Damaged by Childhood Sexual Abuse

This is the first of a four part blog series on the experience of child sexual abuse and experiencing recovery by Patricia Eagle, the author of Being Mean--A Memoir of Sexual Abuse and Survival. Here Patricia shares her story and the damaging effects abuse had on her own life.

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It isn’t unusual for a survivor of child sex abuse to have little or no self worth and to feel damaged. I used to think of myself as a “throw-away girl.” I had developed a strong inner voice that told me I was wrong, not worthy of love, a liar, and couldn’t trust myself. 

At first my dad told me he loved me when we shared intimate times, which for us was masturbating together. I was only four when these times started, and I looked forward to them because of that “feel-good feeling,” and because Daddy paid attention to me then and might tell me he loved me. My mom called this activity “being mean,” which didn’t make sense to me for something that felt so good, but Daddy told me to not tell her about our times, even though somehow she seemed to know. I denied her accusations.

As I got older, I became suspicious about whether we were doing something that was wrong. Dad quit telling me he loved me and sometimes acted mean. Mom insisted that anything that went on “down there” was nasty and bad, so much so that I started worrying and felt confused about my times with Dad. Self-trust was non-existent by now.

When I got a boyfriend at fourteen, Dad quit coming to me, and I shifted what had become a craving for that “feel-good feeling” to someone my age. But my boyfriend was as on again-off again as Dad had been, appearing to like me when we were having sex, but not so much when we weren’t. He kept breaking up with me to date other girls, then coming back and saying how much he loved me when we had sex. I always took him back. 

That’s what I had learned about love, and what I had learned about doubting whether I was of value or not. This pattern confirmed what I thought about myself. I wasn’t worth someone’s sustained attentions. Maybe other girls weren’t having sex with my boyfriend so he came back to me, his nasty girlfriend. Soon I wanted my boyfriend to stay with me forever and love me so much I’d do whatever he wanted. By fifteen I thought I was pregnant. Luckily I was not, but that didn’t curb our sexual activity. 

I was damaged on the inside so subconsciously I tried to align my outer self as damaged, too. At eighteen, I did become pregnant. By now I was having intercourse with two young men, and I wasn’t sure which one was the father. (My boyfriend had broken up with me, but insisted we still “make love” while we dated other people.) After an illegal and dangerous abortion, I set out on a risky course of self-destructing. I’d create a hopeful path for myself, then self-sabotage, over and over. Sometimes it was as simple as becoming a long distance runner and running too far and too fast while maintaining an extremely poor diet, or as reckless as popping acid before going in for a day of public school teaching, or getting pregnant over and over and dangerously terminating the pregnancies. Without realizing what I was doing, create and destroy became my path. 

Such behavior confirmed what I thought of myself. When my Dad told me in my twenties that I was “a filthy slut and whore,” it made sense to me. As I wrote in my memoir, Being Mean--A Memoir of Sexual Abuse and Survival: 

“Now that I’m pregnant again, Dad’s words seem to fit. It occurs to me that there are not any corresponding insulting words like slut and whore that I could use against a man. Filthy itself says something, then slut feels like such a hard word, and whore is simple dismissive. All those words are like dirt, scum, waste, shit, discard, trash. That’s what I feel like when I’m pregnant. Something to throw away. It’s not just the baby that gets tossed, but a piece of my soul as well.”

Child sex abuse is a public health problem by virtue of the damaged humans it leaves in its wake. Our damage surfaces through over-sexualized and risky behaviors, unwanted pregnancies, suicide attempts, extremely poor judgment, debilitating depression and anxiety, PTSD, and patterns of treating ourselves with disdain and distrust. 

In the next blog post I’ll talk about learning to listen to helpful inner voices that tell us we have value, are worthy of love and can trust ourselves.



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Patricia Eagle is the author of Being Mean: A Memoir of Sexual Abuse and Survival. She discovered language with her first word, “bird,” and later found great solace in nature. Six decades of journaling also served as a life buoy – tangible evidence of a life explored in earnest while being tossed by the confounding experiences of childhood sexual abuse. Her experience as a high school teacher informed her master’s research on the use of “professional reflective journaling,” a method to help educators better understand themselves and their students. A story gatherer, Eagle maintains an unyielding commitment to excavating and acknowledging what is resilient about her life and the lives of others, as an author and a Life- Cycle Celebrant®. Eagle lives amidst mountains and hot springs in the San Luis Valley in south central Colorado, where she watches the Milky Way splash across the night skies. Visit her online at https://patriciaeagle.com/ to learn more about her upcoming speaking engagements in Houston, Austin, Sacramento, Dunsmuir, Pacifica, Novato, and Santa Barbara.