For First Time Visitors

If you are a first time visitor to this blog, I invite you to start from the beginning, especially if you are unfamiliar with the potential emotional impact of long-term child abuse.

Trigger caution to unhealed survivors!

Understanding the Incomprehensible

Children of incest or long-term sexual abuse grow up to be wounded adults with complicated emotional issues. Unfortunately, some symptoms are misinterpreted or often dismissed as "crazy", only serving to maintain a tormented victim status. We, as a society, have the power to change this dynamic. Each of us can make a difference.

Aug 19, 2008

Divided we stand

If you had been a child being molested at will by a parent or other primary caregiver, would you want to know it was happening or not? Children don't get to make that decision. Their mind does it for them.

In the previous post, the great double bind of having to live with a parent who "loves" you and whom you count on for survival and the reality that the parent is hurting you and terrifying you, is usually the first "split" for a child's sanity. The child compartmentalizes what is happening when being hurt from when she is not being hurt. (While both sexes of children are victims, the feminine will be used for references.)

This compartmentalization could be repressed, as in tucking it away for now and being able to retrieve it at a later time. There is no element of amnesia inherent in repressing a memory. It's buried. Another way a child copes with abuse (not by her conscious choice) is to compartmentalize with a wall of amnesia between hurt self and not hurt self. This is called dissociation.