Recovering from abuse – confessing

So this post follows on from yesterday’s post “Recovering from abuse – Remembering”

I first told an adult that I had been 'abused' during a formal confession to a priest, prior to being Confirmed. I didn't consider it to be abuse - I confessed it as consensual sex, even though I had been so young. I went to a High Anglo-Catholic church and we were told that if we had any 'Technicolor sins’ we needed to go to formal confession. Boy did I have some Technicolor sins.

Kneeling beside the priest I confessed... it was agonising to spit out the words. The liturgy was set, but he seemed to stray from it for a second. Four extra words were added:

‘It wasn’t your fault’.

‘How ridiculous, I thought. This man knows nothing about sin, and he’s a priest!' I was a precocious thirteen year old!’

Fifteen years later I was reading a book by Dan Allender called ‘The Wounded Heart’. It is subtitled ‘Hope for Adult Victims of Childhood Sexual Abuse’:

Now it is interesting that I was reading this book… because I hadn’t been abused.. no no no… other people had been abused. Me? Oh I’d just had sex when I was young – but I had consented to it… I was completely responsible. Completely in control. It was my fault entirely, and I had done it because I was bad and evil beyond any other human being that had ever lived. (With the possible exception of Genghis Khan)

The first chapter of the book was like dropping a nuclear bomb on the landscape of my worldview, it had such a cataclysmic impact on me – the chapter is entitled “The reality of a war – facing the battle”. It is only now that I understand the title of the chapter – the war would be bloody but it was a reality and the battles needed to be faced.

Apparently, I read, adult survivors of childhood sexual abuse deny that they have been abused… so the book told me...  'Mmmm', I thought, shifting uneasily. They deny it because they suspect their memories – Check. They deny it because it is sexual so did they invite it or enjoy it? – Check. They deny it because whatever they do, they don’t want to explore it any further. Check.

And, of course, the greatest reason of all for me to deny it was that it gave me control. When I was small something happened that was terrifying, repeatedly. If I told myself it was because I was bad then I could control it – I was being punished for being bad... so all I had to do was become better, quieter, more obedient, then it would stop. The possibility that this event would happen over and over and there was nothing I could do about it would have crushed me.

Falteringly, I read the first chapter and then went backwards and forwards over the definitions of sexual abuse, examining each word, trying to find wriggle room, or the loop hope that would enable me to deny that I had been abused. Perhaps I went over the chapter for an hour. I had the workbook that went with the book, and eventually managed to wring out some feint letters that spelled the words ‘I have been abused’.

That was the beginning of the hardest journey I have made so far.

PS I liked Chris Rea as a teenager – can you tell?