Anxiety issues persist

I am sorry it has been awhile since I have posted. My anxiety is still really bad. i don’t sleep well and I am scared all the time. That makes it hard to come up with posts and to remember to come onto the site and post them. I can’t continue on this way, it is getting to be too much. I am even scared to go places, all though once I leave for the place I am a lot less anxious. That is not good at all, if I can’t go anywhere I won’t have a life. I don’t know where these things are coming from and I don’t understand why I feel this way. I have tried so many things and nothing seems to help. Part of why nothing seems to help is because I don’t seem to be able to take it in deep enough so that healing can take place. It seems like I don’t believe the information or something, that I can’t use it to it’s fullest potential and it doesn’t end up helping me. I don’t know what to do to allow this stuff to help me. I don’t know what will help me and I feel like I will never get better. I hate feeling this way and I want things to be able to help me, it just seems like nothing ever does. It doesn’t even seem like therapy is very helpful and I am too afraid of medications to be able to take them to help me. I am so lost. Anxiety is such a horrible condition, it makes even the good things feel like too much to handle, and it makes the things that could help it get better scary. Add depression to the mix and life is a constant struggle and things are twice as hard as they would be otherwise. I know that facing what scares me is what will be the most helpful thing in getting past my anxiety, but it is so hard and I haven’t been able to do it very much yet. I hope I figure out a way to get beyond all the suffering that my anxiety and depression are causing me, because I can’t keep living this way anymore.

Struggling with fear

I spend every day struggling with fear. This anxiety is getting out of control. Being abused as a child explains a lot of it but not all of it. I have also developed anxiety after having traumatic health experiences. Now I feel like I fear everything. I am afraid to be alone, afraid to be with people, afraid of getting sick, afraid of taking medications, afraid of vomiting, afraid of these fears, afraid I am going crazy, afraid to die, etc. It is so difficult to feel this way all the time and I want it to stop. I just don’t know how to stop it. I am in talk therapy right now and still the fears seem to be getting worse. I am even going to try alternative medicine to see if that will help me. I just don’t feel like anything at all can help me. It is hard and I am so lost and confused. It is not fair that things from my childhood can still be causing so many problems in my life, and I don’t understand why these health experiences had to cause even more anxiety than I already had. I am so tired of struggling with this fear, I wish it would just go away already.

anxiety is ruining my life

I have dealt with anxiety since I was abused as a child, but it is getting out of control now. I am afraid of everything. It has been weeks since the last time I posted to this blog because I have been struggling so much with this anxiety. I fear getting sick, I fear taking medications, I fear being alone, I fear so many things that it makes no sense to fear. I am feeling like no one can help me and like I have no one to turn to. It is really hard. I have been incredibly anxious for 3 days straight just because my cousin has some kind of virus. I am afraid I will catch it and afraid of how I will feel if I do catch it and afraid I’ll have to take some medication and won’t be able to. This anxiety is ruining my life. I hate it. I don’t know what to do anymore!! When I was a kid I used to get just panicked at the thought of dying. I used to just get terrified and cry and keep thinking to myself over and over, “I don’t want to die, please don’t make me die!” I don’t understand why I have to have this problem. But when something like childhood sexual abuse turns your life upside down, anxiety goes with the territory. You can’t help but be anxious in that kind of situation and if you don’t get help dealing with it, then it just keeps getting worse and keeps getting into more and more parts of your life until you are anxious about everything all the time. Having had some traumatic health experiences hasn’t helped with my anxiety about getting sick or taking medications at all. It has made that issue so much worse. I don’t know how I am ever going to get through this. And then I feel like I can’t talk about it with my family because they get frustrated and don’t know how to help me and I end up feeling worse after talking to them than I did before talking to them. I don’t feel like I have anyone I can talk to and I feel like I have to keep this stuff to myself, like the only place I can talk about it is in therapy and that always turns out horribly because I don’t know how to explain what I am going through and how I feel in a way my therapist grasps how bad things are with me. It is hard. I feel like my therapist can’t help me because she doesn’t get it and I feel like my doctor can’t help me and I feel like my psychiatrist can’t help me either. Even with that’s not necessarily true. Because my psychiatrist and doctor have had some good ideas that might actually help me, it just takes time for them to start helping. I just hate the way I feel and don’t know what to do or who to turn to. At least with this blog I can get it all out in a way that is helpful for me and that I can stick with even if sometimes I don’t do it regularly enough. I am glad I have this blog and can get this stuff out and written down. It really does help.

