Living with almost...

When I was a child, I was sexually abused by my brothers or as I used to think for years, almost sexually abused.  They did not actually have sex with me and that has left me in a kind of limbo where I'm not really sure how to feel about what happened to me.  One brother didn't touch me sexually, he would watch me bath or undress when he got the opportunity and he would hold me down and try out different techniques for torturing me.  The other brother would "tickle" me and "accidentally" touch my breasts.  The last time he did it, I actually felt him get a hard-on which seemed to embarrass him and he let me go.  For years, I would tell myself that I was lucky that they didn't do any more than what they did.  I couldn't understand why I struggled so much with my experiences when they "weren't that bad".

In college, when I started getting serious with my now husband, I started having panic attacks when things would get a bit hot and heavy.  I ended up seeing a counselor about it and she was the first person to validate my feelings that I had been sexually abused.  Though there was some suspicion that there might be some repressed memories which were preventing me from healing.  I went through age regression hypnosis and the event that I "remembered", I had never really forgotten.  One day the brother who liked to torture me, decided he wanted to find out what would happen if he suffocated me.  He held me down and covered both my mouth and nose with his hand.  I was probably 11 or 12 and he was 5 years older than me.  His hand easily prevented me from getting any air and I was completely helpless to get him off of me.  What I had forgotten was how terrifying this had been for me.  I'd made jokes about it and minimized it for so many years that I had suppressed not the memory but the emotions.  During this hypnosis session, I remembered how I tried to push him off of me, using all the tricks I had learned from previous incidents to get away from him and did not succeed.  I remembered how I stopped fighting because I didn't have the energy.  I remember my eyesight and hearing fading as my brain started to shut down.  Then I saw the blurry image of another brother's face peering over the shoulder of the brother suffocating me.  He said something but it just sounded like mumbling.  Then my brother let me go.  I ran.  I found myself outside the house sitting on the ground with my back against the house sobbing.  A police car drove past and as I watched it go by I thought about running to the car and telling the police officer what had just happened.  Maybe my brother would get arrested and I'd be free from his torture.  But I didn't think the police officer would believe me.  My own mother didn't believe me when I told her about the abuse when it started a year or two earlier.  I just sat there crying while I watched the police car drive down the street and felt so alone, so helpless, so resigned to my situation.  Sometimes I've wondered if the counselor was a bit disappointed that there wasn't more to it.  But the acknowledgement of how traumatic that experience had been was the first step for me to deal with the panic attacks.  It was suddenly clear that the panic attacks were triggered when I was physically put in a similar position to how I had been when my brother tried to suffocate me.  My counselor taught me how to calm myself down when I panicked.  It basically involved repeatedly reminding myself that I was no longer a child, I was a woman.  I was with the man I loved, not my hated brother and I was safe.  This simple solution worked and getting intimate with my husband hasn't triggered panic attacks since then but it doesn't really help keep the nightmares away.

Some years ago, I started reading more about sexual abuse and how to prevent it.  When I happened upon a website that included a listing of all the different kinds of sexual abuse, I felt amazingly vindicated when I read about voyeurism.  What I had been through had a name and it was considered sexual abuse.  Yes, my counselor from years ago had confirmed that I had been sexually abused but somehow because what I had experienced had not been as severe as it could have been it still felt like almost abused.  I would even tell myself that I was lucky it had not been worse; I could have been molested; I could have been raped.  However, pointing out how fortunate I had been that the abuse had not been worse only left me feeling guilty for continuing to struggle with nightmares, anxiety and other symptoms.

The site that I had happened upon was Darkness 2 Light (d2l.org) and it had so much information that I found helpful.  There was an explanation how there were a number of different factors that contributed to how traumatic sexual abuse was to a particular child.  I had been focused on the fact that I had not been molested and didn't understand why I couldn't just "get over it".  I came to understand that there are a number of factors that play into the amount of trauma experienced.  I had been raised in a very conservative Mormon home where viewing pornography was just as bad as fornication itself and the only thing worse than fornication was murder.  I was essentially my brother's pornography and that made me just as filthy.  It didn't matter that he was watching me without my consent and inspite of my varied attempts to keep him from seeing me.  When I went to my mother about what my brother was doing, she told me of ways I could keep my brother from seeing into my room but didn't do anything to my brother.  I was 10 and it was very clear that it was my responsibility to keep my 15 year-old brother away from me. Over the next 8 years with a 2 year reprieve while my brother served a mission for the Mormon church, I lived constantly looking over my shoulder, learning to dress without showing any skin, checking my walls for new peep holes, covering the ones I'd already found, fixing torn curtains, etc.  In that time, I also heard my dad make statements that it would be better for me to lose my life than give up my virtue (I attempted suicide twice) and that he didn't understand how a woman could get raped when she could run faster with her dress up than a man could run with his pants down (it was supposed to be a joke).  There was also the physical abuse.  My brother was so angry all the time.  It was like he blamed me as well for his inability to control his sexual desires and somehow torturing me made him feel better.  He was smart about it though and made sure that the things he did wouldn't leave a mark.  There was one time when he lost his temper and kicked me hard enough that I could barely walk.  Even then my parents didn't even ask what was wrong with my leg even though my friends at school did.  Maybe they knew and didn't want to have to deal with it.  I certainly wasn't going to say anything.  I knew that they wouldn't do anything about it and the next time I was alone with my brother I'd get it even worse.  Looking at what I went through in it's totality there is no other word for it... it was abuse.  It doesn't matter that others have been abused more or that I was not actually molested.  These were horrible experiences and I have every right to call it what it is... abuse; not almost abuse.

Recently, I read the following blog post on the Not Rape Epidemic and found the experiences described eerily familiar.  Although my brother never came out and threatened to rape me, it was very clear that he had the ability to do it.  Reading this article made me think about how many times I have thought I was lucky that the abuse wasn't worse and prompted me to write about how I have lived with almost abused and how I have felt guilty about being so screwed up by these events when they may seem as "not that bad" considering what others have gone through.  http://www.thegreatfitnessexperiment.com/2009/01/not-rape-epidemic.html

Here's the thing... while I'm grateful that my experiences were not worse than they were, I'm not lucky.  I was incredibly unlucky to have been born into a family that was more concerned about appearances than the well being of the children in the family.  I was unlucky to have two brothers who felt that they had a right to use my body for their own pleasures.  I am unlucky to live in a society where abuse in all levels of severity is so prevalent.  As the author of the Not Rape Epidemic article wonders how many women have not been raped, I wonder how many have almost been abused.