A lifetime of pain

From a young age I was exposed to being physically and sexually abused, combine that with the emotional abuse and it's left me with lifelong trauma. I was made to believe it was my fault, that it wasn't that bad, that it didn't matter and that I shouldn't talk about it. These incidents happened while I was in a Christian school, at different ages by different aged groups of men some my age at the time being 9 years old others being older than me, there were students, teachers, strangers that I didn't know. It never seemed to end, it went on for years with no indication that it was ever going to stop, how was I to get myself out of this, who would listen, who would believe me when my voice didn't matter. It only ended when I left school, I had to, I couldn't stay there, I couldn't keep being hurt.

Fast forward a while and I found relationships but I wasn't looking for a partner but rather a father figure something I had lacked all my life. This lead to being further abused as I sought out men that were considerably older than me, wanting to felt cared for, to feel safe but instead I was hurt. So I escaped one lot of abuse only to continue to experience another, was this all my life was going to be like, was this what I deserved, was this just normal?

All my life I've sought friendships that have been of varying age groups for different reasons. Younger friends to feel as though I had siblings to grow up with and so that i still felt like i had a childhood, older friends so that I felt like I had an auntie or a mother figure that cared and wanted to protect me. Now I find myself alone with only a couple of friends that I communicate with but none that I can physically see due to the distance between us.

Come to today and life's still in shambles, there's still ongoing abuse by various people including a family member. I've been seeking help, trying to learn to live with a lifetime full of trauma, trying to make sense of why it's been like this. It's not easy, trying to find someone that truly understands what I've been through, why I'm the way I am and to then be able to help me to recover if that's at all entirely possible.

I'm grateful that I'm still here given others have tried to fatally hurt me, then there's the attempts of ending my own life. But it's a struggle, flashbacks are triggered by the simplest of things, a word, a smell or taste, a sound, a name it can be anything and it can hit without warning, they can last minutes, hours or even days. I've used self harm to cope throughout my life and still do as it's the one thing I can control when everything else is spiralling around me. I know it's not healthy and I've tried to find other alternatives, sometimes I'm lucky and something will work for a while but then it stops and it's back to square one.