If you have experienced childhood abuse or an abusive intimate relationship, it is hard to imagine that there can be any more painful layers under those invasive and often violent experiences. It took decades for me to gather the courage to face my sexual abuse and assault memories in therapy. I never expected to later uncover far deeper layers of pain, but this reality is present for many survivors of interpersonal trauma. These are such feelings as neglect, betrayal, and abandonment. It is the pain of knowing, even as a young child, that nobody cared to help you process your trauma…or to even prevent it in the first place. For me, this betrayal was the deepest layer under the violence of trauma.
Two months ago, as I cleaned out boxes in my attic, I came across a large stack of letters from 30 years ago. My whole body instantly reacted with a burning rage I did not know was inside me. I ran them outside to the trash can–afraid of the volcano building in my chest. For the next few hours I was hit with wave after wave of intense anger and then despair as my dark depression monster with its sharp claws hovered above me.
My body knew what to do. Don’t stop moving. Detach. When you stop moving the monster will suffocate you. My mind raced. I had no focus; my brain had exited my body. I cleaned and cooked and did not stop moving for the next several hours. But all my years of trauma therapy have taught me to recognize my attempts at avoidance and denial when I am overwhelmed with big emotions.
They’re just emotions I repeated to myself between the waves of hopelessness. You have learned you can tolerate the emotions. I tried to remember what to do to get grounded again. Be compassionate to yourself. You’re triggered but you can stay with it. Be curious about these sensations in your body.
I returned to the trash can, gathered up the letters from my old friend and brought them back inside. I spread the hundred or so pages out in my bedroom and I began reading.
My friend’s name was Angie and I had banished her from my life 30 years ago. Straining through the tears, I could only skim her words. I read for a few minutes before my body panicked and I’d again jump up, keep moving. I continued this pattern most of the day and the next.
Over 30 Years Ago…
When I was 15 years old I attended a Christian youth conference, an intensely emotional experience. For the first time I allowed myself to acknowledge some of the sexual abuse from years earlier. Prior to that year, some protective part of me managed to block the disgusting memories entirely. Why were they now beginning to piece together? I hated these fragments floating into my brain but had no power to stop them. The 15-year-old me was needing help, a lifeline to be more accurate.
Overwhelmed with memories and emotion, I confided in a youth counselor – just the tiniest bit. This was Angie, a young college student. I didn’t say much. I didn’t let her see emotion. I didn’t know how to feel or express any of it. But something moved in me…there was some opening….some hope of freedom. Without showing any emotion, I confided in her. It was only a couple sentences.
It would be the only sentences my voice would utter about the abuse for the next 3 decades.
From age 15 to 17 I opened up more and more to Angie through letters in the mail, unable to say any of it with my voice. We did not live near each other, which felt good to me…safer. So little by little I let my heart soften. For the very first time – I trusted.
Occasionally I saw her and she tried to get me talking, to connect, but I could not. She cried for me when I never had tears. She prayed when I had no words. She reached out to hold me, but I was stiff – rigid – emotionless. Detached.
The Beginning of My Anxious Attachment Behavior
The 15 year old me latched on to Angie with emotions I never felt before. Although my face and body showed none of this when I saw her in-person, inside I was intensely craving not just a friend, but a savior. Please dear God let this person rescue me from the hell of my own body.
This is what I now understand as my first experience with anxious attachment. The need for her to soothe my painful emotions, to validate my experience, to offer some sort of rescue and protection was overwhelming.
Although I had never experienced this sort of desperation before: the clinginess, the yearning for rescue with every cell in my body believing my life depended on the connection to my friend…. I would certainly experience it again with other important people later in my life.
This intense cry for help approach to connection scared me. The internal family systems (IFS) approach to therapy would explain it with the understanding that it was young child parts, exiles, carrying heavy burdens that were seeking to be soothed. A young protector part of me (a firefighter in IFS language) worked to desperately find connection in order to soothe the exiled parts.
But I knew nothing of psychology theories. I only knew I HATED this part of me with her intense longing for rescue. I wanted to destroy her so that I would not look needy or intrusive. The best I could do was try to hide how I felt.
