Tandia's Story
Tandia's Story
My misery started as a young child,in my family - love was equated with how thin I was and I was never really very thin so from the age of 7, i started to starve and throw upto make sure I was thin enough for my family.
I had 2 sisters and a brother and my brother and I shared a room. When I was 16 - he was 13 and I was quite well developed. Initially it started off with innocent touches here and there and then when I was asleep, he would sneak into my bed and fondle me and I think he knew I had woken up, but since I never dared to say anything, he just continued, At the back of my mind, I thought maybe I was the one who was giving all the wrong signs, I was the older one so it was my fault.
Then one day, almost 9 months into the abuse, he tried to take off my panties and insert his penis, my hand was on his penis when the phone rang and he went out. That day I was in shock - he was going to have sex with me - his own sister. I wrote him a note and told me if he ever touched me again I would tell our parents wven if they didn;t believe me, they will have to do something. He stopped for a little while,I was so scared and ashamed I started hurting myself, taking small over doses and loosing control.
I ended up tring to kill myself for the first time when I was 17 and was sent to a counselor. For the next 8 years, the self mutilation, the depression, the eating disorders all continued but somehow I managed to keep a job and look "normal" to my family.
Then when I was 25, I went on holiday and one of the workers at the resort came on to me, first I tried to say no and push him away, but I was alone and he was much bigger, he ventually raped me slowly and gently but rape none the less - he told me I wanted it and it was good.
The next morning, I had my first panic attack, I was so ashamed of myself, maybe it was my fault, did I say something, did I lead him on - I was suffocating and dying but I could not go home becasue my family would find out and I couldn't face them.
I decided to stay on and avoid that man. I was succesful until the last night, I was walking to my room and he followed me, pushed my inside the room and pulled my panties off. He turned me around and pushed me on the bed and stuck his penis in my mouth while he ripped my clothes off, then he raped me again, this time it was not gentle, but it was violent. I was numb, I wanted to die.
When he finished, he put on his clothes and said" That was good, I'll see you when I see you again". I can never get that out of my mind. I had a shower for so long and prayed I was not pregnant.
I did not tell my family, or anyone,I felt so guilty and dirty and started to take more serious measures to kill myself, until the last time when I eneded up in a coma and was found by my mother. My family could not handle me anymore, so they left me in the state system, a psychiatric hospital for 9 months and that was the first time in my life I told anyone about the rape and abuse.
The psychologist tried to help me and for the first time in my life,I let the secret out. You will not believe the relief of telling someone.
Today, I am 33 and I still have flashbacks. I am leading a normal life but I still do not trust men, I hate sex and I still wander if it was my fault.
At least I am alive.
Eia's Story
Silence seems like a relief, like a chance to escape and feel peace. But increasingly i feel it is a part of the problem. I was adopted at six weeks old into a family that thought i was amazing; so excited to have a child that they idolised me. I grew up in a dreamworld quite separate from reality. My father is an alcoholic, who i rarely saw as a child, and my mother highly strung and emotionally abusive. My parents waited for nine years to adopt a child - it took much longer than usual because my father refused to adopt anyone but a girl baby. I always wondered why, several times asked him. The social worker passed them as prospective parents with flying colours. When I was very young my father began to come into my bedroom in the deep of night. He was expected to move around the house because he was an insomniac. I can't remember any abuse before the age of about three, but my aunt and a family friend sent me to the doctor when I was a year and a half old because my genitals were not 'normal' for a baby. The older male doctor said it was nothing. I say I can't remember, but i mean i can't remember any abuse in the usual way, as a fairly straightforward memory; i can remember a sort of horrific struggling sensation and a feeling of drowning underwater, of being pinned down, a monolithic primitive kind of struggle to escape. There are no words. It now seems that my father sexually abused me from when i was a few months old.
What i can remember, very exactly now, though it hasn't always been this way, is a repeating situation that would occur from when i was three years old until i was about seven. In the early hours of the morning, my father would open the bedroom door. I could see his silhouette against the light outside the room. Then he would shut the door. I would hide under my covers. I developed a very elaborate mechanism against his entry...I would curl up under the bedcovers and pull them around me very tight. I would fold the ends under and hold them down and i would breathe very shallowly in the thick air. I would do this all night just in case. Then he would come over and pull back the covers and talk to me. He would tell me that i was a little whore, that i was born of a whore (my illegitimate mother), that i was born a whore and that i would always be a whore. Then he would pull up my little nightie and rape me. I would go into shock, stop breathing, everything would seize up as the world swirled around me in one endless moment. I felt nauseous...sometimes i would actually be sick.I would leave my body, and other subpersonalities would take over and monitor my survival until i came back to reality. He would keep going until he was finished, or until there was too much blood and he was afraid that it would be discovered. Then he would pull my nightie down and put his hands over my throat and push down. While i tried to breathe he would tell me that i was evil, that i was not to tell anyone what we had just done, and that if i did tell anyone he would kill me. He would come back in the night and slit my throat, just like that. Then he would get up, open the door, and close it again.
