i wish
out of nowhere
My dad trained me to be raped, by minor and persistent infringements which he would not withdraw or desist in, no matter how I protested. He taught me saying No had no importance. I had no sovereignty over my body. For he would still cup my butt in his hand, rove his eye over my breast and comment on it. This started when I went into puberty and in later years the family made the excuse that he had done it to all of us: but not my brothers, no. Or, they said, he had always done it, as a mark of his harmless affection. But I remembered. It started when I grew hair and curves. It never happened when we were children.
I was – I am – spirited, and fought back. When I told him to stop he looked invariably surprised and injured. “Oh, but darling, it’s only a bit of fun.” He would say, “I’m only tormenting you, pet.” I tried carrying my breakfast into another room when he sprawled at the table with pubic hair showing through the loose fly of his pyjamas. I tried sewing up the fly of his pyjamas in a scarlet thread. Right into his seventies he used to call me and my mother “my two girlfriends.” No amount of rage on my part could ever get him to let this go. In my teens I tried again and again to talk to my mother, who kept insisting I had a ‘dirty mind.’
Dad used to come in at night to ‘say goodnight’ – always to me, never to the boys – and would fall asleep on my bed. When a boy at university when I was 17 started raping me regularly, these attentions from my father, creepily, stopped. It was like he had handed me over. After nearly a year I found the courage when this boy’s violence intensified to overcome the shame and tell my mother. I begged her not to tell Dad. They broke through the flimsy lock I had begged for on my bedroom door and beat the crap out of me. Calling me a slut and a tart. They stripped the sheets off me while I cowered. In the bed where I’d passed out from sexual pain so many times one held me down while the other walloped. Next day a neighbour my own age crept round, she had waited til Mum went out. Was I ok? she asked. She described how she had listened in agony, thinking she ought to call the police. She said, very quietly, “I thought they were going to kill you.”
For years afterwards every time my father visited he would bring with him stored up stories of women who, supposedly, had concocted malicious fictions about rape as a way of destroying the careers of blameless men.
80 comments on “out of nowhere”
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You are strong, brave sister. My thoughts are with you.
I am strengthened by hearing this, Kara. Thank you.
Jesus Christ almighty, I’m so sorry you went through this. A horrible story, and heartbreaking, devastating. Also brilliantly clear and brave. Jesus fucking Christ (I don’t know why I keep invoking the poor guy’s name, as far as I know at least, HE never screwed over girls & women) you are not alone, just know that. And you need to speak this truth to evaporate its power. And you’ve done it. xox
I always imagined Christ was kind to women! Maybe that was his teaching, after all. People are vulnerable: cherish them.
I like the sound of evaporating its power. Earlier in life whenever I would speak of such things – within my family – the speaking brought down more awful powerful things: my family never so vicious nor so enabled as when refuting, with blows, the idea that they had been abusive.
Thank you for reading, Miranda. I’m very sorry to hear. We exchange our words. It’s love.
Terrible
Thanks, Jeff. You’re a kind man.
Oh Cathoel. I have nothing to say except I’m so sorry these terrible things happened to you. You are such a wonderful person, may you be blessed in every way.
A beautiful blessing from you Jameela, and I feel the compass of its balm.
I am appalled that anyone can be treated as you’ve described. It’s almost beyond belief that a parent can do that to a child. At least it’s beyond my ability to comprehend. In writing that, I do believe what you’ve written. And I know that it is not uncommon because it has affected other family and friends.
His retort that “… it’s only a bit of fun.”, echoes the words of so many who engage in bullying, racism, misogyny and sexual harassment. How can they respect others when they have no insight into the harm they cause others by their actions.
I’m sad to hear that you experienced this. I hope that writing about it and the comments you receive give you some solace. I also hope that the many recent revelations by others of sexual harassment and assault will lead to changes in this area: a first step seems to be raising awareness of the extent and horror of such actions, and the condemnation of those who perpetrate them.
