>>SOUTHERN INDIANA — Writing this column is one of my favorite routine writing assignments. This week is a different situation; I want to start by saying that this is the most difficult column I have ever written.

I am a survivor of childhood sexual abuse.

The incident happened to me sometime after my fifth birthday and most of my recollection of it is foggy. I remember that it was late in the year, probably October. There were leaves on the ground and I was wearing a coat. It took place in a neighbor's backyard. I have no specific recall of the perpetrator except that he was much bigger than me (as most adults would be to a 5-year-old) and that he smelled like cigarette smoke. I know that at one point during the experience I blacked out — completely disassociating with what was happening. My conscious memories are slim to nonexistent, but my body memories are intense and very much real.

As I write this, my conscious mind is at a loss for words, but my body feels as if I may be experiencing it all over again. My chest is tight, almost as if it has been wrapped with an Ace bandage making it hard to breathe. I have to stop typing every so often so that I can take a deep breath and find some sort of focus. I am nauseous and can feel a repeated dull thud as if someone is knocking on my forehead with a mallet from the inside. I am crying. Right now, typing character by character, I am fighting the urge to become physically ill.

This is only a sliver of the aftermath caused by sexual abuse. I write for a living and still cannot find the words to accurately define what I experienced. The pain of the abuse is so deeply buried that even after 30 years, I still feel as if I am at the beginning of my healing process.

This outright pain kept me silent for many years. It was my survival mode: my conscious mind did all it could to avoid anything that triggered fragmented memories of the event. Meanwhile, my subconscious mind played tricks on me, causing chronic nightmares, fostering an inherent distrust in people, inviting drugs and alcohol to filter what I wasn't able to process for most of my life.

And yet, the very thing I thought was keeping me safe-being silent-was what kept me in pain. After many years of struggling, I finally started talking about the abuse with a therapist. It has only been in the past year that I've told a limited number of friends and family members. 

How do you approach such a topic with people who love you? What do you say when you have gone 30 years without saying anything? It's not something easily brought up at the dinner table. (It can be done, but who wants to be a guest at that meal?) And yet, here I am, broadcasting this most intimate detail of my life in an op-ed column to be read by people I don't even know before I have shared it with many of the people I love most in this world.

Why?

It started with the book “Push” by Sapphire, the novel that was the inspiration for the movie “Precious.” On the surface, it is the narrative of a young, illiterate, poverty-stricken girl who is the victim of severe sexual abuse. The real story within this book is much more profound; it's not about the abuse, but about the power to heal yourself, and others, by sharing your experiences.

“I could write a column,” I thought as I placed the red paperback down to take a sip of cold coffee. That first thought was immediately undermined by the next thought that told me I was crazy for even considering it. Writing about the abuse was too scary and too risky. What would people think of me? What would family members (who didn't know) say? What if I had to defend myself for something I wasn't all that comfortable divulging in the first place?

Later that day, I came across an article about a new campaign launched by the Family & Children's Place. It urged readers to do one tangible thing to help save a child's life and said out loud what I was already thinking, “…each of us has a role to play to do something concrete to prevent abuse.”

The following days were filled with more nudges to write about my experience. There was an impromptu breakfast with a friend who I had confided in only recently, a Sunday morning sermon that talked about how we could heal our wounds by helping others who had suffered the same wounds, “…what could you do this Easter season to help someone feel less afraid?”

I wanted to share my experience but didn't know how to start, so I simply began with what I was feeling.

Very few people know about what happened to me. (Correction, very few people knew before I wrote this column.)  I wasn't even all that sure about what happened until a few years ago when I stopped drinking. Once I stopped numbing myself, I began to understand and process a lot of the confusion, pain, sorrow, and anger that resulted from the abuse. I'm still processing it and will continue to process it throughout my life. My hope is that in writing this column I will have taken one more step toward healing while maybe helping others take their first step. 



Amy Gesenhues is a freelance writer who lives in Floyd County. You can read her daily commentaries at www.AmyWroteIt.Wordpress.com. E-mail her directly at amy@amywroteit.com.