one of the things about traumatic abuse and neglect is that it screws with your memories. i didn't remember the rape until 2 years ago, and since then little pieces of the puzzle fall in place from time to time.
i've been thinking a lot about my sexual addiction and how to begin to blog about it, and i was talking with a friend about mpd (multiple personality disorder) and i remembered seeing the movie sybil as a child and how it seared itself on my mind. i googled it thinking i'd like to see it again as an adult and realized it was a made for tv movie in 1976.
it was then i started to remember. i was 11. somehow the babysitter (i think it was my grandmother) had fallen asleep and i got to stay up way past my bedtime and i watched the movie. i can still see the enema scene like it is branded on the back of my eyelids.
what i just realized is that seeing sybil's abuse awakened something in me that i didn't understand and had no ability to process. it left me feeling afraid again, alone and vulnerable. that is when i began to self-comfort. that is when i began to masturbate. that is when food became my best friend.
i never could remember before when or why or how it all started. it was when i saw the date 1976 that things started to make sense for me. 11 is such a confusing age for girls, development begins and hormones are causing havoc.
something else happened at that time for me - i became unsafe. my father stopped showing me affection. my sister (3 years younger) was still an innocent child, but me, i was becoming a woman, and my father had no idea what to do with me. in the concrete thinking of the 11 year old mind i had done something wrong, something shameful. i didn't know what it was, but i was to blame.
wow. it used to take me months of therapy to pull those kind of things apart. i guess good therapy helps you get to the place where you can start to process things on your own. i like it when the puzzle of my life starts to make more sense.
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