Choices

Choices
Y

Yves

Registrant
Choices. We all make choices. We all endure the consequences of those choices........

With only the odd exception, all choices are good, and all choices are bad. The goodness or the badness of the choice depends on your outlook for the future, how it affects or influences how your next choice will have to be made. Its also relative to other factors how your family benefits or suffers from it, how your friends admire or reject you for it, how you feel your god accepts you or denies you for it, how it will help or hinder your strides to achieve your goals and your view of what you want your future to be.......

What about a choice that is made on the wing? What about a choice that is made with no forewarning of its coming? No forethought about the consequences of that choice? No reflection on how it is to mold and direct your future? Can such a choice safely be construed as correct? right? just?

I believe it is true that the choice made in that moment is the honest one, the true one, the real one. But what if your heart is made of stone? What if all that choice can bring you is to the rocky shore of an unending ocean, to know that there is nothing behind you and yet there is nothing before you, for you, either...... What if your heart is filled with such badness that the choice you made is the exception to the rule, and can only ever mean badness or at the very least ungoodness?

What if the problem is complicated by the fact that you dont regret the choice you made only because you know the other option was not viable or even possible? And that if you were forced to make the choice again, you know you would unhesitatingly make the same one?

Not how long is it safe to carry guilt, but how long must we carry guilt...... How long must we wait for deliverance, and from where does it come? Or from whom? And is forgiveness the prerequisite or the result?

What if one never reaches the far shore?

What if one doesnt want to?
 
Yves, Hey, Hi, good to see you.

You said, "Not how long is it safe to carry guilt, but how long must we carry guilt...... How long must we wait for deliverance, and from where does it come? Or from whom? And is forgiveness the prerequisite or the result?"

I don't know if I've understood everything that you've said, but this statement stimulated a response.

I don't know how long, "it is safe to carry guilt." I've carried mine for over 50 years. And, "how long must we wait for deliverance," is, as long as it takes to find someone who can guide us through.

I'm 65, and I started the process when I was 19. I got enough good counsel to get away from the abusive family and the last guy who abused me, but I still carried the guilt.

I went through 3 psychiatrists and was told I had been, "delivered." That was back in '77.

Here I am , what is that, 28 years later, having found my, "club house," and my peeps, as my daughter would say. And from those experiences, I've found the spirit guide who is helping me deliver myself away from the guilt, the guilt that wasn't mine in the first place, and showing me a brighter future with possibilities I thought would never be mine.

For me, my therapist has become my spirit guide, for it was my spirit that was crushed, my lust for life that was hijacked.

Yves, I welcome you back and I hope that you find someone who will help you to find the answers you seek.

Again, good to see you,

David
 
Yves,

You ask a lot of important questions about choices, and in a way it seems you are asking not so much about choices as about responsibility for them. Much of this has been bothering me. I don't have many answers, just ways I look at parts of what you are asking about.

One way I deal with this is to ask what kind of choices I had. The choice I had at the age of 11 is easy for me to see: none. My abuser had me alone and in his house, where I thought I was being invited for dinner and maybe a sleepover with his son, who was my good friend. He told me to take off my trousers and I did it; he was an adult whom I knew, I felt embarrassed but I had no idea what would come next. I remember being frightened and totally confused, and the lies were coming at me as fast as he was. I just trying to get from one second to the next, and I guess I wanted his lies to be true so all this would be okay.

It never occurred to me that I had a choice, that I could say no. It seems to me that if a boy doesn't know he has a choice, then in fact no choice exists for him.

And was there any choice for me to know? I was an innocent kid with no interest in sex yet, no kid where I lived had ever heard of child abuse, and I was alone with an experienced pedophile in his own house. To me, that doesn't sound like much of an opportunity for making a choice to say no. I did the only thing I could do: cry.

More difficult for me has been the fact that by the age of 12 I was making the choice, freely and willingly, and over and over again for three years, to continue seeing an adult whose only interest in me was to abuse me and cause me pain and humiliation. Why?

Part of the answer is that I didn't see it that way. He had been grooming me for a year and feeding me lies about how unloved I was at home. That was totally untrue; I grew up in a caring loving family. But he was also telling me that he cared about me, that I was special, and that what was happening was okay. I badly needed for that to be true, so I guess I bought into the whole thing.

But by the age of 12 I was also thinking about suicide. I was burning with shame and guilt and I felt totally alone, worthless and unwanted. If this guy wanted me only for sex, well, okay, at least that's something.

