something i want to share

something i want to share
J

jaketk

Registrant
i only have one female cousin. and right now she's angry with her older brother, my brother, and me. i came home and she said we needed to talk. she unloaded this bombshell that she considers us rapists for what we did to her. i understand that we hurt her. i know that she can't have children because of the abuse. and i've always felt responsible for what happened to her. but when she said this, i just didn't expect it.

i grew up watching my cousin k getting raped virtually everyday by her father. i could hear her crying in pain because that was how he liked it. her brother, and my brother and i tried to protect her as much as possible. we took a lot of punishments for her, a lot of rapes for her. her father wasn't all that interested in boys, so he'd ramble on about having to do it with one of us instead of her.

they, my uncles, mainly her father, started making us rape her when i was about 8 or 9. it was one of us at a time, with my uncles there, and they'd take turns with her, and make me take a turn. i'd have to make her cry, which wasn't that hard because she was already crying. then i'd have to get into, i'd have to enjoy it. so i would just do what they did. i'd hit her, punch her to be more accurate. i would call her every name i could think of and i'd try my hardest to do it as roughly as i could so that it was believable. i felt so low for doing it, for getting into it. i'd play along so well that i was sure i was actually causing real damage.

i know that she has no trust of men. that much i've known since i was a kid. and i know after the rapes, she wanted nothing to do with me. i just recently found out that her brother and my brother both had to do the same things. it's kind of weird, because apparently her brother did it long before i did, but when he found out i did it to her, we were still kids, and we fought, and he kicked my a**.

i realize that what i did was wrong, and there's really no excuse for it. i know i'm responsible for my own actions. i haven't touched her since i left that house, and that was back when i was 14. i never wanted to hurt her, and i never forced myself on her outside of what my uncles had us do. i've always given her the space she wants. i've tried to be there for her without imposing myself on her. it's very difficult, but i have never pushed her off or blamed her for anything i had to go thru, even when it was a direct result of something she did. we were kids, but more importantly, i'm older, and it's my responsibility to protect her.

i completely understand her anger, and i respect that. despite how much it hurts, i'm not angry at k. it just makes me rethink many of the things i might have said to make her reach this point.

anyway, i just needed to get this down.

jake
 
Hi Jake,

So sorry for you and her.

I kind of understand what you are saying. My penpal (a girl) went through some similiar stuff to your female cousin.

When her dad would want some other entainment, he would invite neighbors over, sometimes and even "made" the sisters do the younger brothers.

I think one of my step-cousins had similar stuff, too. That was the "branch" of the family where my bad stuff came from.

(the rest of this is just my opinion)

While it is kind of you to be compassionate for her, it will probably be hard to help directly.

Keep fairly distant except for when you might be of help, and only then under the direction of a COMPETENT therapist. (many T's cannot handle this type of stuff)

Maybe let her know about on-line help, but do not push it -- you are not trusted in her world.
(probably twhj.com would be a good site)

If you have extra money, maybe help (and get the rest of the guys, also) with paying for therapy for her.

Best to you, and get yourself some good help, too

Sunshine
 
Hi Jake,

I, too, am so sorry for you, your cousin, and the other abused children in your family. What a terrible way to spend childhood. I hope it helped you some to get that down on "paper". It sounds like you have suffered with this for a long time. Sounds like you are feeling really ashamed. Even though you were technically in an offender role with your female cousin, you must make a conscious effort to remember that you were forced to do this by abusive adults who had power over you. You were just as much a victim in this as she was. Maybe even more so because of the double mindfuck. She was obviously victimized while you were made to play the perpetrator for the sick pleasure of others, making your victimization more covert. Makes what happened to you harder to see as victimization at first and harder to deal with. You are naturally going to be plagued by thoughts like "I should have done something" but you were just a little boy when this started. It was not your responsibility to protect her, you were a kid, too. It was her parents responsibility and they failed miserably. What, exactly, is a nine year old or a fourteen year old for that matter, supposed to do in such a situation. You can't run away. You can't fight back. If you refuse, even worse things might happen to you. If you tell someone, all hell will break loose and who knows what will happen but it will probably be worse than the hell you are already in. Perps know this and thats why they get away with it. So please do not ever put yourself anywhere near the same category as your uncle(s) or father.

