RYL Forums - 30 years of abuse...Where I begin to recover

I'm going to try to keep this as general as possible, really just to keep it as short as I can. The whole book will be out in a few years hopefully, but I have to begin where I am.

I was born into Alcoholism and some of my earliest memories are of my parents screaming at each other and pushing or hitting each other. I was the only child from that marriage, and was always told they were staying together for my sake. I always felt like it was my fault they hated each other so much.
When I was six, I was brutally raped by a sixteen year old boy whose little sister I would always get sent to play with so my parents didn't have to watch me. I was very beat up when I limped home that day, and I walked right past my parents and went unnoticed. I dissociated my emotions from the event as it was taking place, and sometimes those emotions still rise up from seemingly nowhere. Over the next 4 years, I was inappropriately touched, rubbed against, and grinded on by 3 separate boys in their upper teens. As my parents passed me off to other people to care for me, it seems like every weekend I was being molested by one boy or another. I would beg my mom not to take me there, but her answer was always "I'm the parent, you are the child", and off I went. I just wanted to be left alone by everyone and isolation and alienation were always my two best friends. I've always felt awkward in social situations and never knew until very recently why.
At 10 years old, my parent's began to allow me to stay home and meet my needs on my own. Things like bathing, brushing my teeth before bed, eating (appropriately), deciding what I was mature enough to watch on TV, and a lot of other little things were never taught to me. I didn't learn those things until later, when I picked up on the fact that other people did them.
The things I learned on my own gave me a pretty skewed outlook on life to put it mildly. I learned how to not feel anything, and I learned that there was power in sex. I also learned that I didn't ever want to become an alcoholic.
Alcohol was not the only thing in my house that would dull your feelings, though. The marijuana was as much a staple in my house as milk is in others. I was 11 when I smoked my first joint and I loved it! I had always been very anxious, and this stuff made me feel like I was so relaxed and calm. I had a couple of close friends, my social awkwardness never allowed me to be popular. It was my secret that I wanted everyone to like me too. I began to develop into someone who didn't care about anything and had no goals for achievement in life. Everything I ever thought of that I wanted to do, I would beat my self down because I wasn't good enough to do that, then would beat myself up for being a quitter.
I got to where I was smoking pot every day by the time I was 15, and it made it easier to talk to people for me, so I started to collect some friends. I was also becoming a very attractive young woman, and found that I could make most boys do whatever I wanted by using sex as a tool. I never equated love with sex whatsoever. In fact, I had no earthly idea what love even was at the time.
I was about to turn 16 when I was staying at a friend's house whose single mother worked late, so we invited some boys over and they brought alcohol. I didn't drink very much before I started getting dizzy and needed to lie down. I stumbled and fell onto my friend's bed, laughing. The next I remember, I woke up with an older guy's hand up my shorts, touching me in places I didn't want to be touched. As soon as he saw that I was awake, he stopped and I never thought about it again until recently.
I started hanging around people who were much older than me, most of them drug buddies of my mom's. I developed an adult vocabulary, and was "crowned" by the people around me as "wise beyond my years" or "an old soul". Today, I know that what they thought they saw in me was really just an abused, afraid little girl, doing whatever she had to do just to feel like she belonged somewhere.
I started dating men who were 10 years or more older than me, Freud may have something to say about that, and I seemed to know more about life than they did, or so I thought. What I knew about was survival, not life.
When I was 19, I started dating a man that was a little closer to my age, he was 25 then. We were polar opposites and being together seemed to make one whole person (co-dependency). He was into heavier drugs than I was, but I wanted to impress him so I tried them too. Often I would be much too high and afraid I was ODing, but still made everyone else believe I was okay. After we had been together over a year, our addictions had progressed dramatically and the relationship became physically abusive. I believed that I was in a normal relationship though. If I could make him mad enough to hit me, then he must love me. I'd watched my parents do that my whole life, so that is what I believed as truth. Then I started to enjoy it when he would beg my forgiveness and profess his undying love for me, and in my twisted way, I began to feel like being hit was worth it.
