I will start this by saying what my worse fear is. It is that someone with a desire to harm children or someone who is a sexual criminal will read my trauma and get unintensional reinforcement for their sick and twisted behavior. However, I am gently reminding myself that this is part of my healing and also of the serinity prayer:

"God grant me the serinity to accept the things I can not change, courage to change those things I can and the wisdom to know the difference."

I can not help if a preditor gets his/her jollies off of my trauma, so I must at this point have the wisdom to realize that this is what I need to do for my own healing.

09/08/2007

Last night I had a bed flash back. I am proud of myself in that I did not allow it to emotionally cripple me. It was disgusting. I flashed to age six. I was wearing a black body suit. It was in a car or some enclosed place I could not tell. I felt a big rough hand slip its way into my body suit and in my panties. The hand just groped me. That's all I flashed back to. I was fully awake when this happened. It was like some sick flash player reeling in my head in a quick instant. I could see it, feel it and even smell it but yet I remained my age. This is progress for me in that although I felt it as real I knew it was the past and did not regress in fear to the age the abuse occured.

I know this is not a healthy emotion but I feel shame. I also feel really really dirty like I need to wash by body over and over again.

I'll say this about shame, IMHO, it is like some invisible wall that makes one different than everybody else. For those whose trauma involved disfigurement, it is not an invisible wall but one that society builds with its disconcerting stares and patronizingly shallow looks of pity. In any case, whatever the trauma, I believe in my heart that the shame is something that must be acknowledged and owned in order for it to dissipate.

Its my shame. Its me feeling it. I have allowed myself to feel it for some reason. I have built the wall. A Pink Floid song that I love says the following:

"If you want to find out whose behind these cold eyes you'll just have to claw your way through this disquise."

For me the song would read more like this,

"If you want to find out who's behind the child's eyes, you'll just have to claw your way through this disquise."

Everything seems so interconected! My God! Its frightening. It makes me want to hide. But I can't hide from reality and the disquise only weighs me down.

Summer of 1996

I am married to my 1st husband who has just decided to leave me for one of my college friends. He still has the keys to the house. My daughters and I were still living in the huge house he and I had bought 6 months before. It was a new house but because of its size it was very lonely and very creepy. My daughters were in bed sleeping when I heard the key turn the knob. I knew it was him but had no idea why he was coming back to the house at 1AM. He came into the bedroom with a look of hate on his face. He immediately came toward me in the bed and grabbed my hair. He spit in my face while holding my head back. He grabbed my throat and began choking me. I didn't even struggle. His hands were oily. After grabbing my neck he stopped choking me and whispered in my ear to move onto my stomach. I did and when I did he immediately and very abruptly shoved his fist up my rectum. It hurt so bad, worse than childbirth! I felt the pain stream up my back side and all the way up my back but the more I tightened the worse it hurt because he would not take his fist out. I begged him to please take it out and he said shut up bitch. I then started wiggling. He finally relented and pulled his fist out. This incident caused me permanent damage to my rectum and the tissue between the rectum and the vagina, I bled bad for about ten minutes then for several days after that I had residual bleeding.

sometime when I was eight around 1975:

I see myself lying over the side of my bed. I'm gripping my toy stuffed turtle. I have pink long pants on and they are around my ankles and my bottom is bear. I feel a warm oily solid object slide inbetween my legs. I see the white bed spread. I see the closet in the corner and my dresser with all my dolls on it.

Wavering, feeling weak. Someone please listen. Someone please care. I hurt. I feel dirty, so dirty. I want to wash my own skin off. I don't want pity, as someone once told me. I want someone to say I will listen, I will care. Perhaps that is being needie. Someone once told me that too. Perhaps I should not listen to this person. Perhaps I should listen to what is inside me, a person who so bad wants to heal, grow, learn, and be there for other survivors of society's secret shame!!!! This type of trauma would not be different if people did not treat it different!!! Yes, I'm angry and have a right to be!!! I own that anger! Its mine! Noone made me feel it. I choose to feel it because its easier at this time to feel the anger than it is to feel the pain or look at myself and my own venerabilities.

Marilyn, look at the last post in The Iceberg of Emotions for a better understanding of anger regarding emotions. I have expanded the original content of that thread recently.

Now, without following the past with a bombardment of posts and PM's, please elaborate on the feeling of shame please. What makes you feel shame, in that what do you own within this feeling?

