Childhood sexual abuse can lead to a wide variety of problems in adult survivors. It affects the person’s sense of self, their intimate relationships (or lack thereof) their sexuality, their parenting styles. Hardly an aspect of their lives are unaffected. Some typical symptoms are:

• Feeling bad, guilty or ashamed

• Feeling there’s something wrong with me deep down inside

• Having trouble expressing emotions

• Finding it hard to trust other people

• Having difficulty believing you are loved or lovable

• Problems with sexuality - can manifest as promiscuity, lack of enjoyment of sex, sometimes  “flashing back” to memories of abuse during sex.

• Ending up in abusive relationships where they are controlled and held powerless

• depression, self mutilation, suicide, drug or alcohol abuse.

An individual may not suffer from all of these symptoms, nor does experiencing the symptoms mean that you must have been abused. They are, however, common outcomes of sexual abuse in childhood.

The good news is that victims can find paths to healing from abuse. After all, they are survivors. They have already found ways to deal with the abuse, it’s just that the ways that they have found aren’t the best. They worked in some way back then, but they may not be appropriate today. Sometimes victims feel that there is no healing. “After all, you can’t change the past. What happened did happen and nothing can change that.” Although you can’t change the past, it isn’t what happened that is affecting victims today, it’s what they learned then that affects them. The beliefs, attitudes, “truths about the world, themselves, men" - these are the ties that bind them to their unhappy present. These are the ties that must be loosed if healing is to happen.

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