On the other hand, that's me at 56 looking back and trying to remember now, as an adult, how I was thinking then. Does a 12yearold who has already been molested many times really think through what is happening in the way I am thinking through it now? I doubt it. What I remember is just burning with guilt, shame and confusion and feeling worse and worse about myself and everything around me. Everything was mixed up and it felt like I was choking; I didn't think it out, I threw up and wet my bed. I don't think I was making choices; I had been robbed of every shred of selfesteem and confidence, and I was alone. I just gave up and went into zombie mode. Maybe this isn't it either, I just don't know. But I don't think the issue is about choices here. At least not in the way we think about choices as adults.

That makes me wonder about the numerous survivors here who either were abused as "adults" or who have acted out in lots of ways. I think we all act out some way or another, but that's not what I want to get into here.

We all know that for an abused boy what is happening is a lot more than sexual. David puts it like this:

it was my spirit that was crushed, my lust for life that was hijacked
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I can feel every word of that. I have said this on other threads, but here it comes again. While other boys were learning everything they would need for adulthood social skills, boundaries, emotional tools, and so on our access to all that was filtered through the trauma of abuse. Ask any of the teenage survivors here what they think about trust, for example.

I guess my point is that if an abused kid is robbed of the opportunity to grow and develop, if he is emotionally devastated, then unless he gets a lot of support and professional help he is very likely to carry those scars into adulthood. If he never had the chance to build up his confidence and other defenses as a boy, then these will not suddenly appear just because he has turned 18 (or 21, or whatever) and is now an "adult". He will still be very vulnerable, and this will affect not just the choices he makes, but also the choices he has.

Yves, you conclude with this:

What if one never reaches the far shore? What if one doesnt want to?
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Your second question is the big one. This is the choice we do have. No one else can make us recover, we have to want that for ourselves, admit that we need help, accept help and act on it. But I don't think any survivor genuinely wants to remain where he is rather than reclaim his life. He may feel that way, but that comes from abuse, acting out and denial, not from who the survivor really is.

The far shore: I no longer worry about that, because I don't see recovery as a goal. It helps me to think of it as a way of thinking, as an attitude, as a path. I don't expect to get to some point where all my big questions are answered and what was done to me no longer matters. I would rather think of my task as learning to cope and regain the ability to make my life fruitful and loving for myself and those I care about. Thinking about a path also allows me to appreciate that even when I am stumbling and falling about (like now) I am still getting somewhere.

That too was a choice I had before me and decided to make. For me it was a good one.

Take care,
Larry
 
The thoughts expressed so far in this thread are so profound that I think I could go a couple of weeks just contemplating them and their application to my life.

I would probably then want to come back and do it again a few times at future dates just to make sure I remembered.

Thanks guys,

John
 
I have had a lot of time to think about these responses. They have helped me realize that I am unwilling and possibly incapable of taking responsibility for my choices.

For a moment setting aside the unwilling factor, should I suppose that if I am incapable of taking responsibility, maybe it wasn't a choice at all? Maybe there is no responsibility to take?

To be willing to take responsibility for choices I've made would change the major course of my life..... I've spent years and years running away from it but every time I look back to see how much distance I've made, it's right there, tripping me again........
 
Hi Yves,

I don't know if I'm off base in my response, but I've been thinking alot about the choices I've made, too, especially in light of my new realizations about how much SA has impacted those choices.

Most folks looking at my resume would see "success": Ivy-league educated, attorney, nonprofit and service oriented. Right now, though, I don't have a job, I'm running an organization whose mission I no longer believe in without compensation, and...my tooth hurts, which sucks because I have no more dental insurance.

I've recently come to realize that many of the choices I made were made for wrong reasons ("wrong" is too judgemental, let's say that I was afraid/incapable of admitting the real reasons for those choices at the time). I spent so much time running from my fears, trying to protect myself, proclaiming myself saviour of the world...and I lost myself. The SA, dare I say, forced me into making choices that I probably would not have made. Of course, hindsight is 20/20, so if things were hunky dory right now (millions in the bank, healthy tooth :) ), then I might not complain so much.

But there are many things that I'm appreciative for that might have been different if the SA didn't effect me. I have a wonderful girlfriend, I live in a nice (cheap) apartment, and I DID go to law school.

Sorry for the ramble, but I guess what I would say to you is what people have been saying to me: be gentle with yourself. Be kind to yourself. And don't beat yourself up for choices you've already made. I'll bet that if you looked at your choices, you'd see that you did the best you could given the information you had at the time. And that's the most we can expect from ourselves or any body else.
 
Yves - it is so wild that you touched on something that I was thinking of -
I thought of someone -

It's crushing but just in the concepts that I read - I was given so much insight and humility.
Thanks Yves,

Peace to You - It's good to see you again,

Mark

peace
 
Yves,

I think that most of us would admit that we have made our own ample share of bad decisions, or choices if you like. As adults we are responsible for them.

