I posted this letter anonymously in a brown envelope and disguised it so that it look like a job specification and inside I put two jobs specifications for a lab technician - because this is the job that he said he was doing on friends reunited - I just wanted to talk to him and not "shatter" his life - I was not sure whether his new wife new about the abuse
My life is un-manageable at the moment, in so many ways that I don't know where to start.Perfectionism is a really obvious one, in my head I am trying to do everything perfectly to try and cover up my toxic shame, and then I end up making mistakes or procrastinating because I have set myself up with un-realistic expectations of myself and then get angry with myself for not being able to come through, and so the shame cycle perpetuates itself. I am also physically un-well, which I know is my body’s way of telling me to take care of myself. I have so much self hatred coming up that I don't feel like I deserve to take care of myself,and yet the healthy part of me is getting angry with myself because it believes that I am worth taking care of. I always think that I was the one in the wrong, maybe I am just a drama queen with an over active imagination, maybe I'm the one that's really f*c%d! up
Your disappearance from friends reunited has meant I have reverted back to my co-dependency traits of isolation, not trusting people, not trusting myself, I am just really struggling. I am struggling to make sense of the madness that I am experiencing at the moment. I am addicted to shaming myself, and then shaming myself for being so hard on myself. I want and need balance and I don't know how to get there. I want to trust my higher power again, but I guess I feel like my HP has abandoned me. The truth is that I have abandoned my true self. I have given my power away by trying to get you and my mothers approval and validation, even though I know you are steeped in denial. I have been in Coda for the past year and I feel afraid to share
how bad and depressed I am feeling because I am scared that people will get angry
with me because they will think that I am full of self pity and being a victim, and I hate to admit it, but I probably have been these things. But I guess I have also relapsed back into being a victim because I didn't give myself permission to really experience the grief around the loss of my relationship with "my parents" and now I am overcompensating. Having said that I don't want to continue making myself a victim, I need to accept that grief is a natural response to this loss and not a sign that I am weak and not "working a program - that's another co-dependent character defect I have been re-cycling, that being vulnerable is bad and yet I know from the past that when I stop forcing myself to be "together" and allow myself to be vulnerable with myself and with people who are safe, I empower myself. I am having a hard time allowing myself to be human and allow myself emotions without condemning, judging and punishing myself for having them (a trait I picked up in my family of origin). I have been so judgmental, critical and chastising of myself to the point where I have really been considering killing myself again. I know that I am powerless over that stuff at the moment,but my character defect of trying to control things that I do not have control over is still going because I guess I have relapsed into thinking that my higher power is a punishing and condemning one. I want to believe, I want to trust that if I let go, my life will start to become manageable, as it has in the past when I have surrendered. I do have some hope, because I know I have done it before, so it's not that I can't do it, it's just that I'm struggling to right now. I am trying to force myself to surrender and maybe I just need to accept right now, that my inner child is holding on because all her old hurt, abandonment and terror has re-surfaced. I really need to accept my powerlessness over my parents, and forcing myself to be working. I need to allow myself to feel all the anger, rage, hurt, sadness and grief that I feel around your abandonment, neglect, abuse, denial, shaming of me and harm that If feel in relation to your actions and lack of actions, without judging myself for it. I feel like I am going crazy, and that makes me suspect that there may be some more memories of abuse coming up. I dream all the time about being sexually abused and I struggle to know whether that is a memory or not and tend to dis-count it, because it is not a "flashback". I know that ultimately I have to believe in myself and forgive myself, but I am so addicted to making everything about me wrong and then I project my judgementalism onto others as a way of not having to feel more shame about myself, and yet then I shame myself because I know I am acting out a character defect that I despise. I know that this is not a very positive letter but I want I feel safe to share this stuff ,it's just where I am at and maybe you who will be able to relate. I have just been holding all this stuff in, in just massive denial and now all these emotions and thoughts are coming out left, right and centre. I have had to be responsible and put on a happy face with going to work and thinking that I was OK, but now the emotional pain is so overwhelming and painful that I can't deny it. I don't want to deny it, the longer I try and hold it together, the more my life seems to fall apart, the more my life becomes un-manageable. I know I need help, and yet I still feel reluctant to ask for help because I feel like such a burden and I guess really if I allow people to see how bad I really feel they will pass me off as a hopeless case.I am not hopeless, I know that I am a good decent human being, but I am presently experiencing the hangover voice from my childhood that tells me I'm bad, hopeless, crazy and mad, and the adult part of me knows that they are lies, but the critical parent has really taken over and has lead me to get swept up in the old lies. I have to remember they are lies, and keep telling myself I am a good person. Recovering from this stuff is taking every inch of my energy at the moment........................Please log back on to friends reunited I want to talk.
Wednesday, January 30, 2008
He Logged of Friends reunited and vanished
I found him on the electoral register and wrote him a letter - I will post that next - and hand delivered it to his door.
