What Is Inevitable?
In the months prior to the birth of my daughter I remained petrified of what popular opinion had taught me about victims of child sexual abuse. It was (as I understood it) common knowledge that victims would become perpetrators, and so — still convinced that I was the guilty party in what had happened to me — it felt like that legacy was going to become my inevitability.
As a decidedly straight man — battling with the sorts of demon that work hard every day to dismantle and corrupt the life logic lessons that guide your behaviour and thoughts — my only hope was that the child would turn out to be a boy, thereby negating the temptation that my incorrect belief system told me would arise should we have a girl instead.
My wife had chosen not to know the gender of the baby, and my natural eagerness to please and ability to read the desires of others meant that I wasn’t likely to push back against that, so delivery day was one of nervousness and anxiety for both of us, on a whole lot of different levels, and for a set of reasons that I would never reveal or discuss with anyone.
The baby was not a boy.
The lifelong effects of childhood sexual abuse are different for everyone — I am not going to claim to speak for anyone other than myself — but for some of us, they most certainly are lifelong and they can at times dominate your every waking moment. They can make you believe things that are not true, and keep you believing them — even when you know they’re not true.
Some days the effects self-multiply to the point you don’t know if you can go on living because the weight of coping with shame is just too much to go on carrying.
Today, my daughter is grown. This week she is going through her own set of struggles as she starts university and deals with all of the trauma that leaving home and moving to the other end of the country inevitably entails. Perhaps some of that trauma — her propensity to anxiety — comes from me, but if it does then it comes from our genes and not from any expected behavioural repetition of abuse within our family.
The years since her birth slipped by more quickly than I would have thought possible, and in a blink of an eye I have a beautiful, grown up young woman for a daughter, of whom I am immensely proud. She remains (of course) unmolested (as far as I am aware). The stereotypical expectation that I feared was nonsense, a sort of nonsense that was so obvious that I can’t even imagine now why I ever believed it might be true — but that is how the brain damage of abuse continues to hurt its victims forever.
Merton Barracks doesn’t believe in recovery. Having spent most of his life concealing the sexual abuse experienced as a child at the hands of an elder sibling, but he does believe in survival.
Find out more about his journey here
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