Toxic Guilt - Tumblr Posts
One of the strongest indicators of trauma is overwhelming guilt for something that happened to you. You didn’t harm anyone, you weren’t cruel to anyone, yet you feel ashamed of everything that happened, you feel mortified and believe you somehow caused it, or participated in it, you feel overwhelming shame and guilt for your feelings about it now, you feel ashamed for being hurt by it, because someone indicated you should not be.
If you feel this way, what happened to you isn’t normal or okay. It means you were put in circumstances completely out of your control and then forced to take responsibility for whatever took place, as if you made it happen. You were not only forced to take responsibility for someone else’s cruelty to you, but even conditioned to not be able to acknowledge just how much it hurt you, how much damage you’re still bearing. It means someone hurt you very, very severely and then, for their own convenience, decided that it was you who caused that, and dictated just how you’re allowed to feel about it, to make it more convenient on the perpetrator. You do not owe them a life free of responsibility for what they’ve done to you.
You are not obliged to feel only in ways they tell you to. You already know your feelings about it, and they’re not wrong. You are not in the wrong to be upset, to feel that it was wrong, that you’ve been hurt and someone is guilty of hurting you. The fact they tried to make you responsible for it, and to make themselves look blameless, only makes it worse, it means they didn’t only hurt you once, they hurt you thousand times after, they hurt you every single time you tried and couldn’t acknowledge what happened, they hurt you every single time you had to pretend that what happened to you wasn’t traumatic abuse.
Sexual grooming for children will end up confusing their perception and sense of what is right, because some parts of it are designed to make the child believe they feel good during it, and this will reinforce the guilt and sense of participation or “liking it”. Children do not like to be sexually abused, they do not enjoy being taking advantage of and having their sexually ripped apart by a person chasing their own satisfaction, but they cannot explain away the parts where physical touch felt good, where they didn’t feel like resisting or fighting back, where they even felt dependent on the abuse or did something to encourage it and hide it from others. Children experience arousal during sexual abuse and this too, will confuse them and will be used as a groomer to prove that the child “wanted it”. They will also want to believe that the groomer cared for them in some way, or did this out of “not knowing better” or without being aware the child would end up deeply traumatized.
The “good” feeling of sexual abuse comes just from the fact that the child requires physical touch, and young children cannot feel the difference between “good touch” and “sexual touch”, at most they might feel it’s a bit “weird” or “dirty” but if they get used to it, they wont be able to recognize it as abuse. The good feeling is only because they need touch, but that doesn’t mean they want to be sexually abused, they need a hug. If the abuser’s goal was to make the child good, they would never have any sexual intentions, they would never use the child as a resource of sexual pleasure and then try to convince the child it must have been a good thing. No child would consent to sexual abuse knowing it was going to traumatize them. The good feeling only makes it worse, makes the child feel complicit and unable to distinguish if they have the right to be traumatized and angry.
Arousal during sexual abuse, not only for children but for all victims, is not a sign of sexual desire, it’s body’s way of protecting itself. Human bodies go to extreme measures to protect from pain and injury, and sexual abuse is the worst, most harmful damage on human body. Arousal makes it more likely your injuries will be less critical, and that the level of physical pain will not be as high, whereas the lack of arousal would mean extreme pain and possibly critical injuries. Your instincts can already tell that the abuser doesn’t care if they damage you severely, so arousal is there to protect you, not as a sign of sexual excitement. Sexual desire never involves feeling of deep terror, weakness, vulnerability and submissiveness, sexual desire is only possible in a situation where you feel no fear of your partner whatsoever, can walk away at any point, and are able to do whatever you please, as opposed to being cornered and forced into a violating experience.
So it was not your fault. And none of your reactions was out of place. None of it meant that you wanted it, or participated in it. You had no way of consenting to it. And if you’re still sometimes experiencing some affection or craving for the abuser, this is extremely common and a side-effect of grooming. The groomer wanted you to feel this, they designed the entire relationship in order to manipulate you to feel it. But they couldn’t love you, they did not see you as a human being worthy of respect, care, agency, boundaries, freedom, or even just having your own sexuality. They lied to you, and if you don’t want to face this part yet, that’s okay, because it’s devastating and horrifying to realize something like that happened to you, and it’s okay to take as much time as you need before you consider it.