Do you feel shame because you where abused?
Do you feel shame telling your abuse?
Do you feel shame because you feel its your fault in some way?

Again, I will read and respond when I have time... lets please not resurrect past behaviour thanks.

I will not. That is what was in my heart so that is what I said but I will not PM you for anything. I don't plan to make a fool of myself again. Momma once told me, "Marilyn, when you spill your guts to people you just make a big fool of yourself." Once in ignorance twice a fool! Thank you for your kindness in responding at all. I surely did not expect it.

My "mud story of shame"

I feel shame and I feel dirty because of the sexual abuse itself. Why did I not do something. I have always just sat back and took what ever came my way to protect the peace or at least try to. Mom and dad fought all the time. My sister and I never knew if they were going to kill each other or not or whether dad was just going to kill himself. Then I got married the first time my X never really loved me. He just was an angry man who thought he wanted a family but after I had my first child and no longer had the perfect play boy body he began horribly abusing me especially in a sexually sadistic manner.

I think sexual abuse is like having mud thrown on you that you can't wash off. Its invisible to everybody else but I can see it. And it doesn't matter how one tries to wash the mud offf it doesn't come off. And it is a stinky mud only I can smell. So others can't see it, only me, and others can't smell it, only me. Its a permanent mark that says you've been used and abused, you are dirty and you must keep your dirt a secret from everybody else or you will get it! People will avoid you, dispise you, reject you. You are helpless to stop it, you might as well just not try.

Ok Marilyn, there is a difference in thinking for others though and actually knowing what others think. Your using a negative thinking style to think for others, ie. people will avoid you, despise you, reject you. That is not actually true at all, otherwise you would be rejected by your husband. So immediately you have not been rejected by "everybody" or the like, which is an all or nothing thinking style, over-generalization thinking style.

Ok, the mud is a good explanation actually, though here is the truth to the matter. You have been abused Marilyn, nothing you do or say can change that now. You must accept that this has happened. The difference here though is that you continue to bring your past to your present by using these negative thinking styles, instead of pushing them out of your life and changing your thinking styles to more positive one's.

Only you can change you. Are you waiting for someone to do the work for you?

Oh, Anthony, I wish I trusted someone enough to let them help me develop different ways of thinking. I am so paranoid!!! I assume people are thinking negative things about me. Its a cycle that is so hard to break. I hear words in my ears. My mothers voice, my father's voice, my grandmother's voice, all seem to ring in my ears like they are my voice. My X was intermittently ( inbetween being sadistic and abusive both physically and verbally) very ego building to me when he would tell me I am smart and talented and a good mother. I guess Pieget would say I am a concrete operational thinker but I don't think I'd be capable of writing the poetry I write if I was intellectually retarded at the stage of concrete operational. But perhas there are different areas of my brain that might, because of the trauma be retarded to the concrete. You are correct about my thinking. OMG, I just wish I felt the strength to fight it. The words in my heart come with such automatic emotions and usually result in me shutting down, zoning off, or going into outer space in my head. But Veiled told me about something I am going to try for the automatic negative self talk. She suggested I use post its of two different colors then put the bad thought on one and a counter thought on the other. I'm going to try this. It sounds simple enough.

I am fighting voices of the past that are programmed into my brain like software in a computer. For me, the hardest trauma to overcome is the verbal abuse, the use of verbal threats, the use of put downs and sexual terms to discribe me. Both my mother and my father did this. The events that surround the words served to reinforce the meaning of the things being said. Does that make sense? But I will fight it. No one can enter my brain and change the programming but me. That is correct. But there are people who intice me to think in different ways which will help me change my thoughts and thus my emotional responces to the way I think. When this occurs I believe the flash backs will not be quite so traumatizing anymore and when triggers do occur I will not be so inclined to emotional break down. Perhaps in this area I should post some of the mean things that were said to me. Not to get pity. I don't want that, but to help myself see where the roots of my bad thinking stemmed from.

I didn't just wake up one day and say, :"Gee self, I think I'll just be mean to you today and say all kinds of mean things to you."

I'm not trying to just blame others but I think that I am not the one who initially programmed my brain to think so negative and concrete. Knowing that will help me know the source of my (ANST) and will IMHO debunk those thoughts. I guess I just have to remember, I am a person and I would not talk to another person the way I talk to myself.