Sexuality and survivors

Hope by grace2244

Last night I did this collage to represent my past and my wishful future with regard to my ability to express myself sexually freely without the past flowing into it. I was pleased with the collage artistically but it caused me to ponder that middle divide. There is no wall in my mind. I avoid "sex" with all of my being. Am fairly certain one of me had the job of being happy sexual. Not sure where she is since the medical trauma. My pelvic floor fell for heaven's sake. I do believe I will be healed sufficiently soon to add that back into my life.

I'm not sure about other survivors, but my true preference would be celibacy. I love BB with all my heart and soul. Intimacy is still a hurdle for reasons that have nothing to do with him. He has to pay the price for my past. My therapist advised several years ago that often being okay sexually is the last to heal. Possibly the recent fusion will allow that to happen.

Right now (and the impetus for writing this post) The Oprah Show is addressing sexuality issues. I'm in tears. They just welled up out of nowhere and are streaming down my face. How can someone who has had such horrific sexual abuse beginning before or by age 3 embrace loving intimacy? Guess I'm grieving the loss of not having that in my life. I don't want this to be too personal, but wanted to share that larger issue of separating sexual abuse from expressing healthy love sexually with a loving partner.

And I want it to be ME. I don't want another part to move forward to enjoy that part of my life. My pelvic floor is mostly healed. Getting my body to move is going slowly but surely thanks to the Wii Fit. Yet there is one more known issue tied to my past and that area of my body.

For years my mind justified what happened to me as jeans being too tight. I shifted to jeans jumpers and skirts in my 30s to avoid the problem...or so I thought. Since memories began, I realized I had been burned in my genital area with cigarettes, apparently many times. This body memory has recurred since at least my 20s. I never told anyone about it. It was embarrassing. Some physical signs preceded eruption sometimes, but not always. The most recent cigar(?) or cigarette burns began to appear last night. It's painful. It starts as a stinging soreness in a large area and then develops into several blisters on top of red raised areas (like a cigarette burn) that go through the course of breaking and healing at a rapid rate. Nothing helps to alleviate the pain. It takes several days to stop. I was going to work with my therapist on this issue but the fusion took priority.

For now, my therapist is on vacation, my blisters hurt, am feeling sorry for myself. Am feeling sad for BB that he has not had an intimate relationship in nearly two years. That is a goal for me for 2009. Complete healing...to include sexual healing. I know...bitch, bitch, bitch. This is my rant place. Hopefully if you've read to here, it's been a worthwhile topic.

Backlash of "Telling"

As a survivor of years of abuse at the hands of organized pedophiles, I have instilled into my being--likely scarred into my being--the message it is not okay to tell. As a therapist who helped trauma survivors, I heard the same messages over and over again. Survivors used the same expressions to describe experiences. It was uncanny. Pedophiles do operate from the same "handbook".

With every aspect of my healing, I had to deal with "do not tell" threats and fear. When memories first begin to emerge, the fear is barely tolerable, it's so overwhelming. All the deeply instilled messages come up: Don't tell or you will die. Don't tell or we will kill everyone you love. If you tell, no one will believe you. If you tell, they will lock you up forever. We are watching your every move and know when you tell. So you can see going to see a therapist becomes a terrifying decision.

Setting up my websites and blogs to "tell" has triggered some residual horror. Consciously I know it is good telling. The world needs to know. Have others figured this out before? If so, I haven't seen it. Having come from that world full circle to helping others out of that world, I have my own insight plus knowledge from clients that connected my own dots. I have the unabashed truth. The most protected groups of organized pedophilia are the cults who appear to "worship Satan". The pedophile view is that they have created memories so horrific, the survivor, in remembering, will never get to the underlying level of messages that it was about perverted people hurting children in the most vile of ways.

And now the nation has been embroiled in an argument about whether ritual abuse or satanic cults exist and not getting to the underlying truth that it is about organized pedophiles ensuring their victims never tell or will never be believed. That's a huge "telling". I find it ironic that they did to the nation's mindset what they do to a child's mindset--keep everyone stuck at the unbelievable and unimaginable. "People don't DO that to children!" Well, pedophiles do.

Even though I am substantially healed, as I move through the rest of my life, I encounter new situations when it becomes apparent that something hasn't healed yet because it becomes "triggered". A trigger is anything in the environment that connects to a subconscious fear. Of course, once a person begins to identify their triggers, they are no longer subconscious. Even though known, it may take years to extinguish a trigger. Some of mine have extinguished. Some are controlled. And some still get that lovely startle scream. But the "do not tell" message, for me, has come up as body memories as much as internal messages of fear. The Body Remembers is a book I highly recommend to understand this aspect of healing abuse. The body has memory cells just as the brain does. Research has been released on this topic and is validated by several books and articles on the subject.

From the day I published Forbidden Topic, my body responded with several signs of remembered horror to include insect bites while confined in a small space and inability to move or scream to stop the pain of rising blisters in extremely painful and hidden areas of my body from cigarette burns. I had not realized the message that went with those memories was not to tell until now. Several messages usually accompany that level of especially "demonic" abuse. I don't know if my body will ever be able to stop showing me. It could be a self punishment my body was conditioned to perpetrate on me--if you tell, you'll be burned with cigarettes in the most painful areas.

Do I remember that being done to me? No. Do I believe it was done to me? Yes. Does it matter if anyone else believes it was done to me? No. Is it important for me to know so I can heal? Yes. But it is important for society to believe that organized pedophiles abuse in unimaginable ways. They can and do inflict horror for the purpose of trauma for the purpose of creating and reinforcing dissociative states to allow their activities to go on for years. I was recently made aware of a court decision outlining some of a sadistic pedophile's activities. This may be triggering to survivors. It is proof of the incomprehensible to a child.

Wake up, America. Hear me roar. Hear that children everywhere are prey, especially babies and youngsters before the age of six. Tyler, my client whom I worked with when he was 5-6 years old, remembered it all. I don't know how he didn't dissociate. Not dissociating (which is not the child's choice) allowed him to be believed. The same horrors that happened to him happen to those who have dissociated. Yet we choose to ignore their pleas for help? Think about it. Also think about the statistic that of children who die from abuse, the most deaths are for children under 5. Dissociation IS a survival skill.