How it feels to suffer sexual abuse

An important part of healing from my trauma involved going back and confronting not only feelings, but the actual sensations associated with being molested; how it felt when it was happening in the moment and afterward in my body to have experienced what I experienced.

It might seem cruel or painful, but going back and fully submerging in those emotions, sensations, and thoughts helped me confront them and release them, so that gradually they lost their ability to hurt me. It’ll never be totally gone – it will never NOT be there. But by reliving the moments fully, I come to grips with what happened to me on every level of my being and then I can let go of the hurt and heal it.

So how does it feel to be sexually abused? Nobody can know unless they personally experience it.

But here’s what it felt like to me.

It feels clammy, sickly, cold. It feels itchy, it feels restless, it feels like Wrong. It feels like Bad, it feels like Sick, it feels like Dirty, it feels like No. It is the incarnation and physical manifestation of all of these words, and so, so much more.

It is sickly, dirty green. It is nasty, infected yellow. It is filthy greenish-brown, it is contaminated orange. All of this – all of this smeared, smeared, smeared all over you, all over the air, all over the time and space where it happens.

It is knots in your stomach made of rusted iron and lead. It is ice cold lava coursing through your veins. It is Novocain numbness, it is live-wire alertness in every infinitesimal cell of your body. It is desperately trying to run while remaining utterly paralyzed.

It is nausea in your soul.

It is an infection in your heart.

It is a dull, black, sticky substance that flows just under your skin, where nobody sees it but you.

And after?

After.

After … is shame. After is guilt. After is self-hatred. After is self-judgment, after is self-revulsion, after is desperation and misery.

After is confusion. After is utter bewilderment – what? Has happened? Who? Have I become? What? Has he done to me?

Who am I now that I am sub-human?

What is it in me that made him think it was ok to treat me so? I must be bad. I must be dirty. I must deserve this. I must be a little dirty whore. Something must be wrong with me, or he wouldn’t have treated me this way.

I let him. I’m guilty, too. I did it, too. I didn’t stop him. I’m going to hell.

This is hell.

After – it takes a toll not only on your relationship with yourself, but your relationship with every single aspect of your life. It affects you so profoundly that you can’t help but be different with the people you love, the world you live in.

You feel so unlovable, so utterly and completely undeserving of any kind of positive regard, tenderness, or gentleness from anybody. In my case, I decided that in order to keep my place in my family I would have to earn my place. I would have to do whatever my parents and grandparents and teachers and friends said so that they would approve of me and then I’d be good enough to at least stay.

As long as I could make them happy, I could stay and nobody would find out what a cheap, disgusting, revolting, marked, tainted, guilty little whore I was.

And with the people pleasing comes the burying of everything that makes you, you. You start to give up the things that you love, the things that bring you passion and make you feel alive, because that’s not what the world wants and it’s not what makes others happy, and if they aren’t happy with you then you’re Wrong.

You’re Bad.

You’re UNLOVABLE.

I can’t remember how many times I looked down at my body while in the bathtub and could only feel deep, penetrating sadness and disgust at my body, because you can’t escape yourself and it was a constant reminder to me of what Jamie did to me. As if the memories weren’t enough, I had my body to look at every day.

There’s an indescribable feeling of isolation. Because nobody knows what happened to you, because nobody knows what you’ve been through or how it’s affected you or what you’re feeling, because you know that there’s this huge stigma over the whole situation, you feel cut out of society – you don’t fit in. You’re perpetually on the edges, always coming at life from the shadows, never participating fully.

Sounds lonely. It is shatteringly lonely.

Life is for the unmarked people, right? It’s for the ones who didn’t do disgusting, wrong, dirty things and then lie about it to their mother and grandmother. You gave up your right to life when you committed this terrible sin, little girl.

And you’re always that wounded child – or however old you were when it happened. I carried Little Me inside me for decades – she was always there. I was always that little girl, regardless of whether I was 12 or 32. Didn’t matter. As long as that pain went unacknowledged, unprocessed, unhealed, that little girl was always there.

