Revisiting The Shame of My Sexual Assault

I was sixteen when my sister’s boyfriend, fourteen years my senior, pushed me back and had sex with me. My sister, who also became his fiancée around that time, had been staying overnight in the hospital with an ectopic pregnancy. Her first or second, as I recall.

For many years after that incident, I ashamedly told myself that it was something I had somehow, inadvertently agreed to. I was, after all, this wild child who crashed through a complicated life, anesthetizing my vulnerability and wounds, as much as I humanly could. And along the way, never for once did I see the ugly reality for what it regrettably was. I was just a horrible person in my eyes.

It wasn’t until seventeen years after that indelible experience, becoming a mother to my daughter and watching her grow into a beautiful young woman, that I finally found insight and clarity into what had truly taken place. My perception, sharpened by the untangling of my trauma, worked through with my therapist—enabled me to comprehend why I had lived all my life with chronic self-doubt.

My eyes were now fully open to how gullible, naïve, and easily influenced I had been in my earlier years, allowing people to exploit me in far too many scenarios at such a young age.

My father lived out a volatile on-and-off relationship with my hard-to-love mother. In my infant years, when he was allowed to stay over, which was abundantly rare, my twin and I thought life was good again. They finally parted while I was still a child, leaving me uncomfortable with the idea of living with a man in the house; the only intimacy I understood crossed boundaries that overshadowed my sense of self.

I was fourteen going on fifteen when my mother took a trip abroad, taking my twin. I had refused to go because I struggled with her mood swings and eccentricity. My sister was instructed to mind me, and that meant her fiancé, too, as she lived with him by then.

It was during one of those evenings, they took me along to visit some friends, who, as we sat down and chatted, casually slid a porno video into the machine as if it were a run-of-the-mill thing. As the explicit vulgar images flickered across the television screen, a sickening sensation flooded my stomach as the five adults teased my interpretations of shock.

My sister, who had been around eighteen, couldn’t see that she should have protected me. Still, like me, she hadn’t been loved in a way that nurtured her inner specialness—she, instead, hung onto her sexist boyfriend’s misogynistic persona.

And sadly, my siblings and I had all left home by the time we were reaching our sixteenth birthdays. Our mother, although she taught us good manners and fed us, and extremely fertile, wasn't at all maternal. Her mother had walked out on my grandfather when she was only three years old.

My grandfather was a cold and controlling man and refused to let my mother go and live with her mother. This affected my mother's mental health catastrophically; her rigidity, religiosity, and incessant demand for control through manipulation drove all of us children away. The whole family dynamic felt like one big fuck up.

My father hadn’t ever really wanted to know and did his best, but the least nurturing as possible, when he remembered to turn up. He warned me as a young teenager that I was on my own when I reached the age of sixteen. He didn’t prepare me for life and was the type of man who took the little savings I had to spend on my school uniform. Both my parents are sadly narcissistic and emotionally damaged by their past.

My therapist banned me from using that word — damaged. Still, that is how the insidious, toxic shame that ran through my family engulfed my entire being. I didn’t have anywhere else to escape to, apart from my older sister, whom I looked up to, but that would come with a price.

And so, I moved in with my ‘surrogate mother’, who is four years older than me. My mother, mentally and physically incapable herself at the time, had made my sister look after my twin and me, even as babies. And my sister was still playing that role. She had a young babe in arms herself — with her fiancé, who eventually became her husband, and then became her ex after leaving my sister for another woman. He was an immature, lazy, and sexist spouse and far from a nurturing father.

I remember feeling excited and astounded at the same time by the big crowd of friends visiting every evening. I would happily make numerous cups of tea and coffee most evenings, free at last from my controlling mother. Porn tapes were played out on the video recorder — viewed by the audience of said friends. An array of glossy porn mags stashed in cupboards. Conversations, teasing, and situations — over sexualized and yet so normalized. I was sixteen, unworldly, and crippled with a lack of self.

My sister's fiancé would tell me he should have been with me, and not my sister. I remember even once he made my face up; looking back, it’s seen as grooming now, yet at the time, I took any compliment without understanding the lack of boundaries. Even my senior-aged doctor, along with other close older adults, knowingly sexually abused me. A young teenager, who had assumed she was a hideously unlovable girl.

My intense self-doubt felt like a painful disability and created other abusive disorders. I began to rely on alcohol for courage and used drugs to anesthetize my not-enoughness. I was sexually shamed by a boyfriend and our colleagues where we had worked, and attempted suicide because of it, yet thankfully supported by a friend who came to look for me. I had only been seventeen or so, yet I ached to end my self-hate, which had been intensified by the sexual abuse and shaming.

I couldn’t ever or want to imagine my daughter having to go through any of this. Yet when I look at my younger self, I just didn’t know any different. It was better than living with my neurotic mother. It makes me feel sad; even now, when I have let her back into my life, she tells me that God has cursed me. I have a small amount of faith, and so this upsets me more than anything else.

I have been in therapy since my late teens in an attempt to heal; nonetheless, in more recent years, I lucked out with an intuitive therapist, who pushed me to dig even deeper and was a wonderful mirror. He opened me up to a new paradigm when he pinpointed my co-dependency, as well as the narcissistic behaviour I was being subjected to by many close people in my life. Before these sessions, dysfunction had permeated my life for a long time, as I was unknowingly stuck in a self-destructive and self-sabotaging cycle.

Nevertheless, I have now learned to understand the adult, parent, and child within me. This empowers me when I consider which one I am acting from — when I am triggered. Healing is happening after decades of disconnection and disassociation.

I have found it difficult to find words because, after so many years of chronic survival, one forms spiritual and emotional scar tissue. And scar tissue is inflexible and rigid. With writing, we can unpack and reflect to understand ourselves with self-compassion. Self-forgiveness is going to be the key for me, as I blame myself for so many ugly scenarios that I got myself into. However, I do believe if we can find a place within ourselves to do this, we can find it for the people who have hurt us, knowingly or unknowingly.

I was eventually able to tell my sister the actual truth of what happened, and even though I had been drinking that evening, I was pushed back, my tights ripped apart, and in that instance, my mind, dazed and confused, felt I had no other options. I had frozen into the fawn trauma response and kept quiet and submissive. I had assumed for years it was my fault — I hadn’t been self-aware of what I wanted, and that it was okay to say out loud, ‘NO’. I was a terrified people-pleaser, even when it came to something as intimate as sex.

I’m now able to discern, through loving my daughter, how normal it had been for me to accept the abnormalities as reality because those were my only available options to survive.

I always pray that my life experience isn’t at all just one huge fuckup and that somehow, I can be a conduit for hope for others, in what I have learnt from healing those wounds. For the past ten years or more, I have worked tirelessly on searching for self-acceptance, inner peace, forgiveness, and self-connection. It is an indefinite journey to heal, and I believe with family members, it can be even more ambiguous. Particularly because learning about what boundaries are and creating healthy lines in the sand can offend others. And having the courage to hold on to what is right for me, no matter how family members feel about that, as so far it’s been more about their rejection and hurt, more than my healing, that’s in the mix.

We have to allow a huge amount of unconditional love to flow in for ourselves, even when it doesn’t feel natural to do so. Forgiving others is hard, yet no matter how horrendous the acts and words were, I acknowledge that humans are flawed. Somehow, we need to find a way to heal mankind before the darkness gets too dark, and hopelessness is all too consuming.

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