Tuesday 31 January 2012

Witness To My Shame

Memories... Light the corners of your mind
Misty watercolour memories
Of the way things were.....

It's been several months since any "new" memories surfaced. There are those "out in the real world" that doubt the victim when new memories come to the surface. I will be totally honest, when I get these memories I doubt myself. Unfortunately with the memories come other "proofs", confirmation that those horrors bubbling on the surface are very much real.

I've spent most of my adult life knowing that I had been abused sexually. It was only when other problems brought immense emotional and mental stresses that the depths of that abuse became clear. Last autumn I thought every door had been unlocked, every drawer opened, every stone turned over.

I was wrong.

I have always felt insecure. Self doubt and self loathing has been an unwelcome lifetime companion. The insecurities result from the way I was treated growing up, the conditional "love", doing what I was told to do in order not to be punished. Listening to the lies of adults, accepting blame for things when I was innocent. The list goes on and on...

I cannot put the latest memories down as FACT yet, so wrote this....


I wish I could curl up and die
Crying over the pain a waste of tears
I open my mouth and scream silently
The filthy hands invaded and defiled again

Forced to sleep at his side so sickening
I lay there naked, shivering and bleeding
My life a lie, my purpose to serve
it all appears surreal, in the blackness

My body aches, stinging and bruised
I open my eyes, I look around, hoping
searching for a way to escape
Knowing I cannot, must not.

Through the darkness I see my teddy bear
My sleep aid, cast aside, tarnished
A silent witness to my lasting shame
My innocence raped, my mind fractures.

He wakes from drunken sleep,
His hand searches for me, I tense
His finger invades, I clench
He snores again, finger left in place.

I pray for someone to take me away
I imagine flying, soaring through the sky
Anything to blank out my reality
He moves, his bitten nails cut into me.



8 comments:

Beyond the tears said...

I wonder what would make you reluctant to put the statements down as fact. One would not want such experience to be true. Yet there is no doubt that what comes to mind is real. No boy dreams such nightmares, no child watches such shows. For me, it was the glass door knob, so close, yet so far away.

Beyond Survivor said...

Hi Lynn,

The memory is very fresh in my mind. Put bluntly the memory was triggered by seeing a damaged teddy bear. I flashed back in my head, I could feel his sharp finger inserted into my anus. As I've written previously, abuse is about power. I was a thin, sickly child, he controlled me. He HAD power over me. In my darker moments it feels like he still has power over me.

As a friend said to me tonight, these flashbacks only come through when our minds are able to deal and cope with them.

A day must surely come when the memories have all come back,,,?

Beyond the tears said...

I'm sorry for your pain and triggers and flashbacks. Sometimes it seems as though there is no end. One of my therapists said that I don't have to remember everything in order to heal; my SELF knew enough to recover body, mind, spirit. But, like you, there are triggers seemingly out of nowhere. I don't second-guess them anymore. The memories are mine, they are real, and I'm no longer reluctant to determine them as facts. I am sometimes scared of what else might surface when I am able to "deal and cope" as your friend says.

Patricia Singleton said...

Jan, thank you for sharing this. I shared it on Facebook with a comment of my own and on Twitter too. You are having the memories surface now because your mind knows you are safe and strong enough to deal with them. I know that doesn't give much comfort when you are facing the horror.

In my own early stages of healing, I didn't have many flashbacks, maybe because I had 6 years of memories to deal with. I never lost those memories, I just stuffed them to the back of my mind and tried to shut the door on them.

It was only after about 4 or 5 years of dealing with those memories that I was asked to be a guest speaker at the area Alano Club, a social gathering place for recovering alcoholics and Al-Anons that I heard myself tell the story of the 3-year-old adulteress that I got a clue that I was being abused a lot younger than 11 years old. I still don't have the memories of that abuse.

I have decided to continue to work with what I do have - 6 years of memories ages 11-17. At 17, I realized that my dad was weaker than I was and that I could stop him from controlling and abusing him because he was more afraid of my telling than I was of him.

Anonymous said...

Dear Jan,
I appreciate your sharing your feelings of doubt as well as the memory. I know so well how that feels! After years of suppressing ugly memories in order to survive, it is difficult to suddenly believe them. I wrote about that extensively in my memoir, The River of Forgetting.

Your strength and growth show so well in your posts. Thank you for writing.

Anonymous said...

Major thanks for the article.Much thanks again. Fantastic.

Anonymous said...

Wow, great blog post.Really looking forward to read more. Really Great.

Anonymous said...

This is one awesome article.Thanks Again. Much obliged.

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