Self-abandonment since CSA

[DD]

My PTSD was recently triggered and that actually helped hit something home. And looking back over the last months there has been a theme of self-abandonment. It's in the songs I keep listening to on repeat. And this is actually quite hard to write about as it is so fresh a realization. All my life I've been the one to hold everything together even as I was taking an emotional beating. It's unfortunately a repeating pattern. I am the one keeping things together while I am in agony and no one sees the pain, even as a child.

I experienced CSA at the hand of my uncle as a child. My parents knew my sister had the same fate some years before me but they kept taking me there. For that and for all the other traumatic things there is a theme that always a few people knew about it, but no one came to help. So I grew up as the person who tries to save everyone because no one came to save me. They just watched me hurt, and get hurt as if it was nothing. As if it was meaningless, as if I was meaningless. So I grew up believing I was less than human. That I had to earn the right to exist and it had to be earned by being useful, kind and helpful to others. If everyone around me were fine, maybe it was ok if I existed just a little.

This led to a lifetime of people pleasing and enabling the abuse that ensued. Now I sit here having cried for some hours and just see the damage done. I don't have a question. What I am asking is to be kindly witnessed. That I exist. That I matter. That I'm allowed to be human.

[Blueberry]

I experienced CSA at the hand of my uncle as a child. My parents knew my sister had the same fate some years before me but they kept taking me there. For that and for all the other traumatic things there is a theme that always a few people knew about it, but no one came to help.

I'm sorry DD, that sounds to me like SUCH a betrayal! Your parents knew of the danger and still didn't prevent it happening to you.

Yes, you are human, you matter, you exist. I want to add that you have rights - to exist and to be treated with respect.

[TheBigBlue]

I see you.

What you shared is devastating, and I want to say this clearly: you were a child who should have been protected, and you weren't. The way you learned to survive - holding everything together, being useful, keeping others okay - makes sense in the face of that level of abandonment. None of it means you were ever less than human. It means you were hurt and left alone with it.

You exist. You matter - not because you earned it by being kind or useful, but because you exist. You are allowed to be human, even when you are not holding anyone else together.

Thank you for trusting this space with something so raw. You are being witnessed.