[Janeytwo]

Brandy

Hope you don't mind me giving you your own frame here but you said a lot and all of it was valuable so I thought I'd respond separate.

Believe it or not, what you talked about here isn’t anything new and it’s really pounded into the head of women who have been raped

Sigh...Brandy. It is a sad thing to admit that while I was in the basement, I had my head so far into the sand I should've grown ostrich feathers!! I truly had no idea that this kind of thing was going on!! It seems I have been asleep at the wheel my friend. All apologies to my sisters in this world.

For me, I wasn’t able to heal until I had faced the demons of the event, realized that I didn’t need to tell myself it never happened, but instead, admit that it happened, remind myself that it was nothing *I* had done wrong and then ultimately faced the anger, rage and pain that resulted from the original attack.

That old saying, "the past is the past". How untrue! The past is never over until we acknowledge it. Until then, it hangs around in the background, picking at our psyches, causing fear and anger to roil up over the stupidest of things and there we are saying, "What is my friggin problem? Why am I acting like this?" And all the while - somewhere inside - we know why but we just can't go there. Because we've been told to "forget and go on". That that is the course of the brave and the strong and the survivors.

IMO - no one survives really until they've seen where they've been. Not just intellectually but emotionally as well.

Until then, the past keeps nattering away at us. Sort of like that old joke about being pecked to death by chickens; only chickens with hatchets for beaks.

I also had to get to a point where I no longer accepted the blame for what had happened to me

((( Brandy ))) A hard road that road. Kudos to you for your courage in taking it.

now I live every day with the knowledge that had I had the strength and support to go against what I was being told, he wouldn’t have gone on to rape at least three more girls (and they were girls, children) – and the countless unknown girls/women he was never caught hurting – because they too got the same talk I did

And so - to me at least - it is like you were victimized again. And it is like I said, no one says to victims of muggings or attempted murder - anything like that - just go on and forget - take your power back too yourself through denial.

I am so very sorry that you had to witness this personally in your own life; that any woman/girl/person has to witness it.

And this line of "take back your virginity by denying this ever happened"?

You are right. It serves no one any good purpose but the perpetrators and the liars out there. For the rest of us? It's just another nail in the coffin of denial and shame.

Thanks for sharing!! I know it can't be easy to do so, even after healing from it all.