It isn’t the trauma, it’s what you learn from it . . . .

When I was sexually abused by my stepfather, finally confessed (guilt-ridden, ashamed, scared) to my mother, and she preferred his lies to my truth, I learned some lessons, and I learned them deeply:

— I don’t matter.  People can do what they want with me, and nobody cares.

— My body doesn’t really belong to me.

— No one can be trusted, not men, not the person whom I most loved, my mother.  (She stayed married, and the abuse continued until he died a few years later.)

— When you’re in trouble, you’re on your own.

And so I went into my adulthood (so-called), a solitary, brave performer, a watcher of other people and of life.  It wasn’t for me to belong; I was an outsider, marked and dirty forever.

You can see that the trauma itself — his co-option of my body and its sensibilities — was horrible, but it was temporary, and not lethal.  What I took with me were the lessons.

“Why not move on?” you ask.  “The events are over, and they can’t be changed, so why grip them so fiercely?”  Because those lessons are unacceptable.  I have to disprove them.  I learned them in my body, way below the level of thinking.  Of course I “know” that his spirit was deformed — it wasn’t my idea! — but now I’m contaminated.  I have to try to eject this poison, as I would any poison in my body.  It’s actually healthy to keep worrying over it, fighting, trying to eject it, to reclaim myself.  The events can’t be changed, but the lessons in my body can be revised.

In order to succeed, I must shift the focus from “what he did” to “what I believe.”  I must identify with my true spirit and, so to speak, return his lies, his poison, to him.  I must realize that I got the facts right (it did happen, repeatedly) but drew the wrong conclusions (it was entirely about him, not about me).

That’s a great idea, positive, terrific.  The price is high, however.  When I return his deformity to him, I am vulnerable to my own truth.  Will I be able to withstand the reality of my experience, how it all felt to me?  As long as I blame and fixate on him, I’m not up close to my reality.  Continuing to obsess is actually protective.

But continuing to obsess means I don’t have my life, and that’s not okay.

So I approach my emotional reality . . . slowly . . . one truth at a time.  And each one becomes a building block to support me for the next.