Letting it out

Welcome, @NothingGirl , it's good to have you here 🙂

Wow, I am so impressed that you shared your childhood sexual abuse for the first time - that's powerful, and the start of the healing process.

(I'm not saying that full healing is possible with childhood abuse, but I think some healing is possible, from my own experience)

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@NothingGirl wrote:

My brother was only 14 when he did this to me. I felt like he was an adult at the time but he wasn’t. Really he was just a child himself. For this reason, I don’t feel like I have the same right to even call it “sexual abuse” or to feel the way that others do when the person was an uncle, a teacher, a family friend…

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This was definitely sexual abuse. And you definitely deserve to have it treated as sexual abuse. It's had a huge effect on your life. 😞

I'm wondering if you have a counsellor or psychologist to help you work through it?

A handy forum tip is if you type @ and then click on a name in the drop-down box, that person will get a notification and won't miss your reply to them.

I hope you find the forums supportive, @NothingGirl ...

Hello @NothingGirl and welcome. I'm sorry to read of your experiences. I only align with some–the sex drive. I was damaged by my first, traumatic sexual experience too and it became buried deep in my sub-conscious. I only went through the motions with my now ex-husband until my ex-psychiatrist attended to my scarring. I can say that a trustworthy, skilled therapist can help you with that, and it's too important to have to endure this ongoing trauma.

I hope you will be able to disentangle that traumatizing event in your life, come to terms with it and move on.

Sending best wishes.

P. S. I've never shared this with anyone other than my ex-psychiatrist before either.

Hey @NothingGirl welcome to the forums firstly. It was really brave of you to share your story for the first time. That takes a lot of courage!

I share a very similar experience, in that I was sexually abused by other children... and my brother was forced to partake in it as well. It wasn’t until this year that I started talking about it and I told my psychologist about it. I also grew up with beliefs that sex before marriage was a no no and was terrified of my wedding night because of the abuse.

It really does mess with your head and yes, what happened to you was sexual abuse. And for that I am really sorry.

Like @NatureLover said, I really hope you find the forums a really supportive place to be.

🎀

Welcome and thank you for sharing your story. There's two organizations that I would love for you to have on your list of recovery resources:

The first is The Blue Knot Foundation https://blueknot.org.au/ . A complex trauma network. They are small but excellent national team.

The second is Relationships Australia https://relationships.org.au/ . They are getting so big, and so is their wealth of resources for helping relationships through all kinds of hard times.

These are just the two main ones I can think of. No one should go through what you experienced. You deserve every support available to reclaim your rightful well-being.

Thank you for saying that.

I don’t have a psychologist. I don’t even know how I could get any help with it. It’s not as though I have all these painful flashbacks and I’m traumatised. I know the vaginismus must have been caused by it. But how can I speak to someone when I don’t even know what to say…

Thank you.

I want to be healed of this but I don’t know how. I have limited memory of what happened. If you feel comfortable, could you please explain how the psychiatrist attended to this? I feel like I can’t be helped because there isn’t much for me to say/remember

Hi @wellwellwellnez @Bow @NatureLover ,

I believe the above messages are for you 🙂

@NothingGirl - if you'd like to tag anyone to your posts so they get a notification, you can type "@" in front of their name and a drop-down list will appear.

tyme

That's okay @NothingGirl . There's other tricks but the @ tags is the main one.

First thing is that everyone's journey is different. It's also a general part of recovery philosophy to allow yourself to be in charge of what works for you.

There are two main steps and they work in either sequence.

1. Find your psych.

2. Find your G.P.

The G.P's give a general evaluation and have the referral power to access medicare rebates. They also work in tandem with the psych as a health specialist in different ways depending on the scenario.

You can find a psych by shopping around and/or discuss options with G.P's who usually have people or a list of people in the field as referral options. Here's a link to the Aussie Psych Society if you want to browse https://psychology.org.au/find-a-psychologist

It can take a bit of patience to find the right team and there can mixed experiences along the way. It's kind of hard to know what you're looking in therapy until you find it. But, it helps to try to self-define it (or (let's face it) guess) as you go.

Hi again @NothingGirl ,

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@NothingGirl wrote:

But how can I speak to someone when I don’t even know what to say…

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One way I found of talking to my psychologist about difficult things is to write it down beforehand and give it to her to read. Even if you print out your post above, to give to them, that would help.

And to find a psychologist, you can visit your GP (take the printout of your first post maybe?) and ask for a Mental Health Care Plan. This will entitle you to 10 (20 during Covid) subsidised sessions with a psychologist per year. The GP will write you a referral. The only catch is that psychologists are so overloaded at the moment that it may take 6 months for you to get in to see one. But it's worth getting on the waiting list now.

A good thing you can do also is to research psychologists in your area before you visit the GP...that way you can take the name of a good psychologist in with you for the GP to refer you to. You can ring around local psychologists in your area to ask: are they taking any new patients at the moment, what are their fees, and are they trauma-informed. The GP might not necessarily know which psychologists aren't taking new patients or whatever.

You definitely deserve professional help with this matter - firstly as abuse of any sort needs therapy to work through it to get some healing and wellbeing, and secondly as the vaginismus has had such a long-term bad effect on your life.