This Perversion Does Not Belong To Me

It’s not as if anyone ever gave us a choice before. It’s not as if our wishes, our needs and wants mattered one single bit. What happens in these situations where we think we should have done this or should have done that is we’ve taken responsibility in the very manner we were taught to. We were either outright told it was our fault or we were told that if we didn’t do it there would be major consequences to pay. Real options were not offered because the real concern was not you or me but the abuser and how he or she could continue perversions without interruption.

When I think about my cousin, the one called Wolf, I feel so horrible inside. You know why I didn’t tell way before it became painfully obvious? Because he said he loved me. The only person in the world that took it from me and told me he love me, told me he was addicted to me, couldn’t get enough was him. He loved me. I liked his stories, his jokes, his attention. I couldn’t tell on someone who loved me and someone I thought I had fallen in love with. There’s an odd story to tell. What would I say he did wrong? For me, trading the “I love you” and the funny stories and the jokes seemed like nothing compared to how my mother beat me before she took it, how my uncle put a gun to my head the whole time. I was scared of Wolf sometimes because of things he did to animals but if you ask some of me he never laid a violent hand on me. His respect, wow, I can’t believe I just typed that word, his respect evil attention turned from me to my sister and I was furious but not before severely humiliated by my mother and the rest of my family. One day when he called me down to the basement for more the family was quite irritated that I walked down there. Man was I in trouble. The whole ride home the mother said, “Everyone knew what you two were doing down there.” I was so humiliated. I thought, she knows I have a boyfriend. I wondered if she was going to take him away. You can see how confusing things get. Boyfriend? Hardly. My goodness, what else did I know but this type of service? They’d all been doing this to me since I was three. As Beauty said, “You get use to it.” But I have to add, you also understand deep inside that the choice to not “let them” was more costly than “letting them.” What other decision does a person make but to comply, especially when they’ve been conditioned to for so long?

When dealing with someone elses perversions at such a young age our brains are not given the right of passage untouched children are given. (That right of passage doesn’t come along until well in our healing years.) Our reasoning ability was based on their lies and their deceptions. What we concluded and still conclude about ourselves is based on information they gave us. How on earth would we ever paint a self portrait with anything other than guilt? If you are only given one crayon you can not paint a rainbow. Your options are limited. Our options were limited if at all.

These days, my adult days I find dealing with the abuse harder than dealing with it as a child. As a child I had limited resources, limited information and because of my age very little reasoning ability. As I grew older and saw more of the world that is when the deepest shame set it. That is when I realized just how wrong things were and when I really began to settle with the idea that it was all my fault.

As an adult I can draw upon this and that experience and conclude my childhood and early adulthood was riddled with abuse and I could have, should have done something to stop it. As a child all I could think about was that I was doing something wrong. I was dead set on finding it. I did internalize it but I was still motivated to find an answer. The same information about my abuse is available to me now, nothing more, nothing less but now it tires me, sometimes it cripples me. This is because as an adult I have much more reasoning ability. The problem is, I still reason with the lies and guilt forced upon me. And I take those lies and that guilt and compare them to this and that experience then conclude that I could have, should have done things differently. But really, I couldn’t have. I was a child. Even when I was physically no longer a child the will I had to make them stop was broken long ago. I had been crippled by fear so long ago.

Funny I should read the two entries tonight on this very subject. Tonight was another one of those nights I jumped out of the shower vomiting due to a flashback. I felt so stupid hanging over the sink like that. Argh! The anger was as strong as my retching. I couldn’t believe I’d still respond that way. But why wouldn’t I? We don’t just walk away from that and a few years later we’re free of their conditioning. It is their conditioning that makes us question ourselves and makes us blame ourselves. A good liar is one who can tell a lie, have the person listening know it’s a lie but still respond to the liar as if they were a truth telling saint. They were and are liars! They’re liars and they were such good teachers. Even after all these years we still fall back on early lessons about who we are, about self worth and ultimately about guilt.

However, there are days I hear the lies for what they are. When my soapy self is hanging over the sink throwing up because of a flashback I’m not just angry I’m moved to not give up. When I have days like this when stuff comes flooding back so fast I can’t seem to stop it my first reaction is anger but it’s the sort of anger that drives me to ensure that I become the woman I was supposed to be. They lied on me and to me. I want to yell to them, “It was your perversion then but it is my life now. I can not hear you.” Today I can not hear you. That silence is such a gift. “You can not do this to me anymore. I’m not that little girl anymore.” Oh it makes me so angry that I have to keep going, must keep going for me or I start feeling like that little girl again. I can’t be that little girl again.

You guys I get what you’re saying. Please get what I’m saying. What you’re asking yourselves, what I’ve asked myself is based on lies and deceit. Can you hear a voice that’s not lying to you and that has no gain if she were? It’s their fault. They lied, they deceived and they taught us all how to take it as truth. It is this which makes survivors ask, “What if I’d told sooner?” The blame is theirs, solely.

Austin

For Beauty, Enola and survivors like us.

This Perversion Does Not Belong To Me-Saturday, December 01, 2007-4:27PM EST