#I'm a csa survivor do not tell me I'm not allowed to be upset about getting triggered

[traumasurvivorshelpingsurvivors]

Hello! You can tag my asks as "Beetle!" TW: Possible CSA, alcohol(ism), SA I have been having a lot of thoughts that I can best describe as intrusive. However, they are not about me harming others/myself, but about me being harmed in the past. I have been having thoughts akin to "What if my father sexually abused me as a child?" I have little to no memories before age 13 (I am 20 now) and have always wondered why. I also have troubles with forming new memories. At 14 or 15 I entered a relationship that lasted for 2 or 3 years, and that was sexually abusive. The person also kept going after the breakup (and are still very likely to contact me again.) I know this and I know my trauma responses got worse after that, but I had "symptoms" before this relationship as well. The thoughts of my father are not memories, I don't think. They feel more like catastrophic hypotheticals. However, I keep having them and cannot shake them. My father has been an alcoholic my whole life, drinking more or less in periods. He gets physically affectionate while drunk. I do not know why, but this bothers and disgusts me to no avail. I feel uncomfortable having him near me at all. He drank a lot when I was younger (or so I've been told) and he has recently gotten really bad again. I am really upset about not knowing, and would love any advice and resources I can get on straightening this out in my head. Can intrusive thoughts be like what I describe? Is it called something else? I am in general very confused and am hoping for some clarity. Thank you! -Beetle

Hi Beetle,

I'm so sorry to hear about what you've been going through. It can be distressing to think that you may have been abused as a child, and it's understandable to want to explore this.

Originally when I tried looking up some resources to inform my answer, all that was coming up was how intrusive thoughts are linked to PTSD. Then I found this list of the different kids of intrusive thoughts. While this may not capture every kind, it's possible that the intrusive thoughts you're experiencing could be either "thoughts that cause doubt" or "unexpected reminders of painful past events". Intrusive thoughts that cause doubt tend to be symptomatic of False Memory OCD. Though this is one possibility, it's not clear whether or not this is what you're experiencing. It's also unclear what causes FM-OCD, though this resource offers a few possible explanations.

It's concerning that you say you don't remember almost anything before the age of 13. This can be due to repressing traumatic childhood memories. The fact that your dad was not only an alcoholic but becomes physically affectionate when drunk supports the idea that something could have happened, especially considering your feelings about that. It's also common for trauma survivors to experience revictimization, where being abused puts you at a higher risk of being abused in the future, which could describe your sexually abusive relationship.

It's important to remember that if you potentially do have earlier trauma, it can be incredibly damaging to your mental health if you attempt to explore this on your own. If you are repressing trauma (before 14-15) then it's imperative to respect that it's not ready to be uncovered yet. Repression is a mechanism that keeps us from information that is too disturbing to psychologically digest at this point in time. It's essential to allow yourself the time and space for your potential repression to take its course, until it decides that you are ready to know what happened. But again, this is assuming that there is trauma there.

Ultimately it's not my place to tell you with certainty whether or not you've been through earlier trauma. You know yourself best at the end of the day, and it could be dangerous to believe you have trauma if you don't, just as it could be dangerous to believe you don't have trauma when you do. This could be something to explore with a mental health professional such as a therapist, if you can access or afford it. A therapist could help you navigate your experiences and feelings, more accurately determine where these intrusive thoughts are coming from, and if you have earlier childhood trauma.

I hope I could help, and please let us know if you need anything.

-Bun

[tetherless]

Heavy TW for talk of abuse, child abuse, CSA and brief mentions of RAMCOA (it didn't happen but I will be talking about the potential of it happening, specifically OA)

I didn't want to put it in the main post because I'd have had to go on a small tangent to do it, but re: my last post

I am pretty sure that that's why we have parts of ourselves that are constantly hypervigilant and expecting to be assaulted by men at any given moment. I think that it's probably why reading about things like RAMCOA triggers us so badly too - we have no experience with either of those things* to my knowledge, but some of them (assault at the hands of men, being abused by multiple adults or trafficked) are things we grew up aware of and afraid of because either they were happening to other people around us or we were being warned about them all the time, or we were in unsafe situations constantly where they COULD have happened and we felt in danger.