An Offer of Protection Felt Like Betrayal
By the time I was 17, I had disclosed enough of the abuse through my letters that Angie (with guidance from other leaders) determined she must disclose the abuse to my parents and provide them with guidance and next steps. The next time I saw Angie in person she told me of this plan and I froze! I remember the incident vividly – every detail of that painful encounter with my trusted friend. My body was in shock.
The one person in my life I trusted with my dark and shameful secrets was about to betray me. My parents would know the disgust inside me. At 17 there was no greater betrayal I could imagine.
Angie gave me the choice to either tell my parents myself with her support… or she would do it herself. I felt like the entire world was caving in upon me. My face was hot. My body filled with energy wanting to run. I couldn’t look at her as I shook my head “No! No! No!” I insisted. I begged! In the end she told my parents and I watched from a distance, hidden and horrified. The rest of the evening I willed my eyes to be lasers, burning a giant hole into the floor that I could sink into and disappear into the Earth forever.
Parents Cannot Always Help
How the hell did I know to not seek help from my parents?!? Angie thought it was best to break my trust and tell them. She had done this for other girls and they found relief in her support as they leaned into their parents protectiveness. But I KNEW different! How!? How did I know at age 5 to not talk about how my grandpa used my body. How since the age of 8 did I know to hide what my cousins did to me? Nobody told me not to turn to my parents, but I KNEW they couldn’t handle my emotions.
At 17 I assumed Angie would understand this. I loved my parents and wanted to protect them from this. How could I be so stupid to share my secrets!? Now I would hurt my mother with the mess I created. My poor mother with her own history of sexual trauma and depression that I knew nothing about yet. But I knew Mom could not handle my pain. I knew this instinctively.
I vowed to never trust someone again like I had trusted this friend! And for the nearly three decades I did not.
What Angie did that day, telling my parents without my permission, felt like the most horrible betrayal. It FELT like the deeper layer under the violence of my trauma. What I would discover 30 years later with the help of therapy…was there is yet another far deeper layer.
My Lies To Fix My Mess
I never again talked to Angie. I never wrote her another letter. My anger and hatred kept me from ever again looking in her eyes. I was horrified trying to embrace what my parents now knew about me after I spent years keeping them from knowing my shame.
The next day I lied to my mother, saying Angie was confused, not understanding my stories – that I did not experience any abuse at all. My mom was visibly relieved to be rid of the whole mess. My mess. My shame.
It was done. My abuse was never again spoken of.
Creating My Own New Narrative: A Child’s Strategy
Neither my mother nor my father ever mentioned what they had learned. It was so easy to return to hiding. All I could feel was relief that my ridiculous lie was enough for my dark secrets to “return” to their guarded home deep inside me – FOREVER! Because it was so easy, I convinced myself that Angie must not have told them anything after all. She must have just hinted at it and left it so vague they could dismiss it when I offered my lies. That’s what I told myself.
That is the story I clung to for 30 years: MY PARENTS DIDN’T KNOW ABOUT MY ABUSE. My story, my narrative, the strategy of a child – it allowed me to function – to only blame myself for not seeking help. I moved through life with my hidden shame, but without ever acknowledging that my family did not want to help me process what I had experienced.
We all develop protective parts of ourselves when we are young. I somehow knew my parents couldn’t be emotionally available to me, so a part of me created the belief that I needed nothing from them. This belief could protect me from the pain of rejection. So I believed I never wanted my parents’ help to process my abuse. I believed I never wanted a connection at all with them, not emotionally. I’m just a private person I told myself. This story, this approach, this strategy guarded me.
If I had allowed the child me to yearn for my parents help to process my big emotions, and they instead looked away – walked out of the room – never spoke a word about it ever again – could I have managed that? No! That would have crushed a child! I would have felt horribly abandoned, alone, unloved, unprotected. My child parts instinctively knew to protect me from feeling the full weight of this by NOT wanting their help, NOT wanting them to know the secrets.
