Love

Love
R

russ-milwaukee

Registrant
Hello everyone:

I'm going through a very hard, yet revealing and interesting part of my recovery. I wanted to share it with you in response to a post by Josh1. In that post, Josh describes the complicated feelings that he is experiencing. I am very sure that we all have complicated feelings but as an incest abuse survivor I have just hit another one of those revelations that make me better understand me as a person:

I loved them and I still do nearly 30 years later.

Don't get me wrong. I have felt anger, rage, hate, fear, sexual identity confusion, depression, and worthlessness for 3 decades. But, I admitted to myself during my last T-session that I fell in love with them. It was how I handled what they were doing to me.

Then one day they simply dropped me. Abandoned. No longer needed. And that probably hurt worse than the rapes, the verbal abuse, and the coersion.

Love has the tendency to rip your soul out. Turn it inside out. Rough it up a bit. For me, my abusers hurt me and I turned it into love to survive. Then they ripped my soul out and dropped it on the floor by abandoning me.

When I said this to my T, he sat quiet. Listening. And I cried. Right there in his office -- I hate when I do that. It makes me feel small. I know that crying is a good thing, but it still makes me feel weak and small. I cried for 5 minutes. Uncontrollable sobbing.

Then my T kicked in and did his job. I am lucky. He is very intelligent, a specialist in male sexual abuse, and has perfect timing.

I was 8 years old. It was not my fault. I found a defense mechanism. I fell in love with them. How do you hate your family? Trust me, I hate them. But I still love them too.

Josh, the issues are complicated. Men have layers -- and those sexually abused have so many overlapping layers that there is no single image that describes us all.

How many of you relate to love in your abuse? How many of you understand that hate and love often go hand-in-hand in this process? I'm interested in hearing your views.

Russ
Milwaukee, WI
 
Russ,

Those feelings must be terrible things to reconcile. I am not an incest survivor and frankly I have no idea how I would even start on this one. I'm just glad that you are with a good T who can help you understand all this.

I don't recall loving my abuser, but after a time I went with him willingly, even though I was frightened of him and hated what he was doing to me. I think one part of the answer, Russ, is that after a time we lose sight of the fact that we deserve better than this. Part of our coping technique, part of the way we survive from one day to the next, is to conclude that the abuse is all we deserve. We figure we really are THAT unlovable and worthless.

When the abuser was chased off, I actually missed him. I still have that one to work on. I didn't love him, but I missed him. At the very least, that shows how messed up my self-image had become.

Much love,
Larry
 
Russ, I was only molested one time and I know that is enough but for some reason I have no attatchment or feeling for the man, I think it is because I did not have any kind of relationship with him at all, I just met him that day in the yard playing with his son and that night he molested me. I think the situations, male on male, male on female, incest, rape, all play a part in the way we react to the trauma. I think that repeated molestations and years of molestation does something to build an increased tendency to shape our sexuality in a more profound way. I have never liked men, however I have been attracted to getting a shemale off in porno world or the internet but that soon left me. Man there is so much to think about and I don't know if I have given you good feedback, I just know that the more I read the more I find out about others and it seems that the longer a person is abused, the age at the time of the abuse and so on has more to do with what happens to the person in adulthood. I am not sure if I am right about all of this it is just an observation. Either way it is all tragic. I am new here and I am not familiar with triggers and all so if I am writing things that are triggers for others would someone please let me know. I am not even sure I know when I trigger or know what my triggers are. I am fearful that I may not be posting right or what I say may cause others to feel bad and that is making it difficlut to continue writing.
 
Jake,

I just wanted to comment back on something you said this morning that I thought should be noticed:

despite all that, in the end they are the only people connected to me by blood.
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True enough, but could I suggest that there really isn't any reason for you to feel a sense of fealty to relatives who don't hold up their side of the relationship or who are positively toxic?

I have some relatives like that, and I wasted a lot of time and effort on them because, after all, they are "my blood". But finally I realized that this effort was doomed and that it was only going to produce frustration and emotional exhaustion for me.

So I figured what the hell and stopped making an effort. That doesn't mean I am angry at them: I know they just can't do it. I would be happy to discover otherwise, but the initiative will have to come from them.

I now insist on defining my "family" as my inner circle of safe people whom I trust absolutely. That includes a few people who are not my relatives at all. Never mind. They and I all have what we need. As for the others - their failing, their loss.

