Hello every one!

For the last little while I have been reading all the postings when I have been able, and making just a few posts. 

So many of you are saying so many of the things that I feel or have felt over the years.  I have been keeping a journal/diary on and of since I was in my teens, although all the ones from my teens got destroyed when I realised that the staff in the children's home I was in were reading them.  From time to time I get them out to see if I can pull them together to try and make sense of my life, and then they get put away again because other parts of life become more pressing.

As a survivor of several types of abuse including sexual abuse it is so good to know that there are people who understand some of the things that it appears we do in order to survive. Memory: how I twisted it that my rape became my fault, not only was it my fault I instigated it, that ten year old girl who was so confused in what appeared an alien land where she could not speak the language, because she was deliberatly brought up speaking the language of the "enemy" even though her parents both knew English. 

What I find interesting looking through my journals is how long it took to wake up to the realisation of what had happened.  The denials, the self-flagelation, the myths, the repentance, and then the slow dawning of the reality, and then the liberation.  I am not there yet, as the sexual abuse was only ever part of it.

The other interesting things are what triggers memory, sometimes just a smell will start me off, and to start with it does not crystalise immediately - but will sometimes take days, maybe weeks for the memory to form, I just know that that particular smell is significant, or that piece of music, or a name that I have not heard for a long time, or the language of my childhood.  so I try to write all these things down as soon as possible - my life is still a bit of a mystery to me - huge chunks are missing, some to depression, but some still to the events of my first sixteen years. I also keep a dream diary as what we dream seems to be hugely significant, and often the place that I work out problems. Dreaming has also been a way to escape!

I am so very, very glad that this is such a sharing and caring place.

Segelov