You don't like the Sound of the Truth Coming from my Mouth

"Truth Hurts People"

This was a comment sent in by an anonymous reader of TWC.

I felt like I'd been slapped when it came into my inbox.

My breathing shortened. My face got red. I felt like a little girl who had just been caught doing something that she had been warned against doing. The same feeling when you told a secret about your family...and realize that it was never meant to be shared or even acknowledged as happening.

Next came my anger at feeling shamed. Who was this person to tell me that I was hurting people? That "Truth" hurts people? Who the fuck were they to pass this judgment?

AS I sat here, feeling enraged, feeling shamed, feeling guilty for something I had done, I had created, it occurred to me.

These are the feelings of a survivor of sexual abuse. One who talks.

I am one of those women. My perp? My biological father. I was ten. He was not the first, as I was quite the favorite of many of my older male cousins ... until I learned that yelling for my mother at the top of my lungs seemed to keep them away. He was not the only abusive man in the family, for my uncles perpetrated against my other female cousins, I later learned.

He was, however, the least expected. My father. The man I adored. The one that I wanted to please beyond all reason. He was the one to sexually assault me. In my house. After my parents had separated.

My mother, thinking she had left this man, and that the damage he could do to my brother and I was minimized never dreamed that he would come for a Christmas visit and bring this sort of catastrophe.

And like almost all young children who experience this, I kept quiet. I had nightmares. I wouldn't be in the same room alone with him during summer visitations. My signals got crossed. The man who was supposed to love and protect me was my abuser.

This became a distinctive pattern as I aged and began to date. I loved the emotionally distant ones. The more they resisted me, ignored me, emotionally abused me? Like candy. When one got me pregnant and emotionally and physically abandoned me? He became the penultimate love of my life. I would have abandoned my education for this man. I would have had this baby at age 20. To please him. To have him choose me. To give me anything, anything at all. My sacrifice was proof of my love, my worthiness of his love, but still he never chose me.

The first time I talked of my abuse was in my therapy sessions. Trying to figure out where my irrational anger and impulsively as coming from as I whirled in crazier and crazier circles, my therapist finally asked me point blank.

And I told her the truth.

And she cried.

To sit in front of your therapist and detail in a flat demeanor the horrors of your childhood, ,and to have her cry as she told me that none of this was my fault? It was honestly the first time that it may have occurred to me the enormity of the impact that this had on my life path. I was not crying. She was. How could I not cry when it had happened to me, and she was weeping simply hearing my dialogue?

Next I told my mother, and she cried and raged and vowed to kill this man. But I did not cry. I had lived with it for nearly nine years. I had hidden and distorted my truth for so long, it no longer resembled anything but a story for me. An experience, much like falling from your bike and scraping your knee. Or being brought into a drug house so your father can use you as a shield in front of his buyer? Or the time your father shot your dogs one winter because they were barking? Or that time he shot the glass out in the car as your mother drove away from the house when you were five? Or the time that he threatened to kill Santa, and took his gun out to the back yard to prove to you that he was serious? Or the time that you were nine and he taught you how to smoke a bong? Or that time when you were ten and he sexually assaulted you on New Years Eve?

You mean everyone doesn't have these stories?

So, "Truth hurts people" commenter, I respectfully disagree. Truth doesn't hurt people, secrets hurt people. The secrets we keep from our loved ones to spare them pain. The secrets we keep from ourselves. The secrets we keep for fear that we won't be liked, or loved, or admired. Maybe the truths expressed at TWC are the first time someone is saying their truth out loud. You don't have to like it. Hell, you don't have to read it, and you don't even have to agree that there should be a place like this to express yourself.

But keep the shaming to yourself. This is what keeps abused people silent. And I, for one, won't shut up to please you.