My heart goes out to you and your cousin tonight.

Roy
 
Its not your fault. When some nut comes along and says release this criminal from jail or im gonna blow up a bunch of people, you know that you cant release that person, you know who is responsible for what happens.

You were being tortured. I mean that in the most literal sense you can imagine. If you did not do as asked you would have been beaton and raped until you did. Through all of what happened, you did your best to protect your sister. She is angry, she cant see that you had no choice. But you were 9 years old when it started. What could you have possibly done? I know we all believe in hopeless causes here, but we also must learn to know when to say we did what we had to do to survive. Dont blame yourself, because that is exactely what this sickness wants. To trap you into guilt and pain and keep you from seeing who is responsible and making lasting change. Most of us dont have the power to bring our abusers to justice. We certainly did not have the power to stop what was happening. But we can not blame ourselves, and we can not deny the truth, or we are failing ourselves, and for you, the one you were forced to hurt. It may be a long time before you can let go of that guilt, but remember, for all of us, that it was not your fault.

I hope good things come to you, and your sister.
 
Jake

Add this to the list of lies...
i realize that what i did was wrong, and theres really no excuse for it. i know im responsible for my own actions.
Click to expand...
IT WAS NOT YOUR FAULT JAKE

NEVER AT ANY TIME.

be strong
Lloydy
 
i would never impose myself in any way on my cousin. i've always tried not to get into her comfort zone. i haven't thought of myself as imposing, though it's possible she might have thought i was being so. the most i've ever done it get close enough for her to be able to hear me talk in a lowered voice. mostly i'd ask how she felt, if therapy was going good, that's all. maybe it's that i'm no longer trusted by her that makes this hurt so much. i could understand it if she'd expressed these feelings before. i thought we were doing better because she talked to us on her own. i guess it was mistaken.

i can't help but feel i'm no better than my uncles and father. i mean, i got into it. i enjoyed hurting her. and afterwards, there wasn't anything i could say except for "sorry' and "don't cry'. she wouldn't let me get close to her until hours later. i always felt guilty. and i felt worse knowing that she was in pain because of me. looking back on it, there were dozens of things i could have done. true, none would have helped much, but i could have done them.

there are so many things that i, we, my older cousin and brother, never told her. since last night, we've been trying to decide whether or not to tell her. i think that we shouldn't, because she'll think we're just trying to shift the guilt to someone else. she only saw a few times when we were punished for not complying. and last night she made it clear that our attempts to protect her from father weren't very good. she doesn't know about the beatings, the rapes, none of the stuff we let them do to us because we were used to it. i thought we did a good job of protecting her. she isn't as scarred up as we are. i know she suffered. there were plenty of times when none of us were in the house to help her, but when we were, we did our best. and now it's like all that we went thru was for nothing. and it only adds to what i already feel about myself, and now i'm wondering what good would it do to tell her any of this.

she wants us to go with her to her therapy session on thursday. i want to, but then i think i know what's coming, and i don't know if i can handle that. i got no sleep last night. i almost broke down in tears, it hurts that much.

and this morning, she behaved like nothing had happened. she was oblivious to what she'd said. she got up and left out with us, walked with us, waited for train and went to school, with us right there, no more than three feet away. i don't understand that at all. she's her same self, nothing's changed for her.

i don't know anymore…

jake
 
i realize that i was made to do the things i did. i would never have done them otherwise. it's just that i thought i was helping her. there was so much that i took that she never had to go thru because of that. my brother, my cousin, we tried our best to protect her and my youngest brother and my youngest cousin. my uncle tried to protect us. before he killed himself he said he wished he'd done more, but i thin he did everything he could. i know the same applies to the rest of us. yeah, there was more we could have done, more we could have taken, but for whatever reasons, we didn't. but we tried. you know? it's not like we just sat there and let her father hurt her and did nothing. we did try to help. but they way she came at us, it was like we did nothing. like she took it all by herself.

i don't think it really has anything to do with any of us, just her making sense of what happened. even though i blame myself for lots of things, there were times i did my best not to give in. i took a lot for her, my brothers, my cousins, not because i could handle it, but i'd rather it be done to me than her. there were a few times when she tried to do the same, but we wouldn't let her.

i completely understand it's her stuff. i've never pushed it further than that.