Thank you, Ian. I was so discombobulated by it all, and the seeming universality of their denial (brother, second brother, dad, and mum), and the uncle who slid his hand up my thigh, etc, it was a whirlwind that never seemed to set me down… I ran away from home over some set-to with my mother in Jakarta when I was 9 or 10, and they came along behind me as I was climbing over one large tussock after another of roadworks red dirt, and picked me up in their giant vehicle, and took me home and sat on either side of my bed, telling me the world was full of men just waiting for their chance to ‘do terrible things’ to little girls… I didn’t know what those things were and didn’t know to look closer to home, to take refuge in the cleanly world.
My Dad saying ‘it’s only a bit of fun’ never sank in til I was in my twenties, when I finally learned to reciprocate saying, little bit of fun for you (flat hand at knee height), heaps of traumatic distress for me (hand at head height) – how can that be a fair exchange? The selfishness that let him going on doing it I guess prevented my distress from ever being real to him.
It is astonishing being part of this flood of terrible stories. We pass each other like rafts broken in the rapids. Male violence, as I keep saying, is #therealjihad.
Darling Cathoel. I am awed by your courage and kindness that you were there for this man and this woman when the man was dying.
I am awed by your loving heart that still finds such beauty and love and life.
I am awed by your generosity and incredible talent when she share the beauty, love, and pain in your life.
You are a treasure. If I wasn’t so angry at those people for their violence and cruel domination of their own child, I would pity them for having a treasure of a child that could have brought them such joy and pride if only they weren’t so small minded and pathetic.
If I could physically reach you I would (with your permission) give you the biggest healing loving hug in my universe ❤❤❤❤❤❤❤❤❤
Dearest Josephine, your response is so nourishing and heartening, and my, how I would like to have your hug. Thank you most much. I’m out of words. I wish to respond better. Thank you for articulating something I had never realised I wanted anyone to feel, before now, and now it overwhelms me and I cannot even answer: why couldn’t they just be glad that I was their loving daughter, and among them? It’s hard for me who so strenuous;y longed to be a good parent to comprehend how people blessed with kids can fail to appreciate their quirky irreplacement.
Thanks for your love. So many people have these damaging stories and for your share, I am very very sorry. ❤❤❤❤❤❤❤❤❤
I am sorry this was done to you by people who abused their positions of trust and power.
I am heartened that you are no longer reluctant to name those people.
I am sure your testimony here will stand as an inspiration to others everywhere.
I am hoping that you are feeling a lightening, a relief, and a further freedom.
Jx
Dear Jess, your words are invaluable to me. Thank you for your ferocity and clarity. I feel heartened. I’d been feeling overwhelmed. I’m glad of your support of this act – naming, though not by name, these perpetrators (maybe perpetraitors with an i) – because I am afraid of the backlash. They don’t often read what I write, but one day they might.
Thanks for being you and being here. You’re always so spot-on. Cx
I am amazed and impressed that you were able to forgive them, and go on to have an adult relationship with them. I don’t think I would have had that ability.
I sometimes think I have been too forgiving: that is, not enough forgiving of myself. Thank you, Suzanna. This is food for thought.
My love to you Cathoel. You deserve nothing but the purest and most steadfast love. I hope you find healing in these writings ????
Oh! Amanda I am taking this right into my heart. Thank you so much. What a kindness. I can feel it. Merci ❤️
Some of this is very familiar. Such a shame that the feminist movement is diluted and operating on the fringes, with the more militant totally shut down and shunned. I miss Andrea Dworkin. And what jumps to mind is Sylvia Plath’s ‘Daddy’:
So I never could tell where you
Put your foot, your root,
I never could talk to you.
The tongue stuck in my jaw….
…Daddy, daddy, you bastard, i’m through”…
Fathers have done some lifelong damage preparing their daughters for a man’s world. So good you are talking about it, Cathoel, and bringing it into the light of awareness for all of us.
I ad oddly never thought of that poem in this context. I’ve spent years telling myself what my father did was not so bad, was ok, and I feel guilty that plenty of girls go through worse.