self defeating behavior

There is a part of me, the abused little girl part of me that feels as though she did something to cause the abuse, that she brought it on herself somehow. That part of me believes that she could have done something to keep the abuse from happening and that she could have told someone it was happening when it started so it would stop. That part of me sees that by telling my aunt what happened, the abused stopped and she takes that to mean that she could have stopped it right away instead of “letting” it go on for nearly 5 years. The experienced, grown up part of me knows that it wasn’t my fault and that just because I was able to break silence at 15 and the abuse stopped, doesn’t mean that at 11 or 12 I could have done that. But the little girl I was then thinks that I could’ve broken my silence any time I wanted to. That part of me thinks I should be ashamed and feels guilty about what happened, even though it totally wasn’t her fault and she didn’t deserve it. There’s no reason to be ashamed or feel guilty when I did nothing wrong, but that is how I feel. That part of me that is an abused little girl is the part that causes my self defeating behaviors. That is the part that actively sabotages my efforts at getting better. That part of me sabotages my efforts because she feels I don’t deserve to get better, that I am bad and deserve to be punished, that I should suffer. That is why I feel like I shouldn’t do things that make me happy, that will help me get better, and that make me feel good. That is why it’s hard to be nice to myself and why it’s hard for me to pamper myself or let myself go places and do things that are fun. What do I have to do to convince that part of me that I didn’t do anything wrong, I’m not bad, I don’t deserve to suffer, I don’t need to be punished and that I deserve to be happy, have fun, be nice to myself and pamper myself and above all I do deserve to get better? How do I get through to the lost, hurt, abused little girl inside me and convince her of all of those things? What will it take? This is the struggle I am having right now and it is making me go in circles in therapy and it is why I am not making any progress. Man it sucks so much having to clean up after the mess my abuser left me in after what he did! Am I going to spend the rest of my adult life trying to overcome my childhood? It really does suck!! I still can’t believe someone could do something with so many far reaching consequences to someone that they claim they love!! It’s so wrong!! Why do people do stuff like this to children? I don’t understand!!

Self blame and guilt make it hard to heal

In my abusive and traumatic childhood, I felt guilty about the abuse and took the blame on myself for what was happening. It is something that has stayed with me ever since and it makes it very difficult to heal from the depression and anxiety I have been suffering since my childhood. Having a trusted and loved adult become sexual with you and start touching you inappropriately is a very confusing, painful experience and the younger you are when it starts, the harder it is to understand and deal with. You begin to believe you’ve done something wrong and you start to feel guilty and instead of blaming the adult who is the one who really is wrong, you blame yourself. Most children believe that the adults know everything, have their best interests at heart, and will always protect them. When they find that this is not true, they would rather believe they were wrong, than to believe that what they’ve always believed about the adults in their lives isn’t true. They’d rather believe that it’s their fault that they’re being abused, than believe that adults would harm them. A world where the very people you depend on are the ones that are hurting you, is the scariest, most horrible world a child can think of. So they blame themselves, no matter how bad it makes them feel, and the guilt and self blame stays with them into adulthood and keeps them from healing from the trauma inflicted on them as children by the adults who were supposed to be protecting them. It is very hard to heal when you believe the trauma is somehow your fault, and you feel guilty about what was done to you. It is very hard to get better when you feel like you don’t deserve to get better, that you should suffer for what it is you believe you have done as a child. It is scary to let go of the self blame and guilt because then you have to believe that the adults that were supposed to take care of you as a child didn’t have your best interests at heart and that the ones that were supposed to protect you from harm, were the harm. You have to come to grips with the reality that the world isn’t a safe place and that even the people you love can hurt you. It is very scary to do that and it is scary to change and to reject the beliefs of childhood so you can accept the truth you’ve learned in adulthood. This is why I am still struggling to get better, and to heal from the wounds inflicted on me in my traumatic, abusive childhood. This is why I am still struggling with depression and anxiety, because it is scary to change, and because the guilt and self blame keep getting in the way, keep making me feel as though I deserve to feel this way and that I don’t deserve to get better. Yet I keep struggling, keep working, and keep trying to get better, and don’t give up on healing. I want to heal, and so I will keep trying, because I do want to get better and be happy. It is just so hard and I sometimes feel like I will never get better and never feel truly happy again.

