Interrogations as presentation

I guess everyone is special, but still, I don't feel quite at ease asking the questions I am about to ask.

I have been sexually exploited by my mother when I was a teen-age boy until It decided to stop seeing her when I was 18. I completed wiped out any sort of memory of my early childhood and I remember almost nothing from my later childhood until I was 15. Even then, my memory contains huge lacks, such as a specific period which I remembered as a 3 months period and which lasted a year as a matter of fact. Even today, I have a very bad memory and I sometimes invent things.

Some years ago, I wrote to an older woman, a friend of my mother. I did remember her as having sexually assaulted me when I was a boy of 10-12 (can't remember my age then). She did not reply but passed on my letter to one of her daughters. We visited the children of that friend of my mother almost daily for a while (can't remember how long).

So, that daughter asked me if I remembered the orgies that were organized in her mother's house and the abuses we, the children, regularly suffered. I was just dumbfounded and it took me a few months to get over this. I just did not remember a single thing. Step by step the story was confirmed, and I started "remembering" even worse: ritual abuse at the hands of esoteric and satanist groups. I tried to get independent proof of all this or at least something that could be used as arguments making the whole story credible. I did find some evidence to the plausibility of the story but, after now 10 years, I still can't fully believe all of this

Even worse, I feel bad because I am now afraid of inventing the whole story.

I have a quite complicated perspective on reality as a basis: I do tend to invent and I am sorry to say that I often lie to please the others - "good lies" to comfort those I love, to calm them down when they can't cope, which leaves me trying to cope in their stead - even on financial matters. I regularly hide financial problems from my wife because she would be desperate and I try to solve these problems myself. It has gone so far I could tell her the truth now on some things. I did not betray her with another woman, but because I wanted to protect her from any kind of preoccupation as she has been depressive for years after the death of her mother and her repeated failure to find a professional occupation.

So, I do think of myself as a liar, and being such, I do have problems believing in the flashbacks and other troubles of the PTSD kind that appeared in my behavior. I feel as I was overdoing it. My wife does believe in my "story" and reproaches me the fact that I do not believe it myself.

Add to this the idea that - I know it seems stupid - I do not know what exactly is suffering: that is, when I feel be about something, am I suffering. Is there not a risk of "make-belief" in the suffering stuff. How can I suffer if I do not even believe in the reason for my so-called suffering? And that feeling of being "somewhere else", not in the suffering, not in the present, not in the past. Another thing that my wife can't stand. And those flashbacks of children killed, eaten, and my forced participation in this, as an instrument: how can it be true. What is the probability of me being in those places? Almost nil.

My wife would like me to talk about all this. I am the only one in my family to have studied beyond the fourth year. I wrote a Master thesis that my wife just loved some 30 years ago. And she would like me to take up the cause of the exploited children to "show the world". I think of myself as a fraud and I know that my way of writing won't impress anyone. I do not even have anything interesting to write about this because I can't make up my mind. In short, I'm not up to the task.

This is my position today. As usual, I wrote too much. Sorry for this. This was just as a way of introduction.

Hello and welcome to the forums!

Just wanted to say, I think a very common thing in sexual abuse, is a feeling as if we either really didn't undergo suffering; or that it was somehow consensual; or that we're inflating it out of proportion; or that we're even making it up- I know the little bit of sexual abuse I've had, it has got so wound up with memory and fantasy based off of the abuse, that I'm not even sure what is real and what's not, anymore. So you're definitely not alone, in how you feel.

Snaga wrote:Hello and welcome to the forums!

Just wanted to say, I think a very common thing in sexual abuse, is a feeling as if we either really didn't undergo suffering; or that it was somehow consensual; or that we're inflating it out of proportion; or that we're even making it up- I know the little bit of sexual abuse I've had, it has got so wound up with memory and fantasy based off of the abuse, that I'm not even sure what is real and what's not, anymore. So you're definitely not alone, in how you feel.

I love very much the sound of what you are saying. I have always that strange feeling of being cold-minded, like heartless, without love and feelings, a truly despicable person, but also of being so fragile and hurt, without knowing why. Also, I have that experience of remembering pretty well the last years of my relationship with my mother - that period during which I thought Freud was wrong about incest and that there could be a "happy incest" (although I was growingly disgusted physically as she plunged into alcoholism and mental destruction - and at the same time not recalling anything from my early childhood, or so little. Now, all those flashbacks seem to me so abstract whereas the later relationship is so clear.... I know I have been given drugs as a child and I suspect my mother gave me alcohol later. The would-be story is a that of 2 mothers selling their children for sex - selling to anyone in our small town.