Codependency causes people to feed off each other’s emotions and to lose their ability to care for themselves. Codependency is a cruel dance where one person needs the other who needs to be needed. Thus, you end up with one adult being the giver and the other the taker.
Sexual abuse in childhood can leave people vulnerable to forming codependent relationships and complex post-traumatic stress disorder.
Is there a way to heal from codependency after childhood sexual abuse? That is what this article shall explore.
What is Childhood Sexual Abuse?
Child sexual abuse is sexual activity with a child by an adult, adolescent, or older child. While most people think of penetration as child sexual abuse, glaring, touching, showing pornographic pictures, or speaking sexually to a child is also child sexual abuse.
There are several effects that experiencing childhood sexual abuse, which is an adverse childhood experience (ACE) can have on the physical and mental wellbeing of the victim. Later in life, they may form or have:
- Unplanned pregnancies
- Obesity
- Cancer
- Depression
- Complex post-traumatic stress disorder
- Substance abuse disorder
- An increased risk of suicide
- Problems with intimate relationships
Unfortunately, child sexual abuse is not rare. Every nine minutes, a substantiated claim of child sexual abuse is made by child protective services with over 65,000 children are being abused in the United States each year. Approximately one in four women and one in six men were abused sexually as children. (Prevent Child Abuse North Carolina)
The problem is enormous and has gotten worse since the coronavirus epidemic when children have been forced to remain home instead of going to school.
Who are the Victims and Perpetrators of Childhood Sexual Abuse?
Children are innocent and do not understand adult sexuality. They are naïve and do not understand they should avoid certain people or circumstances.
The victims of child sexual abuse are any children below the age of eighteen. They come from all economic and all other demographic backgrounds. There is no family that is totally safe or immune from child sexual abuse.
The perpetrator of childhood sexual abuse is usually someone the child and their families know well and trusts of either sex.
Yes, women sexually abuse children too.
The perpetrator might be a pastor, a family friend, a scoutmaster, or many people who have power over the child. Often perpetrators were sexually abused themselves as children, but that is only an explanation, not an excuse for their behavior.
A perpetrator need not be frightening to the child and often is subtle, quiet, covert, and even pleasurable to the child as it is disguised as play. Perpetrators of childhood sexual abuse often deny their behavior and blame it on their victims.
How Do Victims of Childhood Sexual Abuse Become Codependent?
Becoming codependent doesn’t happen in the open where everyone can see, nor does it occur overnight. Codependency begins when a child feels emotionally abandoned and they begin to repress their feelings, needs, and thoughts. Children are adept at numbing their hurt and to cope and be accepted, they hide behind false personalities and develop codependent behaviors to cope. This maltreatment usually occurs over the space of several years or even decades.
Dysfunctional families are the breeding ground for codependency. This type of family has closed in on itself, not allowing new ideas to be discussed among the members of the family and certainly not with someone outside the family unit. Some families are isolated while others make appearances such as in a church and are highly respected in the community while in private they suffer. Within the family, talking about the family to others is considered disloyal and the family will use shame and fear, keeping members in line.
Children growing up in a codependent family learn early to not trust and to protect, plus take care of any members who live with addiction or other dysfunctional problems.
In short, the child grows up believing, because of experiences with their family of origin, that they are responsible for the well-being of anyone they have an intimate relationship with.
Symptoms of Codependency
Codependency has many symptoms, but a person need not have all of them to qualify as a codependent. The symptoms of codependency vary in degrees of severity and, if left untreated, can lead to worsening symptoms.
Below is a list of the symptoms of codependency:
- Perfectionism
- Low self-esteem where you feel you are not enough
- Giving up your all to please someone else
- Absent or weak boundaries
- Reacting instead of acting
- Difficulty expressing oneself with your feelings and thoughts
- Difficulty saying no
- Denial of your own feelings
- Denial that you are a codependent
- Caretaking and controlling
- Addiction to a substance or another person
- Shame
- Fear
- Anxiety
- Despair
- Depression
- Having a lack of assertiveness about what you need
- Afraid of being alone
- Feeling trapped in a poor relationship but being unable to get yourself to leave
- Relying on other’s opinions of you
- Avoiding closeness
- Trying to control others through manipulation
Codependents wake up each morning wondering how “we” are feeling rather than how am “I” feeling. Their lives are entangled around that of someone else, but there are ways to break free.
