The Aftermath – You Can Win This Battle Too
What happens to us – the sexually abused children – while and when we grow up? How does the abuse affect us? We often have difficulties trusting other people and we are always cautious. We sometimes cannot really love another person, because we just don’t know how. We are likely to use drugs, alcohol, pills etc. just to forget the abuse and to escape from the stress and pressure in our life. We can easily fall in love (with our image of love actually) because deep within we want to be loved too. We are likely to go into casual sexual relationships because we want to have positive sex experience and to forget the bad one. We get easily depressed, frustrated or desperate because we don`t really powerful and strong enough to manage the life challenges. We are likely to hate sex sometimes because we connect the thought of it with the abusive sexual experience in the past. We often think that nobody understands us because we cannot be completely honest to anyone. We often think we are not pretty/handsome or clever or strong enough and this is the reason for our low self-esteem sometimes. We often feel helpless and we are likely to believe that life is unfair because the abuse happened to us in the first place. We often end up in bad or abusive relationships because we are always looking for love, and sometimes in all the wrong places. We are likely to be abused again in our adulthood because we already have the “victim-thinking” and we think nobody can help us, or we are sometimes just promiscuous which leads us to dangerous social relationships again. We often do not understand what’s the reason for the many mistakes we have done in our life. We often live our life feeling guilty for what happened or because we didn’t tell about it. We are constantly afraid that probably our silence made others to suffer (other possible victims of the abuser), and that we didn’t prevent this from happening to others. We are likely to feel constantly ashamed of ourselves in case our body actually responded to the abuse, not realizing that this is just a physical body response to sexual stimulation. We often don’t think that it was really an abuse, especially if it was not physically painful. We are likely to minimize the damage and the facts. We sometimes try to forget the abuse by trying to keep our minds busy – reading, writing, movies, sports or other causes. We are likely to get involved in “bigger” causes – political, animal rescue, Red Cross volunteering etc. – and this is something like a “rescuer-syndrome.” When helping...
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