This is a very personal journey of survival and healing, I hope to inspire and give ideas.
(incest: refers to any sexual activity between closely related people (often within the immediate family) that is illegal or socially taboo).
I was adopted as a baby into a family. I was one year old when the adoption process was completed and I went home to live with them. When I was four or five years old, I had my first bout of incest. When I was a baby, I developed the same bonds with my mom and dad as if they were actually my biological parents. The incest attacks were all very brutal, gradually as I got older even more and more painful, my father used cruel and malicious mind games with me and twisted the truth and twisted my thoughts to suit the needs of him. He beat me unconscious on many occasions, on 3 separate occasions he beat me so severely I thought he was dying. He had 2 natural children and at one point he put a shotgun to my brother’s head and said he was going to blow his brains out. We including mom were beaten and abused every day. I won’t go into details because it is not beneficial in any way and would only attract predators and repel survivors because it would be too shocking and painful to read.
For the first 3 or 4 years of my life I think it was normal. For the next 8-9 years I lived through unspeakable horrors at the hands of a psychopathic pedophile. When I was a pre-teen, I would fight with him and curse him out and he would beat me mercilessly. I ran away several times and each time was returned home by the police and again to a concerned family. The severity and duration of this level of abuse broke me inside, mentally fractured me into a million different pieces, all of those pieces were damaged and had their mental manipulations stamped on them. At age 12, the last incestuous assault on me ended the reign of terror because my father left and moved to California to work at an elementary school as a bus driver.
What follows is my journey through the devastation of what had happened and my gradual recovery. By sharing this with the world, I hope to reach out to other survivors in order to be inspired and perhaps gain insight into the recovery process. Not everyone will be able to relate to me, not all abuse was as severe, some survived much worse. No matter what level of survival you come from, I still hope that by sharing my struggles and healing journey with you, you can find inspiration and draw from this some ideas or insights that will touch your life and be useful.
During the 8 years of incest my only goal was to survive until I was an adult so I could escape and be free. (I didn’t know at the time that being free would mean 8 years of hard work in intensive therapy sessions). As a child, I clung to the belief that somewhere, somehow, I could find a place and people who would love me and not abuse me. to me. I clung to that belief; it helped protect my sanity and that incredible hope also helped keep me alive. When I was very young and the incest assaults occurred, I would repress the memory as soon as the assault stopped. I didn’t know what had happened. I became increasingly wary and terrified that something was trying to destroy me, but I couldn’t tell you what it was. As the incest attacks continued, I learned to disengage from my body completely and sometimes even recalled a sensation of floating and looking down at the scene. I became a very light sleeper and the smallest of sounds would wake me up instantly. Gradually, the full weight and burden of the memories and countless bouts of incest came to full consciousness and I began the impossible task of suppressing the thoughts and trying to stay in control of the utter chaos in my mind. My disassociation from my body during the abuse was a relief and helped me survive, but gradually I realized that I was maintaining a level of dissociation from my body all the time. This was a problem because someone held my hand once or twice and I would look down and get the sudden sensation that I had a hand and it was so small and warm in his. I will talk more about this in future posts.
As a child, I tried to stop the abuse by telling friends, strangers, teachers. I told a police officer in Louisiana that I was being abused and he did nothing to help me and he took me home because I was running away and my father saw me being taken home in a police car and then he beat me up. knock me out I told my mom, grandmother and neighbors that I was being abused, no one helped me, they turned their back on me and my grandmother hit me so hard, blaming me while she yelled at me. she was alone.
(sidebar here: if a child tells you that they are being abused by their parent, the last person you call is the parent or family. You are endangering that child’s life because, in my case, my father enjoyed especially beating me so severely on those occasions when I thought I was killing myself (I was passing out and thought I was dying.)
So when a concerned person who I had told I was being abused called Child Welfare, I was doing fine in high school and when they took me out of class to the counselor’s office, I was so scared for my life that my one and only intervention came. Too late… because at one point my father held a shotgun to my brother’s head and told my brother that he was going to blow his brains out, so I decided that this man would probably kill one or all of us. So I did what I felt I had to do and denied it all, sobbing hysterically; that the social worker begged me to step up and they would protect me but I didn’t see how and my fears were so ingrained in me and since I had lived so long why risk being murdered by that evil man when I am so close? freedom for which I denied everything, in tears, in absolute fear for my life. It was too late.
My mother and father divorced when I was 12 years old, their last abuse was public humiliation. But at 17 I moved from my hometown and the lives of all those people for nine years, I never spoke to anyone in my family. As for my father, I plan to never speak to him again.
So if you find yourself in the middle of abuse, get help, you deserve to be safe and from the 70’s when I was trying to get help until now there is more awareness about incest and easier to seek help. I hope my writings help give you hope for your healing journey.
My experience left me with total chaos inside my mind and a body that was numb and out of touch with reality. All the extreme and thunderous emotions very intense pain, shame, humiliation, disgust, all those kinds of feelings are common and with time and counseling they become like a faint whisper that you can barely hear and when you walk in the dark, believe they will find the end of the tunnel and you will come out into the light and your heart will rise with joy, peace and love. I know because I’m in the light and have been in the summer sun for many years, it really does get easier. Please wait and be inspired by me. I have returned to the darkness to write for you, to take your hand and say come with me out of the darkness and into the summer sun. Be brave and walk with me on this journey that you are no longer alone.
Let me tell you, from my heart to yours, you must seek professional help and commit yourself to never be like these people, ever. Never let the abuser win. Incest is a generational abuse, stand firm here and now, do not allow incest to pass from you to the generations of your children. Your true journey to healing and recovery now begins. Have courage and take it easy, this is not something that can be rushed.
In Dallas you can look up the Center for Pastoral Counseling and Education and also the Incest Recovery Association. Both agencies were instrumental in my recovery. My honest blog is not meant to replace professional help. Books to read… No one has ever cried for me, Wounded Heart, Bold Love, The Shack.
You may not know, at this time, how profoundly your abuse has altered your thinking, your behavior, your belief systems, your sexuality, self-esteem, self-esteem, future relationships, everything about you has been altered by your perpetrators, but now it is time to make up lost ground. Withdraw your thoughts by doing this: Take a thought back to its origins to find out if it is based on the truth or based on the abuser’s lies.
These are simple examples, there are much deeper and more complex thoughts within all of us:
I used to think that I deserved to be abused. Well, that’s not true. It’s a lie from my father that he used as part of his mind control over me.
I used to think that I was a bad person and somehow it was my fault. Well, that’s not true. It’s a lie again created by my father to shame and control me.
Find the thoughts you have and write them down. Do it with the guidance of a counselor, it is for his safety and to make sure that he is coming to the truth. Take that thought or belief back to its origins and find out if it is based on truth or lies and that is how you really start to break free.
The Dallas Pastoral Counseling and Education Center, as well as The Family Place, are great agencies to look into. Another great book, “La Cabaña”.
Our thoughts become our behavior, start reclaiming your thoughts from the control of abusers and in the next post I will talk about the behaviors….
like a phoenix rising from the ashes; you will rise whole and renewed.