Being sexually abused has left me depressed and anxious

Having been sexually, physically, emotionally, and verbally abused as a child has had a huge impact on my adult life. Instead of putting the blame on the abuser, I took his negative words to heart and started beating up on myself instead. I felt so awful that I often thought of hurting myself to make it stop. I was suicidal at times and it was scary to feel like I’d rather take my own life than continue hurting the way I was. When I was 18 or 20 I actually admitted myself to the hospital because I was suicidal and I didn’t feel safe where I was. This depression and anxiety started during my abusive childhood, and haven’t stopped yet, not even now. I still have so many negative thoughts, like the abuser is in my head, yelling at me and calling me names as he did in my childhood. It is very hard to get past depression and anxiety when your own thoughts bring it on. It takes a great deal of work and change to heal from it, and I am not there yet. I am struggling even now with these things, and I don’t know when I will heal from it. It is indeed a journey, and I haven’t yet reached the end. I probably won’t reach the end of this journey until my life is over, but I think it’s the journey that counts. My anxiety gets triggered by health issues, being alone, eating ( I have Irritable Bowel Syndrome and eating with it is hard, some foods make it worse and some don’t and figuring it out is difficult) and taking medications. I get depressed for many, many reasons, including my anxiety, my IBS, loneliness, the way my anxiety seems to be keeping me from living my life, and much more. I feel so helpless because I can’t seem to get past this depression and anxiety, there doesn’t seem to be anything that helps. I am going through some self help books, I am in therapy, and I am at my wits end about what to do to get through it. It’s so hard and I don’t know what to do. But I do know that the thought patterns that I developed in my childhood have led to my depression and anxiety and they are what makes it so hard to get better. I am trying and I hope that my effort will pay off sometime relatively soon. In the meantime, I will continue this blog, continue working with my self help books, and the online self help stuff I am doing, as well as continuing with my therapy, and keep on trying until I see some positive effects in my life. It just truly sucks that this stuff has to continue affecting me for my whole life. How can someone do something to me as a child that can have such far reaching effects in my life? How exactly is that fair? Abusing children is so very, very wrong!! It should be stopped!! And the only way to stop it is if we survivors speak out about it and end the stigma and secrecy surrounding it, so the abusers can’t get away with it anymore.

