Things have finally started moving on the counselling front so I thought I'd post a brief update.
Yesterday morning I had a preliminary consultation with one of the psychologists running the counselling programme for adult male survivors of childhood sexual abuse. My local health authority has only been working in this area for 2 years and this is actually the first fully planned programme.
The programme proper won't actually start until March next year and it will be group based. In the past I've resisted any attempts to bring me into group therapy because nobody was making any effort to ensure that participants were "like minded", there was a tendency to just lump everybody suffering from emotional problems into an homogenised group.
That isn't intended to disparage anybody suffering from depression for any reason whatsoever. The point is that suffering childhood abuse brings its own unique emotional issues and, as I've said more than once in the past, only those who were abused as children have the faintest idea what it's really like.
Perhaps the most startling revelation was that I won't be the oldest person in the group by a considerable margin. One of the people I'll be meeting next March is 10 years older than me and has recently, like me taken the decision to finally face the past. One of the key traits of abuse survivors is effectively denying our past and getting on with life, albeit somewhat ineptly.
There were a couple of other things that we discussed yesterday which I'll put into a follow-up post. Hopefully they'll spark some discussion.
5 comments:
Just like the elephants, Malcolm - if someone took advantage of you early on in a way which range your internal alarm bels at the time or afterwards, then it's something you never forget.
It's another demonstration as to why this blog is well worth having all its intimates.
I'll be interested to hear about your experiences with the program.
Can you tell us how the abuse influenced your life as your tried to ignore the past? Why couldn't it be ignored. What where the effects?
@FreeFox
I will explain all of that but rather than a long comment I'll try to put it into a post.
Hi Malcolm;
You state "one of the key traits...denying out past and getting on with life...". I find it interesting, because no matter how hard I try to do that, no matter how many times I tell myself to just get on with life and quit carrying this crap with me, it's still there. I've had a bit of counseling, some help, but dangit it's still there. Does it ever not be still there? I'd really rather just get on with life. -randy
@Randy
I wish I could say something encouraging here. What I should have mentioned perhaps is that the denial doesn't work, or at least it doesn't for me. At best I would say I limp through life sometimes dodging the past but then frequently being sand-bagged by it.
I hope the counselling will help me to find a way to balance the past and the present so that I can stop my childhood ruling my adult life. To be honest that's all I think I can hope for.
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