Part Two

If you missed part one, you can scroll back through the older posts to find it. It should just be a few posts back.

I left off in part one when I was around the age of 11. I am going to pick up there and share a few significant life events that occurred in my life around that time.

My mom remarried and at first it all went well. I really liked my new stepdad (from this point forward I will be referring to him as dad and when I am speaking about my abuser, I will continue to refer to him as bio-dad). He was fun, outgoing, spent time with me, and it really felt like we were a family. I felt like he cared about me and wanted me to be a part of his life. It didn’t feel like he was taking my mom away. It felt like he was adding to us—not subtracting by taking her away. It wasn’t too long after they were married that my mom found out she was pregnant. She had my brother when I was around 12 years old. It was such a difficult time because of everything else going on in my life.

Once she had my brother, I felt like my one constant, my one thing (my mom) was taken from me. I felt like I was all alone and had nothing and no one so I turned away from her. Looking back, I know some deep-rooted bitterness formed. At that time, I could not form my feelings into words, but I knew I never felt like I fit into the family my mom created. It was like she had created the family she always wanted with my dad and brother and then there was me. I was so messed up, so hurt, and so broken I just always felt like I was on the outside looking in. I felt like my brother stole my mom and my family. He got the life I always wanted but could never have. I had to watch my dream life being played out day by day right in front of my face, but I was not part of it because on the inside I was in constant torment. The torment built a huge wall between them and me, so I turned to other people and things to fill the void. I started getting very interested in guys and I also spent a lot of time at my aunt’s house. Her house became my escape where I ran to and where I wanted to be. I didn’t hate my mom or brother, but the pain and jealously was too hard to carry so I allowed it to turn to anger. Early on I learned how to turn pain to anger. If someone hurt me instead of feeling the pain it was much easier to feel anger so that became a pattern in my life that carried through many years.

Because of the pain, behaviorally speaking, I was a very difficult child and teen. I felt rejected by my mom when she had my brother and because of that I built a wall around my heart that refused to let her in. I was not ever going to let her, or anyone, hurt me again. So, at the same time I loved her and wanted a relationship with her, but I also hated her and wanted to push her away. Of course, I could not articulate any of that when I was in the middle of it, so it came out in harsh words, behaviors, and erratic behaviors. I think a lot of times it was just easier for her to let me go where I wanted than to have me in the home, but that also felt like a rejection. It was what I wanted in the moment, but it also felt like I was screaming for someone to rescue me, and no one came. When no one came hate settled into my heart and more and more of me died.

I made the vow to myself that if no one was going to rescue me then I was never going to depend on anyone, except for the fact that I was very co-dependent on anyone I was in a relationship with which always led to major issues. It created very toxic love/hate, I must have you/I don’t want you type of relationships. I always went from one extreme to the next. I lived with these extremes, and I never understand why. My emotions were never balanced, and the undertone of depression was always present. Depression and fear were my constant companions from as far back as I can remember.

I started having fantasies about killing myself, how to do it, what it would be like, and then I started working on making a plan. The first plan I can ever remember making was one day when I was sitting on my bed. My bedroom was on the second floor, and I thought about wrapping the cord to my blinds around my neck and jumping out my window. I was too afraid to try it because I figured I would just get hurt but not really die. I also had a fear of dying and going to Hell. I had been raised attending a Pentecostal church with my grandparents, so I knew a little about the Bible. Most of the plans I thought of had the same outcome as the first plan. I didn’t really have access to anything that I knew would for sure kill me and I was afraid of pain and Hell.

I hated school and was still very shy. I didn’t like speaking out in class, so I hated to be called on to give answers. I didn’t have many friends and I never felt like I fit in. I was never the giggly, silly teenager. My family and I often joked that I was born an old soul, but in reality I was on edge all the time and I could never really relax. I grew up quickly because of the abuse.

I wrote a paper for one of my classes about a girl whose mother died, and she had to go live with her dad. In the paper the girl didn’t want to go live with him, so she killed herself. My teacher became very concerned about me when she read it, so she called a meeting with my mom. She suggested I see a counselor, so my mom set up an appointment. I do not remember much about the appointment. I don’t even remember if it was a man or woman, but I do remember I lied. There was no way I was going to talk about the abuse and my fears. I must have done a good job at covering it up because I did not have to go back, and life went back to normal—well what felt normal to me anyway. It was normal to hide my feelings, to hide the abuse, to pretend like I was fine, to feel like I was dying on the inside, but plaster a smile on my face and go about life the best I knew how. It was normal for no one to understand me or my actions. It was normal to feel alone and isolated. It was normal to want to die more than I wanted to live. That was my normal.