Losing The Story I Created
So I took all of my rage and anger towards Angie, my shame, and I locked it deep inside my frozen shut-down body. And there it remained for 30 years… until I found her letters. All of her loving, compassionate responses to the desperate cries for help. All her gentle reassurances to my clinginess, my despair, my search for rescuing. All her attempts at protecting me…the same words that once brought me comfort now only filled me with rage.
All my life I have tried to connect with friends, to feel close to people, to trust others. My whole being craves deep friendships, but the vulnerability of each connection quickly triggers my fear of betrayal and I isolate myself. I get excited to spend time with friends and almost instantly look for ways to leave, to hide – to protect myself from the inevitable pain of betrayal and abandonment. My parts continue to fight this war inside me – in my belly – with swords so sharp I was diagnosed with an ulcer my senior year of high school.
I found Angie on Facebook and I sent her a message. I stayed guarded. I didn’t “friend” her or give her my phone number. FB Messenger only! That felt as safe as I could make it! I thought it would help me feel grounded again, more whole. I thought I could forgive her and then that open wound inside me would heal. It did not.
I am beginning to understand now why I can’t simply “let go” of that experience with Angie. I have cried bitterly through 2 therapy sessions trying to understand why I can’t “get over” this. I have tried talking to friends. The feelings of rage, anger, betrayal – they are still inside me.
Reconnecting with Angie did not magically heal my wounds. Rather, it made them larger.
Once we began messaging, I learned what happened 30 years ago. I learned that my parents DID in fact know all the details of my abuse and abusers. There was no chance they believed my childish lie. Rather, they used it as their way out, just like I did. I learned that others had reached out to my parents to ensure the abuse would be reported to authorities and I would receive therapy. None of that happened.
This new reality continues to hit me in heavy waves. I sob and gasp for breath. I am forced to let go of the story I created, the one that let me function through life. Nobody wanted to report my abuse to authorities. Nobody wanted to even acknowledge it. This taught me the weight of the shame I carried and that it must remain silent…and that I don’t matter.
Now at 48, I and all of the child parts still within me are devastated! I am reeling from losing my strategy. I am feeling all of what the 5 year old, 8 year old, 9 year old, 17 year old versions of me couldn’t feel as it was intolerable then.
The Deepest Layer of Trauma: Believing I am Not Worth Love or Protection
In my recent therapy sessions I cried from deep in my belly, flooded with the pain as I began realizing I had in fact always craved a connection with my parents.
“Put words to it! Describe it!” my therapist insisted. I cried harder, longing to be alone, curled up in a ball, not searching for the damn words to give her!
In a high pitched voice and struggling for breath, I squeaked:
“I wasn’t worth…I wasn’t worth…I wasn’t worth…love. I wasn’t worth protecting. I DID NOT MATTER TO ANYONE!”
Voicing this deepest layer caused my whole body collapse to the floor with the weight of it.
Working in therapy on my sexual abuse memories and the memories from my abusive marriage was hell. I never imagined there was a more painful and deeper layer to my trauma. Like many survivors of interpersonal trauma, it is the feelings of abandonment and betrayal that are the deepest layer.
What I FELT throughout childhood had been CONFIRMED by my parents lack of a response. My unconscious beliefs had been confirmed in in that moment.
I did not know I held this belief – that I am not worth protecting or loving – THAT I DON’T MATTER TO ANYONE. It was an unconscious belief created in childhood, living under my skin. Yet it held the power to guide all my choices and behavior. It was never told to me in words, yet still it was learned. This was the felt sense in my body all my life.
Angie had attempted to gain the support and protection that I needed, but my parents did nothing with it. I suppose I knew that these 30 years, but could not face the truth. Now what do I do with this fierce rage boiling inside me? If my anger is no longer directed at Angie, will it be directed at my parents? It feels so wrong!
After I collapsed onto the floor of my therapist’s office, I cried from the deepest place inside. With her big pregnant belly, she lowered herself onto the floor and hugged me. For the first time, in 2 1/2 years of therapy with her, the touch felt good. Being held felt good and I did not want to let go of her.
I left her office feeling raw, hurt, vulnerable…like so many times before. But I also felt something open inside me. It felt good to be held, to be touched. Being held did not immediately trigger fear in me…a fear of future betrayal. This was new. This was a new opening.