(*it is possible that we were assaulted by men and have no memory of it. It is also possible we were victims of OA, but not RA or MC, and I don't really want to talk as if it definitely DID happen when I really don't know. Personally I think the fact that we were surrounded by dangerous men who COULD have hurt us and made us feel like they MIGHT assault us at the age of like <5 is enough to cause these trauma reactions without us actually being victims of OA or whoever.)

The other day we had a very unpleasant experience where reading about RAMCOA made us dissociate, panic, and have fleeting images of being in a dark room with a man - but i have no way of telling if that was an actual memory or just a distressing mental image. I can't fully remember everything that went through my head at the time, only that I was suddenly terrified by the possibility that the abuse was worse than i'd thought, and it took a while for me to calm down enough to recognise that it's unlikely I would ever have been in a situation that would allow for that level of severe abuse (especially not RA or MC). But knowing that at the very least it's POSSIBLE there was OA involved really fucked with us for a bit.

(I think it's pretty natural for abuse survivors to read about certain extreme experiences and... "resonate" with them, for lack of a better word, but that doesn't mean what happened to us WAS that thing. You know?)

The only thing that really casts any doubt for me is that a few weeks ago we woke up one day distinctly feeling like... dogs that had escaped somewhere bad and were supposed to return. We felt that we werent meant to be living in the "real" world and that it was bad for us to be independent; that we had to go home to our master to be punished. And I know how that SOUNDS given the context of what I'm talking about lmao but there was nowhere to go back to; there was no one to contact, or who we felt we SHOULD contact. Just a nebulous concept of An Owner Or Superior. It was very strange and upsetting and you can probably see why the memory of that combined with the RAMCOA stuff made us briefly freak out with possibility.

I don't know what else to say about it really. Just that it was fucking strange.

[canon-notcanon-warriorcats]

your blog is so negative and dictating. and the fact you associate yourself with anti shippers, who, are getting worse and doing stuff like throwing around a CSA victim’s photos around from his abuse (and he, is still a minor) all b/c he has proship views. Comparing real life abuse to fictional lines on paper will never not be vile - it belittles us abuse victims.

I’m not saying to be proship, I’m not saying you aren’t allowed to b uncomfortable with ships, hell, even proshippers have a lot of ships they’re uncomfortable with. I’m saying this to make you aware of who you associate yourself with.

pro ship has always meant anti harassment over fiction. Not the anti’s lying manipulative definition of “all proshippers support pedophilic and incest relationships.”

proshippers are also mostly survivors ourselves. We have our trauma belittled, and we are alienated and told by antis our traumas “don’t count” b/c of our ship preferences - not asking you to change your opinions, but at least understand where I’m coming from - people take fiction too seriously and the purity culture movement is full on fascist.

i'm sorry if you've ever been belittled by others and said that your experiences don't count because of ships you like, that's just stupid

but i ain't associating myself with anybody

i don't like ships that are lowkey or highkey pedophilia or super incesty

i ain't gonna tell people to not ship a thing just cause i don't like it, but i'm also not gonna say something makes me uncomfortable with the ship if there's something with the ship that makes me uncomfortable, or would be uncomfortable with and if they make content of that ship the general public will get generally upset

i know that there's liking ships because it's a way to cope, but i've also heard from people who do like ships like that and have been advised by their therapists that it is a healthy coping mechanism, that also putting it out publicly (as in not keeping it to it's own private area/tag/server/whatever) immediately negates that as a coping mechanism because it is now bringing the public who do not share that trauma or don't want to see content like that or even get triggered from it from their own trauma

tl;dr: ship whatever y'all want, i've become way more lenient over the years, i'm just gonna talk about things that make me uncomfortable with certain ships sometimes and some people have asked me if certain ships are "okay" because they specifically want to avoid incestuous/weird age gap ships and they know i know way too much about the dumb forest cat timeline and the hellish family tree