Powerful words my friend and a heart wrenching story. Thank you for your courage in sharing.

Thats deep. Thanks for sharing PB xx

I want to hang my head in shame at my fellow human beings. But I don’t. I keep looking at you, while crying inside. You with the head held high and deserving of every good thing that you have made for yourself, despite this horror.
@sheepfoldcarer

I’m so sorry that you had this day (and many others like it) in your childhood.

Thank you for sharing your story with the Blog Carnival Against Child Abuse!

So much of this feels familiar, but here’s what stopped me in my tracks:

“I step into the shower. The hot water feels nice. For a moment it feels like everything’s okay.

My father storms in, yelling that I’m using up all the hot water.”

Wow. I can’t tell you how many times I had that very same experience growing up. Not even the smallest moment of safety and personal space was assured or tolerated. I felt like I was reading my own story for those few lines.

This is such good writing. Touching, sad, evocative, real. The bit about the boxing moves also got me. A little boy trying valiantly to “man up” for another grueling day. Heartbreaking.

Prozac Blogger, I am glad that we connected recently on Twitter. Your writing deserves to be shared. As you can tell by the comments here, all of us feel connected to your childhood by our own experiences. My abuse was sexual and emotional with just the threat of physical violence which I have only recently come to realize can be seen as a form of domestic violence. Another area of denial that I need to strip away with the awareness that this really did happen in my family. Thanks for sharing this in the Blog Carnival Against Child Abuse.

That door- we had a wall at our house in the kitchen just as you went in. I think my step-dad put his hand through it whilst my parents had a particularly awful fight. Everyday, I walked past it and it reminded me. I wish that it didn’t exist. Once my Mum put a calendar over it. I still knew it was there.

Sorry that this happened to you. But thankyou for sharing it. It was powerful and beautifully written. I can relate.

No child should ever have to go through a day like this one that you shared. Personal space doesn’t exist for so many of us that were abused as children.

I remember so clearly the first time that I became aware of my personal space. I had gone to Little Rock with an acquaintance to a workshop. When we sat down in the meeting place, she sat down so close that I could feel her in my space. For a minute or so, I didn’t know what was going on and what I was physically feeling. Then a light went on and I realized that she was in my personal space and I physically felt it. I had to smile. It wasn’t an unpleasant experience. It was just something that I had not had awareness of before that day.

As an incest survivor, my personal space was invaded so much that I had shut down the feeling when I disconnected from my body as a young child. Because of the healing that I had done, at that point, I was fully reconnected with my body and my senses. I felt joy flood into my being because I was feeling the woman sitting too close to me. I wasn’t shut down. I was very much aware of her presence beside me. After sitting with the feelings for a few minutes, I easily moved over on the seat so that she wasn’t still so close that she was in my space.

I know that seems like such a simple thing to most people. For me, it was a really big sign of growth and reconnection to myself and my body.