I am sorry it’s familiar to you, Jennifer. They’ve no right. And I so fiercely agree about the movement of feminism – through the thickets – bringing up in clots and chasms these unpalatable and prickling truths which are familiar to perpetrator and betrayed by traitor alike. I so cherish the openness of your response.
Fuck. This is truly insane ????. I’m so sorry this happened to you. My father (in his 70s) still feels entitled to my body, ever more strongly since I learned to set boundaries (because he has anxiety about us not being close enough). I have spent tremendous mental energy at casting myself as someone who will not be beaten or raped since i was a little child, so I know this implicit threat very well. Still can’t believe yours reacted this way…. ????
Oh Vira, I am glad you had this mental energy and such clarity even when you were tiny. And I’m sorry you’ve had to save yourself. One’s parents wondered why they can’t get close enough… I always feel they must at some level surely know. Thank you for calling it an implicit threat – after decades of having it minimised, that’s so warming and relieving. Good for you and your strong sane boundaries. All of your own devising with no help from the household, no doubt.
I hear you. This is horrid. Tomorrow I am leaving my Husband who is clueless as to the horror he has inflicted.
Dear Regina, I’m so sorry and glad and feel fierce that you say this. Go, go, leave, love, leave. He has no dominion in your good life. This is yours. Shove him out of it.
Strength, power, clarity, and certainty to you. I hope you have someplace welcoming and healing and warm to go. I wish you could come stay with me for a few days, and hide out in my kitchen and take long baths. Isn’t it shattering how the people whose damage is worst are necessarily the ones so insensitive they cannot perceive it, even when we find all the courage it takes, to tell them. Love to you in your aftermath of horror. Healing love. Go. And let the door bang behind you.
Truly awful. I’m so sorry you had to go through such a terrible thing(s). And for you parents not to believe you?!? ????
They had, have, an awe-inspiring capacity for denial. My mother used to lose control and hurl things – insults, books – and then while the dust was still settling she would be unable to believe she could have done such a thing. My father sat there saying, in his lightest voice, “But I was sitting right here, and I never heard her say that.”
So many times I have asked myself, am I mad.
One of my brothers has an answer to that question: yes, you must be. Either mad or so malicious that I would invent, and cling to, ‘these stories’ because, as he so kindly put it, they explain that ‘your life hasn’t been it all could have been.’
It took me decades to work out that it’s less painful to sacrifice a sister than to lose both parents and watch the stability of one’s entire upbringing shudder.
Thank you, Beth. I am moved and feel supported that you read this, and responded. X
Cathoel, you’ve spoken. Thank you. Hug!
Thank you lovely Russell, most gladly embraced! Thanks for hearing me
Oh, the many ways they try to break us and still the words keep crawling back to remind us of the injustice.
Yong Sun. They do, and they do. I keep wondering why someone would choose to pour all their creativity and nerve into such a terrible project. Why not embrace the free sky, learn to play piano, plant some trees? I am thinking of you and your healing and your pain. Perhaps we form a disparate community of survival and nourishment. Love to you x
Words of sympathy can’t lessen the burden of those experiences, what you went through. So sorry to read that, Cathoel. I wonder when a critical mass of men will break through into enlightenment, and see our daughters sisters mums and neighbours as the beautiful gentle vulnerable co-humans you are, and treat you with respect, and leave you the fuck alone. So sorry for all this. Shocking that so many women experience a similar story.
Thank you, Martin. What hurt me most in the long run, and I have heard so many other women saying this too, is how they made me question my own experience, my sanity. I spent decades asking myself in anguish: am I completely and utterly insane, then? So mad that I would invent (as my brother puts it) these heinous experiences, out of thin air, or (as he believes) out of some awful longing to justify not having achieved (as he sees it) what a top-ranking over-achieving student ought to have reached in her life; and so extremely unhinged that I would cling to these fabricated experiences, which I remember prismatically through blinking blinds of neon terror, like stop motion on a dancefloor, even through the literally thousands of hours of therapy my family kept sending me into? That would make me fairly well insane. We have a second cousin who died in an asylum, having been put away be her family when she was in the flower of life. Her little son, my father’s cousin, was told his mother had simply died. Not until after her death, decades later, in his adulthood, did anyone tell him that his mother had been living for most of his life… down the road from him in a lunatic asylum, as they called those places.
