn’t think through all of the financial shit before I jumped into starting this grad school. It’s not cheap, and there are less expensive options out there, although the quality is likely lower as well. But I really don’t have any other options.

I don’t remember exactly what set it off, but I felt the tears coming. I tried holding them in and that lasted for about thirty seconds; then I just started crying. My therapist noticed and asked me what was going on, and how I was feeling right then. All I could say was “nothing”.

My go-to answer, as usual. I don’t have feelings. I’m okay. Nothing is wrong. Why can’t my therapist just go along with that? Why must she insist that I connect with these feelings?

Then it all came out. “I made a huge mistake coming here. Why did I think I could make it by myself? I should have stayed. I wouldn’t be in this mess if I had just stayed.”

“You’re not being physically and sexually abused here. If you had stayed…”

By that point I just started drifting in my own head. I know what I escaped. But that was my normal. When you’ve been abused for so long, it just becomes your normal. I’m not sure the damage could have gotten any worse had I continued to endure it. When faced with overwhelming challenges, we go back to what we know. And that home is what I know.

I started having short flashes of memories from the recent past, reminders of how I made myself numb to what my mother was doing to me. Then I started to cry even more. What is wrong with me? I know what I went through and yet I still ask myself why I left, I still want to go back in time and forget I ever left.

My therapist told me that if I had stayed, it would have killed my spirit. “My spirit is already dead. That wouldn’t matter.”

“I don’t think that’s true. I still see the spirit in you.”

That’s not spirit. I don’t know what that is. After all of the shit I have been through, how could I have any spirit left? Shit, I don’t even know how I’m still living.

I think I cried for most of the session. By the end, I had a hand full of used tissues, neatly folded into little squares. I’m not sure why I kept on crying. I really try to keep that under control.

Perhaps it’s the physical pain I’m in. Perhaps it’s the sense of hopelessness once again creeping up on me. I don’t know for sure, but I do think I’m dehydrated now.

Mothers Abuse

~ KJ ~ 14 Comments

The majority of child abuse and neglect cases involve a female perpetrator, most often the mother of the child. The majority of cases. That means over 50%.

Yet, what type of person is consistently portrayed as the typical child abuser? A creepy-looking male stranger.

No. Just no. Between 80% and 90% of child abuse and neglect cases involve a perpetrator that is known to the child. Most often, parents or other family members are involved.

Part of my struggle growing up, and also attempting to seek help in adulthood, was the flat out refusal to believe that females would abuse someone, let alone that a mother would abuse her own child. But they do. So often they do. And they get away with it because no one wants to believe it. But the facts are there. They’ve been there all along.

I was told I was just confused, that my mother loved me, that what she was doing was out of love and protection, that my mother seemed like a nice person so they didn’t think she was an abuser. One counselor, after learning my abuse history through hospital records and some of my own admission, handed me a book on attachment disorders and said “I think you have an attachment disorder. Read this.” In essence, I had the problem

Way back when I first started this blog, I wrote a post on mother-daughter sexual abuse: The Elephant in the Room. I will copy and paste it here as well.

As we head into Mother’s Day weekend, the majority of my posts are going to be mother-related. This is a difficult time for me, and for survivors of mother-perpetrated abuse. But we are not alone.

Continue reading →

My mother, the sociopath

~ KJ ~ 2 Comments

I’ve been having a rough time this week.

Tomorrow is my mother’s birthday, and a milestone birthday at that. I’ve had a lot of mixed emotions about it.

Birthdays are the most important holidays for narcissists; my mother was no exception. She believed she deserved the world every day, but even more so on her birthday. I always dreaded that day. I dreaded the obligation to get her a gift, and a gift that met her approval. I dreaded when she didn’t get what she wanted and went on a rampage.

And even though this is the first time that I don’t have to deal with her birthday bullshit, I’m still going through the same emotions as if I did. I’m also angry that she is still breathing. She’s still going on with life as if nothing ever happened, as if she never hurt anyone. She has blown out her candles every year and made her self-centered wishes, while I had spent the last 18 years wishing for my death. It’s not fair.

