{"id":14359,"date":"2023-12-12T08:54:05","date_gmt":"2023-12-12T16:54:05","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.childabusesurvivor.net\/reviews\/?p=14359"},"modified":"2023-12-12T08:45:06","modified_gmt":"2023-12-12T16:45:06","slug":"the-meaning-of-being-traumatized-as-a-child","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.childabusesurvivor.net\/reviews\/2023\/12\/12\/the-meaning-of-being-traumatized-as-a-child\/","title":{"rendered":"The Meaning of Being Traumatized as a Child"},"content":{"rendered":"

I’ve got to be honest; the title of this article showed up in my newsreader, and I immediately started making assumptions.<\/p>\n

Healing Childhood Trauma Part 2 \u2013 Meaning<\/a><\/p>\n

I’ve seen so many posts about finding the “lesson” in our trauma that I just assumed this article was likely going to be another puff piece about how everything happens for a reason, and if we learn to see the meaning in our abuse that we could then use it for our growth.<\/p>\n

Or some such BS as that. Another article where we never acknowledge the fact that this wasn’t the universe causing trauma to teach us a lesson but another human being committing an evil act for no reason but their own.<\/p>\n

But I was surprised.<\/p>\n

The meaning of the loss can be summed up in one simple phrase; the loss of love. It is hard to wrap your head around, hard to fathom being used in such a way just because someone else wanted to gain power over a helpless child.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

What Rebekah is writing about isn’t finding the meaning that would define why we were abused. That’s toxic. What she is writing about is finding what it means to live with childhood trauma.<\/p>\n

The question we often ask ourselves about being abused is the simplest one to answer, but we’ve gotten it twisted.<\/p>\n

Why was I abused? Because someone else decided to abuse me.<\/p>\n

That’s all there is to it. There are many other things we could say about family relationships and dysfunction, failing societal systems, etc. All of that may have made it easier, but at the end of the day, someone made the decision to abuse a child, and that is why I was abused.<\/p>\n

The more difficult question is, what does that trauma mean for me moving forward in my life? That’s not as easy to answer. As Rebekah says, as young children dependent on the love of others to take care of us, protect us, and nurture us into adulthood, we lost that. That impacts how we move forward, which may look very different for all of us as we try to reconnect with that love.<\/p>\n

The one thing we should stop doing is trying to answer the question of why we were abused by looking at ourselves. We didn’t make that decision. We played no part in that decision. We aren’t responsible for other people’s decisions.<\/p>\n

The abuse happened because the abuser decided to do it. That’s all the meaning we’ll ever find there.

Also on:<\/span>