Re: Sibling molestation

I cannot agree enough with gatormul's admonitions to do all you can to save your children's lives...because that's just it, you would be saving them. I am in my late 20s and did not disclose my abuse to my parents as a young child (my brother touched me and raped me, he is 6 years my senior). I think my trust was so broken just by the experience, and my voice was somehow so stifled by it (I was already a shy kid) that I just shut up inside myself and "lived" there---as a little girl I decided to bypass depending on others, as would have been healthy for a child, and instead became very emotionally independent/withdrawn. Now that I am older and have more insight into the situation, I feel absolute agony, this sort of gnawing grief, over the fact that I didn't get to be a child when I was supposed to, and now I have to be an adult, whether or not I am ready. So parts of me are still not emotionally grown up --- they're frozen in time, it's as if I have a 6-yr.old inside of me, and I can't get back all those years I need in order to "grow her up" into an adult. So instead we abuse victims simply buck up and try to discipline this inner child so that it won't get out of hand and control us, when really if I had been loved properly at that time, I wouldn't have an inner child to control.

I divulge all of these details because my heart truly aches for you and your daughter. I had many physical and emotional signs of abuse as a child, and the fact that my mother never put 2 and 2 together only added to my justification for my premature emotional independence and cynicism. Her actions (or lack thereof) only served to reinforce that I was not important enough to protect or notice. I felt consciously distant from her my whole childhood, and as an adult it both breaks my heart and fuels my anger to think of all that my parents were oblivious to and all that they could have done had they cared to pay attention. Maybe they thought I was the one with the problem. That's what I thought.

Please, do everything in your power to help your daughter, and tell her over and over again, even if she seems like she understands, that you love her and that she has nothing to be ashamed of, that she's precious, that it wasn't her fault, and that anytime, ANYTIME she needs to talk to you about what happened to her or how she feels, you will always be there to listen , even if it's 5 years down the road. Tweet