Of course, there were always variations on the theme. Sometimes my father would force me to put my mouth on his penis. Sometimes he was more brutal than others. Sometimes it would happen every second night, sometimes not for months.
When i was little i repressed what was happening. Partly this occurred because the memories happened while i was in a traumatic state, so they were very different to other memories. Partly it happenend because i did not really connect my father that was there in the daytime, who made me toast or did up my shoelaces, with the monster man who came into my room at night. Also, the state i was in after waking up suddenly was quite a different mode to my usual consciousness. I still , when woken up suddenly to someone leaning over me, punch or kick the person viciously without being conscious of what i'm doing.
This year i have become aware of some of the subpersonalities that are part of me, and what they are like. There are quite a few child entities, ranging in age from 14 months to six years old. One of them, a nameless one, is a little girl of about four. She is aware only that the abuse exists, and knows nothing else...in her mind it goes on endlessly, is going on right now. She believes that school and friends and sunshine are dreams, and that only the darkness exists. She's not very happy.
There's another one, she's kind of cute, she's called tarbaby. Actually, i should say it, because it insists it is not a boy or a girl. It is very young, about 14 months old, and it is curled up in the corner, and it is completely, head to toe, covered in tar. Only the whites of its eyes show. It doesn't talk. It is empty, nothingness. I feel sorry for it.
There's another, a bad one, but not the worst. She is a hyperactive little girl, about six years old, she is kind of like Angelica on 'the rugrats'. She is so active, she can never stop for a minute, and all she talks about is ways that i can kill myself. She's very creative. When i look at a knife or a pair of scissors she shows me detailed visions of how i could slice my veins with it; when i see a stick she imagines plunging it through my eyeball. She shuts up if i tell her i'll consider her proposal. I never do it.
The worst one is really horrible. This one thinks that it IS my father. Somehow when it was experiencing the abuse it got mixed up and identified with him. It can kind of float around the room and look at the abuse from different angles. It is dispassionate. It thinks that i want to do these things to myself.
I didn't remember what had happened to me for a very long time, but i always felt that something was wrong with me. Something that was wrong morally, like i was shameful and awfull, different to other people; but also something wrong psychologically, that my mind was screwed up. I was always looking at psychology books and self help books, and analysing myself. It was really that half of my mind was shut away from me, anything that referred to sexual abuse.
I left home at 17, the same time that i got my first real boyfriend. I had increasingly wierd feelings about being intimate with him, feelings i was hardly conscious of. I played games to get distance from him and his masculinity, When we'd been together about a year, i woke up from a half sleep after we'd had sex, and i had a body memory. My whole body was screaming out, surging with nightmare intensity, almost like i was rocking around in a boat.My only thought was...'Something bad happened to me when i was little'. I said it out loud, to my boyfriend. He didn't seem very concerned. I felt like they were the most powerful words i had ever heard.
Shortly after, i went to a spiritual healer to try and get some headway on my general fucked-upness. I have no idea if the woman knew what she was doing, but looking at it now what she did seems incredibly irresponsible. She got me to walk around a table in a dimly lit room, around and around. I went quite quickly into a kind of trance. She asked me which parts of my body was i noticing most. I said my throat and my hips. She asked me what these parts would say if they could talk. I said that there was a sharp feeling in my throat, like a knife being pressed there. She told me to look down and describe what i was wearing. I went on to tell her a story that i could visualise going on around me. I was a young woman in a blue dress, with blonde hair, in an alleyway smelling like the sea. A bearded man came up to me and pressed a knife into my throat, then he cut my throat. I fell to the ground and felt increasingly faint and dizzy until blue people came around and took me away. While i was on the ground bleeding, the man raped me. I then experienced another scenario, this time i was older, and i was a few months pregnant. A figure i recognised as my father was in the corner of the room with a male friend. They were beating me because they had raped me and i had got pregnent and they wanted to get rid of the baby. They beat me until i miscarried, then they threw me out the window. After this the healer got me to get up on the table and then she gently forced my hips, which had seized up, unitl they were wide apart and more relaxed while i sobbed. Then i rolled over and lay on the table until i came out of the trance and back to reality.