During this same time period in my life my bio-dad purposefully shot himself, but he did not die. He was dating a woman and she had broken up with him. I have no idea if that had anything to do with it or not because he never really said why he did it. He blamed it on medication he was taking at the time. He shot himself under the chin. The bullet traveled through his chin, his tongue, and then followed his sinus cavity and lodged in his skull. My family was told that it did not do more damage because it was a very old bullet. He lived in the house with his parent at the time and he had placed three bullets in the gun. To this day I still think he had planned to kill my grandparents and then himself, but for some reason he didn’t go through with the plan to kill them. He ended up in the hospital and had to have surgery to remove the bullet. They had to shave his head and when his hair started coming back in it was straight for a while and not curly. He made jokes about it and just laughed the whole thing off, but it turned my world upside down and I carried the trauma from the abuse as well as his attempted suicide for years.

I thought I knew what fear was before he shot himself, but that was nothing compared to what I experienced after the incident. For me it was real tangible proof of what he was capable of doing. He was his favorite person in the entire world and I knew without a doubt if he could hurt himself he would have no issue at all hurting me or my mom. From that moment on I had visions of him breaking into our home to kill me. Every time I saw him in person I felt terror because I didn’t know if he would try to kill me or not. I always wondered if he had a gun with him. There were times I would physically shake because I was so scared. I was on high alert every single time I was near him and even when I wasn’t I could not feel safe. Part of me, a big part if I am honest, was sad that he had not died because I felt like the only way to be free was for him to be dead. While he was in the hospital he often became belligerent and yelled at the staff, but once again he blamed his medication. The first time I saw him with the shaved head and wound it was really scary.

After his suicide attempt I had a major downward spiral. I started having flashbacks of the abuse and many memories surfaced. It wasn’t that I ever had a time in my life that I didn’t know he had sexually abused me, but the details of the memories became fuzzy from all the times I pushed them down and out of my mind. I had refused to allow myself to think of them for so many years that eventually they faded, became fuzzy, and some of them even totally disappeared. To this day I do not have all of them back.

I do not know what lead to my parents taking me to see a therapist, but I do know I started going regularly. Once I had been going for a little while I disclosed about the abuse to my therapist. She didn’t report the abuse to any authorities, and I have no idea why because she was a mandated reporter. She did write a letter to my bio-dad to tell him that I needed a break from visits with him in order to work some things out. That caused a major divide in both sides of my family. Up until that point several members of both sides of my family (bio-dad’s and mom’s) attended the same church. My bio-dad’s dad was the pastor at the time. It did not go well, there was a divide, my grandpa was asked to step down as pastor, and the ripple effects lasted for years. I felt responsible for the divide and that was one more thing to add to my mounting list of reasons why I felt no one could really love me, why I was full of shame, and why I felt that I was innately bad.

The therapist also did not keep my mom informed about my treatment at all. She didn’t offer advice on how to help me, she didn’t facilitate family therapy, and she didn’t tell my mom how bad my mental health was at the time. Looking back, as a therapist myself, I have no idea what she was thinking or why she ran her practice in the way she did. It was unethical at best and crossed the line of malpractice in my opinion.

I stopped visiting my bio-dad, his parents (because he lived with them), and my aunt and her family because he lived on the same property as her. It was a huge loss, but I was terrified of him. Once I stopped the visits the fear increased because I knew that he knew that I was saying something bad about him otherwise my therapist would not have sent the letter to him. The anxiety and fear that came with telling was almost unbearable. I don’t even know how I was able to continue functioning. School felt impossible and my grades were the furthest thing from my mind. I was just trying to survive each day. To the outside looking in I probably seemed like a lazy student who refused to follow the directions and rules, but the truth was I just didn’t have any energy or focus left for school. I was in survival mode and there wasn’t much left outside of that.

We are still going through heavy material but hold on and remember sorrow may last for the night, but joy comes in the morning! Psalm 30:5. My sorrow lasted for many years, but joy did come, and we will get to that part. Stick with me, I promise we will get there!

Blessings,

Nichole Henson, Fullness of Joy Ministry