‘It’s not your shame,’ says the therapist.
‘No,’ I say. ‘I get that. It’s not my shame.’
But still the feeling persists. Always the feeling persists.
Shame has many flavours and right now I’m tasting ‘hiddenness’ with a hint of ‘withdrawal’. Sometimes I gulp down whole mouthfuls of self-disgust – that sense that I am toxic, bad, evil and corrupt. A green-slimed festering soul, a ceaseless chasm of ungoodness.
And right now the shame is a shrinking-down within myself. I don’t want to see myself. I don’t want to be seen. I barely want to exist. I want to minify myself, to get into the smallest place possible. It’s a familiar feeling. I’ve had it since childhood. I’ve had it since I was abused.
‘It’s not your shame,’ says the therapist, again.
I sigh, frustrated.
One of the great conundrums of child sexual abuse is why, as blameless victims – as mere children – we feel so much shame for acts forced unwillingly upon us. After all, it really wasn’t our fault. The blame for child sexual abuse lies only and always with the perpetrator. My very first memory – of being abused in a toddler cot by my grandad when I was just 2 or 3 years old – reveals the ridiculousness of shame: how could that ever possibly be my fault, my guilt, my wrongdoing, my bad?
And yet shame and child sexual abuse are eternal bed-fellows. As survivors, shame consumes us so totally that our beliefs adapt to accommodate it: ‘It was my fault,’ I said, many times, during therapy. ‘I did cause it to happen.’ Fruitless, endless arguments against the illogic of it all: I could just about see, when my front brain was online, that it wasn’t my fault. Just about. Mostly I could only see it because I knew that I wouldn’t ever blame another victim, another child, for being abused – so logically I could see that that impunity applied also to me. But still I couldn’t shake off the bone-deep conviction, the immersed-in-it, shudder-and-shake feeling, that the shame was mine: that I caused the abuse, deserved it, invited it, even wanted it. I knew technically it wasn’t true. But it felt true. Oh, it felt so true.
But why? Why as survivors do we universally struggle so much to put the shame back where it belongs: on the perpetrator? Why does it seep into every cell of our body, and contradict every logical thought we have ever had on the matter?
Doubtless there are numerous thoughts on this matter. Here are a few of mine.
1. GROOMING
Grooming induces the transfer of shame from perpetrator to victim. This is no accident. For the abuser to continue to abuse, they need ongoing access to the victim, for their crimes not to be uncovered. The abuser therefore grooms both the child, the family and society at large. We are led, insidiously and persuasively, to believe that they would never do – could never do! – what they are doing. Because they’re the good guys. They deflect suspicion. They are pillars of the community, loving parents, faithful friends, trustworthy employees. ‘Not him!’ people cry when his crimes are – so rarely – revealed. Less commonly, so even more forcefully: ‘Not her!’
Abusers lower the child’s defences by inviting closeness, intimacy, trust and reward. They inveigle us into secrets and lies, trapping us perhaps with our own wrongdoing – I knew I shouldn’t have sat on the tractor or eaten those sweets; no-one must find out; my new ‘friend’ held the secret for me willingly; later my new and not-so-friendly ‘friend’ held it as a threat. What starts with sweets and attention may segue into threats and manipulation. There’s more than one way to groom a child.
Grooming is the way that we fall victim to the perpetrator, whilst believing that we willingly participated or even initiated the abuse. It’s a set-up, an intentional reversal. We are tricked. And so the shame that the abuser ought to bear is borne instead by us as the victim. There is a sleight of hand, a switch, an exchange: and instead of the abuser feeling bad for what they are doing, we as victims end up feeling bad for what they are doing, believing somehow (we’re never quite sure how) that it’s our fault. The whole thing is a trap. We fall for it, because we are children. And we fall for it, because the abuser stands to gain everything if we do so, and to lose everything if we don’t. The subterfuge is planned with precision; we simply don’t stand a chance – not least because as children it simply doesn’t occur to us what’s going on.
