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.