- similar sense of responsibility in giving brother sex as to when I feel responsible for other people’s feelings, that’s part of how he must have coerced me into it sometimes.

- The memories come as flashbacks: something in the world (sight, smell, feeling, etc.) triggers a vivid “waking dream” that makes it feel like I’m right there and it’s happening to me again.  I have to remember that I am where I am now, as an adult, with more strength, experience, knowledge and resources, that I am safe, that I cannot be hurt by him now.

-think back to those memories: try and give that little boy some compassion; try and comfort him.  This is really hard to do.  I feel like there’s a bear-trap surrounding my heart, and to open it up a little bit takes all this strain and effort, but when the emotions become too much, I slip and it snaps shut again.

- I feel really frustrated about my session today.  I feel like all I did was kick up a bunch of emotional shit and didn’t get anywhere.

I have lots of old beliefs about feelings.  It’s really hard for me to feel my emotions and feelings because I’ve trained myself for so long just to stuff them.

There such an overwhelming feeling of emptiness, of “what’s the point” sometimes.  I used to use substances to deal with those feelings.  Now, I try and do positive things to feel better, but it’s still just running from those emotions, it’s still trying to fill that emptiness, even though it may be with better things than alcohol and drugs.  I’m still avoiding how I’m feeling.

I have these beliefs that say I won’t be able to stop the feelings if they come, that I’ll lose control.  My counsellor says it’s a normal, human thing to think. We think that we won’t be able to cope with the feelings that come, so we avoid them.

Another belief I have that makes me stop feeling my emotions is that I just shouldn’t have any bad emotions.  I should just be fine now because I’ve done all this work to be better (side note: FINE = Fucked Interior Nice Exterior).  If I feel bad at all, depressed or whatever, I think “no, I feel fine, because I want to be better and be OK”.  But all that does is stuff those bad emotions away and not deal with them.  Same thing with trying to cope by doing something positive.  I do something that I think should make me feel better, like meditate or workout, and then if I don’t feel better after I think “no, no, no, I just did (whatever), so I should feel better now.  I don’t feel bad, I’m fine”, and so I stuff the bad emotions again.  Doing positive things is still a good coping mechanism to have, but I need to experience the emotions that I’m feeling.  I need to acknowledge that I’m feeling bad, accept the bad feelings and be OK with them, not just scream “AHH! I’m so fucking depressed!  How do I escape this shit!”.  I can’t just avoid that pain.  There’s a reason that I’m feeling that pain.  Pain is not a bad thing, it lets you know that something’s wrong/injured.

My emotions/pain/feelings won’t kill me.  I’ve felt some aweful emotions in the last while.  When my counsellor called Child Protective Services, I was a wreck, sobbing and crying.  But I survived.

I will survive the feeling my feelings, I’ve done it before, let them come.

It’s hard for me to even acknowledge that I’m feeling bad, for the above reasons, and also because there’s a belief that that will mean I’m weak.  The voices say “suck it up.  It could be worse.  You’re fine.  It’s no big deal.”  But I need to accept that I am feeling back.  I have to let those bad emotions come.  I am hurting.  It doesn’t mean that I will be hurting forever, but I probably will be unless I face the pain and hurt.  I have to go through it, not around it.  I am safe now, I will be OK someday.  I am still here, so I am still fighting.

I am broken and whole at the same time.

Today is probably the only time I left my counsellor’s office feeling good.

I realize now that I had no responsibility in the abuse that happened to me.  I could always intellectually justify this with some kind of age comparison: less age equals less responsibility, therefore, the older person involved should always just “know better”.  But now I actually believe it.

The reason I believe this to be true now is being able to see and understand how I was manipulated at different times to engage in these acts.  I can see how my brother would be angry at things I did or convinced me to continue what I was doing if I said I wanted to stop.  And I did say I wanted to stop sometimes.

I would be conflicted because I knew he wanted me to keep going, but I wanted to stop.  I was young.  I can remember how I felt like I had no other choice.  That’s feeling helpless.  I was scared.  He was physically stronger than me, intellectually superior because he was four years older, and he held so much emotional control over me because he was my older brother.  I wanted him to like me, so I would do what he wanted.  I see how he was then as so dark and ugly now.  How he would get angry or convincing sometimes just to satisfy himself.  It makes me angry.  There are still the voices that say “oh, he’s just a sick person” and want to forgive him and forget about it, but that’s OK.  I’m getting there.

It’s so freeing to feel like I was really not responsible.  Before I would be mad at myself or feel responsible because I didn’t do anything differently or because I let it happen.  But I was a child.  I can only see now, as an older person, how I should have acted.  I couldn’t have understood what was happening at the time, I had so little experience with life and especially sex.

