Child Abuse, the Impact: Anger

These next few blog posts will be a bit difficult to write. It hurts to re-visit some of these memories and I don't want to hurt anyone else in doing so. I made a promise to myself when I started this blog, to be open and honest and while doing that, I knew others would be helped.

I was a sweet, precocious little girl. I believed that the world was good and that people really liked me. My mom said that I never met a stranger. I would go up to people in the mall and start telling them about my doll or my little brother. I loved life and thought that it was great to be me.

At the age of 10 my childhood was changed forever. It was at this time that I was molested. This lasted for 3 years and I was never the same.

Through my years of therapy as I learned about Post Traumatic Stress Disorder, I found out a lot about the general disorder and about the way that I coped with it.

When someone is victimized over and over, it changes their brain chemistry. This is to say that the person I once was is not the person I am today. Don't get me wrong, I know that everyone grows up and changes, but I often wonder what kind of person I would be today if this hadn't happened to me. I might have known how to handle my life and others in it with assertiveness rather than letting them walk all over me.

I have been in several hospitals dealing with my eating disorder, but the most helpful was a Sexual Trauma Unit that I went to in Kansas City.

It was there that I learned to really let the anger I was feeling out. I was always afraid of the anger and thought that if I was a good person I wouldn't get angry. My poor husband was the only one to ever see me really angry and it was seemingly over something very minor. Little did I know at the time that it was decades worth of anger boiling over at really inappropriate times. In the hospital I was taken to a room that had carpeted walls and was sound proof. I was given a foam bat and was told to use it to let out the anger on some pillows on the floor. It took me awhile, I was very tentative and safe at first. I didn't want the therapists to see me lose control, and then suddenly it all came out. I screamed, I pounded, I sobbed uncontrollably. At the end of the exercise, my therapist held me close as I cried and cried. She told me that it was okay to let it out, and that all I needed to do was to find a safe place to do it.

This was a great exercise for me, and there were other ones that helped me too, but I believe that one really let me release a lot of the pent up feelings that I had.

Although this was good for me, I also learned not to let it get to that point when I am angry. I need to let my feelings be known and talk it out with someone if I have that opportunity. Sometimes though, it does feel good to go pound a pillow or to let out a primal scream into it.

I believe that I was put on this earth and allowed to experience this pain for a couple of purposes:

To make me more empathetic to others that are hurting, and to help others see the goodness in life even after a tragedy.

I do hope that you will continue with me on this journey as I let you into my world and open up to you about not only surviving it, but thriving in it.