The more I see research like this, the more I become convinced that one of the most significant losses many sexual abuse survivors suffer has to do with how complicated touch becomes for us as adults.
The impact of what you weren’t given as a child can be just as real as the impacts of physical and sexual abuse. The struggle to navigate relationships and work, emotional immaturity, the lack of trust, the inability to be vulnerable, etc. Those are all things we should be learning throughout life, and they are all something we can learn throughout life. It sure would have been nice to have been able to start that process in childhood, though.
This is why I look for the definition when I read anything about being fully healed. What does being healed mean to you? Is your definition possible? A definition that includes the abuse having zero impact on who you are today? Because that’s not realistic. But it also doesn’t mean you can’t go on to have a healed life while acknowledging that it is still part of who you are.
It was a traumatic event; they became part of us. They don’t have to rule us, though. That’s healed.
We hear stories about this all the time. If your parents constantly compare you to an older sibling who could do no wrong, you spend much of your adult life believing you are not enough. If you come from a family that didn’t express emotion, you find it hard to be close to someone emotionally as an adult, and so on.
You take those messages about what is expected from your surroundings and adjust your behaviors and beliefs to fit in with them. It can be very difficult, not impossible, to overcome that and relearn a different message.
If this seems familiar to you, I want you to take the next step and imagine what kind of messages a survivor of childhood abuse carries from their childhood.
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.
