Life After Abuse is Still Trauma

“You survived the abuse, you’ll survive the recovery” is a platitude I’ve always hated.

I grew up abused. It was my world. My entire world. Sometimes, when I was a kid, I would have these momentary times I’d almost step out of myself and realize abstractly, just how afraid, and tired I was, and how much I wanted to die.

But for the most part, life just was. It was bad, but it had no context, no moral weight that let me understand the breadth of its cruelty. You can survive anything if you think that’s just how the world works.

There’s a strange kind of okay-ness that comes from not even conceptualizing that there’s a fight to be had.

I used to think I made up my PTSD. I used to think that I had crafted it, faked it, because it didn’t exist in the same way it existed before I started talking about it—so clearly the talking about it must have been the moment I decided to play-act it.

Now I think that maybe sometimes the difference between experiencing abuse and being fully traumatized over it happens the first time you realize, “this was wrong.”

Once you think that what you went through was wrong, then you start to realize you’re not supposed to be scared. Or hurt. Or wishing you were dead. There’s some other kind of life you could have. There’s an entire world out there in which people are not abused by their parents. Once you know that you don’t have to be treated this way, an entire new layer of hurt and pain and fear settles into your bones.

After my mother started treating me like I was the black sheep, the fault line in our family because I didn’t want to be around my brother anymore, I felt utterly worthless. The feeling of being worthless felt worse than anything ever had. I started begging my best friend to please, please, please, tell me I deserved it. Tell me I’m evil and stupid and meaningless and nothing, nothing, nothing, nothing, and of course a worthless piece of shit like me deserves to be treated like this, right? Please tell me yes, please, I need it.

Because if she said yes—if my best friend confirmed for me that I was uniquely awful, then being treated like I was worthless wouldn’t hurt anymore. The pain would go away and I could accept that I was exactly where I was supposed to be instead of hating that I was trapped. It was the incongruity that hurt, the feeling that I shouldn’t be treated like this that was making me feel like I was slowly losing my mind.

I built up a lot of online friendships, when I was still being abused. I was loud, and ugly, and I didn’t particularly care that people knew that I was messed up, hurt, and suffering. I was certain that I wasn’t going to survive much longer, and the suicidality made for that kind of desperate honesty. I was doing so badly, but it was bad and awful enough that I could scream better.

Whenever people would fret about me when I would talk a lot about how I felt, I would always say: no, no, as long as I’m talking, I’m doing better than you think I am.

And then, over the past few years, I stopped talking. I was told by others that my speaking online was bad–it was dangerous for myself and others. It was proof that I wasn’t fully an adult, but still a child that needed other people to control me until I was well. I started feeling ashamed and wrong and evil that I ever said anything. I pulled myself inward and told myself I was doing better because look!—all those PTSD symptoms were disappearing. I told myself that that reconfirmed that the PTSD wasn’t that bad, or was made up, because the more I isolated and didn’t speak about it, the less obvious it was that I had it.

But it’s easy not to realize how hurt you are if you don’t conceptualize that you have a self. I didn’t have a self as a child—I wasn’t allowed one—and I haven’t really let myself have one in awhile. This feels like the first truly honest post I’ve written in a few years, and even still, my brain screams at me that I have no right.

People often say that much of life after abuse involves dealing with old coping methods that were useful during the abuse but aren’t anymore. But I don’t think that quite gets at it for me. For me, it’s that the old coping methods just don’t work anymore. They don’t offer the catharsis or the reassurance they once did. They’re still very much useful and in a lot of ways, still very much needed. I just don’t have them anymore.

To say that recovery is survivable because the abuse was presumes that the pain of the abuse was the worst pain you could ever experience. That recovery cannot hurt as badly as being abused hurt. But when so much of the pain of abuse is realizing just what you lost, the full scope of what you’re still dealing with, the acknowledgment of the damage can be far more horrifying than the damage itself ever was.

But where is the place to say that life after abuse can be much, much harder? Over the years survivor communities feel almost more overwhelmingly inspirational, filled to the brim with positive platitudes that I have always found frustrating and unhelpful. The survivors that struggle, the ones that we lose, the ones whose trauma has debilitated them are crowded out by the hopeful narratives demanded of us.

Abuse is traumatizing. But so is escaping abuse. So is trying to cope with it, so is trying to deal with it, so is trying to get better. To say that recovery—whatever that means, exactly—is survivable because trauma is, misses the usefulness, the power, the pain-numbing good your brain does in order to get you to survive the abuse. And the danger, the pain, and the risk that comes when you lose those protections.

So many of us survive as long as we can survive. And so many of us have lose the fight, not during when we were abused—but after. Not because they were weak or because they were irrationally afraid of recovery. Because it’s hard, and sometimes it’s harder, and sometimes the harder was a fight they couldn’t win. And I wish that we could acknowledge that. So I am.