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Did I deserve to be abused?
Absolutely not. "This is one question that has a definite answer. But your feelings of being bad or of having done something to deserve it are universal;
people who have been abused feel that it would not have happened if they were good. You may feel ugly, dirty, worthless, shameful, cheap, and even evil, but those feelings are based on your confusion and misperceptions of your abuse.
Although these feelings are totally without basis in fact, they are the most common and devastating effect of abuse. Being abused is so terrible, so shocking, so painful, that we have to try to make sense of it. We ask: "Why is this happening to me?" There is no rational answer. When we are being abused we do not know that our abusers may also have been abused, and we do not know that the abuse comes from their own sickness. We try to figure out what we did to cause it. But there is no
explanation. So we assume the reason is that we are bad. We do not know how, but we must be bad, or they would not being doing this to us. We conclude that we must be so bad and so unlovable that we somehow deserve to be punished.
This explaination is our attempt to make sense out of chaos. Without an explaination, we must believe in a world so senseless, so arbitrary and out of control that we could not bear to live in it. If the world is that dangerous and without meaning, we must go crazy or die. The only alternative is to find a meaning--even if it is one that hurts us.
Young children think that they are the center of the world and that they make everything happen. Even their toilet behavior is a big deal to their parents. So children believe that whatever happens, they are the cause.
Our irrational conclusion may be bolstered by what our abusers tell us. Most abusers sift the blame to others so that they can avoid looking at their own behavior. The easiest person to accuse is the victim. Abusers say damaging things based on their own distorted feelings. Although what they say is untrue, we are all too ready to believe them because we already think we bad.
The truth is there was absolutely nothing you could have done as a child, no matter what your age. The important thing is that you survived. Even though you could not have stopped the acts of your abusers, you can control your actions to those acts."
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