So how do I recover from childhood sexual abuse? And will there be sandwiches?

The literature of recovery is full of some very hardcore accounts of abuse. In fact, if you're looking for something that with truly sicken you right down to the center of your soul, read some of the accounts in, say, 'The Courage To Heal'. But when it comes to recounting the actual process of recovering, the amount of reality in these guides tends to go down and the amount of cautiously worded guidelines begins to rise.

Recovery...rebuilding the life you want out of the ruins of your past...is not a pretty process. Neither is it a politically correct process by any stretch of the imagination. Understandably, therapists need to make sure that their clients don't lose their shit, go out and and round up the abusers and their henchmen, throw them into a handball court and pour muriatic acid or flesh-eating bacteria on them, because therapists have insurance rates to think of. And then there's that whole thing about helping create well-adjusted members of society, too. Nothing wrong with that. But when they try and channel every impulse, sanitize the language, and guide every route through a moral high road, that strips a patient of at least half of the weapons they need in order to remake their minds.

The thing that lead me out of the darkness was ANGER. HATE and VENGEANCE were right there to my right and to my left. RAGE brought up the rear and kept the whole parade marching when all I wanted to do was pick up a gun and point it at my head. Hope? I had none. Children? Thought she'd be better off without me. Love? Please find yourself a normal woman you poor man.

Religion? Oh dear. (lengthy digression follows)

Religion played NO PART WHATSOEVER. Unless you count saying 'oh please God make it stop', that is. I can state conclusively that in my case there was no personally concerned deity, that the prayers of children are just wasted words, there are no guardian angels, no demons and nothing as sophisticated or as conniving as a Satan, and no power in blessings, or in curses for that matter. Salvation is a meaningless concern when your parents want you to die. 'Honor thy father and thy mother' is merely a lovely thought for a perfect world. The meek are not blessed. The meek are prey.

On the other hand I gained a whole new respect for Jesus the man, once I realized just what he meant and who he was saying it to. He genuinely did set me a good and brave example. But going to church, dogma, the bible, no. It's not that I didn't reach for religion, it's that when I did it turned out to be made of smoke.
Except for elements of Judaism, but I'm still working on that one.

My therapist was a very nice, almost grandmotherly woman. I surprised her with my 'ability to contact my anger' as she delicately put it. She spent a lot of time encouraging me to 'channel that anger' and to 'not let it carry me away'. All of which is perfectly good advice. It was indeed something that I needed to work on. But there was a particular intensity to her admonitions that I finally had to front her up on- and it all came down to her being taken aback because women don't generally express 'that'. 'That' being 'murderous rage'.

This had as much to do with old school feminism as anything else. Remember when feminist scholars were postulating 'woman' as naturally free of the need for hierarchy, daisy-covered estrogen fonts of passive, rational and civilized behavior, while all the bad ol' men were just barely controlled rapists running butt-wild all over the planet fucking everything up? That model.

It also had to do with some kind of Victorian left-over garbage...the thing that paints negative emotions as morally and spiritually 'bad'.

Negative emotions exist for a purpose. They are tools to be used, just like positive emotions are.
When you teach people that half the tools they are given are never to be used, that using them will in fact SEND THEM STRAIGHT TO HELL FOR ALL ETERNITY, you effectively cripple them.
When you socialize one half of the entire population into behaving as though this part of their psyches should not even exist if they are 'good', you damage their minds.
When you give them reason after huge reason to experience the press of this negative half and then viciously punish them when they break out, you make them psychotic.
Once they agree with this treatment? You've turned them into slaves.

Once a person has come to accept being down in the galley chained to an oar, they'll kill the first one among them who tires. There is nothing a person who believes themselves to be truly defeated and enslaved hates worse than someone weaker than themselves. That is the point at which a human being becomes a subhuman abuser, male or female. Half of them beat children up with belts. The other half press childrens' hands against hot stove burners and call it an accident.

The only sane, rational response to child abuse is rage, anger, hate and vengeance. Anger fuels change. Vengeance drives people to put an end to evil. Hate identifies the enemy. Rage feeds motion.

People so socialized against these things that they can't even say 'shit' when they have a mouthful of it are going to have a lot of difficulty making the transition from 'victim' to 'human'. And unfortunately, even in the 21st century, this still describes one hell of a lot of women.

In order to recover, you have to ask yourself "Whose rules am I afraid to break? And why?
You have to ask yourself " Who am I making happy by following these rules?"
You have to ask yourself "What if I was lied to?

You HAVE TO GET ANGRY.

This is what I worked out with my therapist at last. I think it was good for both of us. She grew braver and got in touch with something she needed to learn to live with, and I became less feral and more mindful, and stopped equating 'feminine' with 'weak'. It worked out pretty well all 'round.
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Another thing you need in order to recover is MONEY. Money has to be the second biggest reason that people won't get help, after denial.

Nowadays there are actually some very effective resources out there available inexpensively, or even for free. Even in a small town. So telling oneself that 'therapy is too expensive' just doesn't wash anymore...although to be perfectly fair people are so conditioned to be afraid of therapy that they tend to avoid the entire subject, much less research it.

Let's stop doing that, OK? The phonebook is full of therapists. Call the damn welfare office, use the community resource directory in the front of the phone book, go to a church, the Salvation Army, a local school even. Make those calls, people. They don't mind if you cry and carry on.