I had a job at a grocery store where computers were just starting to be used as cash registers, and I understood the operating system better than the owner of the store. I found a way that I could skim money from the registers without being noticed. My boyfriend would send me off to work and tell me I better bring some money home, because he was sick and had no dope. He had long since quit working and depended on me to support him. And I was okay with that because I felt like I was in control. I never saw my own drug use slipping out of control, becoming an addiction.
One day, during a brief period that I had thrown my boyfriend out for being a bum, I took a pregnancy test and found out that I was pregnant. I would like to tell you that I quit using right then and I am at least a happy single mother today. That's not my story. With the best intentions, I decided that I wasn't going to use anymore while I was pregnant. I never took into account the withdrawal. I had been using heroin, and rationalized to myself that prescription pills were safer, and used them until the day the baby was born. Of course social services took the baby and placed him in my sister's care. I had no idea how to cope with real adult life, and retreated into using harder and heavier than ever.
One day, after a physical fight with my boyfriend, I set out determined to get money to get drugs that I wasn't going to share with him. I ended up in a small grocery store a few towns away from home, grabbing the twentys out of the register when the cashier opened it. I didn't even recognize the person I had become. I was put in jail for 45 days and given time to think about it. I was very sick the first few days and desperate to get out, but once I accepted the fact that no one was coming to bail me out, I started getting more comfortable. My cell mate was in for murdering her abusive husband, and that kinda unnerved me, but I didn't bat an eye, so I could keep up my "untouchable" ficade.
The day I got out, I had found God and wasn't going to use ever again. That lasted a whole day. I went right back to it just as hard as before, only now I was on felony probation. The embezzlement also caught up with me around the same time, and my probation officer had me locked up because he was afraid I would die if he didn't. I wouldn't see physical freedom for five years this time. During my time that I was incarcerated, I made myself as invisible as possible and got along just fine. Actually, it was easier not to think about the messes I had made at home as long as I was in there. The year I was to be released, my boyfriend died of an intentional overdose, and for the first time in my life, something rocked me to my core and I grieved. I was zombified with depression for a couple of months and really began to take my own addiction seriously and went through substance abuse counseling.
When I got out, I continued my substance abuse counseling group therapy and began going to 12-step meetings, made clean friends who were recovering from addiction and really felt like I belonged somewhere, but I refused to do the work the program requires in order to work. I had to examine MYSELF and change ME. After spending my whole life in self-deceit, getting down to the real me seemed impossible and I just plain refused to get honest with myself.
So life shows up and me and a guy whom I believed to be my best friend got too carried away when we were alone in a hotel room one night and I said to stop, but he didn't. He only used his fingers to touch me, and never even pulled out his penis, but I was deeply hurt, and refused to tell anyone just as I never had in all the similar situations in the past. I used my own coping skills, isolation and feigned apathy and began to isolate and insulate myself from the people who cared about me.
Six months later, I relapsed and wrecked my car so badly they rushed me to a trauma center by helicopter. Thankfully, I did not have a head injury, but I had two sprained ankles and a ruptured disk in my neck, so I gladly took the pain pills the doc prescribed.
That set off another downhill run of using and trying unsuccessfully to stop, that lasted about two years and didn't end until a few weeks ago when I was brutally raped by my dealer. The last couple of weeks I have truly experienced the pain, fear, self-blame, shame, depression, anger, and anxiety that would be appropriate if all the abuse I had ever lived through happened at one time, says my psychiatrist. I have attempted suicide twice in the last week because I felt so hopeless, useless and worthless. I am seeing three different therapists, a psychiatrist, and I still have some friends from the substance abuse recovery program to support me. This is the first time I've ever faced a crisis head on rather than run and hide with drugs. I have a strong husband who is being fully supportive, but still I am depressed. I am not suicidal now, so I know that progress is being made.
I went to the doctor to get screened for STD's today and it brought back all the negative feelings I've been feeling, only now I'm starting to feel like maybe, even I can recover from this in time.
I hope to one day be able to work in a field that helps victims/survivors of rape trauma. I believe that I must still be alive for a reason, even if I don't know what it is right now, it must be important though, because I have been trying to kill myself (not necessarily physically) since I was six years old. Yet here I am. I have learned a very valuable lesson and if you have made it this far in reading, I saved a treat for you! When I feel lost and don't know where to turn next, sometimes the only thing I can do is start where I am and that is where I begin to recover.