Disclaimer: I have no idea what came before the quoted post, and I don't laugh at people (only with them).
Was being sexually assaulted really that bad? If so, why didn't you object loudly enough for someone to stop it? If not, then why are you letting it define your life? Grief counseling actually increases suicide rates, you know (I cannot attest to the veracity of that particular statistic, but I have no argument with it).
I don't do grief counseling. Don't know what it is.
This is going to be very long, but if you can maintain your stance after reading it all, then I will know to avoid you in the future.
TW for other victims/survivors of CSA, and adult victims of sexual assault/rape. I will be including enough detail in this that if you will be triggered by it I must strongly suggest not reading it. However if you can, and you wish to know that there are people who believe you about your experiences, then it may be worthwhile.
Do you really think I had the ability as a child to prevent myself from being raped repeatedly?
Yeah, being sexually assaulted and abused is really that bad. There is a reason especially that people who experience parental incest are fucked up.
The reason it fucks you up is because it completely changes how your brain works. It's hard not to dwell on something when you get daily reminders of it.
When I get changed, I feel exposed. I feel like I did when I had that happen to me when I was going.
I wake up multiple times throughout the night screaming and moaning. When I lie on the bed, I can literally feel what happened to me happening again. It's been encoded on to my DNA. I become immediately fearful that my father will break down my front door and will come into my room and do what he always did.
I'm terrified of him because he told me if I told anyone that he would kill me, that's if I didn't get into trouble. He said no one would ever believe me, and everyone would tell me I was disgusting and dirty and that I wanted it, and I consented.
I told him every day that he did it, that I wanted him to stop. When he would still do it, there were times I went straight to my GP and I would be shaking from head to toe. I begged my dad to stop. On Christmas, 2016 when he groped my ass I spun around, hit his hands away, and I screamed in his face to never fucking do it ever again.
He told me that he is allowed to do that because that's just 'how he showed he loved me'
I begged him to stop the sexualised comments. And I bought myself a new lock which I put on the INSIDE of my bedroom door, since the one he installed for me was on the OUTSIDER (its almost like he is a creep)
I told him, to stop telling people how my FOURTEEN year old German exchange student had 'a massive rack, good for playing around with' as if he wasn't a 55 year old man saying that about a fucking CHILD.
I told him that I did not want to do the things that he made me do, but he told me I had to because that's how children show that they love their parents. I told him I didn't like it, it made me feel weird, uncomfortable, gross, and yucky.
He has ruined my fucking life dude. I am so glad that you think being sexually assaulted by a parent isn't bad, as if it's something one should look forward to. All I lived through for 20 years of my life was being endlessly violated and never feeling safe in his presence.
What part of being sexually assaulted would be nice? It's sexual assault. By definition, it is without consent.
The last time he did it to me, was my 27th birthday. We were at a nice Italian restaurant. My mum sat on my left of the square table, my brother say opposite me, and sperm donor sat on my right. He 'accidentally' spilled water, which went on my thick chinos and didn't cause an issue anyway. So what does he immediately do? Grab a very thin napkin, and proceeded to fully cop a decent 30-60 second feel of my genitals while my mother and brother discussed the menu.
There is no part of me which enjoys these repeated assaults, rapes, and the fact that I have been so effectively groomed that I told my behaviour support practitioner for therapy for my self harm related to this, that he only 'attemted' to fondle my crotch because I hit his arms away. I wanted Tom to think I defended myself. Cause otherwise I was afraid that he, like you, would make some kind of absurd statement that a victim/survivor of prolonged child sexual abuse would not be so effectively groomed and controlled that they have no ability to fight back.
When one of my friends tapped my ass one time, I spun round, grabbed his shirt, and almost punched him in the face and said 'dont you fucking do that cunt'
When the guys from lacrosse would hug my shoulder I would spin around, and frantically escape from them, kicking, biting, punching. But they would eventually subdue me and at that point I would go from shouting at them to 'fuck off and let me go' to them seeing me switch and then cry in front of everyone begging the person to let me go and not hurt me like they did the last time.
By the end, I would walk towards my sperm donors office to see my brother and mother and I would brainstorm ways in which I could avoid him groping me this right? Maybe if I only stood in the door way. Maybe if I sat down immediately, he wouldn't do it. Maybe if I didn't let him walk past me, he wouldn't do it.