Methods to Overcoming Codependency After Childhood Sexual Abuse
People who grew up being sexually abused sometimes wake up to find themselves in a codependent relationship with someone else. They suddenly realize that they have become either the doormat or the user in the relationship and wish to change. Usually, this change is brought about by someone else’s healing or by attending a twelve-step group. No matter how the person first recognizes they are codependent, they must act if they are to escape.
The first step to escaping codependency is to leave denial behind and confront head-on the problem while acknowledging reality. If that sounds hard, it is because it is very difficult to admit to yourself that you have been trapped in a circular relationship. It is likely that this change in perspective begins as the result of a life event known as hitting bottom, where your life has become so unmanageable that you want out.
Once an awakening has occurred, it is critical to make changes. Instead of ignoring the facts, recognize them as painful but true. You may not like the facts, but with effort, you can see them as they truly are.
The second step, after recognizing there is a codependent problem, is to reach out for help. Many people start with getting professional help, such as a therapist, while others turn to twelve-step groups to help them heal. With this help, you will learn about codependency and how your childhood sexual abuse was a catalyst in forming it.
After these two steps, you will find you are experiencing hope as your guilt and denial melt away. You will learn what healing means to you and refocus your life on yourself.
This is not selfishness it is the way it should have always been.
Finally, because you have begun to care for your needs and build boundaries, you will build your own identity and recognize your dreams and needs.
Ending Our Time Together
While living in a codependent relationship, you have made someone else more important than yourself. After a while, all your thought, feelings, and actions revolve around that other person and how you can meet their needs while ignoring your own.
Sexual abuse experienced in childhood can lead to an increased risk of becoming codependent if not acknowledged and treated. One can attend twelve-step groups such as Al-Anon or seek professional help from a qualified therapist.
Sexually abusive experiences in childhood need not capture and control your life as an adult. You are grown now and in control of your destiny. Breaking free of a codependent relationship is painful and difficult, but the rewards of doing so are enormous.
“Codependents are reactionaries. They overreact. They under-react. But rarely do they act. They react to the problems, pains, lives, and behaviors of others. They react to their own problems, pains, and behaviors.”–Melody Beattie
“Many of us live in denial of who we truly are because we fear losing someone or something and there are times that if we don’t rock the boat, too often the one we lose is ourselves… It feels good to be accepted, loved, and approved of by others, but often the membership fee to belong to that club is far too high of a price to pay.”–Dennis Merritt Jones
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My name is Shirley Davis and I am a freelance writer with over 40-years- experience writing short stories and poetry. Living as I do among the corn and bean fields of Illinois (USA), working from home using the Internet has become the best way to communicate with the world. My interests are wide and varied. I love any kind of science and read several research papers per week to satisfy my curiosity. I have earned an Associate Degree in Psychology and enjoy writing books on the subjects that most interest me.
Hi Shirley, Just read your post re codependency and childhood sexual abuse. I am dumfounded that you continue to recommend 12 step groups for healing. There is absolutely nothing evidence-based about the 12 steps for healing from abuse or substance use disorders and the myriad of other problems Bill W’s steps pretend to treat or cure.
I’m surprised that a well informed site like this one does not edit their posts for accuracy and present the public with the latest research and evidence based treatments based on science.
Oh…you’re diabetic? There’s a 12 step group for that! Racist? One for that! Too emotional…porn addict, over eater, guess what? You guessed it! Yup! 12 step groups for everything! Good grief! It’s 2022 already.