2. THE COLLUSION OF SOCIETY
It’s hard not to feel ashamed – excluded from the group, different, stigmatised – when the group never talks about your experiences. Until I started writing and speaking in this field, I’d never spoken to anyone who ‘admitted’ to having been sexually abused. Even in that word – ‘admitted’ – is the inference that the guilt is mine, and I am uncovering my own shameful secret. Never having heard anyone speak about abuse, I thought it was only me. It never seemed to occur to anyone that my mental health struggles were due to trauma. No-one ever asked me if I’d been abused. It was an unspoken unreality in my mind – a secret known only to myself, and then only to dissociative parts of myself: my main consciousness reflected the denial and splitting of society around me. What else can we do but feel that we are unspeakable, when our experiences are unspeakable? Shame seeps in from society around us. ‘You’re different,’ it says. ‘You’re weird. You’re wrong.’ So we keep the secret that our abuser so desperately wants us to keep, and even though one in four girls and one in six boys are abused in childhood, no-one quite believes it.
3. REACTIONS TO DISCLOSURE
I sat at a conference table with a young man from Fraserburgh. We were strangers, randomly seated together at an event (ironically, so it would turn out) on ‘How to communicate’. We were instructed to pair off and introduce ourselves. ‘What do you do?’ he dutifully asked. ‘I’m a writer,’ I replied. His face brightened and his eyebrows puckered in interest. ‘Oh really!’ he said, eager and excitable. ‘What do you write?’
Here now was the moment. Do I gulp down the truth, or do I speak it without shame?
‘I write about trauma,’ I said, slowly, steadily. ‘I write about my own experiences of recovering from trauma, especially child sexual abuse.’
The change was instant. He literally turned pale. He broke eye contact, and his entire face clouded over with a mixture of anger and disgust. ‘Excuse me,’ he said, swallowing his words into his throat as he stood up. And that was that. He turned away and walked off to the toilets, not returning until the next session had begun. He didn’t speak to me for the rest of the day. How is that possible? I thought to myself, burning hot with shame. How is that reaction even possible for a grown adult?
Perhaps I’d triggered his own trauma; perhaps he himself was a perpetrator; perhaps he had ulcerative colitis that flared coincidentally just at the exact wrong moment. I’ll never know. That was the first time I’d had a reaction like that, but it certainly has not been the last. I’ve been quizzed, and disbelieved, and challenged, and lectured. People have told me – simply in response to me saying what I do in my work – that I need to stop being a victim, that I need to move on, even that it’s impossible for me to be sure I was abused (‘because false memories are a thing, aren’t they? – people think they’ve been abused when they haven’t. I saw it on telly.’) It’s the minority response, of course. But so too is empathy and compassion.
The sad truth is that by far the majority response I’ve had is silence, withdrawal, a quiet discomfort, and an immediate change of subject. I’ve learned over the years that I can avoid a reaction if I talk about ‘helping other people to recover from trauma and adversity’ – because it’s abstract and it’s over there (‘How nice!’ people say.) It’s not as immediate, not as slap-you-in-the-face, as saying ‘child sexual abuse’ and referring to it in the first person. Sometimes I take the easier option. Sometimes I do not.
4. THE TABOO AROUND SEXUALITY
Some people simply aren’t comfortable with the words ‘sex’ or ‘sexual’, whatever the context. They may disapprove of the concept of sex; or they may disapprove of it being talked about. They erroneously equate child sexual abuse with ‘sex’. It’s not ‘sex’. It’s abuse. ‘Sex’ is an activity between consenting adults or at least consenting adolescent peers. Anything else is abusive and criminal. Sometimes people in their ignorance assume that a child is engaging in ‘sex’, and they disapprove of the child for doing this. That’s the disapproval we then face when we say that we were sexually abused as children. They don’t see the crime, the hurt, the pain, the terror, the confusion, the exploitation, the manipulation, the abuse. They shame us by crediting the criminality of the perpetrator to us as their victims. Children do not have sex with adults. Adults abuse children. Sex and abuse are entirely different activities. They just happen to use the same physiology.
