Buried

     There are some things you don't talk about.  I assumed by high school that everyone had some particularly nasty secret that they kept from everyone at all costs, I thought perhaps that was just a normal way of life.  One type of abuse that I find particularly hard to talk about, to admit to having experienced, is abuse involving preventing, distorting, or forcefully controlling bodily functions of a young child.  Usually done by a parent or caretaker, this type of abuse usually involves things like telling a child he or she may not use the bathroom for hours and beating them when they finally wet themselves, giving unnecessary and often frequent enemas, or inserting objects or tubes into the anus or genitalia for sexual or sadistic enjoyment.  This interference with bodily function is not limited to elimination, some children in extreme circumstances may be forced to eat things other than food, such as chemicals or excrement, either through forced feeding or with tubes stuck down the throat.
     I have not found many references to this subject.  Maybe because I have not really wanted to look, or maybe because everyone else who knows about it is committed to silence.  The few times I have heard mention of it, in tiny whispers in shadowed corners of human interaction, I have been relieved to know I was not the only one and at the same time, overriding that, the need to squash that subject, that knowledge, that reality, out of existence in my life.  That subject is beyond triggering, and the mental scars run just as deep as the physical scars many victims of this type of abuse have.
     I refuse to pretend this has not happened.  I refuse to forget, I refuse to keep it silent, I refuse not to heal, and I refuse to accept any of the shame that belongs to perpetrators of such crimes but never those it is inflicted on.  This has happened to me, and I am still alive and I have not given up.  The whole point of torture is to break a person, and I am not broken.