Common feelings experienced by survivors and some coping strategies

Child sexual abuse can have an impact on a woman’s ability to trust and to develop intimate relationships in adult life. Women may experience depression, anxiety, post traumatic stress, lack of confidence and low self esteem.

Other common feelings are:

Blame

When someone we have loved and trusted betrays us we look for a reason, for someone or something to blame. This is a way of justifying their behaviour, of trying to explain why they would hurt us in this way.

Often we will say:

“My mother rejected him. He had to turn to me for love.”

Abuse is not an expression of love. It hurts the person who is abused, mentally, emotionally and sometimes physically and it can have long term effects such as anger, fear, shame, guilt and self hatred.

Also, abuse is the responsibility of the abuser – it can’t be blamed on the behaviour of someone else. Someone who sexually abuses a child does so because he chooses to. Only he is to blame.

“He told me I was his special girl. I liked being the special one. I must have wanted it.”

No one wants to be abused, but we all want to be loved. We need attachments: we can’t survive without them. Abusers are very skilled at maintaining that culture of silence – it allows the abuse to continue. If a child is drawn into the abuse and made to feel that she is a willing participant, then the silence is assured.  This is a real betrayal of a child’s feelings and need for affection.

“I used to get aroused by him. I had orgasms – how could it be abuse when I got pleasure out of it?”

Sometimes our body responds to stimulus in a way that we don’t want it to and abusers make the most of this. We can’t control our body’s reactions and as children we are inexperienced in sexual matters.

Orgasm can be a response to fear and hyper arousal, it does not matter if you experienced pleasure, this doesn’t mean that you wanted the abuse to happen.

We feel that for it to truly be abuse we must have hated and despised every moment of it but for some women, feeling that closeness and intimacy with someone who says he loves you can feel very good. We then blame and hate ourselves for all these mixed up feelings. Abusers use this against us; tell us that we ‘asked for it’ and that the abuse continued ‘because we wanted it’.

“I was a bad child. I needed to be punished.”

Abuse is not punishment for being naughty. No matter how ‘bad’ a child is, she does not deserve to be sexually abused as punishment.
This is yet another excuse used by abusers to justify their behaviour.

“He was a sick man. He needed psychiatric treatment.”

Only around 2% of sex offenders are referred for psychiatric treatment.

It’s often assumed that you can spot a sex offender by the way he looks or behaves but most abusers are perfectly normal men. This is the most widely accepted myth around sexual abuse of children.

Anger

Firstly, it’s OK to be angry with this person, or people who abused you.

Anger is a very normal reaction to hurt and pain but we’re raised to believe that it is a bad thing and that we should suppress it. Often our anger and our aggression are used against us as an excuse not to deal with the abuse as the anger is all people see, not the pain behind it.

People are scared of anger, and we can be scared of it when it’s inside ourselves: we may feel that if we let it out it may overwhelm us and we won’t be able to control it. So very often we turn it in on ourselves, blame ourselves, hurt ourselves, or just swallow it and try to block it all out.

In their book, ‘The Courage to Heal – A Guide for Women and Men Survivors of Child Sexual Abuse’, Ellen Bass and Laura Davis talk about ‘getting in touch with your anger’ and ‘directing it where it belongs’.

They give examples of some exercises you can do to release some of that anger safely, so that you don’t hurt yourself. These include positive expressions of anger such as:

• Writing a letter – either to send to your abuser or just to let your feelings out
  
• Pounding on the bed with a tennis racquet or some other object
  
• Screaming – and maybe getting a friend to scream with you

One woman interviewed for the book stated:

“I felt incredible anger, but I never allowed anger my whole life. It was really a difficult thing to let out. One day my therapist got up out of her chair and she said, “Your father’s in that chair,” and she handed me a rolled up towel and she said, “I want you to hit your father.”

It took me a long time to psych myself into doing that, but once I started I couldn’t stop. I pounded and screamed until I couldn’t move any more. It was such a relief.

That was an important turning point for me. After that, I did a lot of pounding on beds and screaming and writing angry letters to my dead father. I even worked with a punchbag.”

Experiencing Flashbacks

Flashbacks are a natural reaction to the trauma of sexual abuse but they can be very frightening and women often describe feelings of fear, confusion, panic, being out of control, terror. This is because they can happen when you least expect them and can be triggered by a noise, a smell or by seeing something that reminds you of your childhood or the abuse.

No, you are not crazy. You may feel that you can’t speak to anyone about your flashbacks because you think you are going crazy, but it’s a natural part of the healing process.

Sometimes women will try to avoid all the things that trigger flashbacks but the down side of this is that it can really limit what you do and where you go. There are other ways to help alleviate the fear and panic that flashbacks cause.

• Tell yourself that it’s a flashback and that, scary as it is, you are now safe.
  
• Breathe. When you are having a flashback you stop breathing normally and this can cause a pounding in your head, dizziness, shaking, sweating, and feeling faint. If you can start breathing normally the feelings of panic will lessen.
  
• Take time to recover. It will take a while for you to feel yourself again so give yourself permission to take some time to get back to your normal activities.
  