But here's the thing: many abused people have health problems and/or psychological problems that either prevent them from finding work, or keep them just barely employed (the boat I was in.) And you need to kept fed and out of the weather while you recover or it's all kind of a waste of time. Hopefully that isn't an issue -it isn't a truism, but it's far from being unheard of.

At any rate, then, before you start your process, EXPECT that things WILL get shitty. Nobody every cops to this in the literature, but you WILL become incapacitated by stress at some point. Not permanently, but enough to shoot the shit out of that whole 'regular income' thing.

There is no way around this. You need to plan for a fallback position. If this means relying on a partner, or safe family members, or even living in a van, do it. If it means applying for welfare, do it. Using savings, trust money, selling belongings, couch surfing, do it. I had a partner I relied on. I also had a job with flexible hours cleaning houses. When that went down the toilet I did temp work. Restaurant work is good. Cleaning rooms. Night clerking. Bar tending. House painting. Selling pot.

Out of all these, I'd choose temp work or even day labor as the best solution. It can solve a lot of problems if things get desperate without breaking the law. You get a paycheck, you end up doing non-demanding things more often than not, and if you can't work you don't call in. They expect that.
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The third thing won't apply to everyone, but it does apply to some, and that is IF YOU NEED MEDICATION, TAKE IT. Abuse can and often does cause actual brain damage, even if it was 'merely' psychological abuse. This is established fact. That damage can result most commonly in clinical depression and a whole host of other things I can't speak to because I don't have them.

At any rate, if you have it, you can't tough your way out of it. You can't. THIS IS NOT WEAKNESS. THIS IS NOT A MORAL FAILING ON YOUR PART. If you aren't producing the right kind of brain chemistry all the positive thinking in the world isn't going to change that. Not prayer, not a vegetarian diet, not Norman Vincent Peale. Take the goddamn medicine.

Antidepressant medication does NOT give you brain damage. Antidepressant medication does NOT make you stoned (unfortunately.) Antidepressant medication does NOT make you addicted. That isn't even how it works. Re-uptake inhibitors supply a chemical that your brain normally makes and needs-one which it isn't making, ergo depression.

Think of vitamin D. Your body makes that when sunlight hits your skin. But if you live way up north, they have to put it into the milk to keep people healthy. Nobody has a problem with this. The same principal applies...re-uptake inhibitors treat a deficiency.

You still get depressed when you take antidepressants, in fact. It's just that the depression goes back to being another emotion. It no longer lasts forever, it no longer comes on for no reason whatsoever, and it doesn't get worse and worse and worse uncontrollably any more.

Neither will antidepressant medication turn you into Kip Kinkel or make you go out into Stanley Park and start killing swans. The only thing it might do is enable you to get out of bed and get dressed so that if you feel so inclined you CAN go kill a bunch of swans in Stanley Park, but it won't put the idea in your head. That's up to you.

YOU TAKE ANTIDEPRESSANTS UNDER A DOCTORS SUPERVISION. You need a medical diagnosis. This is not to say that you won't react badly to a specific drug; you might. You take that chance with any medication. If you do, report the symptoms and CHANGE THE DRUG. This is not rocket science.

As for me? They will have to pry my Prozac from my cold, dead hands.

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Ask anyone who's worked as an EMT and they'll tell you that injured people are not a barrel of laughs socially.

You are an injured person. Once you start going though therapy, you will not be a barrel of laughs socially.

Self pity? Acres of it. Oceans of it. You'll cry all the time, at the drop of the hat. Another thing that happens is, once you're able to put your abuse into some kind of narrative order, you will also not be able to stop telling people about it. Then you'll get upset and offended when people don't want to hear about it 24 hours a day, and you'll cry some more.

The nightmares will be horrible.

You will remember things (and I mean with the ferocity of an atomic blast) at the most inopportune moments. During sex. Changing lanes on the freeway. In the middle of class. Sometimes you'll be able to take a time out and go cry and scream, and sometimes you'll have to put that off until later.

All of this is normal. It has to happen and it's supposed to happen.

It sucks ass, too.

The good thing is, this time, the shit goes away. All this emotion and all this turmoil are what happens when this injured part of your mind finally gets to express all these things and resolve them once and for all. The shit gets intense, and that's when it's good to have a therapist to lead you through this dark wood. You went through all of this turmoil once already, as a little kid, and lived. Now you go through it again and live, but this time, you follow it out to a resolution. I don't know why the mind works like this, but it does.

And you get better.

It lasts a couple of years or more. It's not unrelenting shit, but it's a fucking rocky couple of years. Make your appointments and do your work, the less time it takes. Lame out on yourself and rot in denial, it takes more.

Toward the very end you begin to feel kind of lost and naked. This is because there is now a big hole in your life where all these unresolved things were encysted, with all that mental structure that was keeping it that way still in place. Someone removed the evil vampiric conjoined twin, but dammit, he was YOUR evil vampiric conjoined twin, and his name was Chuck.

This is the point at which a lot of people find religion hard.
I found the Italian Renaissance and classical literature, because I am a nerd.

This space seems to need to be filled with something you can love. I don't know what that means or why, but I've seen it and it's happened to me. Finding something to love seems to be the end point of the process.

Once the process is over you get to have the rest of your life. The bad experiences fade into the background of the weave, no longer the dominant pattern. They become just like any other memory, stripped of their malignant energy. You get to enjoy sex again. You get to see children again and not automatically wonder if someone is hurting them. You get to stop being on guard all the time. You get to stop being afraid.

This really does happen, and it really happened to me. And it's worth it.