But as survivors whose choices have been so drastically affected by devastated childhoods we also have to ask ourselves: "What do these choices/decisions say about me as a person?" We want to know if our doubts about our worth and self-image, feelings left with us by abuse, are justified, and what that means for us now.

This could get deeply philosophical very fast, and that would be interesting. But perhaps a more practical approach is more useful to us.

One thing I think we should remember is that the differences between one survivor who is further devastated in later childhood or adulthood, and another who is not, is in many cases just a matter of sheer good or bad fortune. It is not a matter of who was the better person.

An example of this, if I may, is Mike Church and myself. Mike has freely posted to us about his youth as a prostitute and heroin addict, and I respect him for his honesty; that can't be easy to talk about. I never had either of these experiences, but only because I was so damned lucky. At the age of 15, a year after my abuse ended, I was still entirely messed up and thought I was good only for abusive sex by adults who would hurt and humiliate me. I can honestly say I think I would have gone with anyone and done anything with him. But no one appeared; I was lucky.

The same with alcohol and drugs. I threw myself into both in a way I can now see was absolutely self-destructive. I would drop two tabs of acid when I knew one would already be wild, and then drink and smoke grass all through the trip. I would get so high I couldn't tell the difference between a street and a river or figure out whether the TV was on or off. But I didn't get into really addictive stuff like smack or crack. It wasn't around. If it had been available, I bet I would have used it. And somehow I didn't become an alcoholic. Again, I was just so lucky.

So I guess my point is that it is too easy to compare our lives with others and use the differences to dump all over ourselves. In fact, that is usually why we make the comparison: to validate our feelings of shame, guilt and worthlessness. Even when we know intellectually that these feelings are false, they are still easy feelings to surrender to.

Perhaps it would help us, then, to recall that so much of our pasts has been a matter of circumstance. Mike didn't choose prostitution and heroin addiction, just as I didn't choose to avoid them. In only slightly different circumstances I could have fallen in a second into the same hell that he endured. There is no moral difference between us. Our pasts do not show one of us to be a better person.

I think it is also useful to bear in mind that we cannot change what is past. If I wanted to do so I could spend the rest of my life lamenting things I have done that have hurt myself and others around me. But to what end? Who would benefit? No one. Which part of the past can I change? None of it.

We cannot rewind to the moment before it was too late (assuming there was such a "moment") and reclaim our past. What we can do is rebuild. What we can do is look at our pasts to recognize ways we can learn for our future. How can I avoid making that mistake again? Why do I feel this way today? Asking these kinds of questions allows us to be positive about ourselves and reject a lot of the crap that is just the burden of abuse anyway.

I'm not saying that we can deny responsibility for what we have done. That too is part of the past, and hey, where we got it wrong we got it wrong. Nor am I saying we should run away from our responsibilities or rationalize them into meaningless rubbish. Both of these strategies end in the same place, as you rightly say, Yves:

I've spent years and years running away from it but every time I look back to see how much distance I've made, it's right there, tripping me again........
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But survivors who act out (= almost all of us) have already paid heavily for it: addiction and sexual problems, lost opportunities, broken relationships, estrangement from loved ones and friends, whatever. Does it actually help us to add to the penalties?

So I guess I'm back to the point I ended with in my last post on this thread. The enormously empowering choice open to all of us is that of deciding to explore our pasts in order to learn for our futures, and to reclaim the opportunities that are still rightly ours.

Take care,
Larry
 
I have decided to erase this post. I have read all the posts in here and come with a few observations which are going from my experience. I agree with both Yves on not regreting the choice in the absence of an alternative, and with Larry's argument about the fortune that has guided a survivor's life.

My guess is that a professional help might assist in learning that I am not bad or guilty neither for my abuse nor for my choices. Still, how a person may become better for himself and for other people is not clear.

Alexey
 
This is a tremendous Thread.

I have come to the point in my life that I am (for the most part) not letting the past influence right now or the future.

To do this I have placed the anger where it belongs, forgiven myself for 1. blaming myself and 2 for making choices that did nothing to help me or my self esteem. The latter were as has been mentioned , prostitution, heroin addiction, acting out, alcoholism, rage at those I love, and a whole lot more. But I also recognize that while non of it helped me move forward it was my way of coping and by coping I stayed alive. And this despite three attempts not to. But there comes a time in all our lives when we have to move beyond coping towards becoming the well rounded person we were meant to be all along.
As has been said we must accept the reality of the past but we also must change our values, beliefs and feelings around that historical past.
And that includes moving from the what if , why me and if only questions. In my case, and I suspect in most others, we were in the wrong place at the wrong time and because of our lives seemed to be vulnerable.
 
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