February 21, 2007Owning Her Own Life After Incest
I’m an incest survivor. I lived 20 years trapped in the terror of my realities that then gave way to my memories and the fear that my father could still hurt me. I feared at night I would still be accosted in my sleep while I lay helpless and unaware that I was being preyed on. The anxiety would rob me of my sleep. It would steal my sanity and my self-respect. It would limit my world until I was afraid to leave my house, afraid to be alone but afraid to be with people. It was the hell that my mind created for itself borrowing on the demons of my past.
A human can only go on like this for a moment before the soul devours itself – I broke. My nervous system crumbled. There was nothing left but a terrified child in a woman’s form waiting to die.
A tiny dot of my strength remained untarnished – unnoticed by the monsters in my body. Over time this strength started to build – it was so gradual that at first no one even noticed…it was a sly strength that was afraid to be seen too early, least it be stamped out.
When the strength started to be noticeable people around it didn’t like it. It was frightening. This woman who had been fragile and small was standing taller…something was happening that they couldn’t control and it frightened them. If they couldn’t control “it” then they couldn’t control me. And if they couldn’t control me then the secret wasn’t safe either.
My father tried different means to try to get into my head when I was still vulnerable and rebuilding but the supports that were in my life helped me keep him out of where he shouldn’t have been. After 6 months of this rebuilding, I finally came forward to my family and let them know what I had been through as a child. I wish I could say that it was a happy ending – it wasn’t and isn’t. But I took the first step in owning my life for the first time since I was 5 years old.
No Comments »
RSS feed for comments on this post.
| TrackBack URI
You can also bookmark
this on del.icio.us or check the cosmos
