Hi there Whispermae, firstly I'd like to acknowledge your bravery in being vulnerable with us in sharing these traumatic experiences from your past, we are very privileged to be trusted by you in this way. How does it feel for you when you share these experiences and/or type them out? If you feel comfortable sharing how it makes you feel, and if you'd like anything that could help you feel more safe after disclosing an experience of assault, or more safe during/before/after, please let us know.
I am so sorry to hear about the ways that your body autonomy has been violated by people in positions of authority who should have been providing care to you in the past, and how this has lead to you feeling about yourself now. These events should not have happened, and you are valid in identifying as someone who has survived assault and abuse.
In this most recent experience of being triggered by an ECG and thinking of your early memory with the Didi violating your bodily autonomy and then the doctor, seems like quite an insightful connection that you might find benefit in chatting to your psychiatrist about if you've not done so already. Is that something you would be comfortable speaking to them about? (I understand from your other threads that you see someone for your CPTSD, which I'm glad to hear you have this kind of support).
To touch on the framing of your memory with the Didi, her touching you in an intimate place roughly and without consent and with words of shame
is a kind of assault: assault doesn't require insertion of an item into an anus or vagina, and also not about sexual desire/sex as motivation at all, and rather is about
power, and
control. In the example you gave here, the power/control dynamic by bodily boundary/trust violation (touching you in an intimate place/at all without consent), is really clear, and they acted against what a care giver should give, that you as a child inherently deserved. This person should have been someone you could trust, trust and helped overcome a fear of an unfamiliar place by empowering you, and instead assaulted you.
For this to be followed by an intrusive non-consensual medical examination at a similar age (it is possible to get consent from a child at that age, and also you are 100% right that the doctor should have told you what they planned to do, and why, in a child appropriate way), I can see how it would make total sense to be triggered by a situation in which someone with power (a medical professional) touching you in an area private to you, and your brain to connect it to these childhood experiences of intense distress. Distress is a kind of pain too, just because something didn't cause what we might think of as
physical injury, the way that the brain processes all pain is well documented as being all part of the same system.
I am of course not a psychologist or therapist, so this is best unpacked with a trained professional who can provide a safe, caring space in which they have the training to help keep you safe, however I hope that this helps you feel more valid in your experience, because you are
so valid in deserving support and the opportunity to heal from these experiences. Whilst everyone who has experienced abuse and assault has their own individual journey and experiences, this doesn't mean that anyone is less deserving than anyone else/being in spaces for healing, because everyone deserves access to what they need to heal.
I hope this post helps you, it can be really confronting and/or difficult to hear/read your experiences described/validated as abuse, even if it is also validating (or may only feel validating later). I hope you have good tools available for you for self-soothing and self-care when you are interacting with these memories and feelings.
Just in case you would like some more of these, I am going to leave some articles and lists here, however it is entirely up to you if you'd like to interact with them or use them!