The messages Jan 07
Its important for me to see you. Please send your contact details, and a some suggestions of when you can do this. This is about my recovery. I am 38 now on medication and in therapy and trying to put the peices of my life together. You owe me that.
Friends Renunited.
Not a place I can assure you that I expected to find my abuser, but here he was - bold as brass, larger than life - a picture of him and his new wife on their wedding day and his comments under the picture states "the child in the background of the picture is not mine" what a strange thing to comment - was this for my benefit. Did he know that I would try to find him. My abuser was my step father. He moved in with my mother and to me it felt immediately that he moved in with us all at my grandfathers house the abuse started. "He claims It didn't start until I was 5" ...and your point is - squabbling over a few months - what ever. The abuse started at 4 and the last time was when I was 15 and this was after I had told my mother and the family agreed it would stop. It stopped because eventually I ran away from home. He carried on living with my Mother and my brother eventually left home (age 23 - (he was 2 years my senior)). He stayed with my mother until January and in July 2007 he received a prison sentence of three years of which he served 18 months and a his name put on the sex offenders register for 7 years (now no longer listed). This sentence was based on some particular events that I recalled for the statement I made to The head of the CPU in Guildford. He was given this sentence for over 10 years of excessive (sometimes every night - in never went more than a few days without him coming to my room) sexual abuse. He took my childhood and he has never made amends to me. His version of events in that I shattered his life.
The next few posts are are the communication that I had with him on friends reunited last year. I found him and contacted him in January. The first time he replied all he said was "what is it that you want" (unfortunately this note has been deleted now from friends reunited and he removed his profile promptly when I said I wanted some answers.) I was in therapy at the time and decided that I would find him through the electoral register and hand deliver a note.
I had a motive and that motive I never got to explain to him because it the communication was so difficult just to get him to hear me - because "he didn't trust me" My motive which has now changed but it was something like this. I had done a lot of self healing, but he (and my mother) hold so many of the pieces and I felt confident enough to be able to meet with him as an "adult" and sit and discuss what had happened in my life, what had gone on for him and why did he do and how did he feel" I wanted to interview him and go through my life piece by piece and put it back together and write a book and If I am honest I wanted to know a few things, mainly and most personally was he sorry and what did he think he could do to make it better for me...Take the responsibility and take it away from me. Secondly was he rehabilitated, perhaps he is abusing again and lastly, is it possible to find peace if he took the responsibility and for me to really be able to move on. I know I am healing and only I have the power to do that, but my belief is that if you cause someone some harm only by making amends can you truly move on.
So I wanted to write a book for people who have been abused with a hope that a finished biography of my life would be able show that when adults use their power to make children powerless they can give it back and not take years and years of silence, suppression and depression, the thousands of pounds that get spent in therapy, the drain on mental health resources, the shattered families and scathing, festering denial, could be avoided and the person - me - who was abused can have her life back with out all this fall out that happens when abuse goes on.
He wouldn't really talk to me, so much as he just continued being abusive, so I never got to that point of being able to ask him if he would help me to write that book, and I never got to write that book so I am going to do it in a different way. Here are the posts below the ones from "him" are in green and the ones from me are in red.
The next few posts are are the communication that I had with him on friends reunited last year. I found him and contacted him in January. The first time he replied all he said was "what is it that you want" (unfortunately this note has been deleted now from friends reunited and he removed his profile promptly when I said I wanted some answers.) I was in therapy at the time and decided that I would find him through the electoral register and hand deliver a note.
I had a motive and that motive I never got to explain to him because it the communication was so difficult just to get him to hear me - because "he didn't trust me" My motive which has now changed but it was something like this. I had done a lot of self healing, but he (and my mother) hold so many of the pieces and I felt confident enough to be able to meet with him as an "adult" and sit and discuss what had happened in my life, what had gone on for him and why did he do and how did he feel" I wanted to interview him and go through my life piece by piece and put it back together and write a book and If I am honest I wanted to know a few things, mainly and most personally was he sorry and what did he think he could do to make it better for me...Take the responsibility and take it away from me. Secondly was he rehabilitated, perhaps he is abusing again and lastly, is it possible to find peace if he took the responsibility and for me to really be able to move on. I know I am healing and only I have the power to do that, but my belief is that if you cause someone some harm only by making amends can you truly move on.
So I wanted to write a book for people who have been abused with a hope that a finished biography of my life would be able show that when adults use their power to make children powerless they can give it back and not take years and years of silence, suppression and depression, the thousands of pounds that get spent in therapy, the drain on mental health resources, the shattered families and scathing, festering denial, could be avoided and the person - me - who was abused can have her life back with out all this fall out that happens when abuse goes on.
He wouldn't really talk to me, so much as he just continued being abusive, so I never got to that point of being able to ask him if he would help me to write that book, and I never got to write that book so I am going to do it in a different way. Here are the posts below the ones from "him" are in green and the ones from me are in red.
