HappyComeLucky

This post has been bothering at me for a very long time. I keep trying to ignore it and push it away, but it keeps coming back. I have a long list of reasons not to write it but it seems that I have a much more insistent need to get this out there.

This latest surge of need was triggered by Oleander Plume’s post and my immediate response to that. I need to thank her for helping to stop me from stuffing these thoughts away in the cupboard at the back of my mind.

I am quite a stubbornly strong woman. I take pride both in my independence and my resilience. These aspects of me are wonderful and are very active parts of my survival and successes in life. These traits have also had their downsides too. I have used my independence and resilience as a barrier to others. I have struggled to accept that I need others and connected to that, I have struggled to accept that others like me. I have worked hard to overcome this and for a lot of the time, I am completely successful.

Over the last few days, I have been thinking about the different stages of getting to the place I am now. I still have work to do, but I am happy and able to live with the current conditions. I was reflecting on all the different layers and wondered how to describe it. Of course, the thought of layers made an onion come to mind. That doesn’t work for me though. For me the different layers of experiences that I have been through on my way to healing are more like dealing with the accumulated layers of paint and wallpaper in a beautiful but tired and neglected house. To restore the house to its form and allow it to be a home again, it needs someone to deliberately strip away those layers to the bare plaster. The structure needs checking and repairing before carefully chosen finishings can be applied.

As with restoring a house, the first stage for me was brutal and destructive. Several years ago, all my blocked memories of abuse as a child came flooding back to me. I can still remember the shock and the complete destruction of me that those memories caused. For me, everything had come tumbling down. As well as the horror of what happened, I also had to deal with the devastation of my trust in myself. I struggled to come to terms with the fact that I had hidden those memories from myself.

For me, it was time to bring in the professionals. I was absolutely blessed to have 1:1 therapy from a charity that specialises in supporting victims of sexual abuse. I am passionate about this charity. They saved me. They not only saved me, but their expertise and skill helped to begin to rebuild me. Over the course of a year, I found myself, tended my wounds and began to rebuild the core of me.

The therapist was sassy, challenging, thoughtful and insightful and just what I needed. She took me past my logical responses and helped me to find, recognise and accept the child that I had been. She helped me to understand how vulnerable and powerless I had been. Once I recognised that, I was able to stop blaming myself for what happened.

That desperately needed structural work on myself took a year. At the end of it, I was stronger. I thought the work had been done and that it would be just finishing touches left.

It turns out that there were still surprises in my self-restoration project. My structure was strong but my connections with the world needed attention. My second round of therapy was with a private therapist. She was calm and insightful and was an implacable reality checker whenever I started making excuses for others.

Once again, I thought that my restoration project was complete. I had changed my connections with the rest of the world to better meet my needs and to reduce the erosion from the negative ones.

I loved living life in the newly restored me. It was all fresh and new. The restored me was filled with a better outlook and it felt as though I had opened up the dark places to daylight.

One of the things that I have discovered is that often we can’t see or imagine how things can still be improved because we have never experienced better.

Several years on from there, I found that there was something more to do. Something that risked causing damage to my foundations but also gave the chance of more benefits than I could imagine.

I took a leap of faith. A leap that was only possible because I had a deep and instinctive trust in someone. Until this point, the only people I had told about the abuse in any detail and of the effects on me had been professionals. They were paid to react properly. I had told the most basic information to family and that had not gone well. My leap of faith was to risk damaging a new and developing relationship with someone who was already meaning the world to me by telling them. I did. I told him while our relationship was still online early. I told him knowing that it might be too much. I told him without being able to guess how he would respond.

The rest is history. My man listened and responded in the most amazing way. I didn’t know until after I had done it, but having someone who you can tell the darkest parts of your experience to is fundamental to the long term success of restoring yourself – or it was for me. Sharing all of me, and I do mean ALL of me with him, allows me to be vulnerable when I need to and to lean on him when things crop up that challenge me. Without that, I would be reliant on my old methods which involve scaffolding myself and shutting the world out. My life is much better when it is open to the world, and I am so very grateful to have my man who I trust so completely in it.