And rage. It took me a long time to get in touch with my rage because when I was molested, I wasn’t mature enough emotionally to be able to feel and understand that kind of intensity. I didn’t have the inner tools needed to acknowledge it or express it or let it go.

But once I tapped into it? Jesus Christ. I cannot tell you how hot it burned. I cannot tell you how painfully it twisted in my guts. I cannot tell you how stiff it made every muscle in my body as I screamed it out – scream after scream after scream. I literally had to stuff a dishtowel in my mouth and scream into it because it went on for DAYS. No exaggeration. I screamed for DAYS. I would go to work, come home, change my clothes, stuff the dishtowel in my mouth, and start to scream. Hours. Until my voice was gone.

And once I screamed it out, there was still violence attached to that rage. I had to HIT something in order to express that angle of the rage. So again, I would go to work, come home, change clothes, and then build a column of pillows and cushions from the furniture. I would stand before it and pound on it with my fists, screaming obscenities and accusations and all manner of things until I was utterly spent.

Scraped raw.

Bleeding.

But healing at last.

I could probably write for days, weeks, maybe months about how it feels, about the gamut of emotions and feelings and thoughts that arise during the actual abuse, after, and during the healing process and I’d never touch all of it. I can’t. Some things, words just can’t capture.

It seems to me that although people are talking more openly about sexual abuse and sexual violence these days, there’s still a heavy hush-hush veil that hangs over the issue.

Having experienced this kind of abuse personally, I can tell you that the secretiveness is what hurts the most – to be in unfathomable pain and feel like you can’t tell anybody, can’t get help, can’t do anything to stop the pain is one of the most alienating and despairing feelings in the world.

I look forward to the day when people no longer treat the victims of these wrongs as shameful inconveniences to be dealt with through the back door, quietly and with a minimum of inconvenience. I look forward to the day when people can be open about this subject and help the victims confront their experiences, process them, and heal them with open, loving hearts.

This culture of silence, this culture of don’t ask-don’t tell, this culture of blaming the victim is so foreign to me. I can’t make any sense of how humans can treat abused humans that way. Let’s put the shame where it belongs – on the perpetrators.

My hope here is that anyone who has suffered sexual abuse or sexual violence will read these words and know that their pain is NOT a secret they have to keep.

Your pain is KNOWN.

It has been FELT deeply by those of us who suffered as you suffer.

You are LOVED by those of us who have suffered like you have suffered and have managed to find healing on the other side.

You have nothing to be ashamed of – you did NOTHING WRONG. And it can get better, you can heal. There are many out there who would love to help you.

Just reach out.

*********************************

I'd like to wrap up here with a poem I wrote about how it felt to my 8-year-old self to be molested.

*****************************

“Hands”

Where are your hands – they cannot be there

I cannot be here

Where are your hands – why are they there

I will not be here

Where are your hands – how can they be there

I will not stay here

Trying to hold my body away from the revulsion

From the repugnance, from the violation

From the Dirty, from the Wrong, from the Bad

I am The Dirty, I am The Wrong, I am The Bad

You did it, what did you do and I let you?

Your fingers, your hands, your eyes, your voice

Smears – smears - smears -

Sick in my belly, sick in my head, sick in my skin

Inside, inside the Shame it feels like

Worms, it feels like squirms, like Dirty-Sick and No

Such trouble - such trouble they’ll know, and such trouble

Little whore, unchaste, un-virginal for the bible tells me so

Is anything going on? No mommy no not a thing, wide-eyed

Nothing going on because you’ll never love me anymore

Nothing going on with your little whore

Nothing ever happened with the fingers of his hands

Good girl be a good girl or else they’ll know

The Dirty, the Wrong, the Bad you are

See it, can they see it, I see it all the time

Hide it, clean it, wash it, deny it, forget it

Never clean, never forgotten

Hands.