The taboo around sex and sexuality though stops people thinking about the difference between sex and abuse. It stops the conversation, the discussion, the thinking-it-through. A single, simple, and very, very wrong framework is imposed: child sexual abuse is sex; we don’t want to talk about sex; children shouldn’t be having sex; we don’t approve. And hence the shame. It’s all based on a false premise, but the shame sticks to us. Ugh.
5. THE PROJECTION OF DISGUST
More widely, we feel shame because it is projected onto us via disgust. The responsibility that should be placed on the invisible perpetrator falls instead, in their absence, on us as the visible victim. We become a lightning rod for the horror and disgust, the visceral reaction to child sexual abuse, that is a natural reaction in those of us who cannot conceptualise sexual activity with a child. The wrongness of it, the perversion, the sickening revulsion – this is the reaction that most people have when their minds try to grasp the concept of child sexual abuse. But instead of containing that reaction or dumping it on the perpetrator – the only worthy, deserving recipient of it – instead it boils over too easily onto us as the victim, simply because we are there. People react. They recoil. They retch. And their revulsion is projected onto us – perhaps unintentionally, perhaps unconsciously, but as survivors of child sexual abuse we are exquisitely sensitive to the reactions of others, and we see it, and we feel it, and we take it into ourselves.
Sometimes, shamelessly, the disgust is projected directly onto us. ‘Ugh, that’s disgusting! That’s horrible! Ugh! Yuk!’ – often followed immediately by, ‘I don’t want to know. I don’t want to hear. I don’t want that in my head. Don’t tell me any more.’ There, on a plate for us, served up with an extra serving of fries, is our main course of shame. You are disgusting, is what we hear and feel, even though that may not be their intention. But it’s hard not to feel disgusting when someone reacts to what you’ve just said with disgust.
6. THE FREEZE RESPONSE
The most common response in the moment of abuse – especially for a child – is to freeze. It is a neurobiological default, an ancient evolutionary instinct when fight and flight fail. With activation of the dorsal vagal nerve, there is a cascade of sensation-numbing chemicals into our bloodstream; our attention narrows; our body goes still; and we freeze in submission to the predator, in the hopeless expectation of defeat. To freeze is to dissociate. And to freeze is to feel shame. Not because there is anything to be ashamed of – again, it’s not our shame – but because evolutionarily shame is an instinctive response: avert the gaze, slump the shoulders, submit to a greater power, take the fall, don’t provoke the predator. It keeps us alive. Shame and freeze have the same neurobiological fingerprint. In that moment, especially with our front brain shut down, it’s not about what we think of ourselves. It’s simply a gut thing, a bodily reaction to threat – and shame resides forever in our guts, sub-diaphragmatically, in full dorsal vagal collapse.
Freezing and shame go hand-in-hand. They are both our best attempts to survive. We extrapolate meaning afterwards: ‘I’m bad; it was my fault; I deserved it; I’m unloveable; I’m unworthy; I’m toxic.’ But that, I believe, is our brain in retrospect making sense of our experience, matching our beliefs to our experience. We saw ourselves conquered. We saw ourselves freeze. We saw ourselves small. We add all of that together and assume our place in the pecking-order of our band: grovelling in the dirt. We take the lowest position, of the wrong one, the bad one, in order not to provoke the predator further. We know our place. And this neurobiological response becomes an unconscious neurochemical habit for us – burned hard into us through the ineffability of trauma. Shame is the natural outcome of being made small, of our wishes and desires and feelings and comfort being obliterated by the criminal desires of a ravenous predator. It lives on. It’s hard to shift.
‘It’s not your shame,’ says the therapist, and I know, again, that what she is saying is true. No, of course not. Of course it’s not my shame. My intellect agrees. But my body remembers all of this and it still feels like it’s my shame. I know my place. And so it persists. It’s not fair, and it’s not right, but also – at so many levels – it makes perfect sense. The perpetrator and the society which births them – a society which does so little to reduce their opportunities for predation, which does so little to hold them to account for the harm that they inflict – together pass the blame onto us, and we accept it, because it’s what we’ve been trained to do. It allows the abuser to keep on abusing, and it allows society to blame us for it and therefore not to have to act.