we're going to go the therapy session. i want to hear more clearly what she feels and what she thinks.

i don't know if i can tell her about what we went thru. i don't want her to think we're blaming her, and i don't want to shift focus from her to us. this is about her, like you said, and i want to keep it that way.

i spoke it over with my father, and he said pretty much the same thing you did, john. it feels good to know people care, but i still feel like crap.

thanks again for listening.

jake
 
Jake,

[john] safe hugs jake, yeah, it is a bitter pill to swallow, i wish i had something to make it go down easier, i am sorry your having to deal with this stuff, its all tough and ugly stuff no question, i just know you did the best you could every step of the way, and you have no right to second guess yourself now.

your right, it is about her, and yeah, you can go and you can help her fill in some of the blanks and you can tell her what you remember as part of her healing, and it wont have anything to do with shifting blame or trying to change her mind.

your allright jake, yeah, your one of the good guys....

hugs,

John
 
Jake

i dont think it really has anything to do with any of us, just her making sense of what happened.
Click to expand...
Does this sound familiar ? not just because you wrote it about what you think your cousin is thinking.
What it describes is the confusion all survivors feel, it's exactly the same confusion you feel about your own abuse.
Remember all the distorted thinking you've done before now ? I bet you've thought "it was my fault, I asked for it" we all think that shit because that's what they made us think.

It's just as John says, your putting your adult thinking onto a childs situation - and it doesn't fit. You can't apply your decent adult thinking to the horror you experienced as a kid and make any sense of it. What happened was outside all normality and defies understanding even as an adult. NOBODY could expect a bunch of kids to deal with it in any way other than survival.

You all survived the best way you possibly could, you have no guilt, none of you kids has any guilt.
I bet if you had a time machine and went back you would see nothing but fear in all your eyes, that kind of fear is too much for any child to deal with.

I would be tempted to tell your cousins therapist about your side of the events alone so he could judge whether she can handle it. But that's a tricky deal with her maybe thinking you're going behind her back to make excuses.

Hell it's a tough call Jake, but you must make it easier on yourself by believing you did what you had to do to survive.

It wasn't your fault Jake.

Be strong
Lloydy
 
Jake:

Not a lot to add except to affirm what the other guys have been saying, and with them to wish you well, along with k, as well as your older cousin & brother.

It seems k wants to have a relationship with you of some kind, at least enuf to want you to come to the T with her, even tho this may be just to dump on you & blame you--or it may not be that. Maybe she wants you to explain or just tell her about things more, maybe in the safer environs of the T's office.

I don't see how by telling her the truth you would be shifting any blame to her. You'd be putting the blame where it belongs--with the adults who abused you & made you do abusive things to one another--which is exactly what happened.

Youwere not being abusive.Youdid not want to hurt k, and you did not. You were an instrument in the hands of evil adults, used by them to abuse her. In my opinion, you no more abused her than if you had been a hammer they used to beat her. The hammer didn't abuse, the people wielding it did. Period. That may be hard for her to understand but its the truth. Maybe telling her of the stuff you took at times for her would be helpful. I dunno.

Incest Survivors Anonymous (ISA) makes it clear in their literature that a child in any forced or coerced to perform abusive acts on someone else is not considered a perp but a victim, and a survivor.

No Jake, you didn't enjoy it. As you said in your first post here, you were made to enjoy it. You "got into it" becuz you had to. Resisting would only have made it worse on you and her.

If you experienced any good physical or sexual feelings in what you did, that's a matter of natural physiology & body function, not what you wanted. If you experienced any psychological pleasure in what you did, it's becuz you were trained, compelled, brainwashed to do so. You had no more control than she did.

Damn I hurt for what you, all of you, went thru & are going thru. :( It would be a shame if ya'll couldn't all get together becuz it seems like you could all really help each other. But if that's too much for her, or for you to handle, so be it. I just hope you'll be able to work things for the best for you all given the horrors you've all been thru.

It sounds to me as tho you are being very respectful of k and trying to offer help the best you can. You're doing what you can now, just as you did then.

Jake, you said even your uncle, however old he was, could only do so much to help. And he ended up committing suicide. What more could you as a child have done? :confused:

You survived. She survived. That's all you could do, and that's what you did!

Take care Jake

Wuame
 
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