We haven’t talked about it here recently, but I know a lot of abuse survivors are bombarded with messages about forgiveness. Some of those messages are awful, such as demanding we forgive our family members for their benefit; some are more well-meaning but not helpful. What we don’t hear often enough is that you can…
One of the struggles that I had as an abuse survivor, and one that I know other survivors have talked about, is defining who we are. Take everyone else away, remove all the ways we define ourselves based on our relationships with others – son, daughter, spouse, brother, sister, parent, coworker, friend, employee, boss, etc.
Who are you? As I often say, when you’re too busy trying to survive the chaos of an abusive childhood, you don’t get the guidance that would help figure this out. So we exist in these relationships with family, friends, and romantic partners, and we don’t know who we are outside of how they see us.
That’s what a sense of self means to me. That’s what self-worth means to me—knowing that I am an adult, like my neighbors and coworkers are adults. I’m not different and unworthy because of my abuse. I am an adult human with everything that means.
I think she’s right about that last point. I’ve written many times about the stories I hear, over and over again, where people don’t want to hear about child abuse and sexual abuse. It’s too sad and dirty. It isn’t very pleasant. People don’t want to know about how much sex trafficking goes on right around us every day and the hard work we could do to solve the problem. They’d rather believe conspiracy theories and look to their “heroes,” who are nothing but con artists, to fix it for them by going on rescue missions or attacking the “elites” who are supposedly controlling all sex trafficking around the world. That seems simpler than solving the problems that make kids vulnerable to trafficking: poverty, abuse, racism, a lack of support for kids transitioning out of foster care, or LGBTQ kids whom their own families do not accept.
Those are real problems that create vulnerable kids who go on to become real victims. Fixing them will require hard work and resources from all of us.
Once I was public about my abuse, it became obvious to me that anyone I was going to be involved with romantically probably needed to know about my past sooner rather than later. Maybe not all the details upfront, but the fact that I am a survivor usually came out early. There was no reason not to share that information with someone who I was going to be in a romantic relationship with because that trauma impacted so many little things about me and how I acted in that relationship.
But then I got to thinking. I’ve talked about being a sexual abuse survivor and how it was a male who abused me. What I haven’t talked about and haven’t considered for myself because the incidents are overshadowed by the years of sexual abuse are the occasions when I was sexually victimized without my consent by women.
