Failing healing. Survivors of child abuse support groups. A personal experience.
NOTE: This is my experience of support groups in Australia - some details have been changed.
“Men rape, women have sex. Sex is good”. Snatching my breast, she slid closer. I froze, trapped in the ‘therapeutic’ circle.
My new family.
All female. Mostly middle aged. A support group for child abuse survivors, we were a world outside the real world, a place where there was no abuse.
Not long out of an abusive home and desperate for a safe place to heal, I didn’t doubt it.
I couldn’t, really.
Because, as explained by a leader, our gravel-rash therapeutic road was the only path to healing.
One way, no bends, one message:
Pass the healing program.
Or you will never heal.
Every one of our ‘therapists’ were survivors of child abuse, several were abusers of substances, a couple carried knives, one had a counselling degree. Underappreciated wisdom, as simply through shared experiences and empathy, survivors are the best healers of each other, we believed.
So, overweight with member disclosures, our ‘healing program’ emerged through alcohol fumes and peppermint gum.
We were the unhealed ‘healing’ the unhealed.
(But only in hindsight.)
Meditation, relaxation tapes, prayers to a ‘Higher Power’, letters written (and posted) to abusers. We shook percussion instruments, played with dolls, wrote about our abuse with our non-dominant hand, slogged up the Emotions Anonymous 12 steps, drew and painted in black and red, set off firecrackers, sculpted, diarised, sang, and chanted affirmations.
Wary, I skipped the past life regression.
And narrowly escaped those women trying to ‘heal’ sexual trauma through illicit sex, their offers full of childhood predators, mothers who watch but don’t intervene, and a child’s conclusions:
Everyone in this world wants my body.
No one will ever help me.
It will never stop.
Healing. Not one of us knew where, nor how to find it.
Particularly me.
Exiled in a corner like an errant child, as others diarised to get in touch with their abused ‘inner child’, mine filled a notebook with three affirmations dictated by a leader, frustrated at my lack of creativity. Affirmations designed to “break down sub-conscious resistance” to my too-sluggish-despite-all-this-intervention healing process.
Resentful of the punishment, ignoring the order to smile, covertly I crafted my own three ‘affirmations’, laced in self-hatred:
This program has to work.
I have to get this right.
This is my only chance to heal.
And I was screwing it up.
I was also screwing up the group.
See, despite best efforts, I did not fit in. Not completely.
Way younger than everyone else, I was a curiosity, my abuse recent, whilst they described events decades old.
And, eager to consolidate our common bond, they wanted to share stories - every detail of every event. I did not, my stuck-inside words dripping shame and embarrassment.
No one clued that I was at a different stage, stunned, overwhelmed. Raw.
So, “Speak”, they demanded. “Or you will not heal”.
Chest gaping, I stopped, started, stumbled, their “Why didn’t you run away from home?” repeatedly slapping open the mouth of my inner child:
Yes, why don’t I run away? I must want it. If I want it then it isn’t abuse.
And it dawned on twenty-something me:
If it wasn’t abuse, I should not be here.
I am an impostor.
Not a survivor.
I was barely surviving our ‘family’.
Our world was competitive, its hierarchy simple: ‘Hard’ abuse and ‘soft’ abuse. A ranking system discussed over cups of tea and red wine swigged from plastic drink bottles:
“Type of abuse?”
“How often did it happen?”
“I was raped but she was only touched up.”
Therefore, my pain is worse than hers.
And thus, I am worth more.
Group discussion. Opinion poll. Majority rules.
My head spun, a confused rank free blur. It was simply my life. I had nothing to compare it to.
None of that hard against soft stuff, as I assess my own worth.
Nevertheless, oblivious to the dangers of discussing these stories of ours, details of abuse were exchanged carelessly, as we bickered for the top of our destructive pecking order.
And…we had flashbacks, nightmares. Our ingrained coping strategies devoured us: we drank, smoked pot, starved, binged, overdosed, set fires, slashed up our skin. One after the other, in front of the other. Every one of us failing to recognise our poor influence on each other -
Survivors are expected to cry, scream, self-harm.
It is essential, for healing.
Determined to achieve this mirage-like healing, I wandered around with slashed-up arms. Some admired the bandages, stroked my hair. Even in our competitiveness they thought I was sweet. A bleeding angel.
Which made it worse.
Because, desperate to win their motherly love, eventually I ran out of skin.
Like a grass fire in a gale, hearing the traumas of twenty or so women tirelessly set off mine, my screaming inner child buffeted by their “you are not trying hard enough, to heal”.
I was a failure. Like dad said.
But unlike the cowed child, I was an adult.
Dangerously out of control.
Which explained the stolen food, the smashed crockery, the fly screen damaged on one of the occasions I (feeling trapped) jumped out the window, and several well aimed kicks at a tipsy therapist, my bellowed abuse silencing all three of the people it took to separate us.
Trapped in my self-combustion, I went on and on.
And on.
And horrifyingly, as I darted around slashing and stealing, to my sisters I became communal pain, elusive justice.
In my childlike agony, I became our emblem.
Combat green expletives painted across my t-shirt, both wrists to elbows bandaged, hair sun-flamed (in photos strategically taken at sunset), my body screamed our message to abusers everywhere:
F***k Off
And die.
Except, it was us who expired.
Haunted in our suffering, our souls burned.
Burned the group.
Our desperation for healing simply re-traumatised ourselves, and each other.
As we scattered, I left more damaged than I started.
Having proven that, just like high school, it is possible to fail healing.