TW CSA I need to say exactly what happened

[GettingThere]

TRIGGER WARNING FOR CHILD SEXUAL, PHYSICAL & EMOTIONAL ABUSE

I've never been able to say the full details of exactly how I was sexually abused in childhood. I've been holding it inside for 30 years and I need to say it now.

I am autistic. What that looks like for me is that my nervous system is like a lightening rod. I cannot cope with life the way other people do. When my fight or flight is activated, I have meltdowns. I scream, I cry, and I definitely cannot reason logically or try to understand other people's intentions. The dial on all of my 5 senses is turned up to a volume that most people will never reach. And submitting my body to being physically controlled or taken over by another person feels like I'm dying.

Both of my parents have Narcissistic Personality Disorder and are likely also sadistic psychopaths. They delight in other people's pain and fear. The greatest pleasure they can experience is the wide smiles and cackling laughs they enjoy when hurting another person. They love hitting and controlling their children and each other. Their greatest joy in life is violating another person, rendering them powerless, and sitting back and laughing at them.

When I was a child, since I was at most 5 and probably before, my parents would grab me, hold both of my arms behind my back, and spank me as hard as they possibly could, only and always on my most sensitive sit spot, usually about 50 times. They did this about once or twice a week from the time I was about 5 until the time I was 12. They only stopped when I was 12 because I got my period.

To justify spanking me, they would provoke me to the point where I had an autistic meltdown. Usually my brother was hitting me or sexually touching me and I told my parents about it. They would tell me I was lying and being a tattle tale. Because I'm autistic, I would scream louder and insist that he really did open my door to look at me naked while I was changing, or sexually assault me, or whip my thighs with the chain of the broken backyard swing, or whatever he had done that time to harm me. My parents would tell me I was lying and that my brother would never do that and that if I kept lying, they were going to spank me.

Because I was an autistic child, I would scream louder and louder that I wasn't lying and scream louder and louder that they couldn't spank me. Then my mom or dad would grab me and start hauling me down to the basement while I screamed at the top of my lungs and physically fought them to get free. My brother would watch and laugh and taunt me and follow us down to the basement so he could watch it happen.

After my parent pulled me to the sofa and sat down, I would physically fight them the entire time they were trying to get me to hold still. I would scream, punch them, scratch them, spit in their face, and do everything I could to beat their hands away me. Sometimes I would manage to fight them off and run away up the stairs and into the bathroom to get myself behind a locked door. I would stay in the bathroom pressing the entire force of my body against the locked door and holding the doorknob lock shut with my hand as my parent screamed, and punched, and kicked, and tried to physically beat the door down. Most of the time once I got myself behind the locked door and pressed it shut with my body, they would only try to beat it down for about half an hour before giving up and I would spend the night sleeping on the bathroom floor until school the next day.

But usually, I was not able to physically fight them off and they would hold me so I couldn't get away. Once I was in position, they would start the spanking. They only ever spanked my sensitive sit spot. Sometimes they would miss and hit me there again to make up for the miss. They would scream about how bad I was and how much they hated me and how much they wished I was dead or never born. Sometimes my father would force me to call him "sir" and say "Sir, yes sir" or "I'm sorry sir." I would always start by refusing to do that and he would scream louder and spank harder until I eventually gave in and called him "sir." My brother would laugh hysterically and point and jump up and down and taunt me while repeating that I was getting a bare bottom spanking.

If I tried to cover my bum, they hit my hand away and spanked me more. Sometimes they would make me count and it was always either to 50 or 100 spanks. I remember getting to 70 and skipping to 90 and hoping they wouldn't notice. Then they would start over and I would end up being spanked 200 times. I would struggle to escape for most of the spanking and they hit me so hard that my body rocked and shook.

By the end of a spanking, my bum felt like it had been set on fire. At the end, my mom or dad would throw me off their lap onto the floor and I'd hit the ground with a thud, sometimes hitting my head. The basement floor was concrete covered by thin carpet. They'd say "Now think about what you've done" and then go back upstairs. My brother would stay behind to jump up and down and point and laugh for a while after my parent had left, but once I was lying still on the floor and just crying, he would quickly get bored and go back upstairs. My bum would hurt so badly that I couldn't move. I would just lie on the sofa on my stomach, alone and in pain, and cry myself to sleep and spend the night in the basement.

