This is About Boundaries

I feel an obligation to check in here, which is good because I would otherwise be basking in absolute enjoyment of life. That is how I have felt for the last few days, having taken a difficult action to establish a necessary boundary—something incest and childhood abuse survivors are not wired for. We are devoted to, and protective of, those who abuse us because they were literally all we had. They count on this trauma bondage to outlive life.

Breaking free involves learning to establish boundaries in the wake of having them violated again and again by those we were supposed to be able to trust with our well-being, and who failed us. Families are the most fraught place to establish boundaries even in the best of circumstances and toxic quicksand in the worst. Family ties are frequently twisted in weird and difficult ways. We get trapped in the unresolved traumas of those before us.

Healing from trauma is not a single passage, but many passages along an intuitive path from victim to survivor. No one else can truly direct our healing, but compassionate witnesses and a conducive environment are critical. I currently have both for which I am deeply grateful, and I am in no hurry venture far beyond either, hence my continued boundary of relative anonymity.

We’ll call this Day No. 27 of recovery. Strength of body and mind began to return once I named my trauma. Once I started writing and saying, “I am an incest survivor,” even quietly here or out loud to myself, on my own. The mere act of being able to say those words lifted a large, heavy, black cloud from my life. The cost of carrying the shame of others is illness, depression, physical pain and too often our lives.

It was me or that burden. I chose to live. I do so each day. I must consciously act on my own behalf every day. I must protect the child I was from those who would further exploit her. I learned as painfully as most survivors do that health-care and legal professionals will often fail them and can sometimes do grave injury, like a surgeon slicing someone open and then handing them a bill to be sewed up. Even well-meaning folks can make the most ignorant statements or conjure the most egregious and discredited theories. It takes a survivor to know a survivor and all that it means to be one. We must be the ones who lead one another out from beneath the dark cloud of silence and pain.

Incest survivors share a lot with sexual trauma and physical abuse survivors. The sanctity of our very bodies has been violated, from the Latin, violare, “treated violently.” But incest survivors are unique in the bond we have with our violators and we are gaslighted into believing we must protect them and the family that did not protect us and may never do so. In almost every sense of the word, we have to learn how to care for ourselves. We were not taught properly, but in contradiction to our own well-being.

For me, right now, there is a great healing in quiet activity and meditation, reading, listening to music, doing yoga, hiking and taking care of the partner who is truly taking care of me and helping me learn to be cared for. I know well my good fortune in this circumstance. I worked very hard to create it.

Healing is not a gift, as Marilyn van Durbur reminds us. It is not. It is a practice.