I wonder now what that woman had to go through, and maybe couldn’t shut up about, in order to be thus hustled out of sight.
Heartbreaking..just heartbreaking…what a brutish, perverse and utterly twisted betrayal of your courageous move to share your woundedness …I cant imagine what that must have done to your head…you tell the truth..and your parents want to violently destroy you……that was something that struck a chord….the truth telling and the getting smashed for it….those of us who cannot help but say what is really happening are a great danger to family hierarchies made of denial and lies …and therefore must be silenced …and a great way to do this is violence and headfuckery CONSTANTLY…until the recipient truth teller is depressed/totally self doubting/thinks there half mad etc etc….However your wonderful honesty wasnt extinguished…it now burns brightly to free others and shine a bright light on abuse of every description…Mygod they certainly didnt win…your spirit was stronger that all those lies and violence…..thankyou…FOR YOUR FABULOUS ELOQUENT HONESTY…what was such a threat to them has become a great call to liberation and freedom for your readers…we are often born into a tribe that doesnt know us or recognise our treasures…your current tribe thrives with every generously scattered word…all power to the truth tellers!!!❤????????
Thank you, Susan, I am crying reading this. I so deeply appreciate your outrage and your compassion. Since I published this story I’ve been very down and crushed. It’s taken some of the stuffing out of my years and years and years of resistance. Now I just feel left with the bare facts of what happened. And all the toll that has taken, on my life.
Thank you so much for reading and replying. I am moved by all the women who are speaking out lately, honoured to be one of them. Thanks for your love. ❤
Cathoel, it’s hard to know what to say to an experience so shockingly universal and yet so awful. I have never understood the “blame the victim” mentality around rape, and I’ve had too many friends who were abused by their own fathers. Kudos to you for growing into the strong, outspoken, graceful and loving person you are despite this.
That’s really kind and generous of you, Raelene, thank you for these loving supportive words. I always feel aware that other women have suffered much worse from their dads, and that has kept me from taking my own experience seriously for far too long. So hard to understand how a man can treat a little girl in his care the way some men, so many men, do.
❤️❤️❤️❤️❤️❤️❤️
.
Thanks lovely Caren, for your love. It bounces. ❤️❤️❤️❤️❤️❤️❤️
There was an article published online about the powerlessness that is disseminated and subliminally promoted publicly just by the words reporting rape. It is never “A man raped ….” It is always “a girl was raped”, making her the passive victim, and always the man seems to have little focus on his action, his evil brutal actions. We also need to change how rape and sexual assault is reported across the media and take back women’s strength and power by reporting the criminal not concentrating on the victim. The rapist needs blamed and identified and described, actively as a person who assaults! If I can find the article about the semantics of reporting these rapists and the disempowering words describing passive voiceless victims I will post it. Most people are assaulted by family members of family friends as it is a trust thing… That is the atrocity of it.
Much love to you, dear Cathoel, and much healing comes from speaking your truths plainly and freely and being authentic. Cathoel you are so strong and amazing! XXX
Dear Balkan, I only just saw the congruence between these two apparently jarring words, trust and atrostcity. It’s very true what you say about the framing of sexual assault, and the way we so often render the woman centrally blameable yet at the same time almost passive. Someone asked recently what wording felt most true, this was in a group of women, and plenty of people spoke up to say, they would rather express it as ‘he raped me.’ My feeling was, however, ‘I was raped.’ Because these were the words that thundered through my head for months and months after the first incident. It starts from me: where I am located, inside this body, the only home I’ll ever know. It is limply passive, overwhelmed: which renders very exactly the experience of what that man’s act did to me – it left me feeling overcome, overpowered, nullified, without agency. I very much respect the argument that we ‘ought’ to put it in the active voice, naming the perpetrator. But I also find it hard.
