(Kind of) Discussing Child Sex Abuse with C – Week 43

TRIGGER WARNING – If you hadn’t guessed from the title, this post contains a number of references to child sexual abuse in varying degrees of detail.  Please, please be careful if you think this material may trigger you.  Take care, Pan x

I received a text message from my cousin Sarah early this afternoon to report that her daughter, Suzanne, has given birth to her second son (Marcus’s baby brother).

Another son.  Not a daughter, as I had feared and (inexplicably) expected.  Maybe there is a God.  Paedo might not touch Marcus and As Yet Unnamed New Baby because they are male.  He might not have touched either of them anyway, but it’s stupidly reassuring nevertheless.  Not that I will be any less vigilant in the company of him and his two great-grandsons, having said that.  As I’ve said in the past, if I suspect he has done anything inappropriate towards them, I shall act.

Why won’t Paedo just hurry up and die?  His life sucks horse bollocks anyway, so remaining alive isn’t exactly doing the miserable old sod any favours.  I believe I said it before; death would be a mercy to him.  It wouldn’t make any difference to me from the perspective of my abuse at his hands, but it would put an end to my worries about the possibility of him trying to fuck his underage descendants, and that would be a major weight of which to be rid.

Anyhow, I bring this up as, perhaps unsurprisingly given the subject matter of recent therapeutic sessions, shit with Paedo was the main crux of what I discussed with C on Thursday past.

I don’t remember a tremendous amount of the dialogue.  I do recall that I whined and whined and whined that I was a fetid, disgusting whore and that C kept asking what evidence I had for that, and that I responded that it was a clearly ridiculous statement but that that didn’t keep me from believing it fervently anyway.

I told him that one thing I couldn’t bear people calling me was a slut, and how I had reacted very viciously on the rare occasions that anyone had done so.  “And yet,” I went on, “it’s exactly what I think of myself.”

He asked if I thought it was ever appropriate for an adult to have a sexual relationship with a child, and I responded that of course it wasn’t, but that didn’t mean that I couldn’t find (make up?) evidence justifying what Paedo had done to me.  In other words, in other cases one can never justify child sex abuse, but it is perfectly acceptable to do so in mine.  Thinking back on this statement, what hideous kind of inverted narcissism am I guilty of?!  How dare I make myself out to be such a special case, even if in a twisted sort of way?

At one point C very gently asked me if I could actually describe some of the stuff that happened.  I wanted to tell him.  In fact, I fucking longed to tell him.  But every time I went to open my mouth, a pathetic groan or muzzled whimper was all that emanated from my mouth, and absolutely nothing of any substance was forthcoming.

I am so ashamed.  So ashamed.  So dirty and filthy and vile.  I am damaged goods.  If I tell him what happened then he will know all that and he will be repelled by me, so filthy and horrible am I.  Shockingly, I told him that I thought this, and then went on to admit that although I do not agree with it in the least anymore, that I was brought up with my mother telling me that sex outside of marriage was a bad thing.  Ergo, I was a slut for having a sexual relationship wth my uncle.  I wasn’t married to him, at a time when I was told I had to be for it to be ‘right’.

What, for me, was most curious about this session was that for what was probably the first time, I felt the full force of a flashback.  I have ‘seen’ images of the abuse in fleeting moments on plenty of occasions, but on Thursday, with C, I felt it physically too.  I cannot believe I am about to type this, but I felt pain and what I can only describe as a nebulous but ghastly sensation in my genital region (I just went to thesaurus.com looking for an alternative word to ‘genital’.  The very act of typing that word fails me with shame and horror).  I felt the physical sensations of his hands on me.  I heard his laboured breathing, and felt my own chest constricting as I tried not to breathe in the futile hope that what was happening might just go away.

And yet, the imagery remained largely third-person.  I saw him push me down as if I had been a bystander, and yet nevertheless I was so strongly feeling the sensations of all that had happened.  There’s a book I saw on Amazon called The Body Remembers: The Psychophysiology of Trauma and Trauma Treatment.  Clearly my body does remember…certain things, anyway.  But, I ask myself, does my mind?

Well, the answer to that seems to be a definite “yes” and “no”.  My mind must love ambiguity; it knows I hate it and it wishes to torment me, I should imagine.  As C and I sat in his office silently with these physical sensations and third-person images battering my psyche, I was suddenly flooded with an abject barrage of other gruesome images, in tiny flashing bursts.

The concealed alley-way beside the garage.  A laybay off a road behind their house.  Beside the old dog shed, which was only there until I was about five making it especially fucking troubling.  Their living room.  The back of my wendy house at my mother’s house.  My darling grandfahter’s house and outhouses

Penetrative vaginal sex.  Forced fellatio.  Fingering.  Other touching.  My reluctant acquiescence versus my attempts to fight him off.  His ‘gentle’ attempts to get his way right up to his brutal forcefulness causing searing pain that shouldn’t be experienced by a child.

It all smothered my consciousness in a racing deluge of awfulness that, despite the considerable scope of it, could only have lasted a few seconds.

I looked up at C in horror and told him, omitting specific details, what had just happened to me.

“It’s false memory syndrome, isn’t it?” I begged him.  “Mum would certainly think it was and she would be right.  These memories can’t be true.  Can they?”

“Look at the filing cabinet,” he said, nodding in its direction.  “The memories that our minds use to build up our conscious recall, our personalities, relationships and whatnot – they’re normally filed coherently in our brains, just like files are put in there in an orderly A – Z fashion.  Trauma memories aren’t so easily categorised.  Because they’re so difficult to deal with at the time, as you know many people find themselves dissociated to a greater or lesser degree, so the memories are completely fragmented.  Even when the person doesn’t dissociate, the memories tend to fragment anyhow, in order that the mind may cope with the trauma.  So if you open trauma memories in the filing cabinet, it would be like seeing a load of files or documents just being thrown in there haphazardly, with no order to them.”