Part of my healing is going to be untangling these bad feelings I have about sex from sex itself.  Specifically sex with another person, because that’s what makes me uncomfortable sometimes.  I need to separate that old context.  My brother took advantage of me, but that had nothing to do with any other sexual encounters.  They’re separate.  Sex is an amazing thing that is pleasurable for both people and I need to see that anything that happens now is separate from what happened then.

This is all about taking my voice back.  I was forced to shut down my voice and keep everything a secret because I didn’t understand what was happening.  That was what made me sick.  Now, in order to heal, I have to find that voice again, speak up and express what happened.  I need to experience it in order to heal.  Healing does not happen by going around a problem, it happens by going through it.

I just heard from my girlfriend that my dad told her mom that he’s having a really hard time dealing with the fact that my brother molested me.  It makes me feel responsible for his pain, like I’m doing him harm.  I know I have to detach from his emotions and remember that I didn’t do anything wrong.  It’s my instinct to swoop in there and save him, to try and make him feel better by minimizing the situation somehow.  But that doesn’t help him or me.

That I could deal with.  When my girlfriend told me that, I could handle it.  But when she told me that she also heard that my brother was “in complete denial”, it hit me like ton of bricks.  I felt sick to my stomach, like I couldn’t breathe.  I feel like this is the kind of thing that tears families apart: there are now two sides, and people are going to choose.  I thoutgt we were all past the acceptance stage.  It felt like things were just jugging along and that this is some serious opposition to progress now.

I had heard that people not believing the victim was a serious problem in cases of sexual abuse.  I guess I was being naive in hoping that wasn’t going to be an issue.

I’m picturing Him and his crazy wife poisoning all my family’s thoughts with how I’m a liar.  I know I’m not.  I was also told that my brother’s wife “is being immature”, which I’m assuming to mean that she thinks I’m doing this just to hurt them because I’m jealous or something batshit crazy like that.

UPDATE (June 25th, 2010):  I saw my counselor about this finally.  I’m shocked at how emotionally closed up I still am, especially about this stuff.  I still have to hardest time crying and letting out all those emotions.  Whenever I get really upset, I just stuff down all those emotions, and that’s really not a good idea.  I guess I just feel embarassed about crying.  I also think that if I start, I probably won’t be able to stop and then I’ll just be a weak person, crying at the drop of a hat.  I know that’s not true, but it’s the only explanation I can think of for why I can’t let it out.

I guess it could also be that all of these thoughts and emotions are really painful.  It’s really hard , so it’s natural to try and avoid them.  They are all just really difficult emotions.

After our work today, my counselor gave me the following reading:

Healing is about opening our heart, not closing it.  It is about softening the places in us that won’t let love in.  Healing is a process.  It is about rocking back and forth between the abuse of the past and the fullness of the present and being in the present more and more of the time.  It is rocking that creates the healing not staying in one place or another.  The purpose of healing is not to be forever happy; that is impossible.  The purpose of healing is to be awake.  And to live while you are alive instead of dying while you are alive.  Healing is about being broken and whole at the same time.

This morning I was doing some memory work with my counselor.  She got me to write down details of my memories from the abuse for about 20 minutes.  What surprised me the most was how few details I could remember.  I didn’t have any memories at all really beyond visual images; that is, I couldn’t really remember many sounds, smells or other sensations.  Also, the extent of the memories was really limited.  I couldn’t remember much of the abuse while it was happening, really just immediately before and after.  After talking about this, I’m ok with that.  My counselor talked about how this really just means that I don’t need to remember these details.  Some part of me is protecting me.  I don’t have to remember every episode perfectly in order to be able to heal.  If these are the memories that I have, then they’ll be enough to accomplish what I’ve set out to do, which is to gain some healing.

Also, the fear and anxiety that I feel when thinking about these events are largely based in feeling like the abuse is happening or will happen again. I need to acknowledge, accept and honour these fears and anxieties when they arise.  But, at the same time, I don’t have to be hijacked by them.  I don’t have to feel afraid.  Basically I need to play a tape in my head encouraging me to think that I am an adult and am safe.  I have to power and ability to protect myself and keep myself safe.  While it is reasonable for me to feel the way that I do, at the same time, I don’t have to be afraid.

Acknowledging that the abuse is affecting my life today is really upsetting.  I want to be able to minimize it and pretend like it hasn’t affected me, which would shelter me from the pain of it.  But that’s not true.  I get anxious, afraid and nervous when people approach me too closely from behind in any setting or even when my girlfriend touches my ass in any context.  It terrifies me and really upsets me, putting me on the defensive and doing whatever I have to in order to make the action and the feelings stop.

