Why Did It Happen To Me? #childabuse

Sooner or later every one asks the question, “Why did it happen to me ?”

Etract from the aest.org.uk website which is unfortunately now closed.

I struggled with that question for years until I found understanding therapists. Lets get some things straight before we go on to look at this question deeper. Your abuser will no doubt of made you feel that the abuse happened because it was your fault in some way.

In asking the above question, you are trying to find out what you did wrong. The ONLY thing that you did wrong was to believe your abuser, and whoever that was LIED to you, and USED you. Other than that you were in the wrong place at the wrong time. I know that putting it that simply won’t be good enough for you yet, so I shall try to explain the answer a little better if I can.

Hopefully the simple answer will be enough for you one day soon.

Let us start by having a look at the person who first sexually abused you, when you were young. They were older than you, wiser and knew what they were doing. They will of probably of had to plan well before hand to make sure that they could get you alone, in order to be able to abuse you. This means that not only did they know what they were doing, they also knew what they wanted to do for some time before anything happened the first time.

There is thus NO WAY that you seduced them, and no way that you are to blame, no matter what excuses they gave you. At the age that you were, you probably knew little if anything to do about sex. Your abuser, on the other hand, being older knew what was happening. It is unlikely to of made any difference to your abuser if they sexually abused a boy or a girl, you were a child.

That is all that the abuser wanted, a child, basically any child that they could get by themselves, and manipulate into keeping quiet about what happened.

It is unlikely that you will be the only person that your abuser will of abused. If the abuser was a member of your family, or a close family friend, then it is possible that your brothers or sisters may also of been abused. What I am trying to do is to get you to realize that it happened to you ONLY because the abuser could get you alone, and it was safe for them.

For the simple reason that the circumstances within your family meant that you could be got alone, then it is also possible that you may of been abused by more than one person. By the time that I was 9 years old I had been abused by five different people that I can remember.

That does not make it my fault, it’s just that I could be gotten alone, and possibly having been abused once, another abuser could spot how vulnerable I was.

I know that it can be tempting at times to blame yourself for some of the situations that you have found yourself in, or put up with in your past, but as long as you have not hurt anyone else on purpose it is self defeating and pointless.

The abuse that you went through as a child had such a devastating, brain washing, effect on you, that you were conditioned to respond almost instinctively in certain ways, without much, if any, conscious thought.

It is not until you are on the path to recovery, that you can start to undo all the lies and misinformation, and start to make informed choices. Until you accepted that the abuse has had an effect upon you, then you had no way of understanding that you were doing things because of the abuse. At times your childhood pre-programming may still take over, but with the passage of time you will be able to take more control, little by little.