Dealing with the aftermath

Being sexually abused is devastating and once you finally find the strength to tell your story and put and end to the abuse, you have to deal with the aftermath of that devastation. You don’t trust people, yourself, your environment, your body, your emotions, or even your own senses. Everything is skewed, and you feel as though danger lurks everywhere. You’re hyper alert, you are ready to protect yourself at a moment’s notice and you jump at the slightest sound or touch.
You are hurting, you hate the person who did this to you, even if they are one of your relatives and you love them, too. You are confused, don’t know what to think or how to feel. You hate yourself and feel as though you could have done something to keep it from happening, even though your rational mind tells you that you had no control over the situation and it wasn’t your fault. You hate your body for responding to what was done, you hate your body for being vulnerable and weak, for doing what it was made to do. You are scared and feel as though you are the only one who has gone through this, that you are alone in feeling this way.
You can’t eat, you can’t sleep, you can’t think. When you do sleep you have horrible nightmares where you relive the abuse over and over again. You have flashbacks to the abuse all the time. The flashbacks are triggered by everything that reminds you of the abuse: activities, sounds, smells, feelings, things people say, certain types of lighting, certain kinds of situations, anything that relates to the abuse. You cry all the time, it’s as though you’ll never stop crying, and when you do stop crying, you are incredibly angry. You withdraw from family and friends, you can’t stand to be touched and their caring overwhelms you.
You suffer from depression, anxiety, and post traumatic stress disorder. You don’t want to be alone but you want everybody to go away. Nothing makes sense anymore and things that used to matter don’t matter anymore. You feel like you want to die and make it all end. You don’t want to be in this horrible place anymore. You struggle just to do the simplest, everyday things that most people take for granted. It takes every bit of strength you have just to get out of bed in the morning. It doesn’t seem like you will ever get through this. You can’t enjoy things that you used to love to do, and sometimes those very things make you feel awful.
These feelings can last a long, long time. Especially if people in your life invalidate the way you feel and make you feel like you are wrong for feeling the way you do. If you were repeatedly made to feel as though you were the one that was wrong, and not your abuser, these feelings will linger for a long time. If you were treated like you were lying, making up stories, or blowing things out of proportion, then these feelings will take a long time to get better. If, however, the people around you were supportive, told you it wasn’t your fault, and made sure you knew your feelings were valid, then it will not take nearly as long to recover from these feelings.
It also matters how feelings were dealt with in your family in general, as to whether it will take a long time to recover from the aftermath of abuse or not. If feelings were not okay for you to have or express in your family, then you will have a longer recovery. If feelings in your family were not really discussed or if they were treated as a bad thing, then it will take longer for you to recover. Sometimes these things can take years to recover from and you may never recover fully.
Sexual abuse has a huge impact on your life and although you may find a way to move on with your life, you will never truly get over it. It may take many, many years to get to a point where you can move on from what happened and live without the constant reminders of the abuse getting in your way. You may be well into adulthood before you can finally move on and have some semblance of a normal life again. You may also move on from the abuse at one point, only for some aspect of the abuse to come back to you and wreak havoc on your life again. It doesn’t every really go away completely, but you can get to a point where it doesn’t define your life and isn’t wreaking havoc on it. You can go from victim to survivor, and reclaim your life and your personal power.
I have been through it and although I got to a place where I could move on and have a life again, it hasn’t gone away. The way that I learned to deal with my feelings and the way my feelings were invalidated or treated as wrong has led me to have a lot of doubting my feelings and trying to avoid them. I have often stuffed my feelings inside myself and not allowed myself to feel them because I often feel that they are wrong and that I shouldn’t feel that way. I suffer from depression and anxiety right now, and a lot of the negative things that I was told about my feelings and expressing them, and really life in general, have become my own negative self talk. I started to believe the negative things I was told growing up and I took them in and began telling them to myself. All of the verbally abusive things that were said to me, all the names I was called and things I was told became my self talk and I beat myself up and say these negative things to myself.
This is why abuse is so wrong, because it lasts and it causes unbelievable problems in the lives of the victims that take years to overcome. Children are so impressionable, and to treat them badly and tell them hurtful, negative things has lasting effects on them. Things you say to children effect them long after their childhoods are over. They also would rather blame themselves when they are abused, than to blame the adult that hurt them because in their minds, adults know everything and are heroes, so they can’t be wrong, it has to be the child that’s wrong. It is never okay to abuse a child, there is no reason that can possibly excuse it. It effects their lives so long and in so many ways, that it could never possibly be okay for someone to do that to a child.
I apologize for the length of this post and will try to keep them shorter from now on. I just really needed to get this all out.

