Child Sexual Abuse (TW)

[Paralyzed]

@avant-garde and @Till23 , thank you for letting me know about this thread. I will sit down and read the discussions, but I thought I would share this with you, a reply that I sent to @Till23 

I survived 12 years of CSA at the hands of at least six men, and the only people who knew were me and my abusers. 

I started a few blogs in the past but ended up deleting them. I planned to speak openly about what was happening to me because I know I can't be the only one. All forums about child sex abuse survivors mentioned nothing about my experiences, and I felt so alone.

I suffered in silence for six months until I reached a point where I felt suffocated and had to speak out. My partner was the first person I confided in then, but I didn't go into too much detail—just enough to find some reprieve. Afterwards, I wrote a few pages in Word and sent them to my psychologist to read before our next appointment. During that session, I expressed that there were some things I wasn't ready to discuss and some that were too difficult to say out loud.

I know it is a very triggering and sensitive topic to discuss openly, but I believe the issues not shared in these forums must be addressed. Still suffering in silence, people like me deserve a space to connect with others who are willing to share. Because I was unable to find help online or in-person support groups, I resorted to chat rooms on various platforms, which were often unsafe. It caused me more trauma, but I did find others who were like me, and I was relieved to know I wasn't alone; I had honestly thought I was the only person experiencing this.

Thanks again for bringing this thread to my attention. 😁

[Till23]

I'm just reposting my response to your post in Functional Freeze to this thread as well

@Paralyzed you are not the only one to have suffered child sexual abuse. It is not the same for everyone though. Everyone has different responses to their trauma as well. There will be some similarities between traumas and responses. Whatever happened to you or however you responded you won't be alone. 

In general, there has been some movement in people being able to speak out and some resources put into some aspects of CSA, however they are inadequate, they are often piecemeal, there is no integration.

Each survivor is forced to not only navigate their own trauma, but also their own recovery and pay for it themselves most commonly. A crime has been committed against you, but you pay for it through the mental health effects, but also the educational, financial, societal etc etc. You are unlikely to be successful in a legal case and you will most likely be re-traumatised if you go down that path. If you attempt psychological recovery you will pay for it because MH assistance is grossly underfunded.

What happened to me was decades ago, there has been some changes but they have been glacial in occurring. I did not speak out for decades.

It is difficult to find safe spaces to discuss CSA, I have not really done so and not with other survivors, so the silence continues. I have only mentioned some aspects of CSA that occurred to me to a psychologist just recently (more than 45 years after they occurred). On the SANE forums I am guarded about what I say, so I still am not 100% sure if others who have experienced similar trauma have used similar coping mechanisms and have any strategies for certain things. There are some support groups for CSA survivors, but they are not well advertised, so again each survivor has to do their own search to try and find them.

I am not sure what the reasoning is behind closing (or at least suspending) the chat line. I have not seen any communication regarding this, only what another person on the forums has posted.

@RachSANECEO who is the CEO of SANE said SANE are trying to get funding or advocate for CSA survivors I have tried to find out what this will look like and offered to be part of it, so far I have not heard anything further. So at the moment CSA survivors have a thread "Child Sexual Abuse (TW) in the open part of the forum. Anyone can start a thread as you know. There is also a space called Talking Through Trauma and PTSD it is an open forum so if you post there, your post will come up on the general discussions which is the landing page for logging in, so anyone on the forums can see your post when they login.

[Paralyzed]

@Till23  thank you for your post, but I want to clarify and make it clear that when I was talking about feeling like I was the only one in the world going through this, I wasn't referring to the CSA; it was about the emotional and physical response that I was experiencing much later in life, and it was something I had no knowledge or awareness about. 

I am well informed about CSA, and I have been researching it for about six years, specifically incestuous CSA, because all of my abusers were family, except for three.

I will start by sharing that I am transgender. I am a trans man, female to male (FTM), and this October, I will celebrate my 10-year ‘m-anniversary.’ I was 35 years old when I began my transition, and I have had people ask me if my CSA was the reason for it. I was not surprised when I was first asked this question because I expected it to arise at some point. 

The simple answer is no. At age six, I knew I was different because I felt like a boy, but I didn’t look like the other boys around me, and I wondered why my body was different. I told my family that I was going to get a sex change when I was old enough, and this all happened well before the CSA started. So, during those 12 years of CSA, I lived and identified as female. 

