Coming Out of the Closet: The Child Abuse Closet

An Excerpt from: Coming out of the closet: The Child Abuse Closet

Remembering good memories means you have a conversation starter at a family get together, cookouts, holidays and birthday parties. 

Remembering bad memories means you have to keep it to yourself because no one wants to hear about it at a family get together, cookouts, holidays or birthday parties.

Remembering good memories means it’s ok.  Remembering bad memories means you are subject to counseling behind closed doors, medication to help you forget and a diagnosis of PTSD, C-PTSD and all associated with being a grown-up abused child. 

Living with Complex Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder is like tip-toeing your way through so many conversations you are hit with in life.

If I grew up to be suicidal, a drug addict, an alcoholic or with severe mental issues, it would have been easily passed off and blamed on the childhood I lived. 

Because adults who lived a childhood full of horrible abuse, horrifying sexual attacks, instilled in fear, shamed into silence, cruel abandonment, lack of support, lack of love, lack of protection and lack of acknowledgement, are adults who were lost in a world of abuse.  I was labeled at a young age as just another statistic in a world full of abused children.


But because I grew up to be determined, strong willed, independent, courageous and proud I survived, I am told to keep it to myself. 

I am offered opinions and advice of how no one needs to know, it happened long ago and stop dwelling.  I’m told I should speak to a medical professional behind a closed door because the ones involved are too much of a coward to acknowledge, remember or stand by me.
So as survivors, we have rules to abide. We must be proud in silence, we must keep our childhood secrets a secret and I was told it was my fault why I have problems with my family.  I am the only one with bad memories and it was my job to forget it all. 

Thank God some rules are made to be broken, huh?
It took me to age forty-five years old to realize for the first time without shame, embarrassment, humiliation or fear, that it is ok to talk about my childhood abuse.  It was also the last time I stayed silent.  A horrifying reality which took me straight to my local police department was also the weight of hundreds and hundreds of bricks being lifted off my shoulders, my back and my self-being. 

I had support from so many who knew me, who acknowledged, listened and believed the childhood I lived, but not from the ones I wanted it from.  The ones who I should have received it from.  The ones who should have acknowledged, listened, protected me and who should have been there for me; my family. 
I had the sexual, physical, mental, spiritual and soul crushing abuse at such a young age.  But the lack of emotional support, protection and acknowledgment from my birth mother and siblings was the worst to bare and the easiest to bury. 

Who wants to remember the caring, loving, safe family they never had?  I know I didn’t.  After months of traumatizing repressed memories, I was forced to remember.  It was months and months of tears, pain and horrifying memories.

I use to hear the term, ‘Coming out of the closet,’ which was/is used as a term when explaining a person who just informed all their friends and loved ones of their sexuality.  “I’m gay,” one would say as another would congratulate the person who just came out of the closet.  I am not gay, but I do relate to the term, ‘Coming out of the closet,’ just the same. 

“I am a survivor of horrific childhood sexual abuse, cruel neglect and a horrifying reality.” 

Every time I say it, I feel the step through the doorway I am taking.  Like I am coming out of the closet, the child abuse closet.  What will people say? What will they think of me? Will they hate me? Who will support me?  Oh my God what am I doing? 

Same questions, just different reasons.  But one thing we do have in common is how important it is to know that support matters. 

We may all be different in many ways, but we all do sleep under the same moon.  Remember to always be kind. 

I was forced to believe it was normal to have family secrets and to be ashamed of talking about being abused.  Back in 1975 when social workers visited me at 346 Fletcher Street, if they had just crossed the street and through the park, they would have found my dad and grandmother had lived right in them brick apartments. 
Social workers are there on the assumption of abuse, but instead decides a child’s fate in just a twenty- or thirty-minute talk about dolls and school.  Social workers investigating child abuse should be allowed all access on both parents of that abused child.

If the law was, ‘you went home with your mother,’ then where were my birth mother’s other children?   I mean it wasn’t like it was just one kid, I was her seventh child.  I am the third daughter and seventh child to a woman whose lies would last longer than the number of kids she would claim to have had.  It is a sad world when a social worker is not protected enough so they can continue to protect children from abused homes.  Not one social worker looked for my dad or his family.  Not one social worker questioned me if I was being hurt. 

My abusers’ frustrations with me started at age five, as I would cry and fight him from forcing me to do sexual things.  Though I cried and fought him each and every time, I was just a kid who was overpowered by an evil man. 

As my mother continued to be caught in lies and realizing she was never going to stop her boyfriend as she kept telling me she would, I started to question the way of living she allowed me to get used to. 
My abuser had no intentions of letting me live past my twelfth birthday and I am one hundred percent positive if I did not run to my friend’s house that Saturday morning, causing my friend’s mother to call my birth mother at her work, my body would someday have been found in that cellar wall. 

