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Hi.. I'm wondering if anyone else had a really awful experience with mental health providers after being sexually abused as a child.
Here's my experience:
I was primarily raised and parented by my grandmother after my parents divorced. My mother moved my brother and I into our very recently (my grandfather passed away 3 days before my mother left my father) widowed grandmother's house.
My mother was not a present parent, although she thinks she was mother of the year. She traveled often for her job leasing malls, and the little time she had free, she preferred to go out to bars and listen to the music of the man she left my father to pursue (NOT my abuser).
The man she was interested was gay, I found out in my teenage years from my grandmother and my dad. He was absolutely wonderful to my brother and I nonetheless, taking us on vacations, his family's homes to play and swim, and cultivated my own love of music.
After six years of this, my mom's friend finally told her there was no future for them and moved away. At the same time, my grandmother was increasingly fed up with my mother's lack of desire to take care of my brother and I. My mom never once cooked a single meal, took or picked us up from school, sports or music lessons, or helped with homework. My grandmother did it all.
She told my mother to move out, expecting her to get an apartment on her own with us (my mother has never spent a day in her life by herself - she went from growing up with my grandparents, to married to my dad, and back with my grandmother, etc).
My mother instead decided to marry a guy we'd never met or heard of that she met at work 8 months earlier. He's 8 years younger than she is.
Almost immediately after the wedding, her new husband started creeping into my bedroom and started sexually abusing me on the nights my mom was out of town overnight for work.
I was 11.
After the first time, I immediately told my babysitter the next morning. She was horrified and stayed with me as I told my mother when she got home.
My mother questioned me, ran out of the room to confront him, and then came back insisting I had made it up or had been dreaming. She never called the police, she called the county psychiatrists.
From there it's been pure ***. He didn't stop, and despite me practically screaming at the county psychiatrists that he was still abusing me, they listened to my mother over me and eventually determined I had initiated my abuse.
I fought back to no avail. At 18 I left home and tried mightily to establish a firm set of boundaries with my mother that included no more forced "therapy with her goals of making me admit to being responsible for an adult man's behavior, no more forced drugging, and no more forcing me to see him. She's respected NONE of my boundaries.
She went so far as to call child protective services, ran by the same county mental health psychiatrists, WHEN I WAS IN LABOR with my oldest child and repeated her assertion I had to have gone after him. They took my son at 4 days home from the hospital.
My abuser's sister worked for the county district attorney's office, alongside the now judge who signed off on this all- my step-aunt is her election campaign chairwoman.
My mother bamboozled child protective services she'd help with my son if I'd admit to what she wanted after they took him... But she dumped my son in foster care with a friend of hers from her church, and then raised *** *** when my dad and stepmom went to get custody, screaming my father was also unfit and to leave him in foster care.
None of this raised a single red flag with the county child protection services.
Five years later they took my daughter at birth for the same reasons. This time, my mother convinced my father to not take my daughter, separating my children.
Both were adopted out.
While I've long since processed my mother's behaviors as abusive too, I'm extremely angry at how the system here failed me miserably.
I have no doubt in my mind my abuser, being the sibling of a prosecutor's employee, knew he'd be rotting in prison, and convinced my mother I was nuts to avoid it. I also have absolutely no doubt that my mother went with it to avoid for once, leaving a man and her lifetime of codependency of not being on her own she prefers.
I'm depressed over the loss of my babies (my father bowed to my mother and refuses to let me see my son), and my relationship with my partner (my daughter's father) is in shambles.
My partner is in full on delusion that his penchant for drugs and alcohol isn't an issue. He's been unfaithful multiple times, including recently, violent towards me, and isolates me, as well as verbally hateful. I DO have an excellent support system in my older child's father, as well as from an ex boyfriend whom is currently battling cancer halfway across the country, but naturally my current partner REFUSES to allow me to openly just talk to either of them for support without bashing them and putting me down.
I'm absolutely miserable.
Honestly, if I could afford to, I'd get on the first Greyhound bus out to my ex's with cancer and help care for him if I could. We're currently just friends, obviously, but he never dated anyone else after me and he's pretty obvious about the fact he never stopped loving me. He and I had a wonderful relationship, full of sarcastic jokes, long discussions about our mutual interests and opposite politics, and great times.
My partner thinks I'm still in love with him... I'm not but I'm not opposed to it eventually when his cancer improves.
My partner thinks I hate him because of my "love" for my ex as a friend, but the reality is I hate him for doing drugs and drinking, hitting me, and cheating on me repeatedly. He refuses to get help.
He wants us to go to couples counseling, but I'm positive any therapist would tell him he's the problem and he's pushing me away.
Did any of you have a similar bad experience with the mental health system not believing you about abuse? How do I cope and overcome?
The lead child protection services worker went so far as to create multiple fake *** accounts to stalk any comments I make on mundane news stories locally to try to shame and humiliate me about what they've put me through.