Growing up

The hardest part of growing up for me was having to deal with sexual abuse. After the first time I was abused at age 10, the abuse started back up when I was like 11 or 11 and 1/2. It progressed from inappropriate touching and fondling to forced oral sex and rape. These things happened daily from the time I was 11-11 and 1/2 until the time I finally found the courage to tell someone at age 15. I would dread the times where my mom would leave the house and I’d be alone with my step dad. He would almost always do something inappropriate to me when my mom would leave. Either that or he would come to my room in the middle of the night and abuse me.
The first time he actually raped me was when I was 13 and he told my mom some crap about me needing to go to his apartment (he got it after he was forced to move out of our house when I reported the abuse at age 10 and part of his probation or something was that he couldn’t live with us and couldn’t be within 100 feet of me or of anyplace I was in) and do some dishes I didn’t do when I was there the day before. I can’t believe my mother believed that when she knew he wouldn’t just let me leave without doing something he told me to do, he’d just beat the crap out of me and make me do it before I left even if I had refused already. I begged my mom not to make me go, I cried and I was terrified but she made me go anyway.
He took me to that apartment, and after some inappropriate touching, he raped me. I have never felt so much pain in my life, the only thing that even came close was some abdominal pain I had due to my Irritable Bowel Syndrome where I actually was rushed to the emergency room because I thought it was appendicitis. I was so terrified because there was so much pain and I was bleeding. He had me go and sit in a hot bath to help with the pain and all I could do was feel totally disgusted and enraged that he was trying to act all concerned and like a dad after the horrible thing he just did. I told him I hated him and slammed the bathroom door in his face when I went to go take a bath. I sat in that tub and cried.
I had to wear my bloody underwear and pants back home because it was all I had to wear. I was told to lie and tell my mom I started my period if she asked about my bloody underwear and pants when she did the laundry. She didn’t though, I ended up doing the laundry when my bloody clothes were in it, so she never even saw them. I just can’t believe she didn’t know what was going on, it seemed so obvious to me. I felt so bad and although part of me knew it was not at all my fault, part of me believed it was all my fault and that I did something to deserve it. I felt so guilty and that guilt got even worse when I didn’t tell anybody what happened and it kept happening. When I finally told someone what was happening and how long it had been happening, it only made my guilt worse. I was depressed, confused, hurt, angry, guilty, ashamed, scared, humiliated, and disgusted by what happened. I suffered from Post Traumatic Stress Disorder and for a long time I was afraid of men.
My childhood was traumatic and unpredictable and I had to grow up so quickly. I was expected to be the adult in my home as early as age 10. My mom and step dad expected me to do things that most kids don’t start doing until a lot later than I did them, like laundry and dishes. I was doing laundry when I was ten, dishes when I was 9, and cleaning the whole kitchen when I was 10. By the time I was 13, I was doing laundry, cleaning the kitchen, and taking care of my brother and sister as well as my mom and step dad and still finding time to do my homework and try to have a little fun. These things have had a lasting effect on my life and I am still dealing with the fallout from my traumatic childhood to this day. I am finding that telling my story is very therapeutic and cathartic. It feels good to get this all written out and I will continue writing about the experiences in my life because telling my story is a good release and is very helpful for me.

Childhood memories

One night when I was ten, I woke up to pain and the smell of beer breath. My step dad had his hand in my underwear while I was sleeping. The pain was penetration, something I hadn’t ever experienced before. I couldn’t understand why he was doing this to me, it made no sense. When I would have cried out in pain, he covered my mouth with his in what I think was supposed to be a kiss, but somehow wasn’t anything that made sense. It was horrible and I just wanted it to stop. After what felt like hours, he just stopped and left the room after saying only that I should not tell anyone what happened. I told my mother the next day and she made me think she would report him, she was so angry and upset, and I believed she would protect me. She didn’t do anything, and I was afraid to tell anyone, but what I ended up doing was writing about it in my diary and then taking my diary to my aunt’s house and “accidentally-on purpose” left it there. She ended up reading it and questioned me about it. That is how the abuse got reported and I was placed in my aunt’s custody, while we went through all the legal stuff and court appearances.
That is only the first time he sexually abused me, and the abuse got worse over time. I never understood why this man who was supposed to love me, who was the only father I ever knew, could do something like this to me. How could he have hurt me this way? What the hell was he thinking? I heard all of his lame excuses, all his crazy, sick, messed up reasons for why he did what he did, and it just pissed me off to hear him try to justify what he did. He tried to blame me, my mother, alcohol, everything and everyone but himself. I hated him for what he did, and I will never forgive him for it. He doesn’t deserve my forgiveness.
The abuse has affected me in so many ways and it completely sucks that it is still affecting my life so many years later. That is the way abuse is, it affects you for the rest of your life. There are things that happen that will always affect you and that’s just the way it is. I have, however, moved on in a lot of ways, and that is what I concentrate on, that I have come a long way since I was that little, abused, hurt, frightened little girl. I have a long way to go, but I have definitely come a long, long way. I am a survivor and for that I am proud. Just tell me why this has to still make my life so hard, that’s all I want to know.

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