Learning To Survive ***TRIGGER WARNING***

Learning To Survive 

When something traumatic happens in your life, something that hurts you so deeply that you actually want to die, you have two choices. 

In the case of emotional, physical or sexual abuse, you either let this person win, believe all the things they say and choose not to go on with your life

or

You tell yourself that you will win, you deserve to live and you dismiss all the things they have told you. 

IF ONLY IT WAS THIS EASY!

So you find a way inbetween the two.

In my case I soon realised that I didn't want to die.  I had so many people who loved and cared about me and I had so many reasons to want to survive.  Slowly, the following weeks and months would show me that I could learn new skills to deal with what had happened.

My perfect childhood and adolescent years had now been blown apart and I had been left questioning everything about myself.  If someone could hurt me like this, I must be a bad person.  If anyone found out how bad I was then they would not want me or love me anymore.  Therefore, I now had to live a perfect life, without faults and make up for the badness I felt inside.

I would also have to learn to cope with my emotions and find a way of hiding this terrible secret from my family.  I had already nearly lost them on that night and I had to ensure that nothing could ever take me away from them again.  This was, to later become one of my major problems as it would lead to serious separation anxiety issues, something I will discuss in detail later.

I had learned that night that no amount of crying or begging would stop someone hurting you so I decided from that day onwards, I would never cry again.  Another decision, that in later life would prove to be a mistake but at this stage, I was young and just dealing with things in the only way I could.

I couldn't unlove the people who were already part of my life but I could try to distance myself from people more.  My new theory was that "If you didn't love someone too much, it wouldn't hurt so bad if you were taken away from them."

I became an expert at shutting off emotion, having a hard exterior and pushing people away who tried to love me.  I no longer felt like I deserved to be loved and to deprive myself of love was the first way I learned to punish myself.

Probably the most common way someone deals with feeling dirty after sexual abuse is to wash themselves over and over, scrubbing hard at their skin in the hottest water they can tolerate.  This was the first time I realised that physical pain on the outside somehow balanced emotional pain on the inside. 

The next thing I discovered was that causing bruises to myself could calm me down in emotional situations and keep my feelings under control.  Seeing the bruises also helped me.  I was hiding a secret that I could not tell anyone and to carry on, I would have to spend the rest of my life pretending that night didn't happen.  Seeing the bruises reminded me that the pain I felt inside was real.

Pushing people away was so hard.  So many times I just wanted to reach out and tell someone but I had already started to believe that what had happened was my fault.  I could not risk my family or my friends knowing that I was this bad person so I became more and more secretive and I began hurting myself more and more. 

I had never heard of self harm so didn't know that this was what I did.  I would hit my arms hard against door frames, over and over until the pain kicked my emotions back in.  At times, I could hardly move my arms for days.  I knew this wasn't right and I often wondered why this made me feel better but I would quickly dismiss the thoughts, cover up the injuries and carry on as normal.

This was to become my way of life!