Though the CSA was traumatic and has long-term effects, it is not the primary cause of my trauma responses. I was open about my CSA with most, if not all, of my romantic relationships, as well as with those I felt safe confiding in. I never went into detail, always spoke very clinically about it, and could never discuss the physical actions of the abuse. 

When I finally felt safe and knew it had ended, I compartmentalised it and pushed it out of my mind for as long as possible. However, when I started dating, it frequently resurfaced as a fleeting thought or flashback, always following me around like a shadow. It affected my sex life and romantic relationships, but I did my best to process and accept it, and I began to forgive each of my abusers internally. As a result, the fleeting thoughts and flashbacks lessened, and I started to let it all go. I have never been someone who holds a grudge or hates others, nor have I ever seen myself as a victim or placed blame on anyone or anything. I reached a stage where I thought I was okay, made peace with the past, and let it all go. I will caution anyone reading this that my next paragraph might be triggering, so I will end this paragraph with a Trigger Warning (TW). 

In 2019, I experienced the shock of my life when I started having frequent flashbacks of my CSA. However, this time it was different and unlike anything I had ever encountered. The year prior, I had gone through several significant traumatic life events, and I would later learn that these triggered my trauma to resurface, bringing me to my knees as my world crumbled around me. What I am about to share still bears a lot of shame and has been one of my biggest challenges, causing me a great deal of pain and suffering in silence. One day at home with my girlfriend, I was having flashbacks of my very first experiences of CSA. With those flashbacks, I was getting aroused, and I had an urge to watch pornography that was of a similar nature that would take me back to those moments and almost relive them.

I was in a state of shock and confusion, but what made it even more confusing was the fact that I had never watched porn or wanted to watch porn before this moment. The urge was intense and within minutes, I was sitting down in front of my computer, google searching porn sites and it is mind blowing still that I was looking for porn that would remind me of my first experiences and to help me relive my CSA.

I'll end things there. I hope this is approved and posted. Thank you for letting me share.

P...

[Till23]

Hi @Paralyzed 

In my post I did mention the responses to CSA. I have also been concerned about responses later in life.

 I thought I pretty much got on with my life, although it affected me (on reflection, a lot) I didn’t really realise it or tried not to think that I was being affected. I had responses later in life. Most recently, in my late 50s I was “triggered” by treatment for cancer and had a decline in MH including nightly flashbacks and therefore decreased sleep, among other things.

Although my responses were different to yours, it’s the reason I found these forums.

I think there is a huge range of responses to CSA, and I think some are not talked about as much, or at all, because of the shame.

I hope you can find what you are looking for in the forums. 

[Paralyzed]

Since that initial response in 2019, I can’t express how challenging it has been to understand my experiences. Processing how this could happen was inconceivable, and I needed to find out why.

Therefore, I began researching extensively, entering numerous queries into Google search for information, yet I kept coming up empty. I remained silent for a long time because I couldn’t talk about it; I felt so ashamed and disgusted that I didn’t want anyone to know. 

I have learned that arousal in CSA and sexual abuse survivors is not uncommon, and knowing that I am not alone in this has provided me with some sense of relief. I am still processing and continuing to educate myself because this experience has nearly destroyed me, and I have only completed a few sessions of talk therapy because, honestly, I did not want to discuss it. Recently, I had a brief conversation with my new psychologist about it, and I explained to him that it needs to be addressed because it is affecting me more than I would like to admit.

I am uncertain how to proceed with this discussion, but I am open to discussing it. If I need to share my story to provide much-needed insight into this topic, I am more than willing to do so. 

[Till23]

Hi @Paralyzed I think it's really difficult when we find our responses challenging or seemingly intolerable.

I am here if you want to chat about things.

It is definitely true that victims can have an automatic arousal response to sexual abuse, which adds to the shame but it does NOT mean that victims "enjoyed" the experience.

Shame is a major response to CSA and there are many reasons for that shame and most survivors, when asked, will give multiple reasons for the shame.

I started talking about fairly "minor" things that happened and responses and slowly over a couple of  years said more to my therapist mainly because of the shame, sometimes to "protect' her from things I thought were terrible, sometimes because I needed a higher level of trust.

I hope you are able to find a way to deal with this response and that may start with realising that there is a huge range of responses.