emotional integrity

[roadrunner]

Now there is a headful! Emotional integrity. What the hell is he talking about?

I am talking about something that is hitting me really hard these days, and that is my inability to feel anything about my own abuse, at least nothing like I see others expressing. There are threads about anger, for example, and I can't remember how many times I wrote out a post, looked at it, and then deleted it. Why? I just don't feel any anger about my own abuse, and none against my abuser for hurting me. When I think about all the others he must have hurt after me, I am white hot with rage, but when I come back to what he did to me it all fades away. I just feel grief that I did not say anything that would have forced him to stop.

What is striking for me is how my Rock, my sister Cathie, takes all this. She tells me that I did nothing wrong and that there is no reason for me to think that my mother and father could have coped or helped me back in 1963. Similarly, it is not at all sure that my abuser would have been stopped and punished; he was an eminent man and an elder in our church. So I might have ended up exactly the same, and perhaps hurt even worse for being disbelieved. But when I look at how I see these things and at how others see them here, I feel that I just have no emotional integrity about any of this.

I feel this especially when I look at how two close friends here post and react to things. Their feelings are right up front where they should be. I appreciate that, but I just don't feel any of that myself. As I said, I immediately get emotionally engaged when I look at others, but for myself - nada.

What is this? Just a stage? Am I still in denial somehow? Am I thinking about things so as to avoid facing them? I have no idea.

Moment of truth. Will I be able to send this post. I better just do it instead of checking it and thinking about it.

Larry

 

Hello Larry!

I think what you are experiencing is normal, as normal as normal gets when it comes to CSA. One way of coping is to distance oneself emotionally from the experience. I wish I could pull up the precise quote from Mike Lew's book ("Victims No Longer") but that's my source for what I am saying. Therefore, part of the healing process is to get fired up, to reconnect to that little boy who is still hurting, to once more assume those feelings that you managed to push away.

Then why am I so darn fired up? Why do I post with such passion? Look back to May when I first started posting. You will see that I was so into denial back then that I had to ask the question if "fondling" counted as abuse. Like somehow I imagined my older brother got a free pass if he just stuck his hand down my undershorts and turned my private parts into his own playground.

Well, now I know he did much more than that. Every day it seems I struggle with more sickening memories that are surfacing. Oh, Larry! There are horrible things I am just now discovering, things so grotesque that I haven't even found the courage to share them with people I consider close friends, people like you.

That, I think, is the difference in my case. For most of my 50 years, I only had a couple of snapshot memories that were fuzzy at best. I could pretend for most of those 50 years that nothing happened. Or if it happened, it was "child's play."

You, on the other hand, have been living with some of these scenes playing over and over again in your head. Which is worse? Which is more painful? I honestly can't say. Is it more disgusting to pretend to have a normal life and then suddenly have the evidence confront you all at once, as in my case? Or is it more horrendous to live with this knowledge since you were 11? I don't konw, Larry. But my way of coping was to block it out. Your way of coping was to shut down emotionally. Either way, we did what we had to in order survive.

Let me repeat that: WE DID WHAT WE HAD TO IN ORDER TO SURVIVE!

So if I sound more passionate about my abuse, keep in mind where I was at just a couple of months or so ago. So much did I first minimize what happened to me that I told the therapist, "I don't really want to deal with that CSA stuff, just treat me for PTSD and the stalking incident and I'll be fine."

Oh, boy! What a cruel joke that seems now. I had no idea what I was going to find when I started digging around in the backyard of my mind. So that's the difference Larry. All along you knew where the bodies were buried. I didn't even know the bodies existed let alone where to find them.

So for me, it's a horror story that is just beginning. And I take my hat off to you guys who have been living with those sick movies for many decades. Does this make sense, bro?

Just remember: YOU ARE NOT TO BLAME. I'M NOT TO BLAME. NO ONE IS TO BLAME FOR WHAT HAPPENED OR FOR WHAT THEY DID TO GET TO THIS POINT.

End of soap box!

Take care,

Jasper

P.S. Doesn't anyone ever check their e-mail?

 

[reality2k4]

Larry, how about permagrief, or rather lack of being able to understand the grief that one is going through.

I never told about what happened for 41 years, not a soul, and now I seem to be telling loads of people on the outside, with mixed responses.

It is a bit like saying, so what! It cant have been so bad, but when I really explain it to them, they see it in a different sphere.

While talking about it is good, it sure hurts emotionally, because past things emerge, that were the cause of my problems.

Sometimes I numb my mind, so I dont feel emotions, either good or bad, but I have to do it, to stop this hurt, and deal with it sometime else.

I think you need to find a therapist who has experience in this field, and work out something with them, because it may be, that because of your job, you are holding stuff back.

Just my thoughts on it,

ste

 

[Leosha]

Larry,

everyone reconnects with their feelings and emotions in their own timing and their own pace. A friend of mine, he still does not feel anger about his abuse. Because he doesn't want to. And truly, for him, perhaps it doesn't exist, or exists in such a small amount that it is not something he HAS to deal with. That is him. Me? I did not truly start feeling any anger of the abuse, TOWARD those who abused me, for months after starting to deal with it. I was assaulted again during that time, and still felt no anger of it. It was not what I was capable of at the time. Now I can feel it, and feel it appropriately, toward the right people, and not myself.

It takes some people time to get emotions, any emotions, 'right up front' where you feel they should be. Everyone has a different time schedule, everyone goes at their pace. Do not judge how you are at present against how someone else is. You are doing fine.

Leosha