• Get some support. You might want to be on your own when the flashbacks happen but if you have someone who knows about them, you can choose to talk about your feelings anytime you need to.
  
• Remind yourself you’re in the real world. Stamp your feet or clap your hands loudly.
  
• Remember that you survived a terrible and frightening experience when you were young. This is part of your healing process and you are a survivor.

Panic

Panic attacks are sudden, unexpected anxiety attacks that can include sweating, tightening of the chest, shortness of breath, numbness, tingling of the hands and feet or needing to go to the toilet, your mouth may dry up and you may jump at even the slightest noise.

When you first experience a panic attack you may be confused, not sure of what is happening to your body and frightened that you can’t control it. But panic attacks are another way your body has of coping with the abuse you experienced. If your body feels threatened, it responds with the ‘fight or flight’ response and a panic attack is an exaggerated form of this.

Although panic attacks are your body’s way of coping with the memories of your abuse, there are some things that can make it worse. These include:

• Alcohol, nicotine and caffeine and some drugs can make panic attacks worse. Also some prescription drugs can bring the attack on more severely. Withdrawal from some sedatives can have the same effect.
  
• Your blood sugar levels being too high – this can be caused by junk food, overeating or too much fasting.
  
• Hyperventilating caused by stress can make a panic attack worse.

Self Injury

There are a number of myths around self injury – such as, ‘it’s a suicide that failed’ or ‘it’s attention seeking’. This is not the case. Self injury is a way of coping with emotional pain, it’s a release when the pain becomes too much to bear.

Women survivors who self injure are not insane or dangerous, they are just trying to cope with the pain in their lives without hurting anyone else. It’s important to recognise that women who are self injuring need to have space to talk about their experiences, need to be believed and most importantly, need to be free of judgment.

There are a number of good publications about self harm that can be
obtained from book shops or on loan from the Rape Crisis Centre library.

There are also a number of ways to keep yourself as safe as you can when you are self injuring:

• Use clean blades if you are cutting and never share with anyone else.
  
• Have a well stocked first aid box where you can get at it easily.
  
• If your wounds become infected, get to your doctor as soon as you can.
  
• If you’ve cut too deeply or cut a vein or artery by mistake, get help immediately.
  
• If you have burned yourself, dress the burn as quickly as you can. If it’s a large burn, get medical help as quickly as you can. Put the burn in cold water as soon as possible.

Drugs and Alcohol

Alcohol or prescription or non-prescription drugs are often used by women survivors as a way of coping with memories of sexual abuse.

Often drugs can be prescribed to assist the woman to cope with how she is feeling or to improve sleeping. Whilst this can be a very effective short term support it should be remembered that it is easy to become dependent and reliant on medication which numbs the pain. Open discussion with your GP will allow you to determine what the best treatment plan is for you. Sometimes illicit drug use and/or excessive drinking is a problem for women who have abuse issues, again, these mask the pain and stop women remembering and experiencing their feelings.

If heavy drinking or drug use are factors it may be better that this is addressed prior to entering into any kind of therapy or counselling.

Whilst feeling the emotions and experiencing and acknowledging the pain you are in are extremely difficult it is a vital part of the healing process.

Eating Disorders

Many studies have shown that a high number of women who have experienced emotional, physical or sexual abuse, have eating disorders. For some women, control over their eating is a way of coping and expressing their emotions. Some women who are bulimic or compulsive eaters reveal that bingeing is their way of stuffing down the emotions they feel. Food becomes their only source of comfort and
it can help to numb their feelings.

Some women who have been abused believe that if they are too thin or too obese, it will make them unattractive and the abuse will stop. Some believe that by not eating they can just fade away and die and the abuse will have to end. Others have expressed a need to be in control in the area of food. Purging is a way for some to release their emotions. If they believe they cannot tell anyone about the abuse and express the emotions they are experiencing, purging may be the only way they know how to get those feelings out. Many feel relieved and calm after purging.

The binge/purge cycle may serve a protective purpose; in particular, it seems to reduce the intensity of intolerable emotional stress, and provides an outlet for:

• expression of anger
  
• regaining sense of self
  
• ensuring predictability
  
• cleansing oneself of the abusive experience
  
• relieving stress and tension
  
• establishing control
  
• developing a sense of personal space
  
• an opportunity to refocus

If you are a survivor of childhood sexual abuse, dealing with memories of the abuse can be very painful and difficult. At times you may feel like you are reliving the abuse. If your memories are flooding back and you feel like you are re-experiencing the abuse, you may feel like you are going crazy and want to die. You will probably want to isolate yourself and not talk to anyone. It is good to have someone to talk to and help you through it, rather than having to experience the feelings, emotions and pain all alone. Having someone to turn to and support may help you feel less alone and make the difficult times a little easier to get through.

Working with a support agency can help you come to terms with the abuse.

There are two things it is important for all survivors’ of abuse to remember. Firstly, it was not your fault, you did nothing wrong and you did not deserve it. Secondly, you do not have to keep secrets anymore because it really is okay to talk about it.