Lise
12-step groups offer support by meeting new people who have similar difficulties as you. Healing happens when you find out you are not alone. I’m sorry you do not approve of them but millions of people, including myself, have found them very healing. Shirley
hi Shirley, are there differences between trauma and traumatic bond? How can a child know if she is in a healthy relationship or a trauma bonding? Thank you for your excellent article
Hi Carola. A trauma bond is an intense relationship between two people. I found the following article that may help you. https://thriveworks.com/blog/what-does-trauma-bonding-look-like/ Healthy relationships are give and take where each person gives of themselves but also takes from the other person. I also found this article:
https://www.oprahdaily.com/life/relationships-love/a36788688/what-is-trauma-bonding/ It has information on what is and how to break a trauma bond. Good luck to you. If you have any further questions feel free to contact me. Thank you for reading my piece. I appreciate that. Shirley
If physically survived, emotional and/or psychological trauma from unhindered toxic abuse, sexual or otherwise, usually results in a helpless child’s brain improperly developing. If allowed to continue for a prolonged period, it can act as a starting point into a life in which the brain uncontrollably releases potentially damaging levels of inflammation-promoting stress hormones and chemicals, even in non-stressful daily routines. I consider it a form of non-physical-impact brain damage.
The lasting mental pain is very formidable yet invisibly confined to inside one’s head. It is solitarily suffered, unlike an openly visible physical disability or condition, which tends to elicit sympathy/empathy from others. It can make every day a mental ordeal, unless the turmoil is treated with some form of medicating, either prescribed or illicit.
The health of all children — and not just whining over what other parents’ children might or will cost us as future criminals or costly cases of government care, etcetera — needs to be of real importance to us all, regardless of how well our own developing children are doing.
A physically and mentally sound future should be every child’s fundamental right — along with air, water, food and shelter — especially considering the very troubled world into which they never asked to enter. Mindlessly minding our own business on such matters has too often proven humanly devastating.
I believe there remains a societal mentality, albeit perhaps subconscious: Men can take care of themselves, and boys are basically little men. Over many years of news-media consumption, I’ve noticed that when victims of sexual abuse are girls their gender is readily reported as such; however, when they’re boys, they’re usually referred to gender-neutrally as children. It’s as though, as a news product made to sell the best, the child victims being female is somehow more shocking than if male.
Also, I’ve heard and read news-media references to a 19-year-old female victim as a ‘girl’, while (in an unrelated case) a 17-year-old male perpetrator was described as a ‘man’. Could it be that this is revelatory of an already present gender bias held by the general news consumership, since news-media tend to sell us what we want or are willing to consume thus buy?
It could be the same mentality that might help explain why the book Childhood Disrupted was only able to include one man among its six interviewed adult subjects, there presumably being such a small pool of ACE-traumatized men willing to formally tell his own story of childhood abuse.
It could be yet more evidence of a continuing subtle societal take-it-like-a-man mindset; one in which so many men, even with anonymity, would prefer not to ‘complain’ to some stranger/author about his torturous childhood, as that is what ‘real men’ do. [FYI: I tried multiple times contacting the book’s author via internet websites in regards to this non-addressed florescent elephant in the room, but I received no response.]
Sadly, as I grow & heal through my incest, I realize that this is just one choice that is made from sex addictions. In my family there have definitely been at least 3 or 4 generations of sexual addictions being learned & passed on. But I do believe, that just as in any other addiction we need to separate the people who have been hurt by this addiction! I am powerless over anyones sex addiction & my life became unmanageable, but a power Greater than myself is the one that I need to restore me to sanity! It is an extremely painful addiction in a family or to be affected by anyones addiction to sex! I am grateful that we have a place to start telling the truth of how hard it is to suffer through & survive living with a sex addict. I did survive it & made it through, but my hope is that we give all of our next generations a chance to be free from this addiction to be taking the lives of many & ruining the chance for functional families. Sex addictions definitely bring insanity to the family & separation from any real love for one another. It is killing our families. But if we can start working the program & supporting one another, we will be able to restore our families back to living functional lives! I pray for this change, & an end to do much destruction of Life! We deserve Better!