Thanks for these heartening words and for expressing your feelings so plainly. I am thankful for it. XXX
how badly does one have to be treated before they are denied visiting rights? before they are warned off?
I don’t know, Jen, I keep asking myself am I being too forgiving… or not sufficiently forgiving of myself. I draw a line in the sand and then the tide rushes over it. I feel so strongly conditioned to accept poor behaviour and to see and understand the reasons why people behave as they do. I wish I could stand up for myself better.
So sad. Good on you for standing up for yourself in spite of the odds, you obviously have an irrepressible fire and that’s a gift. May the next generation in your family fare much better. Xx
Mia, I don’t always see myself this way. Since writing this story I’ve been feeling really crushed. The fund of people’s outrage and empathy finally shows me how awful this was. How little compassion I have had for myself. It feels like I’ve been holding on tight for so long and now I’ve let go.
Sorry to respond so limply. I would love to be all fiery and determined. But I just can’t, right now. Xx
My dear Cathoel, I am so sad to read what happened to you. When you mentioned your ‘atomic’ family I was expecting something difficult but this is beyond anything I could have imagined. I have so much admiration for your for being the loving and kind person you are after all that has happened. Many would have been distroyed by this and you somehow managed to grow strength out of this dreadful experience. You are so brave for having dared to write that and share it. The world really needs people like you, who are ready to out their feelings to make a difference (maybe you should consider TED talking, for you inspired me and many would benefit from hearing this!). You are such a gifted writer and a beautiful human being. I am happy for our paths to have crossed! I wish you well in hoping that outing your thoughts somehow helped you processing the feelings that must be still very present… Stay yourself for it is your best person ! Grüße
Liebe Caroline,
Thank you for this lucid and warm, generous response. I feel it has indeed destroyed me and what I am now is built anew. It has taken me thirty years to gain the courage to write about it in public like this. So I don’t feel brave, I feel all the fear that kept me silent for so long, pressing on my back.
The fear and shame. It is liberating to finally work out I’ve no need to feel ashamed of other people’s actions. I wish we could all be holding more and freer conversation around these most painful, hidden topics. It’s weird but when your comment appeared, I had just in those minutes been thinking of you and picturing what it might be like to know you’d read this revealing story so soon after we met and grew fond of each other in quite another context. Hail fellow well-kismet. Grüße an Dich, auch XXX und danke sehr.
You are one of the most courageous and perceptive people I know, Cathoel. Your lucidity is valuable to us all. I salute you and sympathise, having just recognised similar prepping in my own early years – though not to the extent of yours. Thank you for being the spokeswoman you are…woman putting a spoke in the norms…
Oh, dear Alison, I so much prefer this interpretation of ‘spokeswoman’! Thank you, poet.
I’m so sorry to hear you have been recognising this grooming in your own life. This past month or so – how long has it been? – with the Harvey Weinstein revelations and then #MeToo and now celebrities from Uma Thurman to Björk revealing that as we suspected, no amount of privilege or beauty or power or fame can keep a woman safe from predatory men… has been so exhausting, for so many. I’m thinking of you, and thank you for thinking of me. And for reading. xxx
Liebe Cathoel,
Whilst we’ve only met once, thanks to your writings and postings I feel to have a sense of what an amazing person you are. Power to you for sharing such painful and lasting experiences. How downright awful, when the place of refuge and shelter is not only physically/sexually but also emotionally abusive and traumatising. No wonder that setting these painful truths free is completely exhausting. May the tears and cheers (to your courage) be cathartic and cleansing. Please take refuge in the inspiration you are to all of us (and so many more..!). So much respect and compassion and aroha. May I be lucky enough for our paths to cross again soon sometime.
Sincerely and in solidarity
Lieber Iain,
Thanks for this gentleness and kindness. Really in need of it right now. I hoped that finally finding the courage to tell this story would relieve me of it – and it kind of has – but in fact since then I feel so collapsed. I can feel how the part of me that’s been holding on and keeping me upright has now finally let go.
