When I was sexually abused by my stepfather, finally confessed (guilt-ridden, ashamed, scared) to my mother, and he denied it -- and she preferred his lies to my truth -- I learned some lessons, deeply:
— I don’t matter. People can do what they want with me.
— My body doesn’t really belong to me.
— No one can be trusted, not men, not the person whom I most loved, my mother. (She stayed married to him, and the abuse continued until he died a few years later.)
— When you’re in trouble, you’re on your own.
And so I went into my adulthood, a solitary, brave performer, a watcher of other people and of life. It wasn’t for me to belong; I was an outsider, marked forever.
You can see that the trauma itself — his co-option of my body and its sensibilities — was horrible, but it was temporary, and not lethal. What haunted me were the lessons.
“Why not move on?” you might have asked. “Events are over, and they can’t be changed, so why grip them so fiercely?” I held on because the lessons were unacceptable. I had to disprove them. Of course I “knew” that his spirit was deformed — the sexual events weren’t my idea! — but now my body was contaminated. I had to eject this poison. It was actually healthy of me to keep worrying over it, fighting, trying to reclaim myself. Events ccouldn't be changed, but my skewed lessons could.
I figured out I could shift the focus from “what he did” to “what I believe.” I learned to identify with my spirit and return his lies, his poison, to him. I got the facts right (it did happen, repeatedly), and I also got the lessons right. My error (every child's error) was in generalizing, transferring the lessons to Everywhere. Yes, I was helpless, powerless, terrified, alone and worthless -- but only in that situation. In fact, those choices were entirely his; I just happened to be there. Ick, but "not mine," and not everywhere.
Now I had a new challenge. When I returned his deformity to him, I was vulnerable to my own truth. Would I be able to withstand the reality of my experience, how it all felt to me? As long as I blamed and fixated on him (or my mother), I wasn't up close to my own reality. He was a creep; he was sick; he should be chopped slowly into little pieces, she was weak and neurotic . . . . Everything was about them, and I could avoid what the whole thing felt like to me. In that sense, continuing to obsess was protective, even while it kept me trapped "inside" those awful events.
But I didn’t have my life, and that wasn't okay. I didn't want him, or them, to keep on dominating my internal world. So I stopped fighting them and turned to my own emotional reality, one truth at a time. Now I was the important person. How did I feel the first time he approached me? How was my life different afterwards? Why did I wait two years to tell my mother? What happened when I told her, and how did I feel? What happened inside of me when I realized she wasn't going to rescue me? What other misunderstandings grew out of my having felt I was responsible for any of it?
Each bit of my truth made me more vivid to myself. Now I was the one who mattered; they were bits of temporary dirt. Disgusting, but not central to my identity.
I'm still working on it, but those events have become something that happened to me -- not who I am.