It never worked. First, I would stop going to see him out of anger for a couple of months. But then my mum (to whom he is still married) would become sad at me distancing myself. So I would come over, terrified but hoping he has changed. And then he wouldn't do it that time! So I would tell the rehab psychologist who gave me free trauma sessions that my dad had finally changed and I was going to be fine. I'd thank him for his help, and I'd stop going. Then, after a couple weeks, or a month, I would walk into his office before the main group, shaking and dissociated. He would ask what happened the first times this happened, but eventually after this went on long enough, as soon as he saw me he would bring me into his office and go 'he started doing it again?'
One time, when I had to see my parents and go to their house which is so triggering that I can't even accept Christmas gifts presented as such from people, he asked what my strategy was and I just confidently went 'oh for seeing my dad? Well, see I'm trying something which seemed to work before from now on. I'm just gonna pretend he isn't doing it.'
After a month of missing meetings he just asked 'so how's that strategy working for you? From what I can guess not only is he still doing it but now you can't pretend he doesn't like you could before.
So here's the thing.
I was a pre-school child when I got raped. Do you think I should have done something to prevent my mid thirties sperm donor from doing that when he told me that I couldn't move and has to stay quiet or he would kill me? And that if I ever said anything to anyone, both me and him would go to jail, that's if anyone believed me and didn't just think I was disgusting.
I was 12 when he made me do other stuff. I told him I didn't want to, I said it made me feel weird and gross. I begged him not to make me do it, then he said he wouldn't make me, but that I wasn't what he wanted me to be (being gender non conforming) which made him upset, and that if I wanted to fix that I could do what I asked and then he would be proud of me, because it would show him I loved him. I have the most shame about this one, and I already think that I should have done more about it. You know, I was 12 - maybe I should have used my special forces combat training to protect myself, or pulled a Glock out from behind my back. The thing that you won't ever understand is that he was also incredibly verbally abusive to me and my brother at home, and at times physically, so I knew how mad he would get if I didn't do it. And the shitty thing is, he used my love for my dad against me, because the reason I did it was that I wanted him to tell me that he loved me, since he never really did. And then after, he said that I wasn't allowed to tell anyone or him and me would get into trouble again, and that again, people wouldn't believe me.
The sexual assaults started as a teenager. I relentlessly asked him not to do it but he told me over and over again, that he was allowed to because he was my father and he was just showing me that he loved me. You can imagine that now hearing the term 'I love you' can be triggering, and there was a long period of time where I couldn't allow friends to say that to me.
And again, when I was an adult I yelled at him to not do it, in front of THIRTY people. Not ONE person defended me, so I believed that I was alone. No one listened to me when I was a kid and told someone about what he did to me, the single time I did it, so I truly believed that people would see me as a liar my entire laugh.
When he would bust into my room I would run and slam the door shut again and yell at him not to perve on me.
You seem to be mistaking sexual actions which are consenting with those which are not. Not consentual sexual activities are not pleasant in the slightest, because your power, control, and your ability to be safe, in my case, are stolen from you.
Because of what he did to me, I still live with the trauma because he twisted how I thought about the world. I was a child, and my dad had done something to me which made me feel really bad, really gross, really weird, disgusting, and dirty. I felt like I was poisoned. If I touched another person, the sickness he put into me would spread. I believed him when he told me that no one would believe me, until I met someone who I thought would, and they didn't because they had met him and trusted him. They told me to stop making lies up about your dad. And because it was so ongoing, the issue became this - children need to be able to depend on their parents for not only safety but survival. Clearly, if I accepted what he had done to me being his fault, he would no longer be able to protect me. So I blamed myself. And I also figured that what happened to me was a really bad thing. And kids aren't that smart, see? To 5 year old me, good things happened to good people, and bad things happened to bad people.
What happened to me was very very bad. Possibly the worst thing that can happen to a child. So I was very very bad. And I still think this is true. No matter how much evidence to the contrary my brain, friends, and carers provide me with, all it takes is remembering what he did to me and that he won't ever accept that what he did was wrong, that he was 'only showing that he loved me' and he used my queerness and gender non conforming identity against me so that I would become one of the 56% of transexual people who report sexual abuse by a parent before the age of 13.
And you know, I struggled so much with telling people he still abused me as an adult. But after I yelled at him in front of everyone and no one helped me? Not even cousins to offer their support?
