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@v
@vionoreilly
1y ago

Afraid my experience made me a pervert or something...

I’m extremely ashamed to talk about this... but I need to do it... need to make a decision. I’m in therapy for my lifelong anxiety and PTSD (from a surgery). I think it helps me, my therapist is OK. By accident, I finally opened up to her about my teenage trauma. I was sexually abused by my stepbrother at the age of twelve. I never wanted to share this, it was not my intention to discuss my past. It happened despite all my efforts to leave it as bad memories…It all came flooding back the shame, the guilt... Now my therapist suggests that we start EMDR, I need to say yes or no. I’ve been avoiding her for two weeks cause I can’t get rid of these awful thoughts that this trauma might not have been a big deal… As if I don’t really want to be healed from it? I’m afraid I somehow feel that it makes me special, in a twisted horrible way… It sets me apart from others, makes me different. The very thought fills me with a sense of shame. I’m sure if I told this to my therapist she would add some more diagnoses to my list. I feel like I don’t even deserve therapy with such thoughts. It goes against everything I know to be true about myself and contradicts my core beliefs and values. I feel unworthy, unworthy of healing, unworthy of love.

And the smallest part of me is also afraid that if I agree to delve into it, I’ll be able to see my stepbrother… I’ve been pretending he doesn’t exist for two decades. No one in my family knows about what he did to me. He told me it would stay “our little secret”… All our relatives believe we just quarrelled over something stupid, they used to try to reconcile us but gave up eventually… My mind is so so sick, I’m thinking now that perhaps I wanted this to happen to me, like I allowed it intentionally? Cause at the age of twelve I definitely wanted to be a grownup, and I was interested in boys... Is it even normal to have such ideas, or am I out of my mind? I don't want to hold on to my trauma as some pervert. What am I to do? I’m abhorrent and disgusting...

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