And I am one hundred percent positive my birth mother would have defended him again.  I had to wait until I became brave enough to run as fast as I could from that house of horrors I called a home.  I truly believe my abusers only attraction to my birth mother, was me. 
My birth mother was vindictive and cruel.  I don’t know what happened to the social workers who used to visit, my school, my doctors, my two older brothers or what family I had, but I was left to deal with what I had been through alone because my birth mother was mad that I fought to not be abused anymore.  A fight that caused me to lose out on being with my family, but a fight that made my abuser never to touch me again.

I was always ashamed of talking about my childhood, but only because I was led to believe that I should be ashamed of what was done to me.  I turned to a mother who turned me away, I looked up to brothers who looked the other way and I have a baby sister who would never believe her father was capable of being the monster that he was.

I was in my thirties when I was sitting on my porch drinking a coffee when I thought to myself, ‘I really mastered this distancing myself thing.’  Then came the tears, sadness, anger, resentment and the one that still bothers me to this day, which is the why’s? 

There were so many aspects in my life which kept making me long for the meaning of family.  So, I’d throw myself back into the insanity that is rooted at the same feet which broke me, I just didn’t want to believe it.  But there I was in my thirties sitting on my porch thinking about how my life was really no different from when I was younger when it came to my family.
Even as a young kid, I knew if I was outside away from my abuser then I was safe.  I knew even if my brothers were home, I was not safe.  That morning I ran to my friend’s house in 1981, I ran because no one older than me in that house protected me.  What they didn’t realize they were doing is with all the sexual, physical, emotional, mental, spiritual, cruel abuse they were nesting onto me, they were really just building that foundation up that made me strong enough to do this.
One brother once told me to repent so I could find forgiveness.  That was when I found forgiveness in myself for trying so hard to belong to a family I was never really a part of and I distanced myself to save myself. 

I did in my adult life the very same thing I did at the age of eleven years old that Saturday morning I ran to my friend’s house, I distanced myself to save myself.  I would then spend the next twenty years juggling with the emotions of wondering where did I belong.
But that longing to belong would come back in waves along with anger and sadness.  An emptiness of unanswered questions that some days can really hurt right down to the core of my soul.  Now in my fifties, and many years since my first repressed memory, I no longer feel like I am insulting those relatives, nor do I need to feel shame for knowing where it is that I belong, even if to get there, I had to distanced myself.

Some call it dwelling in the past, yet it is our past that pops up throughout our lives.  I was told often how it was my responsibility to forgive my birth mother and I did try but as I got older, I realized our childhood is always a part of us and how do I forgive what is so unforgiving? 

It took me many years to forgive myself for what was done to me and to realize I was just a kid at the time.  A helpless, defenseless child who she allowed for many years to be terrorized, raped and abused by the same man she slept next to every night.  Abandoning me, stealing my dad’s social security checks until being caught in 1987.  With all that woman had done to me, it isn’t about forgiving her.  To forgive means we accept, condone and/or forget what was done.

So many survivors are too ashamed to talk and spend their lives staying quiet.  So many stay quiet by turning the other way and pretend they don’t know of such abuse and so many continue to rape and abuse because they can, because no one talks.  Too many live their lives as victims and it’s time society along with its laws, help us to be survivors.  It’s time we speak up and make this world a better place for the children of today and tomorrow. 

They say the laws have changed since the 1980s, but why are there still so many silent?  Isn’t it time we make the ones who abuse and the ones who look away become the pitiful fools who live their lives in shame?  Maybe brand unfit mothers for the sake of future kids they may have?  Isn’t it fair to the child?
The cycle of family secrets and shame can end if we are raised to learn in school that abuse in any shape or form, from any member of the family or friend and at any age is something that is not tolerated in this world.  Imagine the children we could save when the shame is put on those who abuse instead of those who are abused?  If only I had gone to school where every morning in homeroom, we were taught that stranger danger can also mean family danger, maybe my childhood could have been saved.  If only I had been taught that we live in a world where seeking help was a courageous thing to do.  Seeking help crossed my mind just about every day in elementary school, but I was feared into staying silent. 

A fear that children should know about in school, a lesson that could have saved me.  Schools should be the one place any child can feel safe about reporting such acts of abuse in the home. 
We have billboards, public announcements, musicians, athletes and actors sponsoring awareness of abuse and rape every day.  Yet every day we have level two and three sex offenders walking our streets.  If they are a high risk that they may offend again, then what does that say to the ones they first abused and what does that say to the ones they abuse next?   We pass by them inside grocery stores, Walmart’s, movie theaters, ice cream stands, the beach, amusement parks or at a local parade.  They are free to be out in society and we are unaware of who they are because most hide their mask well.
Victims shouldn’t be left to live their lives in silence or shame.  Predators shouldn’t be allowed to live their lives so freely. 

The victim in me stayed quiet for way too long and the emotional, mental and psychological effects from child abuse leave lasting marks we carry throughout our lives.  I can only hope it won’t take another lifetime lived, for a survivor to come out of the closet.

You can read this article and so much more in my 2023 release of Understanding Childhood Trauma: Do You Understand It Now?

https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0CKL12YK2

Thank you for reading me.  

Your friend, Catherine Mellen ♡