Mother’s Day

Today is Mother’s Day across the Southern Hemisphere and my thoughts have turned to my Mom and what she meant to me.  It is hard to see people out there talking about their Mom’s and how precious they are, knowing that my Mom is gone and I will never be able to touch her or hold her again.

And of course, I have started thinking about my relationship with her as I was growing up and how that affected what has happened to me.  If only it was possible to go back – I wonder what I would do differently?  Would I be able to use the knowledge that I now have to change what Alex did to me?

Because at the end of the day, what he did, he did to a child, with a child’s mind and a child’s perspective on life.  As I child, our understanding of the world around us bears little resemblance to what we know and understand as an adult.  And that is what is so horrific about Child Sexual Abuse.

It is actually impossible, as an adult, to understand how a child perceives not only their abuse, but also their abuser.  Usually, a child’s experience of the world is tempered by the love and nurturing of their parents.  They are protected from harm by the adults around them and are not exposed to the seedier side of life, nor the harm that one adult can do to another. 

More specifically, a child has no knowledge or understanding of the adult world of complex emotions.  To a child, emotions are simple – love/hate, like/dislike, afraid/secure, etc.  The light and shade of adult emotions do not open up to us until we hit our mid-teens and our own needs change to include romantic attraction.

And this of course, determines the way a child reacts to Child Sexual Abuse.  Not only do they understand what is being done to them but also, they cannot grasp the emotions that drive their abuser. 

So when it comes to trying to deal with the abuse once the child becomes an adult we, the victims of Child Sexual Abuse, are left in a situation where we are looking at what happened through an adult’s eyes, rather than those of a child.  Which naturally brings its own sets of problems.  We cannot accept the fact that we did not get help, we grapple with the fact that we ‘allowed’ it to happen, we rail against the idea that we let it carry on and on and on.  We are seeing what happened through an adult’s eyes, with adult knowledge, experience and perceptions and find it difficult to accept that we were not to blame.