*** sexual abuse triggers ***
A reader emailed me a question that she had trouble finding an answer to online, so I thought I had better address it here. The question was whether it is possible for a young girl to be vaginally gang-raped, survive the experience, and not remember that it happened (dissociate the memories into adulthood). The answer is a resounding yes, and it happens with much greater frequency than society wants to admit. It happened to me, as you can read about in my story.
Let’s start with the physical act of raping a young girl. The reader was asking about the age of eight, but vaginal rapes can happen at any age, even in infancy. The vagina is intended to stretch to enable a baby to pass through it, so it is able to be stretched to accommodate a male appendage or other object even in a young girl. Of course, this comes with great pain to the girl, but it is physically possible.
The younger the girl was when the rapes started, the more likely she is to have repressed the memories. Children under the age of six have the gift of being able to split off the memory from conscious awareness through dissociation so that they do not hold a conscious memory of the rape immediately after it happens. This can result in a diagnosis of dissociative identity disorder (DID) or other form of dissociative disorder. I had been vaginally raped repeated from the ages of around six through 11 and was vaginally raped again a few times in my teens, but I had no memory whatsoever of the rapes until my late thirties. This was the truth I most rejected about my history.
I held onto the fact that I experienced light bleeding when I first chose to be sexually active as “proof” of my self-told lies of still being a virgin. I would have nightmares of being raped but rejected them outright due to this “proof.” Then, as I was reading Safe Passage to Healing by Chrystine Oksana, I came across a passage that talked about the hymen’s ability to regenerate in part after a period of celibacy. That is when my truth leaked out as a sickening awareness.
Throughout therapy, I had kept telling myself, “at least I was never vaginally raped…” That was the one type of abuse I needed to have been spared to be okay. Facing this truth was the most difficult part of my healing journey, and I wasn’t sure if I would survive it. However, after grieving mightily for three days, treating myself with kindness and accepting my truth was the catalyst to ending my status as a person with DID. Since I was no longer hiding big truths from myself, I no longer needed to have a host personality. The host integrated, and I forever stopped losing time. I was also immediately okay because the rest of myself had always known this truth.
I hope that the Google search engine will pick on this blog entry about whether it is possible for a young girl to be vaginally gang-raped, survive the experience, and not remember that it happened (dissociate the memories into adulthood). I don’t want other women who are facing this incredibly painful experience to find no articles when they do their search.
Photo credit: Hekatekris
Blooming Lotus 