I Like Being A Therapist. It's The Becoming That Gags Me.

Always seems like I have something new to spill. But this is actually the first thing I should have ever said, because now it just feels like I'm making crap up.

I have to complete a correspondence test for the Reporting Child Abuse requirement for the NY license. So there I am this morning in an NJ Strabucks, reading the material, getting ready for my first client at the NJ office. I'm underlining stuff and absorbing info. Alanis Morrisette is singing acoustic tunes from her revisited 'Jagged Little Pill' CD over my head, sounding teeth-gittingly successful and well-adjusted now. I'm eating my croissant and sipping my latte. It's all so very grown up and very mature.

Then my heart starts to get a watery feeling. Kind of like a heavy weight is starting to lean on it. I feel my extremities going slack. My mood dampens. I want to stop. I want to go back over the bridge and go to sleep. Why?

Well, I learned the definition of an 'abused child', that's why. I thought I knew it before, but now I've got sentences in black and white that follow the words "such as" and "for example". And it wasn't until I got to the parts about sexual abuse that I lost my strength. I even went to websites just now to cut and paste these definitions for you, but the websites don't get as graphic as this booklet of mine does.

So why do you think I'd get skeeved out? Because the material is tragic? Yeah, that's part of it. The other part? Is because it happened to me.

No I didn't block it out. I remember it. Here's what I remember--I remember enjoying it. I remember having fun and looking forward to it happening again. No, this wasn't me searching out my mother's porn while in Spring Valley. This was me before Mom came and moved me up to SV. This was me in NYC. This was me no more than five years old. And a neighbor in my building, who my father and babysitter trusted. This was a pretty sick individual who did literally untypeable things to a small child. (Because I can't type it. Right now, I'm fairly calm in typing what you're already reading, and I'm pretty sure I'll hit the "Publish Post" button and send it. But I can't go into detail about what happened to me. Some is that it's fuzzy, and I can't recall the detail. Some is just straight-up shame.)

And being here in this head of mine, I see it from my own view, which is still attached to some desire and some titillation. But in reading what constitutes child abuse in detail, from the POV of someone who has to report this if they see the signs, I was filled with the revulsion of the act--the violation--the cruelty of the perpetrator.

I'm of two minds. 1) I want to say it's okay and I'll be okay, and the damage wasn't so bad and I'm not the only one this ever happened to. 2) I want to scream and I want to kill the person who's name I'm even too ashamed to type for changing what I could've been forever. (Yup I still know his name.)

I didn't know it was this bad. I've been asserting that I'm just a strange kid, who happens to be 40 yrs old. Fortunately for credibility's sake, I've already put it out there that I got myself involved with my Mom's porn, and established this symptom as fact. But now I'm thinking how twisted it was/is. How wrong it was to have that kind of appetite so young. And if not "wrong", then inappropriate. Inappropriate because I'd already been violated and my innocence was already gone. My chances of correct sex education and development was forever changed and warped.

My definition of self changed today (yet again), and I recognize what the deal is, but at the moment, I have no idea of my prognosis. Is it going to be able to change? Should I start looking for support groups and crisis counseling?

Today I called my friend, the Soon-To-Be-Doctor, and I was going to tell him what I've discovered. We started talking and of course, I couldn't. With all the drama I've unfolded for him over these years, I felt like the character in a tired and boring soap opera. I felt like I had yet developed another cliched plot twist written by hackneyed writers just to keep the viewer tuned in. I felt like the message board fans in the great beyond were writing posts about how rediculous this storyline about me has become and how they'll stop watching if the writers don't step their game up.

And yet, when I'm with clients, and we begin to talk about their young children, tears spring up in my eyes. I've already posted about the torrential rains I cry when watching movies about innocence and sex ("The Other Sister"). And I may not have posted this, but I have not, to date, watched an episode of "Judging Amy" without leaking a trail or two. Children, not teenagers, are my weakness. Caregivers and struggles for the preservation of young life moves me every time.

I'm constantly mourning the little boy I was, who died at the hands of a pervert. Now I know that.

What I've become today as a result is not an adult. I'm arrested. Something in me is still trying to recapture the innocence. Escapism is my coping mechanism now, and damn, why didn't I realize that? Dissociative Identity Disorder is just an extreme version of Dungeons and Dragons. I may not have blackouts and missing time, but I'd rather play City of Heroes and be someone else for an entire weekend and not leave the apartment in the city for which I have fought so hard to stay in, than call up a friend, or visit relatives, or fight for my place in a relationship.

I only have one defense against this--one thing I can tell myself, and try to believe it.

It wasn't my fault. Let the Republicans and Christians hate me for abdicating responsibility, but this time, it's true. It IS true. I'd tell any other victim this, and it's true for me. It IS.

It wasn't my fault. I was just a child.

All those who abused and neglected me are dead.

I hate no one.

But it was still not my fault.

It wasn't.

Me at 6/16/2005 11:36:00 PM

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