It’s been some weeks since my Counsellor suggested that I might consider ‘telling my story’ as a part of my steps towards healing, since then we have still dealt with the stuff in counselling but I had thought when I first heard her say it that I could/should tell my story here but only as and when I have the strength to do so.
So, this is the first of a series of posts that are basically my life story, I can’t guarantee that it will flow chronologically, or that it will flow in terms of readability.
Also, many of these details are picked up from very sketchy memories and recollections and as anyone who is a survivor of abuse will tell you sometimes we manage to so effectively block out the details of our abuse that we can’t actually recall the exact details of any one incident, it is possible that I will confuse details of and merge some abuse incidents in some way but this is a true record of how I remember now, many years after the event, my childhood being as well as how I came to where I am now, as an adult.
So I was born in the mid/late 1960’s the second son to my mother and father, I obviously don’t personally recall any of the incidents surrounding my birth and early years but from what my mother tells me the birth was traumatic, not sure of the details or why but apparently it was!
My mother also tells me that when I was a baby I didn’t want to be picked up and cuddled and would cry whenever she tried, but as soon as she put me down I would be quiet, she didn’t really want to pick me up either, she says I was ‘an ugly baby who no one would want to pick up’ I can’t recall when I was first told this but know that I grew up with those words ringing in my ears.
I would only have been about 2 or 3 when my parents divorced, again the details are hushed up but my mother’s story is that my father was abusive to her so she left him but my father, who I had some contact with a few years back, tells a different tale, it is possible that my mother had an affair with the man who eventually became her second husband, a man a few years younger than her but with a lot more potential to earn real money, being a Uni Graduate, as opposed to my manual labouring father.
Anyhow, they went on to have 2 children of their own, I believe that both of them were born before my mother was divorced from my dad, let alone re-married.
The man who I knew as ‘dad’ was in fact my step father and it is he who subjected me to sexual, physical and emotional abuse.
My mother was possibly not aware of the sexual abuse but certainly took part in a fair amount of emotional abuse and condoned the physical abuse at times.
What follows over the next few weeks/months, however long it takes is MY story, what it was like for me growing up in what should have been, and everyone thought was, a loving caring supportive family environment.
