HOW IT WAS...OR WASN'T

If you are an adult and I came up to you and slapped you or punched you or kicked you or tried to throttle you, you would know that I did and take appropriate action. No matter what I said, you'd never think for one second that I had not done this to you. Now imagine you are a very young child. Throughout your growing up, you were punched and kicked and throttled and called names regularly. Imagine also you were never hugged or told you were loved. Yet, within hours of being abused you were told you imagined it. It didn't happen. Not just one person told you this. The whole family did. (The other children behaving in ways their abuse taught them OR their lack of abuse and doing nothing about the one being abused.) You dreamed it. You are wicked. That bruise was from when you fell. Starved of love and affection, other adults were able to see that and if they too were abusers, used your need for love and affection to abuse you. Thus you don't see it as abuse and even if you see it as something you shouldn't do, you blame yourself because you were not forced. When the time came and you were forced, well, it was no more than you deserved. So the first 17 years of life, you are told what did happen didn't. That black was white and white was black. Then you are taken away to a safe place. A hospital full of kind Doctors and nurses. At least that is what you grew up believeing. Instead, you found some nurses were abusive. The Doctors told you that your memories of growing up were symptoms of mental illness. They filled you with drugs when you resisted their truth. After a while, you resign yourself to the fact that indeed you were crazy. That you had come from a loving caring home but you had a mental illness that made you believe differently. So if I was ill, why was I treated as if I was bad? Deep inside the real me still existed and knew the real truth. He just didn't know how to live with that all alone. Daeth was the only way to end the nightmare. The result was a coma and proof I was nuts. After about a year, I was finally the patient of a new dr who let me go, and suggested I never went home again and went and made a life for myself. That I did. It has been very difficult. Even today I struggle with my perceptions. It is why I am useless at choosing friends. It is why I keep myself back and don't let myself feel loved. I had got past that, I thought, until my wedding in 2012 and now knowing that more than a few were not my loving friends at all. I had humiliated myself again. I truly believed they cared for me. Hanging on to truth is hard. It's tiring. The constant 'am i good, am I bad' argument in my head all back again. Fear moved back in.