I’ve been avoiding people for a while in meetings, but my counsellor pointed out that that is a warning sign for me.  Isolating myself and pulling away from people means I’m in trouble.  That’s an alcoholic behavior, and that’s the reason that the group setting is used so often in recovery.

So at the meeting tonight, I spoke up a little when someone said hi to me.  Of course, it took that guy sitting down next to me for me to take the chance and talk to him, but at least I did it.  And it was awesome.  We talked about how fucking hot it was in the meeting room and also about the program.  I told him honestly how things had been going lately (rough) and it felt good.  He related a lot and told me a bit about him and how he was the same way sometimes, and that felt good too.

After a while I had to ask him his name because I couldn’t remember his, even though he knew mine.  I apologised in advance cause I’m bad with names so I’ll probably forget.

“Don’t do that”, he said.  I was kind of stupified by this reaction.  “Don’t talk down about yourself.  Affirm the positive.  Say you’re going to remember my name.  Say you’re going to do it, then do it.  If you say you won’t, then you won’t”.

It’s something you hear all the time I guess, but it smacked me in the face tonight, and I loved it.

I thought everything was going so well.  I had six months of sobriety and I had just finished my first step study.

So why did I feel so shitty?  Why wasn’t everything better?  Why were these problems still popping up?

Despite having heard about it from so many other recovering alcoholics, I was expecting to be ‘cured’ after having done the steps and gotten some sobriety.  If the question had been posed to me “do you think you’re cured?” I would have been able to knowingly reply “of course not, alcoholism is never cured”.  But it still crept up on me.

These are massive changes to my life that I’m trying to enact.  I am trying to change the entire way I think.  If I look back at how I was six months ago, the differences are dramatic: reductions in so many negative things like  obsessing over alcohol, denying my problems and trying to control all the situations around me; also strengthening skills like acceptance, awareness and honesty.

I was focusing on how far I have to go (to perfection?) rather than how far I have come.  I have made great progress, and it will never accumulate to perfection, so I have to try not to expect it.

I haven’t posted on this blog in a really long time.  Two months or so it looks like.  I guess I felt like it was too much of a hassle; I always was stressed about having to do it, like it was a chore that I wasn’t doing for my own benefit, but for someone else’s.  I see now how much it helps me just to get some of this shit out of me sometimes.

Recently I’ve been stuck in a victim mode with regard to the sexual abuse I suffered as a child.  Anytime I think about it I get completely overwhelmed with sadness, pain and anger.  It’s taken power back over me, after I had worked so hard to take some power away from it.

There were about two weeks where I was feeling like hell, but not really acknowledging it.  I think it’s because of the subject matter that I so readily ignored how I’ve been feeling about it, since that was what I did to cope with it for so many years; if it were anything else that were bothering me, i.e. something alcohol-related, I feel like I would have caught it a little better.

It’s not just what happened or just the fact that it happened that’s making me upset lately, but also my parent’s reactions.  Other than saying “I’m sorry that this happened to you”, my dad said he was concerned about the relationship between my brother and I.  WTF!  I guess I buried my reaction to that at the time, because right now it pisses me off.  I don’t want to hear about what he thinks about my abuser.  It’s fine that my dad has concerns for him, he’s my brother and my dad’s son.  But don’t fucking talk to me about him.

My counsellor pointed out that it would likely be helpful to talk to my dad about how I’m feeling about things: how the abuse has affected me (beyond the obvious), how I feel about my brother, how I feel about what he’s got to say about him, etc.. Avoiding the situation, while it is my natural and preferred reaction, is not helpful.  Talking about sitting down with my dad and saying something to the effect of “Dad, I need to tell you how my brother sexually molested me is making me feel” makes me see how it would be beyond unappealing and sounds so painful and awkward that it seems like it’s not even a possibility.  This is how I know it’s something I probably have to do.

Anyways, I’m still hurting about everything and my counsellor and I are going to dig through some painful memories.  Anything to get some power back.

In a lot of ways, I was the one people depended on to be perfect, to be a certain way.

I didn’t go to anyone to unload my problems, people came to me.  This obviously built up a lot of suffering inside of me.

- no wonder parents didn’t do anything for me.  They thought they couldn’t do anything for me.  I was eventually so independent that I seemed self-sufficient

- I was always pissed off at everyone in first year, thinking they were so selfish, just having fun and not caring for anyone else.  I was just used to taking care of everyone in my family, being there for everyone, doing chores for everyone, keeping peace between everyone.  Once I left for university, I was removed from that role, and I din’t have anyone to care for really except for my girlfriend.