The term "healing", in a medical sense, can imply that there is an end to the process... that one day, after enough time and perhaps enough of the "right" type of counseling, the impact of abuse will finally be healed. As one workshop participant and shelter worker reminded us, women who have experienced abuse will forever carry their wound (however small) with them. She preferred using the term "transcend" — to overcome, a term of empowerment — when working with survivors.
— thank you "R" in Barrie ON
As a survivor of childhood sexual abuse, you are already in the process of transcending, you have survived... even though the abuse may still be impacting you in profound ways. You may be struggling with a substance use issue, an eating disorder, battling depression or an anxiety disorder. You may have a difficult time trusting others or may be too trusting of others because you don't know how to set healthy boundaries. You may be a perfectionist and have unrelenting standards for yourself... afraid that people will reject you if they knew the "real" you. But you have survived, you are transcending.
Some survivors of abuse have learned ways to mask their coping skills and feel ashamed of what they went through or what they need to do now in order to feel safe. You may have rituals that make you feel safe, like cleaning all the time, checking and re-checking your locks, counting or rocking yourself to sleep. These rituals can make some women feel like they are "crazy" or that they are "losing their mind." You are not "crazy"... you are surviving, you are transcending...
Learning to manage the unmanageable...
As a survivor of childhood sexual abuse, you may have learned ways to manage your feelings around loss of control, unpredictability, violation and betrayal.
Some of the ways you may have learned to cope might be viewed by others as:
- hyper vigilant
- controlling
- resistant
- aggressive
- needy
However, these behaviours make sense given the experiences you have survived. As a child you had no control over the abuse that was done to you, no ability to make it stop and you were not to blame. Yet as a child you couldn't understand how people who were supposed to love and protect you, could hurt you. In order to cope with their harm, you may have started to view yourself as "bad" and believed that there was something wrong with you to invite such abuse. These feelings might have been further complicated if the person was a parent or trusted adult, if you were "rewarded" for the abuse with presents or extra attention, received any pleasure or were told you "asked for it." Many adult survivors struggle with making sense of the abuse and these messages. This is normal. You did nothing to ask for the abuse, you were not in a position to say "no" even if you were told otherwise. Often times adults who sexually abuse children take time to groom their victims to gain their trust and convince themselves that the abuse isn't causing the child harm.
It is important for you to remember that as a child you may have faced a variety of confusing feelings and emotions related to the abuse you were experiencing. While many children experience abuse, each child learns to cope in their own unique way.
How you are coping with the abuse can depend on many factors. Some of these are:
- Did you have a safe person in your life whom you told?
- If you told, were you believed?
- How frequently and over how long a period of time did the abuse take place?
- Who was the abuser in your life?... Did you depend on them to meet basic survival needs such as food and shelter?
- Were there threats to harm you or someone you loved if you told?
- Did the abuse involve penetration or cause physical harm?
- Were there other stress factors in your life such as a substance-using parent, poverty or family violence?
Your own built-in adaptive/resiliency factors will also have determined how you dealt with and are dealing with the abuse... the important thing for you to know is that what happened to you was real, was not your fault and no one has the right to tell you how you should or should not feel about what was done to you.