I felt then that i had some kind of answer to my problems. Of course, that's why i had never liked my father, he had raped me in a past life! Silly me, i'd just have to get over it. For about 5 months after this session i was hysterically afraid of being alone, of being in a room with the door closed. I would hallucinate dark nightmare figures in my house until i would get sick of it and go outside and run around the suburbs in the middle of the night hallucinating dark figures on the road behind me. At least there i could run from them!
It was a strange introduction to my inner life. Icontinued on a strange, evasive path, sure that something had happened to me, but unable to unearth just what it was. A few years later i went into a bookshop and bought 'Courage to Heal' because i felt like i should. I began to remember in a hazy dreamlike way, what i had experienced, but the perpetrator had no face. If i questioned the memory, it would vanish like smoke. It took working in a youth drop in centre as a youth worker, where client after client would divulge sexual abuse to me, to make me crack. I was sent by my supervisor to a lovely older female counsellor at the local Rape Crisis Centre. She accepted my vagueness, and got me to draw a map showing my family. I drew my mother safely outside my personal boundaries, my sister a little closer. My father had a signpost saying '4000 kilometres that way'. Talk about a sign! I spoke to her about my fear of my father, my embarrasment around him, the creepy feelings he engendered. I spoke of all the concrete things that made me feel suspicious, like my longtime habit of jumping a foot off the ground and screaming when he suddenly entered a room behind me. Both he and i were aware of the utter terror on my face when this occurred. Then, a few weeks into couselling, i had a dream that my father was chasing me and chasing me with sexual intent. I woke up feeling intensely horrible, way out of the normal context for a dream. I felt like i had to face that it was real, then.
I couldn't handle the feelings at first. Not many memories, just the feelings. I would get some paper and coloured pencils and crayons and scribble childish drawings all over the page until all the feelings were gone. I would think they were pretty until i took them to the counsellor and we would uncover stark drawings of blood, violence and invasion underneath the scribbles.
I've been seeing counsellors for the last 3 years, on and off. Just when i think i'm resolving things, more comes up, and more intense feelings come up. It's like doing an archaeological dig. I seem to be getting stronger, though. It's not that i can handle it more, or that i feel better, or less upset. It's just that more and more i can feel a current of myself that is strong, that can feel the feelings and know that they are feelings and they are not everything that i am. Sometimes i feel that i am living and breathing sexual assault. Sometimes i feel that it has a minimal role in my life. This has been a pretty long story, but i wanted to include how i remembered the abuse, because i think that it is the most complicated bit. It has caused me to explore completely unknown facets of my self , and to see the world and reality in a new way. I guess i feel uncovered, and it seems a lot better than being hidden away.
Good luck on your journey.-
I was abused in all forms including sexual all the way through my childhood from the age of 10 to 22 and I'm 24 now. My father would come into my room late at night while I was sleeping strip me and get on top of me waking me up, I'd scream and kick furiously but to no avail he would smack me and tell me to shut up then he would force his way inside and do his thing for a few minutes then my mom would take her turn at me. It happened several times a day everyday and sometimes while I was in the bathroom. they would throw me through windows, tvs, and anything else they could find that was hard. they even tied me to a tree in Sulpher OKLAHOMA and doused me in gasoline and set me on fire. It was all over the news. At the beginning of last year I was raped two more times the first was in a field overlooking the downtown OKLAHOMA CITY skyline on a rock by a homeless white indian. I know I shouldn've walked off with a stranger in the first place and it wouldn't have happened so I guess I deserved that for being stupid like that. the second time happened the end of last year beginning of this year in Miami Florida by a gay college student who let me stay with him until I found a job, but what me actually wanted was to rape me.
These inocdents weren't the first time it had happened, before my adopted parents molested me I was in about a dozen foster homes which I was raped in everyone of them from the age of 4 years old.
I never reported any of the assults because I figured the police would look at me like I was stupid and each person said if I told they'd come back and kill me. So I just burried all of my emotions deep inside of me and erected a wall around me and a mask so no one would ever see me hurting and crying inside. I've tried to commit suicide several times in the last year because I feel like I am unworthy of living and that all of this is my fault that because of my stupidity or my lack of fighting it happened to me. They stole my person who I really am and I can't find him again I don't even want to eat anymore and if I die oh well I don't care. That is my story.
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