I hesitantly brought up my feelings in therapy yesterday. A part of me wanted so badly to cry, but another part was strongly resisting, leaving me in an uncomfortable position of feeling emotions on the inside but being unable to express them on the outside. But at least I had feelings.

My therapist then brought up my mother’s complete lack of emotion and feeling. My mother has never felt remorse, guilt, or empathy. But, as my therapist brought up, my mother has also never felt happiness or joy, she has never experienced laughter or love. I never thought of it that way, but my therapist was right. While my mother lacks all negative emotions, she also lacks the positive ones. She will never experience genuine positive feelings. She can’t. She’s a sociopath.

My mother can’t feel anything. Her emotional expressions, when they do occur, aren’t genuine. She can’t maintain any real relationships with people because she can’t connect on any meaningful level with another human being. She is aggressive and volatile, flying into fits of rage whenever she doesn’t get her way. She is impulsive, and acts without thinking. She has no empathy; she doesn’t even understand what empathy is. She manipulates everyone around her to serve her own purpose. And she lies. About everything. She would make the most blatantly incorrect statement and not care who went against her, because she believed that she was right.

My mother has no regard for right and wrong. She neglects and abuses animals, she abused (and likely continues to abuse) her own children and others, and continues to do whatever she wants without regard to legality or morality. She would often refuse to pay her bills and believed she was above any consequences. She didn’t understand why our electricity was cut off when she hadn’t paid the bill in months. The rules never applied to her. They still don’t.

I knew my mother was a sociopath as soon as I learned what antisocial personality disorder was. She fit nearly every criteria. Even worse, she is a narcissistic sociopath, a double whammy. She will never realize her defect. She will never get help. There is no help for people like her.

I struggle with what I want to do with this knowledge. A part of me wants to understand my mother and why she does the things she does. But I also don’t want her personality defect to become an excuse for her behavior.

I should be grateful I don’t have to deal with her anymore, but it’s not that easy. My therapist said that while I escaped the physical prison my mother created, I’m still inside the walls of the emotional prison she made through her programming. Those walls will take longer to tear down. I am free without being free.

My therapist suggested that I should celebrate myself tomorrow. I shouldn’t make it a day about my mother, but make it a day to celebrate me and everything I’ve done. Bake a cake, do something special. I told her I had homework to do, but she said that wouldn’t take the whole day.

I can’t get away with anything with that woman.

Pardon me while I rant

~ KJ ~ 3 Comments

There’s been a story going around on social media about a woman who makes her son take her out on a dinner date and pay as a way of showing her son how to treat a woman.

The story bothers me for a few reasons. One, I don’t think it’s right to impose expectations of sexuality on a young child. She is telling her son he has to grow up and take women out on proper dates. What if he doesn’t want to date women? What if he is gay, or even asexual? She’s not giving him that option; only that he must date women and treat them this certain way.

I could go on. But what bothers me the most about this story (and others) is that focus is centered on teaching boys how to respect women. We don’t teach girls how to respect men. Instead, we teach them what to expect from a man, as if they deserve something greater just for being female. Respect is not gender-specific. We should be teaching children to respect other people, regardless of their gender.

Most people ignore the fact that just as many women perpetrate domestic violence against men as men do against women. Or they say that men are stronger, so their violence is obviously much worse than what a woman could do.

This sentiment makes me want to put my head through a wall. Yes, I’ll agree that in general, men have the capacity to be physically stronger because they can develop more muscle mass. It doesn’t mean they all are. And it doesn’t mean that women are weak little creatures that couldn’t hurt a soul. I can easily overpower most of the men I come into contact with on a regular basis, and I (unfortunately) have before.

I watched my mother beat my father. I watched her hit my brother. I, too, was a target of her violence more times than I could count. It doesn’t take much strength to stab someone, to set them on fire, to beat them with a hammer, or to shoot them with a gun. My mother used her hands, paddles, pans, or even rolled up magazines if she was desperate (though those were mostly for beating the cats and the occasional whack to the face). She wasn’t gentle. She caused damage. My mother is not a fit person by any means. She hadn’t exercised in all the years I knew her. But she hurt. Just as badly as any man would hurt. Angry people like her find strength wherever they can pull it from. She didn’t need a penis.

