Hi, jboogz -
It is a difficult step to take - and requires a fair amount of courage. You have my respect for doing what you did.
You have asked about book recommendations. I have read a few, but the one that really resonated was
Beyond Betrayal by Richard B Gartner, PhD. It is a very user-oriented read. Many here consider the "bible" to be Mike Lew's
Victims No Longer, which I have also read.
Victims joins the list of reads that come across rather dry and almost dissertation-like.
Beyond Betrayal, on the other hand, impressed me as more personal. I really felt that in reading
Beyond Betrayal, the words brought me warmly into the conversation rather than talking
at me - and it addressed my feelings as well as my questions. It was also amazingly thorough - almost to the point of anticipating the questions that formed in my head while reading - and answering them. That's good writing - and I didn't get that from any of the other books.
Another one - albeit fiction - is
Touched by Scott Campbell. So this one I have to qualify. Robbie - the victim in the story - was
me in so many ways - in fact it was quite uncanny. Our ages, who we were physically, emotionally, our perfect middle class families that had no clue, the grooming, the way we processed what was happening to us, the incredible struggle between knowing it was wrong but unable to deal with the emotional and sexual pulls of an older person who knew how to push the buttons, the incredible guilt and shame, the way we packaged the memories as we got older and tried to forget them, and the way we processed those memories as adults when something happened that made us finally face them - it was so spot on. There was a moment in the book where Robbie does something that ratchets up an entirely new dimension of shame. He actually approaches his abuser, unasked. He is that well trained, that thoroughly groomed. And that one section almost reduced me to tears. So... I wasn't the only one, after all. There was a boy just like me - even though he was not real - that was at the time the only MeToo I had. Reading that book marked the first time I did not feel alone in my shame - like a freak. Of course, now everyone has MeToo's. But back then - for me - there was nobody.
So the caveat is that
Touched may not be anything
you can relate to. But don't dismiss well-written fiction, or even the poetry on this site - as resources that bring emotional resonance. You don't get that as much from clinical self-help reads, and in my experience drawing emotional connections with good literature was a crucial component that paved the way for a deeper journey. I derived some very real dividends from reading that book. The author divided it into different sections, getting into the heads of not only the victim but the parents and the perpetrator. So it was quite eye-opening, and ultimately informed me to open my eyes to all the players in my own abuse. I finally started to understand how sick my abuser really was - and that helped me to finally appreciate the enormity of what I was up against. It helped to lessen my self-blame for being weak, for acquiescing. And it opened the door to forgiveness, opening my mind to the possibility that my parents, who I once considered clueless to a fault, were in a real sense victims as well (my abuser went through them to get to me - and in a very real sense he groomed them to get to me). The funny thing is that when you don't look beyond yourself, you build stories of everyone without really knowing them. Those stories can be sad ones. Or they can be angry ones. And that anger can feel so real that you start to believe your stories are real. But what we imagine to be true is not always true. I happened to be very fortunate to find a book - albeit fiction - that gave me some scaffold about which to build my voice and the direction of my healing.
So I know you were probably expecting a book of advice and counselling, but not a book of fiction. I gave you both. For me, they were helpful in different ways.
