THREE TESTIMONIES OF SURVIVAL: Dealing with abuse, depression and cancer Fiona Forde speaks to Helen, who was sexually abused as a child, about creating a new life despite her haunting past, horrific memories, guilt and lack of trust
Helen is one of thousands of women who are coming to terms with a terrible past. She is one of many women who were sexually abused as a child, in her case by her paternal grandfather. The ordeal lasted for years, from when Helen was four or five until the old man died, when she was 13. She is now 27 and still struggling to bring her own identity together after years of therapy. But she says she is streets ahead of where she first began.
"I don't know exactly when it started, but at least when I was five or six years of age," Helen explains in a one-to-one conversation that turned out to be a brutally honest acknowledgement of her past and present. "You never really get over it, you just hope you will learn to live with it," she says. This is her story.
"Basically, he abused me and a lot of other people in the family and outside the family. There were two court cases that were brought against him before I was born, by two different boys he also abused," she says. He was not sent to prison because of his poor heart condition. A local judge, in considering his age and the reaction his crimes would have reaped upon him behind bars, set him free. And he became a free agent to exact his sickly habits and Helen was to become one of his victims.
"I remember when I was about seven years of age there was this one incident that I told my parents about. He had me lying on the sofa with him watching television and he asked me to raise my legs to do exercises. I was lying on my side and I soon realised that I wasn't getting any exercise. But he had already crossed the line about what was appropriate and inappropriate to say and do. I fled before anything else could happen. And I decided to tell my parents."
Helen's parents said all the right things at the time. They told her it was unacceptable. They told her that her grandfather would not set foot in their house again. "That suited me, I felt protected," she says.
But later on that year, her mother told her they would be spending Christmas with her grandparents. "I was shocked, I just couldn't say anything. I was so angry; it was only in later years that I expressed the rage I should have expressed then. I should have thrown a tantrum. I should have said no." But Helen did none of those things.
By then she was already feeling that guilty, dirty feeling that only a victim of sexual abuse can feel. And so the family travelled to make the Christmas visit, to keep up the tradition, to keep up the family ties. And with it, the abuse. The abuse got progressively worse. But she knew that it was futile to tell her parents again. "He raped me, in the end he sodomised me. It makes me ill just to think back to it," she explains.
By the time her grandfather died, when Helen was 13, her life was already stained. When he died, "I remember feeling cold. I cried so much but it was all basically from relief. And I just felt, thank God he died. Because it had gotten to the point that I was so afraid that I thought either he was going to die or I was. When the abuse was happening the only thing I could handle was to have fantasies of killing him. I had so much guilt about feeling that way, a young girl with these awful thoughts. And then he would say to me 'you are going to kill me if you tell anyone about this. I will have a heart attack and you have to be very careful with me . . .' So I was caught between feeling I want to kill him and feeling I can't kill him."
He passed away and she moved into her teens. She was a fighter, on the surface a confident young woman, an able person, a good student, a self-achiever. And in her own way, she was angry at the world. "I used to be furious about all the injustices in the world. I was capable of expressing that anger, yet I was unable to tell my mother how angry I was at her or to feel real anger towards my grandfather," she says.
Helen went into therapy at a young age, but she never quite knew what she was dealing with. It was only when she was in her 20s that she was able to make sense of it all. "The memories came little by little, in images, in body memories, strange feelings and pains I couldn't explain at the time, as I recalled parts of family conversations. It was all fragmented. I began to understand that the memories were probably not going to come in big, complete pictures, like bits of a film. It was only when I accepted that fact that I started to see memories all around, to notice things that had been right in front of my nose all those years."
Like any process, the therapy brought her through different stages. "I think the stages are pretty individual, but they all have common characteristics with other abuse victims' stages. For me there was a kind of hazy, sick stage, when my body was giving me physical signals that something was very wrong and needed to be taken care of." It was manifested in all kinds of recurrent vaginal infections and digestive problems. When she was in her early 20s, an array of medical experts could not put a name on what she was suffering. That pain went when the abuse began to come out.
"Then came the fear stage, when I felt the fear from when I was being abused but it had no evident link to my real-life situation. There is a paranoia stage. And there is a recognition stage, where different things I had always known snapped together in my mind and I realised some particular experience had occurred. This stage comes back most often, because as I go along I'm always putting together more pieces of what happened and how the abuse managed to continue."
When she took that first step into therapy, Helen decided to give it her all, "otherwise, everything else was going to get in the way. It seemed crazy at first, and impractical, but unless you really prioritise this and get yourself going, it's far too easy to spend your whole life doing it halfway, and only getting half of what you could out of everything you do. The process hurts like hell, but it's worth it."
To others who might be just a step away from making that move, she says: "Remember that your body and mind protect you and that you can't rush the process."
Helen is now looking forward to the years ahead. She is just months away from getting married and hopes to start a family next year.
"Thinking of having my own children was one of my greatest motivations when the therapy got tough. I didn't want to have blinkers on as a mother.
"None of this would have happened if my parents had reacted differently."
Helen's name has been changed to protect her identity.