This is why shame is such an integral part of the experience of child sexual abuse and why it’s so hard to work through. And that’s not our fault. It really isn’t our shame.
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22 Comments
Thank you Carolyn for all the great work you do in this area. I truly appreciate your honesty and bravery for putting this post out and for helping others to find their voice. Shame is such a difficult thing to process and let go of and yet it is experienced by so many in silence that I feel we are all collectively wounded by it and it goes deep.
As an occupational therapist working in the field of mental health, I can honestly say that the courses and blog materials you have put together are far more relevant, insightful and helpful than most other academic resources I have come across for communicating how to heal from trauma and abuse.
You are an inspiration!
Thank you much for this important blog post. I have come to believe, for me, under all the other feelings – fear, anger, guilt – lies shame. The deepest and most difficult of them all. I will come back to read this again and again.
As for the shame of being “the child who had sex with an adult” which of course is the same shame instilled into me by my abusers, I have chosen to change my language.
(TW)
I try not to include the word “sex” anymore. I try to brave up and say “child rape.” This is a crime. Why do adults suffer the crime of rape but children the lesser. I wasn’t abused. I was raped. Gang raped. I was 6. It IS appalling! It should feel appalling to hear. And when I can’t say it, it’s because of shame.
People need to understand this IS a heinous act. Period. I think we need to stop making it prettier so other don’t need to face it. Really feel what is being said.
I also want to acknowledge in myself, just how hard it is to eradicate my shame response to any small degree of correction or even “constructive” criticism. It never ever feels constructive on it’s face. The shame spiral is the automatic response until I can talk to myselves and try to thought stop.
Even a friend’s shame response to something said, which should be on them as their response to perhaps what was meant to be “innocuous”, still places me in my own personal shame spiral when I wasn’t even involved. Over the top shame for me if I am.
If I can be thrown asunder by another responding with their own shame, personal healing feels near impossible. Clearly, I can’t stop their responses. And I’m not sure how to stop the shame train.
Such an important topic and this can stand directly between “now” and health. So hard to undo.
Thank you because I’m feeling shame I thought I was moving away from talking about the abuse but it’s still on my mind I don’t know if I’ll ever stop feeling sham because of who it was
Wow! When you wrote a child having sex with an adult it really opened my eyes to something new. A location of shame. Your whole post made me cry. Thank you so much for sharing this.
It IS appalling and that’s really how it should feel. And does feel when reading this. My mind jumps back from it and I can’t even try to comprehend. Even while being familiar with the dephts of human cruelty, it’s so hard to place it in the real. I wish such things would not happen. I wish I could undo such things. But I can’t. I also wish your brain could just go and black out those memories so you could live a normal life and not know it ever happened. 🙁 But wishing rarely does anything to change reality. So I can only hope you can somehow step out of those memories actively and that they let you go. You’re you. Not what was done to you. <3 I don't have much strength to share, but if you see this you may take as much as you need.
Thank you for what you do.
You have articulated exactly what I have always thought and always wondered about. It is not child sexual abuse – it is child rape. This is so much more stark, so much more vicious, so much more wrong than fluffing the issue with ‘abuse’. The shock and empathy we feel when an adult is raped is absolutely as it should be but the rape of children doesn’t have the same impact while we call it something else. The subsequent shame, absorbed by me, is what makes me what to rip my insides out and destroy myself and it seems a lifelong task to believe I did not invite it or to allow myself to be visible
Yes this resonates, child rape seems to instigate feelings of wanting to commit violence against oneself, not sure why. Something erupts violently in the mind from violence committed against the body snd the self. It’s atrocious, not sure if it’s healable really. But thank you everyone for talking about it, that definitely helps.
Thank you for this, my therapist sent this on to me and it’s all so true. I hope you are keeping well and coping in this messed up world.