I realised there was nothing I could do about it, and it was inevitable. I gave up.
You have probably heard of the terms fight/flight/freeze/fawn? There is another stage, called collapse. It's what happens when an animal (or human) has been conditioned to experience horrific events so often that they simply do not only not fight back, but they accept the situation as their reality. Due to his position as my parent, I had a trauma bond with him.
Furthermore, I was, and remain, financially dependant on him, even though we didn't speak for a year, because he remains married to my mother.
Here's the real kicker. Without mums help with money? Homelessness. No psychologist for trauma. No psychiatrist for my psychotic bipolar. No financial help with my transition (and before you ask, no. Neither my mum, my brother, nor myself can figure out why he was happy to pay for that but he did what he did. He does still misgender me though, if that tells you anything. And unlike my mum who tells me how proud she is of me, him and I have an agreement not to talk about that. He didn't even use my chosen, legal name in his phone for 9 years). Without being able to transition, I would have killed myself.
I would like to ask you a question of your own, since I can only assume that you have never experienced any form of sexual violence, and if you have, you have seriously twisted it in your head as something pleasurable and maybe even your fault. And if that has been your experience I would truly urge you to seek help for that trauma because denying that something is traumatic only leads to more suffering.
But if I were to have mentioned the incidents where my father stormed into mine and my brother's room when we were 6 and 8 because we 'stayed up too late talking' and threatened to beat the shit out of us if we didn't immediately shut up, storm back out, slam the hallway door so loudly that the entire window in the frame shattered before then threatening my mum, and driving off in the car for an undefined amount of time as being something 'not that bad'? Should I have objected loudly, as a 6 year old child scared and crying in bed, who could hear his mother crying in the kitchen, terrified, at the fact that whenever he came back, he would proceed to shout at us again? And maybe this time would be when he finally beat us. He would always come back see, and sometimes he left us alone, but his favourite thing to do was come back in and yell at us that we weren't allowed to leave our rooms all night, for any purpose.
And when, in the morning, he would come in to see me and my brother both sleeping on the carpet because we had both pissed the bed, he would order us to strip off and wait in the bathroom while he took out our mattresses. Then, after ordering us both under the shower, he would blast us with freezing water and smirk and laugh at us as we cried and cried and begged him to stop. He would stop, and we would thank him, only for him to yell at us for pissing the bed and hit us with the water for another 20 min. Then he would call us disgusting and tell us to get dressed for school and stop crying because it pissed him off.
What about when he got mad at me for something he broke, pushed me against the wall and choked me, before punching the wall against my head until I pissed myself out of fear. I honestly think I didn't live in perpetual fear that this incident would be the time he actually hit me, that I probably wouldn't have pissed myself. Should I have thought that wasn't so bad? I mean being choked out by your dad then having him cause you so much fear that he is going to punch you in the face isn't really that bad.
And when he got pissed at me for hurting my knee so badly I couldn't walk so I was maybe gonna miss out on a soccer tournament him and mum already paid for, one where I would represent my state? He had a creative punishment for that one. Didn't take me to the physio, and didn't give me any crutches. I walked (lol, walked. No, I hopped intially then limped) around my school until the school asked what was wrong. I explained, and they gave me crutches to use at school. But I wasn't allowed to take them home. So I had to get 2km to and from school on foot.
And the times he literally ignored me for weeks? Well, at least he ignored me. But he also wouldn't let me eat anything but 2 minute noodles. I suppose I'm at least thankful that I fucking love 2 minute noodles.
The time I called him a hypocrite in front of a friend when he was criticising my game I just played? Threw my sandwich at my feet and told me to find my own way home. A 45 min drive away. I was 14, with no phone, no bus ticket, no money. The coach had to bring me home.
Or maybe his whole deal where he hated how much I cried and so he deliberately said awful things about me to 'toughen me up' like calling me a mistake, or just dumping me on the side of the freeway and coming back to check if I stopped crying. If I was crying, he left again. Eventually I just stopped crying. What was the point, anyway. Plus, at least now when I got bullied at school I could just go 'ha, you can't make me cry, my dad is much meaner than you, he calls me a mistake or leaves me places for hours. What are you gonna do? Tell me I smell?'
