TW: see above!
Hey yall. I am sinking into some deep work around the generational sexual abuse within my family, covert and overt, both of which I haven’t known or understood much until recently. I’m already feeling grateful for all the care and support in this group. I have outside therapy support and other resources and feel like I’m at a generally safe-enough place to be exploring some of this. I feel very lucky to be re-encountering this part of my trauma now and with some choice/intention/community and I don’t take that for granted in my own story or in general. And—naming, witnessing, questioning, wondering, ruminating, grieving etc etc etc about this stuff feels new, hard, and scary.
If anyone might have resources related to some of my experiences or that were helpful for you in your own journey so far… I am here looking for where to even begin and want to learn from those next to me. Thank you in advance. 🖤
I have a lot I want to give voice to in spaces like this when it is time but for right now, what feels important to say is:
-I am learning about generations of overt childhood sexual abuse within one side of my family, including abuse impacting my dad.
-I have also experienced more overt sexual abuse outside of my family of origin, and other forms of trauma; it’s all sorts of weird and hard to hold certain things alongside each other some days.
-Piecing together that my parents regularly left me and my sister in the care of an adult, my uncle, who (as a child) sexually abused my dad as a child. I am unsure whether my mom knew about this abuse at the time of that caretaking.
-one of my cousins, from that family/uncle, is in prison for sexual abuse of his own children. We were occasionally around this family when my sister and I got a bit older, always in large groups.
-I have memories/current experiences of unease when thinking about that uncle and his family. Before I knew about any of this. I can’t remember much of the period they would babysit us because my sister and I were still pretty little (maybe 0-6??), and just about all the memories from then on are sparse or neutral as for a few reasons that care stopped happening. There is one memory standing out, though, to do with another cousin from that family — a memory of me as a child, probably about 6-7, feeling scared of them at a social gathering, hiding inside and telling my mom I felt scared of them, and then for all the dysfunctional reasons I was made to come socialize and had my fear of that cousin outed to the rest of the group. I’m looking back now and just wondering if I’m repressing things. Maybe I’ll never know, and I’m not sure if I want to, but part of me does want to remember and understand. I don’t know where to start with that.
-All of this is impacting my emotional experience about my (now passed) grandparents. I know my grandmother was sexually abused by her own uncle. I now suspect that my grandfather abused my uncle when my uncle was a child, with or without my grandmother’s knowledge, and that my then-teenaged uncle went on to sexually abuse my dad in their house for years. I doubt my gradmother knew, but it’s hard for me to believe part of her didn’t know or suspect.
-there’s all sorts of icky covert behaviors in my family of origin. My dad patted me, his adult daughter, on the ass about a month ago (and to be clear this would be zero percent appropriate with a child either) and beyond being absolutely flabbergasted and still unsure about how to respond… it has brought up a LOT. Expectations around kissing parents and grandparents on the mouth, sister and I showering together for far too long, inappropriate boundaries around physical space re: parents’ adult sexuality alongside little sharing of age appropriate info about sexuality/bodies/consent… to say nothing of the emotional incest/surrogate spouse/parentification stuff going on, among other things, which I feel I’ve better explored. I have no idea where to begin with the covert stuff, including the unspoken expectations that I will not disrupt the pattern. But I’m an adult capable of consent now and I have to work to disrupt these patterns.