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Agoraphobia and Sexual Abuse, Part 1 - Page 2

© Katherine E. Rabenau

This fear and shame of my physical person is a big component of my fear of going outside. When my knees or legs hurt, I experience more than just physical discomfort. I become both shamed - how can I have let this happen to myself - and also frightened that I will not be able to manage, to fend for myself, to tend to myself. Another aspect of the toxic body shame is a fear and resistence to seeking medical attention. That kind of physical exposure is terrifying to me. I would almost literally rather die. Not being able to leave the house is a good excuse to give in to that kind of terror. I'd go, you can tell yourself, but I can't make it past the front door.

In the past fifteen years awareness and acknowledgement of sexual abuse has increased. By and large, though, we still relate to the topic with a kind of hysteria which doesn't do much to solve the underlying problems. We want to throw perpetrators in jail and throw away the key without looking at them as human beings and we want their victims to get over it and be happy without asking us as a society to look at the underlying societal sexual dysfunction which allows so many young lives to be profoundly damaged. We continue to pretend that sexual predators have six heads and drool and leer like evil ogres and to ignore the truth that neither life nor the human psyche are that simple. As we all now know, otherwise kindly priests molest young children. So do fathers and mothers, uncles and aunts, sisters and brothers and the kindly guy or lady down the block who gives money to charity and loves animals.

The real monster in the sexual abuse scene is our unwillingness to really explore our societal culpability, to really look deeply at what sexual abuse does to its victims and how those untended wounds become part of what perpetuates the cycle of continued abuse. Until we do this, we remain part of the problem. It's a painful problem and we just want it to go away. May people react to adult survivors of sexual abuse as though we have a contagious disease. People don't want to hear about the pain. It makes us feel helpless. It makes us feel guilty. Without meaning to, we deepen the toxic shame of those who have already suffered profound psychic wounds. And shame is a killer. It thrives on darkness and silence. It locks people into their pain and sometimes it locks us as well into our homes.

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