Would your reply to me about those instances of abuse be asking if it were really that bad? Being almost punched the head like that? Yelled at? Put in a situation where I repeatedly pissed my bed and was punished with ice cold showers? Bullied so relentlessly I have lost the ability to cry? Would you sit there and tell me I would have done more to stop it? That I would have, if I actually didn't like it?
Or is it just victims of sexual violence that you blame for their own trauma?
I could go on and on. And I have my doubts that you'll read this. You probably don't care to. It would be nice to have someone who blamed a survivor of parental incest (which like... Dude, that is such a bad look. I'm less offended that you said it, more in awe that you would put even your screen name to that statement). Was being sexually assaulted by your own father really that bad?' Yes, yes it was. 'Why didn't you say anything?' Because he has abused me so severely I am terrified of him. 'Why didn't you fight back?' You mean when I was a literal child? I would assume something to do with me being a child. I may be wrong though. You're right, maybe I could have used my enormous muscles to push off the 110kg man who was abusing me. And abusing my trust - I feel like you're missing a lot of that. I *trusted* him. I *wanted* to still have my dad. I was *desperate* for him to just stop one day and I could forget about it, but it never did. It continued. I cannot remember a period of my live from my earliest memories until I was 27 that was not filled with some kind of abuse. In fact even until presently, at 28, where he can just snap his fingers and I could be homeless.
No, the reason I wrote all this out (and in fact, the reason I can is that I've done extensive trauma therapy and depending on the day, I know that I shouldn't feel ashamed of being sexually abused as a child). He should, because he's a fucking pedophile. And in the most polite way possible, your comment reeks of sympathy for people like my father. Those poor men, who are accused of molesting their children and their good standing ruined.
Usually, people have a pretty personal reason for doing something like that. I don't want to hear yours, if you have one. I would much, much rather believe that you simply did not understand what you were saying is offensive to not just me, but every survivor of childhood sexual abuse that exists or has existed (because so many of us die early due to suicide and that has almost been my life end more than once), of whom the greatest proportion of substance use disorders exist out of any other demographic, who suffer from more homelessness than any other demographic.
And who, in this bizarre and cruel irony that you have so brilliantly illustrated and the reason I bothered to reply instead of report your comment, are not perceived as actual victims. And not only that, they are told that they should have enjoyed being raped by a grandparent, a father, a mother, an aunt, an uncle. Or raped by their older sibling.
Incest is far more common than most people like to believe, and the effects of it are so much more damaging than any other type of sexual abuse. The worse the sexual violation of the child, and the degree of trust between victim and perpetrator is the definiting tool of how 'fucked up' a person will be. I was extensively violated for basically my whole life, by my father.
I don't do grief therapy or whatever it is that you said. I do trauma therapy. It took me FIVE years after remembering everything (and yes, forgetting child sex abuse is common and this is reflected in studies, which are readily available online. Funny how the 'organisation against repressed memories of child sexual abuse' was founded by parents who had been accused of sexually abusing their children.) No one suggested to me that I had experienced that type of abuse, as an adult. I considered my father a dick, and I was scared of him for a reason I couldn't figure out, but it took until a friend at the end of 2017 after I remembered stuff asking me directly 'were you sexually abused' and me freezing up and almost having a panic attack then and there, only to manage to barely say 'I'm not allowed to talk about that' before rushing off to throw up in the bathroom, and panic about my friend knowing because I realised that I had said yes, in as many words.
So I would like to hope after reading this, which is admittedly a very long comment, that you may reconsider your position. I would forgive you for your previous statements if you did. My replies here have been all over the place. I had to use to be able to be strong enough to tell my mum, and apparently the second dose kind of knocked me around cause I got some stuff off a new source. The only reason I didn't overamp last night was listening to the dealer when he said to use a point less.
But this post is in defence of any survivors of child sexual abuse. Any adult victims of sexual assault. Any adult rape victims. Anyone who has had their power, control, and freedom violated by another person, and then asked 'but was it really so bad?'
I wrote the information out to see how you'll respond to it now that you have more details about how these things occured, given I'm one of the very few CSA survivors who can even type out their story in any kind of detail. Usually people like me never say anything because it's too painful. And, again, painted in brilliant irony by your poetic comment, that we will be blamed for it.
So I wrote this for any other survivors who might read your comments, so they know that there are people who support them.
you.
