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Nobody might want to hear this, but I do believe that there can be wounds created within a child by severe abuse that will never heal.  These wounds are too deep and too awful from crimes committed against children during their growth developmental stages that are too much, too deep, and too overwhelming to ‘make go away’.  Knowing this fact is why we accept that there is a category called ‘criminal’ in the first place.

We do not want to be a lawless society.  We want protection.  We want accountability.  We want justice.  We want these things because we do not want to be injured, wounded or killed.  We do not want to be trespassed against.  We do not want our rights to well being to be threatened by torture and terrorism.  We do not want to pay the price that living with the consequences of these lawless, criminal actions requires.

Then why, at the same time, is it so hard for most people to understand that what life is truly like for a severe child abuse survivor, especially for those who were forced to suffer malevolent treatment from birth through the first 5 years of their lives, have lifelong serious damage as a result of powerful people harming them?

I am not saying that we survivors cannot work toward our healing.  We do that with every breath we take.  We always have, and we always will.  But that does not give us the same quality of life, the same ability or chance to experience health and well being, that we would have had if we had been kept safe from criminals when we needed it most.

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We need more fortunate people to truly be able to hear what we are saying.

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I want to note here that I don’t intentionally keep my writing either clinical or sterile.  I have difficulty realizing how people who do not have extremely severe early childhood abuse histories understand what I say and why I say it the way that I do.  I know instinctively that the people I write most for are those with histories similar to mine.  For us, especially if we have built-in serious ‘issues’ with dissociation, our brains do not work the same as more ordinary brains do.

We are therefore always putting ourselves close to internal danger if and when we choose to recall actual memories.  It is not at all a given that feelings the feelings that were present when the abuse occurred is either wise or helpful.  We must be extremely careful of ourselves, and I am, as the writer of these pieces, certainly no exception.

Neither at this point do I choose to put the ‘Disney Special’ twist to my stories, either.  If any of you are interested, try recalling one of your own early childhood trauma events and write it.  We can write from different points of view, differing degrees of closeness or distance from the experience of the abuse.  I can never emphasize enough how important it is to keep ourselves safe while we disclose our abuse and work toward our own healing.

Because so few of us who need it will ever be able to access or afford the kind of quality state-of-the-art therapy we need and deserve in order to safely approach the kind of emotional-memory work that will usual accompany severe early trauma memory retrieval, we are left alone doing the best we can with the resources we have.  That is NOT ENOUGH in my book.  It reflects a serious lack of attention to the needs of adult survivors of horrendous child abuse.

When I speak of the ‘unitiated’ reader I do not intend to offend anyone.  I do, however, mean that word literally.  Those of us with severe child abuse histories know things as a result of having lived through what we did.  Those who have not — most fortunately — been forced to have their childhoods completely stolen from them, cannot, I believe, ever know what those of us who did have ours stolen think like or feel like.  There does exist, in my opinion, a line of differentiation between these two groups of people I am describing.

There is a vast difference between telling ABOUT a memory and telling the memory.  The former is far safer for us to do than the latter.  That is a fact.  I suspect that a reader without a severe abuse history might be ‘dying to know more’ about what the experience of abuse a survivor might be disclosing, and wants the survivor to give them enough detailed information that the reader might think they know what the survivor is talking about.

I am not at all sure that this is possible.  When reading good fiction the writer can give enough vivid description to enable the reader’s mind to actively imagine themselves as being IN the story.  That is not what my kind of writing is about — at least certainly not yet.  I am not writing fiction.  At the same time I don’t see that I am necessarily writing nonfiction, either.  I am writing the truth.

The truth is not clinical, stark, barren, dry or simple.  Reading the truth, when it hurts, requires more than imagination.  It requires a willingness to open oneself up to one’s own pain, to admit that even though there are certainly times when things were rosy and cheerful (not true in my case as a child but true for MOST readers), there were also  times when someone bigger than you hurt you when you were most small and vulnerable, whether they meant to or not.

Those times matter.  I encourage you to write about your stories yourself.  Writing is different than telling someone a story verbally, though this means of disclosure is certainly valid and important.  Writing about it uses another set of functions and abilities in body, brain and mind.  It forces us to ALLOW a linear process or organization to give order to the chaos that our traumas have created within us.  If you had no early traumas, you are most fortunate.  If you did and they are healed, you are also most fortunate.

If you do wish to write and don’t already have a blogspace, I recommend WordPress.com as a wonderful place to start.  I would love you to drop a comment over here about your writing as I would most definitely wish to come by and visit.

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