Yakusoku and Deepfried, it helps a lot to know that I am not the only one who has struggled with this. A lot of what you have written really does resonate with me.

I think part of the issue for me is that I feel like I survived, so whatever I went through can’t have been that bad, and thus I must be lying about it. It still feels wrong to label what happened to me as “abuse”.

******Trigger Warning- mention of physical abuse and CSA*******

My parents divorced when I was two. My mom couldn’t deal with life for years afterward, and I became the parent. I raised my younger brother as best as I could. My older brother enjoyed hurting me. Mostly he would just beat me up. Sometimes he would use a knife or he would choke me until I passed out. I tried to protect my younger brother from him as much as possible.

We would visit my father in the summer. He would come into my room at night and force himself on me. I don’t remember many details, but enough to know it happened. What I remember most of all is floating up on the ceiling. (I used to think that I was magical because I could float. It wasn’t until I was in a psych class in college that I learned about dissociation.) During the day he pretended that everything was normal and so did I.

*****End Triggers******

The thing is, though, that even though I know all that happened, I also can remember a lot of good stuff happening too. It’s not like my life was always miserable.

I do feel like I am bad for wanting attention. I feel like because I didn’t get any attention when I was little and yet I was able to be strong and take care of myself and my brother then I shouldn’t need anything now.

The dissociation angle is interesting to consider, because I also often feel like I am lying to myself. When I think about my father, it doesn’t really feel like anything happened to me, because I was on the ceiling, not in my bed. But intellectually I know that it really was me in the bed.

Yakusoku- I really think that psychological abuse like having to deny one’s reality in order to survive can be even more damaging than other types of abuse. I can only remember one time when something like that happened to me and I still feel sick about how I betrayed myself.

Deepfried- I totally smiled to myself thinking about you setting your T up to “fail”. You sound like you are in a really good place with your T now, even if it took a long time to get there.