Thinking so much this week, this month, about all of the female energy – and it infects the lives of some men, too – tied up in and usurped by this kind of trauma, and what it costs us to survive it all the time. It alters everything and it never goes away. It’s not always on my mind but always awakenable. Since #MeToo started to open our stories out to one another I keep thinking about what this world would look like if so many of the women living in it were not blinded by shell shock, traumatised by pain, and having to outrun memory. It uses the exact same kind of determination, and getting up again when you fall, and creative lateral thinking I use to make literature, or to make music, or to dance.
Lovely to meet you and I am enjoying our frank respectful conversations. When we do meet next, I’ll be glad.
I am so sorry to learn that this is part of your history, Cathoel. Thank you for being brave enough to write about it.
That’s really generous of you, thank you, Patricia. Thanks for reading. I appreciate it and am warmed. X
I have no words ????
Thanks beautiful Shona. I appreciate you reading, and letting me know you’ve read. Such a kindness.
Cathoel, you are amazing and beautiful and strong, and I’m so sorry for your pain. Thank you for sharing this and helping all the rest of us come to grips with our own lives.
Jennifer, this is such a powerful and lovely response. Thank you for putting it this way, I hadn’t seen it. Best and flexiblest strong grip to you, sister woman.
Dear Cathoel, your courage, humanity, grace and clarity, your lucidity, not to mention a thousand other things, each hold aloft candles offering flames of light, hope, love and connectedness of a kind rarely glimpsed but always greatly needed. You are precious beyond compare. Thank you so very much for sharing your story. May you live for a very very very long time.
This is such a beautiful and loving reply, it’s moved me beyond words. Thank you for this gracious compassionate kindness Paul. I’m very aided by it. I needed it. It’s so generous of you to speak this way and I love your sense of brotherhood. Thank you.
We are such kindreds you and I, and I always take great pride in being a survivor not a victim. We’re awesome hahahah. Love to you sister,thank you for sharing your story with brutal honesty as it should be heard. You are fierce sister. xxxA
Dear Andi, I am very sorry to hear that you know of this pain. I love that you see the survival in yourself. Myself I have struggled for a long time to move past survival, which can seem meagre and mere, into thriving – flourishing and flowering – really living. I wish that for both of us now, all of us. Fiercely. xxxC
Godalmighty! Fucking hell, Cathoel. That is so fucking terrible.
How on earth did you come out of being raised by such assholes as brave and beautiful as you are???
I can’t tell you how glad I am that you figured out at some point that it was them who were doing wrong, not you. I just want to dive into that story and form a protective shell around that lovely, lovely girl. Keep her safe from monsters and tell her it’s just bad luck that her people are horrible, it has nothing to do with who she is.
Now I understand why you’re an artist. That sort of stuff can kill the spirit, if we don’t have a way of making it into art.
I can only guess at how you felt to relive that and write it. I hope people’s reactions give the 17-y-o girl inside you hope that this world has love and kindness and appreciation of talent in it, as well as that hideous bad shit.
