Healing from sexual abuse

Cindy Benezra is an author, inspirational speaker, entrepreneur, and sexual abuse advocate. She co-founded and runs a luxury event company with her daughter and she spends much of her time creating beautiful spaces for some of the most important events in people’s lives. Currently, she and her husband live in Seattle, Washington and are the parents of four adult children with their youngest son having special needs.

Cindy is also the founder of CindyTalksTM, a platform where she discusses healing tools and stories of hope for other trauma survivors.  She grew up in a family in middle America but her Father was a pedophile and her memoir, Under The Orange Blossoms is about her experiences growing up and the long process of healing she has gone through to help her deal with the sexual, physical and mental abuse she suffered.

Cindy thinks pedophilia is still a very taboo subject and one that people are very resistant to talking about but she wants to find a platform to have discussions about sexual abuse predators. Cindy feels comfortable talking about what happened to her now because she doesn't define herself by the abuse and has had a lot of therapy.   She doesn’t want to be seen as a victim and there is nothing holding her in that place anymore.  She has no grief or shame about it and feels free of any words, feeling or emotions around it.

It wasn’t until she was writing her book that Cindy found out that her father was also abusing her sister and other neighbourhood children. She didn't find this out until she was an adult as she travelled a lot and didn’t return to the US until she was 18. When she met up with some of her old friends they shared with her that her gather had abused them and how it had destroyed their lives, marriages and sexuality. She had thought she was the only one who had gone through it but to listen to other people and how it had destroyed them left her with incredible guilt. Didn't know what to do but could just hold space for them. She had empathy and understood but it was hard not to feel responsible for them.

Cindy’s mother was a very loving and affectionate person but Cindy recognises that she had faults and that she rationalised a lot things that she saw in the household. The abuse started when she was five years old but when she was ten Cindy confronted her mother.  She was taken to a woman’s shelter where she was examined where it was found that her hymen was intact and she didn't have any broken bones so, although she had bruises on her body, it was her fathers word against hers and she was put back with the family. Her mother was terrified of living and working on her own and her father used this to control Cindy - if you share this it’ll shame your mother, everyone will know and she’ll lose her home. In the 1970’s social standing was very big on how you appeared in society, what you looked like, what you did for work and how you dressed. 

Cindy went through a lot of different therapy. At the beginning she went to a family therapist then sexual abuse and trauma specialists.  Therapy evolved and she found there was a specialty for everything as she developed from a young adult to a mother. She also dabbled in alternative therapies and found some of them very helpful but she feels that the culmination of everything was healing from reading and listening to other people, the willingness to heal and the degree you to which you want to do it. It’s a matter of choice and how much you want to dig in to your past and what happened. It’s not fun digging in the past and dredging up old things.

Cindy did it in the hope that she would find other people, probably people that she would never meet but that if she could give hope and let them know that you can have an amazing life, be a professional, have a healthy relationship, can choose how you want to be and show up in this world. To Cindy it was such a long journey that she thought it was a shame not to share with someone else that there are choices, we can  all can heal and that it’s up to each individual wants to go how far they want to go. There is no right or wrong in the process.

Some people define the victim status and choose to self-identify but in a victim who has gone through this experience, a willingness to heal is an essential part of the acceptance phase. It’s also part of growing up, the evolution of just being human and going through it. There was a pivotal point when she was ten years old and she felt so stuck and so trapped. She would talk with her mother and sister and fantisise about how it would be if her father didn't exist and if he was here what we could do to get rid of him. She watched an episode of a murder series where someone poisoned her significant other with arsenic and Cindy remembered thinking that's it. I’m going to get rid of him. She thought of different ways she could do this but going through the thought process she realised she was scared just like her father.

Cindy was stuck in fear and behaving just like him and wanted to hurt someone all the time as he did.  It was a true aha moment and she saw that she had become her father and become the monster. She didn't recognise who she was and started thinking about how could she do or be the opposite of what he was. It was an early stage of how she did not want to become like him and clearly shows the dilemma of children brought up with a strong sense of values but how with an abusive father the values serve to control.

You can find out more about Cindy at https://www.cindytalks.com

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