About 10 years ago, I was retraumatized by a psychologist who violated my consent during an inner child visualisation exercise. She told me to imagine my adult self going down into the basement, comforting my child self, and then leaving her behind. In the psychologist's office, I cried and said I didn't want to leave my inner child behind. I said I wanted to imagine adopting her and bringing her to the present with me. My psychologist said I couldn't imagine that because if I did, I wasn't accepting what happened and leaving it in the past. At the time, I believed my psychologist and imagined leaving my inner child behind.

Since that day, I've been sexually assaulted by 2 partners, 1 family member, and 2 medical professionals because I was too afraid to say no. For four years, my psychologist slowly trained me to be afraid to say no to authority figures - something I was never afraid to do before. Now when I try to redo the inner child visualisation my way, I flash back to that psychologist and feel guilty even though visualizing rescuing and adopting my inner child helps me feel safe and empowered and helps me have a more integrated, less fragmented sense of self.

[Kizzie]

I am so sorry for what you have been through Getting There, it is always shocking to read what fellow survivors have had to contend with and now struggle to recover from.  I do hope getting this off your chest does serve to move you forward in your recovery.   

[GettingThere]

Thank you Kizzie. I've been too ashamed to say this to anyone for about 30 years because like so many people, I grew up hearing my parents say that they had to do this to me because I was so bad and it was my fault. So I never told anyone all the details of what happened because I was ashamed and thought I was dirty and disgusting and that it was my fault.

Now in my adult life, whenever I think I've been very bad, I watch or read porn of women being brutally spanked. Recently there were a few months where I was able to visualize comforting my inner child and imagining that I had adopted her and that was very helpful. But I recently had a relapse where I've gone back to watching the severe spanking videos and I'm really trying to learn that I don't need to be physically or sexually punished whenever I'm not perfect, but it is such a hard mental pathway to break when it's literally beaten into you from childhood.

Thank you so much for creating a space for survivors to share our stories <3

[Dalloway]

GettingThere, I´m so sorry for all the abuse you suffered that words can´t really describe it. I was never SA´d but I was abused physically and emotionally from a very early age, that´s why I had tears in my eyes reading and imagining you crying alone after the abuse, because I still remember how utterly alone and abandoned I felt every time my M abused me. I would cry for hours not understanding how the world can be so cruel to me, and try to console myself. It´s so painful when you believe that the whole world has forgotten you and you are all by yourself - at least, this was my experience, I don´t want to misinterpret your words. I´ve been also struggling with shame and blame all my life as a result of the abuse. I hope, as Kizzie also mentioned, that writing about this helped you a little and also that you feel the support and love here. I´m sending you all that. 

[GettingThere]

Thank you so much Dalloway. Thank you for sharing your experience of feeling completely alone and like the world had forgotten about you after being abused. That was exactly how I felt as a child. I'm so sorry you felt the same way growing up. I've also struggled with shame and blame throughout my life. I'm so sorry this has been your experience as well.

As ridiculous as it sounds, the little girl inside me is still afraid that if anyone knows that she was very regularly spanked with all her clothes taken away from the waist down that people will think she's a very bad girl who behaves horribly. As a child, my parents hid from me that I had been diagnosed with autism and they spanked me for doing all of the normal things that autistic children do.

I've struggled all my life with believing I'm a bad person who deserves to be punished and I'm still trying to learn that that isn't true. Learning that I'm autistic and that I was sexually assaulted has really helped with this process.

Thank you so much to you and Kizzie for your replies. This is helping the little girl inside me understand that being spanked doesn't mean that she's a bad girl. It means she had bad parents.

[Dalloway]

 

[Kizzie]

Thank you so much to you and Kizzie for your replies. This is helping the little girl inside me understand that being spanked doesn't mean that she's a bad girl. It means she had bad parents.

    

[Blueberry]

GettingThere,
I saw a few words in your first post on this thread, enough for me to know not to read, not even to skim-read, but also enough to know that there are similarities between the CSA done to you and the CSA done to me. I just wanted to let you know that and also to let you know that you are not alone.

Also I understand wanting to say or needing to say what all exactly happened.

[GettingThere]

Thank you for your support Blueberry. I'm so sorry that you were abused in the same way <3

[Blueberry]

Thank you for your words of support to me, GettingThere