Thanks for writing this Carolyn. I’m so sorry for the poor reactions you’ve endured in the past when you’ve talked about the childhood sexual abuse you experienced. Are you able to please write an educational ‘what to say when someone discloses childhood sexual abuse’? I think it will be so helpful .
I think that when we feel shame as the adult we need to “feel the feeling” understand where it comes from and recognise that we cannot argue with a feeling. Its real and apparent so by acknowledging the feeling and validating it rather than fighting it, we can accept and hopefully move on. we move on sometimes without being aware that we are moving on or working through…
Great article, encompassed all aspects of sexual abuse. Being abused as a child and being blamed for it is a horrible way to grow up. The shame eats at your essence, you feel forever dirty, ugly, and damaged. You just want to hide.
I convinced myself I had put a magic spell on my perpetrators in order to try and make sense of why it was happening to me. It gave me some sense of control over what was happening – it was my magic that caused it. Trying to unravel that twisted logic is proving very, very hard.
I convinced myself I’d seduced my friend/brother-figure with… not quite magic but something inhuman, manipulated him into engaging with me in that way and got him hooked – I convinced myself it was my doing, my fault he kept coercing and threatening me into “giving” him more. That he NEEDED me and it was my fault he needed me. I was 11, and I guess it WAS a way of trying to feel in control. It also became a point of blaming myself later on. I’m relieved I’m not the only one who experienced something like that, and I’m so sorry for what you went through – I hope you’re doing alright. You’re not alone.
How open and well explained. Thank you for writing this and sharing your experiences. 30 yrs on I still have many moments where I hate to be me the guilt and shame are still there. Yet I still had a family member recently imply I must have enjoyed the attention, even though what he did was wrong!
OH MY GOODNESS you did such an excellent job at explaining this feeling and experience!! I love this piece of writing. It was beautifully written, brutally honest (in the best of ways), and vulnerable. You being brave enough to share your experiences and do amazing things in this field is very inspirational for me.
This post really resonated with me, as if I had written it myself from somewhere very deep. I recently shared with a therapist my feeling of being simply “wrong”, (the term you used, which has led to a life of dissociation, problems with intimacy, etc. This post made me feel less “wrong”, so thanks for that. The abuse I suffered was non-violent, more subtle, and the term “childhood rape” would not apply, as the abuse was from a female caregiver and was linked with threats of abandonment. All the more confusing for a young mind.
I… thank you. Thank you for saying it. The abuse we endured wasn’t physical grooming (it was online) but this post helped me understand myself and my reactions to the trauma more. -Emery
Hello. Thank you for this. I feel – repulsive, all the time. And now I know I’m not alone, I’m not stupid or overly sensitive for feeling that way. Thank you so much. -Cat
You read my mind and knew my question and fears, even after all these years it is so clear and unclear. Thank you
Thank you for sharing. The information I’ve found here for helping me on my own healing journey has been a life-saver. Through your own pain and bravery it helps me understand things better for other people as well as in some cases for myself. Please accept a depth of gratitude from me.
On a separate note, I would like to say that I’m surprised there seems to be no information on the website about COCSA and I wondered if that is purposeful? COCSA is very real and prevalent and has long lasting damaging effects on children. I don’t know about the prevalence of COCSA and dissociative disorders but I’m guessing for some people, depending on their situation, COCSA may make up a part of what lead to them having their dissociative disorder.
I am not surprised. Appeals for these types of criminal cases are difficult. Common cited case here is R. v. John McAughey, 2002 ONSC 2863, you can look it up online. The appeal was for a conviction of assault on a minor in Sprucedale, Ontario in 2000.
I am a 72 year old man: a photograph seen three years ago triggered deeply buried memories of abuse by a teacher when I was 10 years old. At the time I froze, unable to protest or stop him.
The recovered memories left me deeply ashamed, angry and very distressed.
I took the step of making a complaint to the school, the teacher is dead, and subsequently the police: I am now pursuing a legal claim against the school who knew the man was a danger to children.
I am getting professional help but your article was helpful in trying to make sense of my feelings. Thank you.