Bless you and bless your talent. ❤️❤️❤️
Anything I say is inadequate for all the trauma you have suffered. Your courage in sharing your pain is truely inspiring. I hope you can find peace. Sending lots of love xxx
Dear Dominique, thank you for reading my awful story. Thank you for replying. I am hoping, too, for peace and I orient myself this way every day, sometimes several times in one day. Trying to live in the beauties and wonders of life. Really grateful for your generosity. Cathoel xxx
Oh Cathoel, I’m so sorry to read that this happened to you and commend your bravery in sharing it. Sending you love and healing thoughts. Xxx
Oh, Beth, this sterling word ‘commend’ with its slight formality and feeling of official importance, it feels so recognising, I feel as though you’ve draped a sash of commendation round my neck. Thank you for taking the time to respond and for your kindness. It’s so heartening. Xxx
Oh, my dear sister. I am so very, very sorry to read your story. I cannot imagine the strength and bravery it must have taken to write this. I have no words with which to adequately express my sorrow and outrage for what happened to you. I wish with all my heart you will find peace and healing. I think it is amazing, that you are amazing, to live a life of hope and creativity and still seek and find the beauty in the world. I am sending you lots of love and solidarity. Please stay strong and remember that you are loved and you are supported. Our families are not always those people with whom we share genes but those with whom we share our dreams and hopes and affection. Take good care of yourself. Huge hugs to you xxxx
Dear Jo. Thank you so much. This beautiful, loving generosity that I have gulped down by rereading your comment over and over again this week. I’m so sorry to be so slow to reply. I feel your love. I feel your solidarity. I’ve been leaching hope from them after telling this story left me feeling so collapsed and worn. Really, really kind of you and I appreciate your wise words, very deeply. Thank you, dear sister woman. xxxx
Horrendous! Blown away how you are after all this – strong, talented, amazing. So, so sorry all this happened to you. So sorry women are so devalued and so badly treated in our society.. xxx
Thank you for these fierce words, Sandra. Just this morning the struggle to overcome and get out from under is all over me again, and I attend to my weeping and my repair and wash my face again and get ready to face the day, to make something. I have been thinking a lot about what all of this costs us, as women, as people of colour, as people disbelieved and abused in all the awful kinds of ways – what the cost is to our community in general, all the medicine, architecture, poetry, and music that wounded people might have been better able to contribute, without the energy suck of giant trauma.
In some ways it can ripen and mature us and I cling to that. But some days, it’s not enough. The cost is too great.
They make it seem so normal and innocent; themselves blameless, your pain and protestations minimised to nothingness – and in your case taken beyond, to the point of being physically beaten in response to a cry for help! That your family were so complicit and protective of your abusers is truly shameful and disgusting. Thank you for sharing this story. I have such deep pain and grief that my abusers to this day do not understand the damage they caused; that they will never be the people I wanted them to be. That last sentence of your story was just like something another family member said to my sister. Others have tried to quantify our experiences, to measure how deserving of compassion we are, or how justified we were in pressing charges against our parents. I find the horror of all these things in how casual the abuse is. It’s just a bit of fun that has the capacity to shape a person’s psyche – that which they take with them throughout life and must always ‘work’ with. Yes we can rewire the brain pathways but damn it takes a lot of effort, which could have been spent on – any – other pursuit!
I commend your courage and am grateful for your openness. Thankyou X
My heart breaks for you Cathoel, the younger you and you now. I hope it is cathartic to write about your harrowing experiences. Despite all you have had to deal with, you are beautiful inside and out.
Your story is powerful and painful. I am sorry for the pain you endured from the people you trusted, and should have been able to trust. But I am so happy you have been able to share this difficult story; i hope it helps you move forward in your journey. Keep at it. Hugs.
Thank you, Kim, for reading and replying, for your encouragement. I strive mightily, and have for years, to smelt this pain into solidity and gold: as does almost every person I know who has experienced savagery and betrayal and abuse. I never stop working at it. It is tiring but I feel determined these experiences are going to continue to make me larger and more grounded, not smaller, more closed off from the world, and more fearful.
I’m so sorry your family did this to you, they don’t deserve to be your family.
That is a most riveting thought, Diana, thank you for putting it into words.
I was in tears reading your story. I’m feeling so angry on your behalf. Your family do not deserve you. Sending you lots of love and hugs and strength.
I welcome your anger, Eleanor, as well as your tears. They help me and strengthen me more than I can express. Thank you so much and I love these hugs and will use this love and strength full tilt. X
Just read this and shed a little tear for you. I never appreciated what a lucky childhood I had. I always assumed all parents were kind to their children. I’m so sorry yours weren’t kind to you ????❤️
What a generous and heartfelt response, Catherine, thank you for your kindness.
I’m glad to hear you had kind parents who were able to be there for you, and I see you making use of that nutrition in your active compassion for others. ❤️❤️
Cathoel, I’m in awe of you and all others who have the courage to share their stories, their wounds and show the world the cost of such betrayal and cruelty. Every time it breaks my heart. How long will it take to erase this sadistic culture of power and exploitation? I wish there was some way I could give you, and other survivors, more support.