I Survive

I am a survivor.

A little over a year ago I stopped making a secret of that fact. I stopped adhering to the law of "we will never speak of this again" laid down by my parents a decade ago. I published my story, on Facebook, and on two of my blogs. It did not go well. Two of my brothers have just this month started talking to each other again. The one who abused me does his best to convince everyone that I over-exaggerated and that I was at the age of 9 essentially a slut...based on the fact that I'd been abused twice already. My parents still blame me for the fact that my eldest brother will no longer speak to them.

I have spent the last year blaming myself for the problems within my family. I have spent the last year feeling guilt that I ought not be feeling. Although I suppose realistically I spent the last decade doing those two things. I talked to my mother over this weekend; she reiterated for the millionth time that the fact that they did not know what to do and so I ought not blame them for how they treated me during that decade. I accepted that excuse for a while, but it no longer holds weight. You see, my parents know people. My dad was a Baptist pastor for many years; even now I cannot visit a Baptist church without running into a mutual acquaintance. There were many people they could have asked if they did not know what to do, but they refused to.

I am not responsible for the fact that my eldest brother took what I told his wife and twisted it into an offense against his family. I am not responsible for the the fact that he does not talk to my parents nor allow them to see their grandchildren. I am not responsible for the fact that he and another brother did not talk for a year. I am not responsible for being abused when I was four, or when I was seven, or when I was nine, ten, eleven, twelve.

Abuse is horrible in and of itself. It causes intense mental and emotional issues that, even if discovered and dealt with early can still take years to fully overcome. It does not especially matter how often the abuse occurred, or how long, or how "consensual" it was, or if it was violent or not. All of these things of course contribute to future problems in their own way, but abuse can be a one-time, five-minute, non-violent occurrence and still cause immense trouble in the life of its victim. I say this because the one who abused me the longest (four years) does not see himself as an abuser. He was never violent, he never forced me to do anything, indeed he even stopped (for a while) several times when I asked him to. We did not even "have sex," so far as the strictest definition (vaginal penetration) goes. Does that mean that I was not abused? Does it mean I ought not carry emotional or mental scars to this day? Does it mean that, as my parents and the counselor I "confessed" to believed, I bore equal guilt for something I never asked for or desired? No.

It is hard for parents to know what to do when one of their children is abused. I understand that. It is even harder when the abuser is within the same family and indeed only a few years older than the victim. But as I said already, they had resources. They had people they could have turned to for help, if they had so desired. They certainly had more opportunity to seek help than I did at the tender age of twelve. Instead, not knowing what to do, and not willing to sacrifice their precious testimony in order to seek help, they banned the subject altogether. They thought if nobody mentioned it, it would simply go away. Everything would be as if it never happened. Except for the fact that even in their minds it never went away. They could not refrain from mentioning it every time I did something wrong. "We know we can't trust you because of what you did before" was a phrase I heard more than once. For you see they blamed me. Even more, I think, than they blamed the one who abused me. I think it was because I was the one who told, who turned their lovely little Baptist home upside down. That is merely conjecture, of course; I do not know for certain. However, it is true that they believed I had sinned just as much as he had. Browsing through old emails the other day, I found one from my father counseling me that the problems with my thought life I'd been having (which are now easily explainable by the fact that I was 17 and horny, thank you very much) were a consequence of my sin. This attitude of my parents, that I was not a victim but equally complicit in my own abuse, had its own consequences. One of them was the fact that I believed them. I believed that I was dirty, broken, worthless. I believed that many of the problems in my family were my fault (for many of them started after I broke the silence the first time). I believed that as a young girl I had been guilty of sexual perversions that are not even talked about in polite society. It was not until nearly eight years had gone by that I realized, for the first time, that it wasn't my fault.

I realized then that I was a survivor, a survivor of sexual abuse. And I was angry. I still am, though the anger confines itself to moments like these when I feel I must say something. It is not constant. But for years I was abused, and then for more years I was taught that that abuse was sin that I was guilty for. As of this moment more than half the years of my life I spent believing those lies, lies many of those who ought to be closest to me still believe. But I have survived. Though I still feel the pain of those years, and still carry scars, emotional, physical, and mental...I still survive.