For all of my life, I have feared being loved. Being accepted. I have felt jaded. Lost. Ashamed. Hurt. There are so many different words that can be used to express the magnitude of the pain I have carried around with me.
To reach a point in your life where you know you are truly loved in spite of your flaws is something that takes a while to resonate. To be seen, and have someone see the capacity for you to grow. That, with all the broken pieces of myself, it in fact made me who I was. It made me whole. That there was light sneaking in through the cracks, and that very light shone through the darkness.
Throughout my adulthood, I have never truly felt safe. I have always felt I needed to guard myself. To hide, and all because a man took my innocence and shaped me into a shell of who I was supposed to be, and for the first time I can say that makes me so damn angry.
Unpacking so much
I have been reading a book written by Pete Walker titled Complex PTSD: From Surviving to Thriving, that was recommended to me by my therapist, and there is so much to unpack in his words that hit home for me, and I am sure for many others who are dealing with similar circumstances as myself. He is helping me understand this stage I find myself in, and it is helping me unlock a lot of latent repressed trauma and find some self-compassion and reclaim assertiveness for myself.
This whole process is making me feel uncomfortable though, as feeling angry was something I have tried so hard not to be. After all, anger is the emotion we are most taught to suppress. And I have always felt that feeling anger meant I was giving in to the abuse. That I was allowing it to win. When that isn’t the case at all. Anger after all is an emotion, and if we don’t acknowledge, respect, and allow ourselves to feel and express our emotions, they will manifest in other ways later. Which they have for me.
What I am learning is that it’s normal and even healthy to be angry. It’s all the anger I wasn’t allowed to feel or didn’t know I was even entitled to. I am feeling furious at the whole world a lot lately. Not in a way that makes me want to act unkind to anyone else. It’s more like a tightly wound ball of fury in the pit of my stomach at living in a world that allows this to happen.
Anger is an emotion that needs to be felt
I fully understand that the world can be cruel and unkind. That bad things happen to good people, but there are some things that should never get a pass. That should never be seen as a definition of acceptance because it’s “life.”. Child sexual abuse is not one of those things. To abuse a child in any way is monstrous, and the lasting damage it has on those of us that experienced it is impalpable.
Learning to allow myself to be angry, to feel it, and to let it pass through me has been the hard part. Allowing myself to be able to be angry and to forgive—not because they deserve it, but because I am choosing to find peace by forgiving the world for allowing me to be treated the way I was. I simply don’t want to feel how I feel anymore. I want to be happy and to experience all the good I have missed out on and let my inner child know that he is safe.
The more I heal the more I realize how wrong it all was and how none of it was ever my fault. It doesn’t change what happened at all, but at least it’s a compass to direct me towards better things, and I hope that in navigating this moment of my healing process, that I can exhaust this anger, because I don’t want to hold on to it anymore.
It truly is exhausting, and I’m tired.