Much love,
Larry
 
Okay, Russ, you made me cry, too. You hit it right on the head. It was my father. I can't hate him. No one will ever know how hard I've tried to hate him. My little boy still equates those things with love. The emotions are so confusing. Yeah, I love him. I love him a lot. Will never understand why he didn't love me. And, yes, although I can't remember it all stopping, I have an empty feeling that must have come from that time. He became ill and couldn't do those things to me anymore. Hate him? No. The kid just wonders what was wrong with him that that was the way his daddy had to love him, and to a kid, any hugging is better than no hugging at all.

Bobby
 
Originally posted by roadrunner:

I now insist on defining my "family" as my inner circle of safe people whom I trust absolutely.
Much love,
Larry
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Must be nice, Larry. I wish I could trust people, hell just A person, enough to let them into my inner circle of safe people. My inner circle consists of one: me.

Sorry to hijak....
 
Bobby,

The kid just wonders what was wrong with him that that was the way his daddy had to love him, and to a kid, any hugging is better than no hugging at all.
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It was crucial that you should say that. Now it's out, so let's look at that.

What could possibly be "wrong" with a young boy that his father would respond to his needs by sexually abusing him? What boy deserves that? No one, of course. What was done to you was not love, it was the cruelest and most selfish violation possible of a child's innocent trust.

It was not your fault Bobby, it was entirely the fault of your father.

You are right: to a young boy "any hugging is better than no hugging at all". Absolutely right. But a boy, ANY boy, needs and deserves love, affection, and all the hugs he can soak up! Even if you thought the abuse was at least attention, the fact remains that it was your father's responsibility to set and keep to proper boundaries with his child; it was absolutely NOT your task to know about these things as a boy.

My friend, this is just my usual way - never one word where ten will suffice - of saying that the next time Little Bobby wonders about these things, Big Bobby, as the strong parent the child needs, can just assure him that he did nothing wrong. He really does need to hear this, over and over again, until he finally believes it.

Much love,
Larry
 
Tim,

I don't think your post is a hijack. The thread concerns love, and love has a lot to do with trust. If you love someone but don't trust them, the love cannot possible produce any meaningful relationship.

It is the most natural thing in the world for a survivor to feel he cannot trust anyone. Look at what happened to him. As a kid he trusted everyone and thought the world was safe for him, and look how that ended.

But you know, we all trust to some extent. The task now is to expand that ability to a level where we feel safe entrusting someone else with the most sensitive things about ourselves. And a lot of that ability doesn't have to do with other people, it is more about ourselves. As my great friend Morning Star taught me here, love has to start with ourselves; we cannot really love others, or trust them, if we cannot love ourselves.

I have found that to be so true bro. For example, for decades I was not able to admit even to myself that I had been abused as a boy. I felt guilty, ashamed and worthless, and I looked down on my body and everything I was doing in my life. Now I can face the world with more confidence and self-esteem, and armed with that, I can reach out to other people, trust them, and accept their support and love. I am starting out from a stronger base. When a conversation drifts onto the subject of abuse, I can even say I am a survivor and feel no shame about it.

I don't think it would be useful to get into how I made ths shift - in fact, I'm not sure I know! But my point is that it can and does happen. Stay on the healing path Tim, and it will happen to you as well.

Much love,
Larry
 
i have no problem hating my father ,but the little boy inside me has no conception of hate only unconditional love . poor kid
 
Thanks for you comments everyone. I hope we can continue talking about this. Today was a very hard day for me. In fact, the entire past week has been tough. I'm caught in repetition compulsion again -- I'm reliving an abuse event at least four times a day it seems and it is tearing me up. I'm in a nightmare phase again after nearly a year without them and having random flashbacks when I see similar-looking men on the bus/street/etc. I hate this.

Today was my weekly T-meeting. I told him "I'm turning myself inside out for you. Can you please turn me rightside out." He smiled and said -- you're doing that yourself. Just be calm, patient, and keep going. I hope he's right. I feel like a well-worn T-shirt that keeps getting put on one way, then the other.

Shadowkid and Bobby suggest in their messages the same key point that I started the thread with: as an incest abuse survivor I have recently realized that love and hate are blended layers. I'm waking up in cold sweats from horrible nightmares as I relive the rapes over and over -- yet I don't hate them. I have repulsion for them, but strangely, like shadowkid said -- i also have an unconditional love. "Poor kid" indeed shadowkid. I didn't ask for this. It isn't my fault.

Yet after 28 years I'm wired to them still. I told my T-man today that if my second abuser walked in the room today he would simply "own me". Does anyone else understand what I mean. A combination of fear, unconditional love, and a strong desire to be needed by him again would stop me in my tracks. And then, right there in front of my T-man I cried again. A 36 year old rough-and-tough man crying like a baby in front of another guy.

And he just let me sit there until the hydrant ran dry.

Abandoned and alone I remain.

Russ
Milwaukee, WI
 
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