Tuesday, January 29, 2008
I want to get a message out there in the world
I want to help to generate more awareness and get a message out there. Sometimes I am not sure how to get out the words that I need to with out sounding like I am still so lost. To those who read my story and feel the same - and sadly I know it will be many please help me to generate a different kind of awareness - one that I hope to take to the governments to change the way that abuse is portrayed not only in the media but to potential abusers.
I don't feel so lost anymore. I have spent nearly two years in recovery and I intend to stay in recovery for the rest of my life.
I was sexually abused from the age of 4 until I was 15 and suffered severe neglect from Birth until now from my family. I do have one parent - my father -that was not involved and new nothing of the abuse until I told him when I was 16.
A family is supposedly the grounds, the foundations of life for a child to grow, to be nurtured and cared for in safety and in love, yet for so many including my self it became a prison of torture, lies,
deceit and denial.
To have your childhood stolen from your life meant to me that i have not yet been able to grow up. Slowly slowly and so incredibly painfully I am trying to make a life for myself. Today I am 10 months from being 40 years old and I am a prisoner in my own flat and struggle to integrate with the world and feel like a outcast. I am fortunate to have a beautiful son that reminds me daily that I have to live and function and for him I can smile and through him I am learning to live and understand my past and how fragile and vulnerable life is to a child. I am already deeply in debt to him, a second generation survivor and daily I am sorry to him in my prayers because he too has suffered from the abuse done to me. It is for him that my recovery is so important and that I do not pass on a legacy to him. I have become aware since being in recovery (instead of my own denial) that I have the power to change and that I can recover from abuse and I can recover because I have found a reason to live.
Nearly tow years ago I went to South Africa to a drug treatment rehabilitation centre - codependently following a boyfriend that had a drug addiction. I myself have been fortunate not to become involved in drugs but my recovery is from codependency and sexual abuse.
I had a blinding revelation after a week of being there that "I" had a right to life. I really didn't know this until then. It was all for everyone else. I was there for everyone else's use. I was useful because I was the best "fixer" there was. I could fix everyone.
Maybe even you might think know that my blog will be about "fixing" - yes to a degree, but I believe my story will be one that many will relate to and hopefully support me in what I want to say to the world.
I don't feel so lost anymore. I have spent nearly two years in recovery and I intend to stay in recovery for the rest of my life.
I was sexually abused from the age of 4 until I was 15 and suffered severe neglect from Birth until now from my family. I do have one parent - my father -that was not involved and new nothing of the abuse until I told him when I was 16.
A family is supposedly the grounds, the foundations of life for a child to grow, to be nurtured and cared for in safety and in love, yet for so many including my self it became a prison of torture, lies,
deceit and denial.
To have your childhood stolen from your life meant to me that i have not yet been able to grow up. Slowly slowly and so incredibly painfully I am trying to make a life for myself. Today I am 10 months from being 40 years old and I am a prisoner in my own flat and struggle to integrate with the world and feel like a outcast. I am fortunate to have a beautiful son that reminds me daily that I have to live and function and for him I can smile and through him I am learning to live and understand my past and how fragile and vulnerable life is to a child. I am already deeply in debt to him, a second generation survivor and daily I am sorry to him in my prayers because he too has suffered from the abuse done to me. It is for him that my recovery is so important and that I do not pass on a legacy to him. I have become aware since being in recovery (instead of my own denial) that I have the power to change and that I can recover from abuse and I can recover because I have found a reason to live.
Nearly tow years ago I went to South Africa to a drug treatment rehabilitation centre - codependently following a boyfriend that had a drug addiction. I myself have been fortunate not to become involved in drugs but my recovery is from codependency and sexual abuse.
I had a blinding revelation after a week of being there that "I" had a right to life. I really didn't know this until then. It was all for everyone else. I was there for everyone else's use. I was useful because I was the best "fixer" there was. I could fix everyone.
Maybe even you might think know that my blog will be about "fixing" - yes to a degree, but I believe my story will be one that many will relate to and hopefully support me in what I want to say to the world.
Ive got alot to say - its gonna take some time
I want to do something. I want to raise more awareness about sexual abuse, abuse and neglet and its devasting and paralysing effects. I want to get some more messages out there to help me and the countless others that have been abused, that are being abused right now and to all those who it may - God forbid - happen to in the future.
Over the next few weeks I will get my story out but most importantly the message that I have and how we can make an impact. Bear with me and all will be beared. It feels like it might take soem time for this message to come out coz it feels stuck and its important to me that I make sense and get it right.
Over the next few weeks I will get my story out but most importantly the message that I have and how we can make an impact. Bear with me and all will be beared. It feels like it might take soem time for this message to come out coz it feels stuck and its important to me that I make sense and get it right.
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