advice on how to heal completely

Hi my name is Robera. When I wan 4years old my mother left me with some friends of hers. I was sexually abused and during the act I was damaged internally. I spent several months in Childrens Hosp. in recovery.As a child and as teenager I had numerous problems. I had self esteem issues and a sense of shame and guilt about myself.It was not until I turned 38 that I began to deal with the issue that I had buried in the back of my mind. I cry a lot: I have memories of being in the hospital as child but I did not know why I was there. My mother way dying and she came to me to tell me she was sorry for what had happened to me as a child. She told me she know she did not do what was right and she did not handle it the right way. My mother told me it was my fault that it happened and punished me for what her friend had did. I now find myself thinking about my stay in the hosp. and wonder why my mohter blamed me for what her friend had did.I am getting married in the Spring and I am having trust issues. I do not trust men at all and I do not know how to get over this feeling. I do not want to be controlled by an incident that happened in my childhood. It is time for me to have joy back in my life. My problem is it is hard for me to forgive my mother and the man who hurt me as a child. They were both cristians and feel as though they both hid behind the church.She has since died and I do not know what happen to the man except he is somewhere in the city.

Roberta,
I am so sorry to hear that you are going through this, especially at a time in your life when you are preparing for a happy occassion in your life: your wedding...And yes, I can relate to the trust issues and forgiveness. It took me years to learn both. With trust, I had to take baby steps, but it was frustrating because I thought that other people had to jump through hoops & over bridges to earn my trust. In fact, I was known for walking around saying, "everyone is guilty till proven innocent." LOL! I didn't know it back then, but I was making everybody, and I do mean EVERYBODY, pay for what my perpatrators had done to me. In the end, I had to work on me to get rid of the trust issues. A big part of doing that was learning how to trust myself, and accepting that not everyone was not out to get me...Regarding the forgiveness thing, even though I've been at this recovery thing for a long time, I didn't truly learn how to forgive until earlier this year. That's a long story, which I'll have to get into another time. However, what I will share is the definition I use forgiveness, which is, "Giving up the hope that the past could have been different." To do that, I had to learn how to control my thoughts because I was trapped in the past, just focusing on my pain, and the abuse. I basic had a victim mentality. I learned how to control my thoughts, surprisingly through self-hypnosis, which I did not believe in as a Christian, but surprisingly, it worked and is still working for me today.

Thank you for insight, I am just starting to be honest with myself.

Hi Roberta, I have not been to the site for awhile and just read your story.

Every time I read another story, I know that my life was hard, but others had it even worse.

Pat yourself on the back for telling your story, the secret kills mentally, spiritually, and physically.

I, too wish you did not have to have this experience, do not give up.

I met a Black psychiatrist in Indiana once at a Alcoholism/Drug training. I was so in awe of meeting my first Black psychiatrist. But I remember him telling me, as I told him part of my abuse history, to get a picture of my mother and talk to her like she was alive and in the room with me.

I still do this technique with others that have gone on or not with me. I was to tell her what happened to me, how I felt, why I was so ambivalent to her, and how the abuse had affected me.

It is like role playing and you know we are all actors and actresses, to get through this life without telling a soul about the abuse, we are putting on a good act of surviving, but we have survived.

It was not your fault Roberta.

This is such a devious disease, folks getting abused, becoming abusers, except for the grace of God, some of us do not. Even in the telling of the painful experience, people react out of their own pain or ignorance.

Why people do or say what they do, why do I do or say what I do? It is a lifetime work on ourselves. I can only change me, but in the changing, others around me will change too or go away.

These are some things I have learned, use what you can. Remember the words of William Shakespeare, "To thine own self be true, and it must follow, as the night the day, thou canst not then be false to any man."

Love/Peace, santacruz1997