He said, “because of the fragmented way in which the mind stores these memories, recall of them is complex.  Something may just suddenly trigger them; they may simply come back over time; they may not come back at all, but still leave their impact on other areas of the person’s life.”

“So you don’t think if I told you about this stuff that I would be a fucking liar then?” I asked, appreciating what he was telling me but doubting my mind’s capacity for truth-seeking nevertheless.  I accused myself of having an overactive imagination.

C replied by saying that in a sense it didn’t entirely matter if what had invaded my consciousness was an 100% accurate depiction of the sex abuse.  “In the first instance,” he explained, “none of us remember events 100% accurately 100% of the time, whether those events are traumatic or otherwise.  And secondly, if your mind is storing this information, then it is clearly bothering you – whether at a conscious or unconscious level – and that’s the most important thing.”

I don’t think he ever said it in an outright fashion at any particular juncture, but I distinctly got the impression from him that he felt that the memories were (at least mostly) accurate.  Maybe it was his gentleness, his empathy – I don’t know.  In part I wish he’d shouted at me and said that yes, I was indeed a horrible little slut, and that my lies were unspeakable and abhorrent.

Maybe then – just maybe – it might not seem to be true.

I have this enduring and recurring image of watching, from my perspective on the chair opposite C, a (faceless) little girl climbing into C’s lap, curling up and burying her head in his chest as he puts his arms around her, strokes her hair and gently soothes her in softly spoken words that I can’t quite hear.

I assume that she’s me.

Writing this makes me cry.  I am so ashamed and horrified and disgusted about all of this stuff, and today should be a happy day because it saw the release of Final Fantasy XIII.  I’m not sure that there was a great deal more of substance in the session anyway, so I’ll try to conclude.

The long and the short of things is that I still didn’t describe any detailed aspects of things with Paedo to C, either from the stuff I recall clearly or from the ‘new memories’.  To that end I accused myself of “capably playing yet another game of avoidance.”

In actuality, even though I thought that, I still thought the session had perhaps been a step in the right direction, and when he refuted my claims of avoidance, he seemed to agree with that assessment.  He actually claimed to think that I’d been very open and that if I was unable to verbally articulate certain things, then that was really not surprising at all, and shouldn’t be something over which I beat myself up.

I said, in that laughably child-like and black and white way of which I am so often guilty, “so, is this good?  Is it good that I’ve told you what I’ve told you?  Has this session been good?”

He replied that if that was the word with which I felt most comfortable, then yes, it had been “good”.

Oh, give me a star medal!!!

He had, at the start of the session, asked me how strong the impulses to kill or harm myself had been since the last time I saw him, and I’d said that whilst I still thought about those things with great frequency, that I hadn’t felt the same compulsion that I had last year or in the earlier part of this one to act on those thoughts.  He’d been encouraged by that of course, but given how much slightly-under-the-surface-bubbling a mere reference to any of this wank had caused me before, he was concerned that such candour as I’d apparently expressed on Thursday would drive me back to hurting myself.  He practically begged me to find something to do to occupy myself in at least the immediate aftermath of the session.  I told him I had been intending to go for swim and a coffee when I got back into town.

He liked that, then asked if I could occupy myself after that until A got home with the X-Box or a walk or something.  I agreed, though in the end I went to get some groceries instead, and I was still quietly pleased that he (ostensibly, anyway) gave enough of a toss to care about what happened after I left his room.

He asked if we could “park” the sex abuse discussion until next week, and discuss a few practical matters.  Unsurprisingly, one of these was the stupid letter from the twatfaced Mental Health Director.  I was taken aback to learn that C had heard absolutely nothing more, and was merely wondering if I had.  If I were C, I would find it professionally unacceptable that he had not been apprised of the ‘progress’ of the issue.

I hadn’t read the letter in detail at that point, so outlined it in basic terms only, telling him that I found it an amusing waste of time.  He misunderstood, thinking I meant that my whole complaint had been a waste of time, and very earnestly and reassuringly said, “I don’t think it was a waste of time.”

Apparently I have flagged up just how inadequate services are in my Trust area for conditions of the ilk that I present.  He suggested that not only had it been good for the head office twatheads to learn of this, but it even aided his immediate bosses in Psychology.  He thinks I have done A Very Good Thing.

I let him think I was completely letting it drop, which was at the time my broad intention.  I will let him know this week, out of respect and courtesy, that that is no longer my intention, and I will show him the pathetic letter that I received to demonstrate why indeed it should not be.

As I left he told me to enjoy my coffee which, wretchedly, made me want to hurl my arms around him and cry.  Why am I such feeble, pitiful bitch?  To add to that sentiment, what has pervaded the forefront of my mind since seeing him has not so much been horrid flashbacks, though that is not to say that they have not been in evidence at all; they have.  But what has played out mentally most commonly, what has dominated my psyche, what just won’t go away no matter how much I try to distract myself, is that sad, prevailing image of a damaged child seeking some sort of comfort or solace in the safety and reassurance of C’s lap.

EDIT: Literally about fifteen minutes after publishing the above, Sarah sent another text message to advise that Suzanne and her husband are calling the baby after Paedo.  This made me feel utterly physically sick and mentally horrified.  Even whenever Paedo does die, the child will always remind me of him and what he’s done.  Fuck.

Related posts:

1. Empty Voices and Empty Chairs – C: Week 44
2. Vulnerability and Self-Disgust with C – Week 36
3. Responsibility, C: Week 45 and Other Pointless, Drivelsome Bollocks