I was raised that men do not express feelings aside from anger. We certainly don’t cry, we pull ourselves up by our bootstraps suck it up and move on. When I was molested on a daily basis for years as a young boy, my other(non assailant) sister tried to protect me. What did dear old dad do? Dismiss the accusation as absurd. What did Mom do? Dismiss the idea as absurd because that’s what dear old Dad said to do.
Torment is reliving those days, which is constant. Torment is not being worth appropriately dealing with the sexual assault when it was proven. Torment is having to live with the person who assaulted me. Torment is living with the trauma, while the perpetrator has the endless peace of death. Torment is continuing to be traumatized because of what was never dealt with as a family, a community (was never reported to police) or from brother to sister. Torment is having an out, but not the guts to take it. Torment is fear. It’s the feeling in the pit of my stomach that because I was never worth dealing with ANYTHING from my childhood, I will be equally worthless to my wife and family. Torment is being bullied daily for several years. If I wasn’t bullied by my sister who sexually assaulted me, I was bullied by kids at school..I don’t mean made fun of for being taller and bigger or otherwise different than the other kids. I mean verbally abused constantly, physically threatened, which resulted in poor academic performance in school, which started the verbal abuse at home. Torment is telling someone that had the power to do something about it, and watching them dismiss me and the situation as absurd, or provide advice that was unrealistic and not helpful. Again, I wasn’t worth it.
I’m 41 years old. I’ve been dismissed, degraded and diminished at home, school and church for half of my life. Common words were “how can you be that stupid?” “That couldn’t have happened”. “There’s no way….” Worse, were the words not said but the actions and sometimes, the inaction that followed the dismissals and diminishing words.
This was all done in a “Christian school” and a “Christian home”. Yeah. Abusive men obsessed over an archaic book of…you guessed it! Abusive men! Noah slept with his daughter, Absalom raped his sister, David (a man after “God’s heart”) had a man killed after sleeping with and impregnating his wife, and the list goes on.
That’s torment. I would have rather had “enhanced interrogation techniques”. Pull out my fingernails, water board me, inflict other physical pain. I can take that. I can’t take the torment. From the grave, Christy and my father continue to dominate my thoughts and dreams. My mother and the bullies at school and church still torment me in my dreams and throughout my days.
Therapy has not helped. Inpatient hospitalizations haven’t helped aside from keeping me alive. Medications don’t help, partly because I don’t take them or I take them for a time then stop. Work doesn’t help because depression, anxiety and borderline personality disorder make it difficult to keep a job. That in turn begins a whole new type of torment–being unable to provide for my family. What kind of worthless man doesn’t provide for his family?
Torment is hopelessness. Torment is a slow agonizing journey to an unknown end. Either it will end from natural causes, or it will end from external manipulation. Either way, it has to stop.
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I recently heard an interview with a psychologist who had studied former child soldiers in Africa. They don’t talk about their experiences, and she said recent research shows that those who don’t talk about it do better than the ones sent to Western-style therapy. It seems that therapy may actually worsen PTSD outcomes.
This lines up with my own experience of many years of therapy with various professionals, which IMO has made me more dysfunctional than I was before.