Confusing Touch

As I look back over my life, instead of seeing a victim, I see someone who was strong enough to survive and has managed to turn out to be a pretty decent person despite all of the challenges I've faced. I had an upbringing marked by childhood sexual abuse by my uncle and the dysfunctional family that worked to hide my father's alcoholism. Due to trauma, I developed PTSD. I'm also bipolar which is commonly passed on in families. I believe my father self-medicated his bipolar disorder with drugs and alcohol.

My relationship with my family is extremely complex. I both loved and hated my parents. I had no way of exploring safe touch. My mother was emotionally absent and didn't enjoy touch so I spent my whole life not knowing what my mother’s hug felt like. The touch that I got from my father was violent. I was often spanked and yelled at. What he called “discipline” was actually terrifying violence. He would hug me sometimes but it was always forced. It never felt safe. I became confused about sexuality and touch at a young age because I was sexually abused by my uncle for years. He would force me to hug and kiss him. He would rub my bum and tell me I had to do things he said or he'd tell my father that I was a “bad girl.”

This all led me to feel very confused about touch and sex later in life. The shameful thing that survivors have to live with is the fact that sometimes the young human body responds to touch even when it's not right or enjoyable. Some children will experience orgasms at a very young age due to extremely confusing sexual signals due to sexual abuse that they can't sort out. They live with these horrible, shameful feelings about themselves. They believe that if they reached orgasm that they must have enjoyed it, but this is not true. The body responded to an external stimulus in the right way. It means that the body was healthy but that it was a complete violation when someone abused that part of a child's innocence. This violation leaves the child to have to make some sense of what happened and usually the only way that the mind can sort it out is if the survivor blames themselves and believes that they are flawed, evil, or bad. It's something many survivors have to deal with.

Later in life, survivors of childhood sexual abuse have difficulties in understanding proper boundaries with others and will end up having many difficult relationships. The problem is that the survivor ends up repeating behaviors that reinforce the abuse they suffered without realizing that they're doing it. They end up in relationships with narcissists and repeatedly taken advantage of and victimized. They don't realize the ways that they act out and end up inviting the wrong people into their lives because they haven't developed the same social skills that others have. Survivors have a very hard time saying no and standing up for themselves. They tend to need to feel love so badly that they jump into relationships without thinking it through clearly. Multiple failed relationships end up harming survivors more because it reinforces the thought that there's something wrong or something bad about the person.

The good thing is that there is a way out of the pattern. Survivors have to begin to set proper boundaries with people. It starts with small decisions every day. It starts with speaking up for your needs and not allowing anyone to harm you anymore. You have to find the power inside yourself to love yourself more. Deep inside, you crave love but you look for it in all the wrong places. Start by loving yourself and protecting yourself. Don't let others walk all over your boundaries.

Loving yourself means committing to always being true to you. That means that you have a say in what you allow into your life. If someone is treating you badly, you have the option of choosing to love yourself enough to walk away from anything that harms you. You don't have to sacrifice your own happiness to please someone else.

You'll find that the love you give to yourself is so much more fulfilling than what anyone else can give you. The power to heal is inside you. Take a lot of time to be alone with yourself and really get to know yourself. There's a child inside you that adult you must now learn how to love.