so sad

My mother knowingly married a pedophile (by the way it saddens me to read other people who have answered this question who have started their story the same way).

The day I found out she knew, I was only nine. It utterly broke my heart.

InitiallyI was terrified of bathrooms and had lots of accidents because I was so scared of bathrooms. I vomited almost every day from the stress.

When I told her what he was doing she called me a whore. Then tried to convince me I was crazy. Then my entire family took to physically abusing me to keep me to scared to tell. So, I started hiding in my closet, breaking into empty houses. I became scared of people.

As a teenager I started having flashback anxiety attacks. Eating still made me sick, I became scared of food and dropped to 87 pounds.

I really wanted to live though. I wanted to love people. I had hope there was goodness in some people. That somehow drove me to keep trying.

Then I had a child of my own and I wanted to be strong for him.

But I have always been ashamed. I have always punished myself, for any and everything I do wrong. I am always afraid people will judge me the way my mother did. I fight with all of this to this day. I often flinch around people. I get defensive. I am quick to withdraw and quick to push away before they find out my “dirty” secret (my mother called me a dirty whore).

I unwittingly sabotage relationships because I am so afraid of being hurt. The loneliest feeling is that because I am so ashamed and so afraid most people don't know the trauma I am fighting every day. People so often say things like but you should move beyond your past, not realizing how deeply it can affect you. And I struggle every day. I have not yet figured how to completely move past it. Unfortunately, many who were abused as children are abused in some way as adults, because this became their normal, it is hard for them to accept it can be better so they settle for similar abusive relationships, sometimes because they feel they don't deserve better.

I get up every day, I fight the negative thoughts, and I fall into old habits and reevaluate and try to do it differently the next time. Most people do not have patience with me through this process. It gets discouraging. I keep proving myself to them to improve as my motivation.

I fell in love for the first time in my life, I may have utterly destroyed it because I was too afraid to tell him what happened to me or how I feel about him, because I was afraid he would be ashamed. I get my feelings hurt easily and then am afraid to accept anything from him out of fear of being hurt. I have said or reacted in ways that are hurtful out of fear. And I may have lost him and that is really hard to cope with. The sad part is, even though I am afraid, I trust him, it is the only reason I could love him. The problem is I have not learned to trust myself.

So, my next step is learning to trust I am a good enough person and trust myself. I realize this will help me deal with the shame and fear.

I guess how I cope is this process I demonstrated here, assess, honest and brutal evaluation, make adjustments and start again. It's hard, and it's lonely. And hopefully I get it right. And hopefully, I don't lose the man I love because I am living in the shadow of my past.