Outside of my family, I’ve come to know many male victims of female-perpetrated violence. Very few of them ever admit in public what happened to them. Why? Because of that sentiment I mentioned earlier. Men are strong. You can take it. It was a woman. It couldn’t have been that bad. Suck it up. You’re just a wuss. Meanwhile they suffer in silence, not only from the physical damage, but from the psychological damage initially caused by the female attacker and perpetuated by society’s gender-biased views.

This exact sentiment and attitude pours over into female-perpetrated sexual abuse. It was a woman? It couldn’t have been that bad! I bet you enjoyed it! She was probably gentle. Women don’t do that. You just misunderstood. It couldn’t have hurt. You should feel lucky. I could go on, but I don’t have to. If you don’t get it by now, you won’t get it at all.

I can only speak of my own hurt from my experiences opening up about the abuse from my mother. Some therapists ignored it entirely. Other therapists outright denied my experiences as abuse. “She’s your mom and she cares about you, you’re just misunderstanding everything.” Yep. That’s it. I just misunderstood. All mothers should bathe their children into double digits and have special nighttime sessions. My bad. If I said it was a man doing it, or my father, EVERYONE would say “that’s abuse!” before I’d even finish my sentence. But for some reason, when a woman is involved, people automatically jump to the gentle, nurturing view of women and deny the legitimacy of the abuse. It was aggravating, disheartening, and saddening to have my reality denied by other people for years. I can’t even begin to imagine how others, including men, feel when their experiences are denied.

Woman continue to get away with domestic violence and abuse because of the attitude that women are weaker, more gentle, and less violent. I am telling you now that women are just as fucked up as men are. Stop letting women get away with crimes that any man would be imprisoned for years for. Stop making victims feel ashamed for being victims of :gasp: a woman. It happens. Let’s acknowledge it. Let’s deal with it accordingly. Because if we continue to teach girls what to expect from others, they will continue to feel entitled to things they don’t necessarily deserve. And if we don’t teach boys AND girls respect, women will continue to think they can get away with whatever they want to because they are a woman.

Perhaps I should have been a man, because women are going to hate me for this and see me as anti-woman. I am not. I am for equality.

PAFPAC Support Forum

~ KJ ~ Leave a comment

The PAFPAC support forum for survivors of female-perpetrated abuses is up and running. There are a few members, but no one is really comfortable with posting yet. If you are a survivor of any type of female-perpetrated abuse, please consider joining the PAFPAC Support Forum.

It is a private forum, so you will need to ‘apply’ – I receive a notification and can approve you the same day. This is so members feel more comfortable sharing and it helps weed out people who may be there for the wrong reasons. The forum is really for anything, not just talk about abuse, but also healing and everyday struggles.

If you or anyone you know can benefit, please pass on the information.

Thank you.

 

A question of worth

~ KJ ~ 3 Comments

I fell into a dark place while in therapy yesterday.

I’m still sort of there, hanging on with one arm, with my head turned over my shoulder and looking into the darkness, waiting for the moment I lose my grip.

My therapist asked me to come up with some positive things I could do for myself, and some things we could do in therapy to help transition from dealing with trauma to going back into the real world. My mind just went blank. I looked around the room aimlessly, stared at my hands, stared at the floor…I even closed my eyes hoping an answer would come into my mind. But nothing came. This wasn’t the first time. Any time she asks me these types of questions, I draw a blank. It shouldn’t be this hard to come up with answers. What is wrong with me?

After several sighs and “I don’t know”s, my therapist finally asked me if I believed I was worthy of these things. No. Sometimes I struggle with believing I am worthy enough to be breathing, let alone to be engaging in any remotely positive things. Then I felt myself sinking. I managed to stay grounded for the most part, but I felt like I reverted right back to being my mother’s child. I apologized profusely, which is a habit of mine. I feel like I am constantly bothering other people, and am compelled to apologize for it. I just kept telling my therapist that it was all my fault. Something was wrong with me. Something must be wrong with me. It’s the only explanation that makes sense. My therapist kept trying to convince me that it wasn’t, but I know it was. She mentioned the possibility of my parents being mentally ill. Could a person (specifically my mother) be mentally ill and still appear so normal on the outside? That doesn’t even matter anyway. It was still my fault. I was the only one treated that badly. The defect lies in me.

