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Freyja Lee

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    Survivor

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  1. I do try to nurture myself. I have my hobbies that I am starting to get back into. I exercise and try to eat healthy. I try to do things for myself. Always looking for ways to better myself, which I feel is a form of nurture - to nurture those things that make me, me. Reaching out for support would be a NO. I attend SIA - 12 step meeting for Survivors of Incest. I get to hear other survivors struggles and hope and I get to share...when I can bring myself to. And I go to premarital counseling with my fiancée. But I do not have friends or a sponsor/fellow traveler that I reach ou
  2. Am I in touch with my feelings now? Definitely not. This is one of the biggest issues with my abuse. As I've mentioned, I don't struggle with flashbacks, etc. My struggle is my disassociation with myself and those closest with me. Which is because I am not in touch with my feelings. I feel like I go through life emotionally flatlining. I'm not in touch with my anger, which I feel is a good thing, but I am also not in touch with my happiness. I have so much in my life to be excited about, to appreciate, to look forward to. But because I am so detached, I just go through the motions in l
  3. Thank goodness it doesn't affect me the way it use to!!! There use to be a lot of shame around sex/masturbation. A lot of the sex I had was for the other person, not for myself. Even if I wanted to be sexual as well, once we started, it was as if I removed myself from it and just went through the motions of whatever the other person wanted to do. And even though I've had many giving partners who were looking to take care of me, not just themselves, and I wanted it/them too, once, we were in the act, I would regress. When I was younger, I had a lot of sexual triggers. Waking up to
  4. Thank goodness it doesn't affect me the way it use to!!! There use to be a lot of shame around sex/masturbation. A lot of the sex I had was for the other person, not for myself. Even if I wanted to be sexual as well, once we started, it was as if I removed myself from it and just went through the motions of whatever the other person wanted to do. And even though I've had many giving partners who were looking to take care of me, not just themselves, and I wanted it/them too, once, we were in the act, I would regress. When I was younger, I had a lot of sexual triggers. Waking up to
  5. Step I/Question VII: How has the abuse affected how you feel about your body? For one, the abuse made me HATE MY BODY. I will write on this after. For two, the abuse made me HATE ME. I hated myself so much. I hated everything about me. On top of all the sexual abuse, my mom was an alcoholic/drug addict who would beat and abandon my brother and I, until my dad got custody of us when I was 6. My dad was an alcoholic/drug addict who was physically, mentally and emotionally abusive/was neglectful. He had a live in girlfriend who was a hard core alcoholic/coke head who was
  6. Step I/Question VI: Do you isolate yourself? If yes, how? I don't normally look at it as 'I isolate myself'. I just happen to spend a lot of time alone/with very limited people. The only people in my circle are my three children and my fiance. I don't talk to my family and since ending unhealthy relationships with past friends and my children's family, I haven't made any new friendships. Now that I am engaged, I do have new people in my life, his adult children, his friends and his family. But I don't really talk to any of them outside of when we are all hanging out. All that
  7. Step I/Question V: Do you act out your pain by self-injury, overeating, drugs, etc? My family smoked pot, so I was smoking by 7th grade. At 15 my cousin gave me my first line of speed, which ended with me in rehab by age 20. I haven't done speed since, but I have on and off turned to weed to escape life. My drug addition was short but did a lot of damage. Over the course of it, I lost 3 apartments, 3 cars, been homeless, had 3 children by age 21, had two of them taken for 6 months, and lost out on years of working towards an education or bettering my life. In and out of my
  8. Q III. Do you blame the assaults on yourself? On your body? Tricky question...nothing jumps out at me as definitive. I know when it started, I was too young to have been responsible for it. But there are times when I have felt that when I was older, maybe things would have been different and not carried out for so many years, had I reacted differently to my abuse/abusers. I was so submissive and groomed, that it made it easy for perpetrators. There were times my body betrayed me and responded to the abuse....wth...what do you do with that?? I don't remember ever being told
  9. Thank you for that perspective, it makes perfect sense, and I've never made that connection.
  10. This was pretty much answered in my response to Question I: Have you kept your sexual abuse a secret?. I protected all my perpetrators. My dad, my brother, my uncle, my cousin, my dad's girlfriend's two brothers and the adult/child relationship I had. I didn't tell anyone of the abuse while it was happening. And as I previously journaled, I even kept the secret from the perpetrators themselves. By pretending to be asleep and therefore, 'not knowing of the abuse'. If I acknowledged the abuse, then I would have been the 'bad' person. Who and how can you tell when there is no on
  11. When I think about the secrecy surrounding my abuse, there are two more instances that come to mind. My dad was a single dad, raising my brother and I. In the 70's/80's, it was less common for a father to be a single parent as it was for a mother. My dad wore this as a badge of honor. Always sure to share this fact with strangers and relish in their praises of what a wonderful thing he was doing. I just remember standing by his side, as he would pull me in and share what a hard job it has been for him. Then the person would look down at me, smile, and tell me how lucky I was to have
  12. Step One — Question One: Did you keep your abuse a secret. Part II (Trigger Warning) After processing the first half of this question, I started to see the different levels of secrecy. Not only did I keep the abuse a secret from outsiders, but I also kept it a secret from my perpetrators. As a teenager, my brother's sexual abuse always happened in the middle of the night while I was asleep. I would wake up to him touching me, while touching himself and verbalizing his fantasy. I would pretend to stay asleep through the whole thing — as if I had no knowledge of what
  13. Step One - Question One: Did you keep your abuse a secret. Part I My immediate thought went to how long did I keep my abuse a secret, how old was I the first time I told someone, who was the first person I told...and then the darker sides of the secret started to come to light (see part II). I had my first child at age 17. I had not told anyone of my sexual abuse prior to this. My son's father went to prison when I was 3 months pregnant, and after I had my son, I connected with a friend of my brothers. She and I became very close and I started dating her brother and became
  14. Thank you all for the kind words and the warm welcome. Thank you for sharing and thank you for the hope.
  15. Freyja Lee

    Who Abused You?

    I was abused by my dad from about age 6 to 15. ...my brother, as a young kid he would experiment on me, then sexual abuse from around age 12 to 16. ...my dads girlfriends two brothers took pictures of me and abused me. I can't remember how old I was, but somewhere between 4-6th grade. ...my uncle - a couple of hand full of times around age 12 ...my cousin made out with me, touched me/made me touch him and almost raped me ...when I was 14 I had an affair with my best friend's dad for a summer, he was about 32 *see blog "Where is the Line"
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