One of the biggest predictors of mental health issues in later life is childhood trauma. Childhood sexual abuse being one of the biggest of all.
The go to Interventions recommended, and proscribed, to survivors are the sort of psychological interventions typified by CBT. These are all based ok the idea that we can change what and how we think by changes inour conscious thoughts and behaviours.
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The environment many abuse survivors lived in, and this is particularly true of those who were abused as children, was one where displays of emotions could be dangerous.
Not just physically dangerous, though that for many was true, but emotionally dangerous.
More and more we are being exhorted to ensure we maintain a good level of self-care, to consider our needs and to respond to stresses in our lives.
This isn’t about being selfish or not being concerned with others but making sure that we do not neglect ourselves.
This is particularly important, and emphasised, when you are struggling with mental health issues. therapists, peer group facilitators and Online chat moderators all emphasise the need for self-care. This is particularly true when a difficult or ‘triggering’ topic is being approached.
But many people find it difficult to ‘self-care’, to focus on their own needs and requirements and to make sure they are, and remain, safe. I count myself amongst these people.
So, what is it that makes Self-Care so difficult for some?
Its rather strange really. When I disclosed the abuse I suffered to the police, and social services before them, I was scared that talking about it would trigger me and I would breakdown. If not right there and then then certainly later. But it didn’t happen.
I was able to talk about it, to given them the details I could remember and answer their question without any problem. Almost as if I was telling them about something that happened to somebody else.
And it is that feeling of detachment that explains it I think. The abuse its self has been so well compartmentalised from me that all I can do is to relate to it in a disassociated way. I think that this was possible because the abuse was time limited in that it only happened either once or a couple of times, to be fair Im not sure which!
But the rejection and emotional dissociation that I experienced from my parent leading up to the abuse and the emotional manipulation and threats after were much more long term, indeed they formed the majority of my formative years so maybe that explains why as soon as I try to talk about them, even to a therapist, I totally break down. And its interesting that what I feel as an emotional storm with very little structure or discernible cause he has described as
‘Classic trauma response. Displaying extreme fear, withdrawn into yourself and a self-protective posture’
I didn’t expect this reaction, and most certainly not to be so violent and frightening. It was not just frightening to the little boy, and I was feeling his fear, I was back there. But it was frightening, terrifying, to me as an adult.
The experiences terrify me and its more than simply my terror or the inner little boy’s terror is almost like one terror is multiplied by the other. The little me’s terror and overlying that the terror I feel now as an adult.
After so many years of denying, to myself, what had happened to me, the abuse both sexual and emotional I was, am, totally unprepared for these feelings. I have no coping strategies and no way of dealing with it apart from pushing it all back down again into my subconscious.
But now they have been set free I can feel them, I can feel them even now. I can feel them every waking moment.
I know that this pushing them down, denying them expression can’t go on, it isn’t even a medium term solution but to tell the truth I have no idea what so ever how to manage them and even the therapist has said that this is way outside his experience and expertise!
Research suggests that something like only 5% of reports of historical abuse ever make it to court and then a conviction rate of around 50% means that when reporting historic abuse to the police you really do need to set your expectations correspondingly low.
I knew this when I went to the police and reported what had happened to me. I knew that given the time that had passed, the lack of corroborating evidence and my limited memory the chances of my report going anywhere were exceedingly low. I had, I believed prepared my self for the inevitable.
I told myself that getting a prosecution wasn’t the main reason for disclosing, which in truth it wasn’t. I repeatedly told myself, before and after the disclosure that nothing would come of it and not to expect anything other than to be heard. This was about me formally acknowledging to myself and the world the truth of what had been done to me and the impact it had had. It wasn’t about vengeance, justice, retribution or even preventing further abuse taking place.
The police them selves never made any promises or raised expectations. The promised to take my disclosure seriously and to investigate fully but did say hat the nature of non recent abuse and my case in particular made the investigation, and obtaining sufficient evidence, difficult.
A life-critical system or more commonly a safety-critical system is a system whose failure or malfunction may result in one (or more) of the following outcomes: death or serious injury to people. loss or severe damage to equipment/property.
But a more intuitive explanation may be
with the consequences of failure .If the failure of a system could lead to consequences that are determined to be unacceptable, then the system is safety-critical. In essence, a system is safety-critical when we depend on it for our well being. [1]
Despite it being rather counter intuitive, how can an investigation into a report of a crime that may have happened 10, 20 or more years ago, be safety critical and does it fit the into a reasonable definition of a system anyhow.
I would argue that yes it does meet both of these requirements.
Like many who have been sexually abused as children I suppressed the memories of the abuse for many years as a self-protective mechanism. It was only in the last couple of years that I have found those memories and feeling beginning to surface despite my best efforts to keep them down.
As they did my own mental health deteriorated and I began looking for support and help only to find that there seemed to be no help tailored to Adult survivors of abuse available in Somerset. Even that provided by charities was sparse and focused in the bigger cities.
This prompted me to begin asking questions believing that either the NHS or Local Authority would be responsible for the recognition of the need for such support and its provision. After finding little or no information on the web sites of wither the Clinical Commissioning Group or the local authority I decided to ask, via a freedom of information request, what provision they had in place and what their planed provision was.
One of the impacts of child hood abuse is that the child will often need to disassociate from the experiences he, or she, has faced.
This can result in being unable to remember specific instances of the abuse or, as In my case, a more general inability to remember much of the childhood at all. These memories are locked away an frozen in time. They are never processed, never integrated and put into a proper context.
But it is not just memories that get frozen. In a way, it is the child, memories, experiences his whole being that is frozen in time. For the IT literate among you it is like taking a snapshot of a running system, or perhaps taking a 3D hologram snapshot of the child. One that not only captures the whole image of the child but also captures his thoughts, feelings and fears and freezes it in place.
O
ver time around that frozen core the adult forms. New experiences and memories overlay the inner child and these memories, skills and experiences often suffice to allow the adult to operate in what appears to be a ‘normal’ way.
The adult part of the person can accept adult experiences and problems and react in an ‘adult’ way. The day to day life of the adult survivor doesn’t seem to need to access the inner child, the adult crust built up over the years processes the experiences its self.
The need for specific support for adult survivors of historic / Non recent childhood abuse is neither well understood or provided for.
The belief within the groups that commission both physical and mental health services is that the existing generic services are adequate.
One of the big issues, at least in my limited experience, is that dealing with the fallout from childhood sexual abuse isn’t easy. It requires a lot of support and professional help.
That support is increasing being put in place for children, as it should be. But in many cases the abuse is not disclosed at the time and often not coming to the surface until the victim is an adult, often years or decades later.
The support that an adult victim will need is officers going be different for each and every one but there will I feel be some commonalities that need to be provided for.
I would suggest that the support falls into two general categories, Mental Health issues and trauma related problems.