I grew up believing my purpose in this life was to be abused. I had no self-worth. I have no self-worth now. It’s hard for me to accept when people say something positive because I question their intentions; it’s just not something I’m used to. My therapist asked me if I believed the things she said about me. I said she had to say those things because she was my therapist. When she said that she said those things because they were true and because she cared, my immediate response was “please don’t care about me.” I don’t want people to care. I needed people to care years ago when I was a child in desperate need of saving. Now I am adult who has lost the ability to trust people. Part of that is due to being raised to believe no one could be trusted, and part of that is due to witnessing the actions (or lack thereof) of people in my life when it came to what was happening to me.

Trust no one, fear everything, don’t talk, you’re evil…these are programs that have been downloaded into me since childhood that I have yet to be able to delete. They are like those programs on your computer that run in the background and you don’t even realize that they’re there; they are automatic, and they’re always taking up space. How can I ever feel like I am worth anything when these thoughts are constantly running in the background of my mind? How can I be worth anything when I am so incredibly damaged?

Nothing like a little Sunday morning dissociation

~ KJ ~ 5 Comments

I couldn’t really think of a title that appropriately summed up my Sunday.  I found it a little humorous, and honestly I have to laugh.  My life is so chaotic, yet I wouldn’t have it any other way.  As much as I am dealing with, I’m getting through it.  I’m learning more about myself, and about my illness every day.

It was 3:30-3:40 in the morning on Sunday when I was startled awake by someone pounding on the door.  I didn’t know who it was.  I only knew what time it was because I immediately looked at my phone.  Then banging got louder.  I went into panic mode, thinking either my mother finally found me, or she sent the police to come get me (she regularly threatened to call the police on me – so while not logical, it’s something that is ingrained in my head).  I don’t remember what happened after that.  What I can tell you is that somehow, I ended up in my closet, where I woke up/came back to reality/whatever you want to call it holding my blanket and my arms covered in scratches.  It was almost an hour and a half later; I heard a commotion outside.  I figured out who it was; thankfully, he was not my mother or the police.  I still felt unsafe and uneasy.  I didn’t find out until later that night that my roommate was not even home when the door-banging occurred; I was completely alone.  Thankfully some part of me had the sense to hide in the closet.

That got me thinking about what made that part of me hide in the closet.  I remember that my mother barricaded our closet doors so that we could not use them.  I always thought that was strange.  Who has closets and blocks them off completely?  Did I used to hide in there and that’s why she closed them off?  I wonder what it would have been like to have a closet.  Would I have been able to hide from her?  I’m sure she would have found me.  She always did.  Like a monster with eyes and ears all around her head, she knew where I was, what I said, what I did.  A closet wouldn’t have protected me.  That’s just silly.

Then again, it makes sense I would hide in a closet.  I still do a lot of things to protect myself that don’t really make much logical sense.  I’ve been doing them since childhood that they’ve become a part of my regular.  I always wear at least two pairs of underwear, sometimes even three pairs.  Does it make sense?  No.  That extra pair isn’t going to protect me.  But as a child, I’m sure I thought it was going to help.  I also always wear multiple layers of clothing, even in the summer, even if it makes me sweat.  Extra clothing makes me feel more protected and less vulnerable.  Maybe she won’t make me undress if it’s too much to take off.  Most embarrassing of all is my habit of stuffing myself with toilet paper.  I remember doing it as young as 8.  I thought if I could just block that whole area with toilet paper, she wouldn’t be able to touch me anymore; she wouldn’t be able to hurt me.  I created a literal barrier between her and my genitals.  It was so uncomfortable, but I wanted her to stop.  Of course it didn’t work.  She caught on.  I still did it, but not every day; only when I was feeling especially vulnerable.  Even in my adolescence and adulthood, when I had (and have) and ability to say no, I still find myself doing the same thing when I am feeling especially vulnerable or re-traumatized in some way.

As far as I’ve come, I am still very much a traumatized child living inside a traumatized adult.