nlhc
As a Nurse, I can tell you that their lives wont go well. Usually abused females end up neurotics and suffer from Personality disorders, and more often than not, Anorexic. They binge and then puke up all theyve eaten, its all about feeling guilty about being female and developing into womanhood, so they do all they can to destroy their body shape, because of that guilt feeling, and it all stems from childhood.
Well it seems to me that you have seen a very limited population. I have worked as a counselor with over 600 survivors of childhood sexual abuse. I never worked with a person who was anorexic. Actually the opposite was more likely to walk into my office. I've only worked with a handful of women who binged and purged but many more were binge eaters.
Most were not neurotic in fact few were. Almost all suffered from depression, low self-esteem, difficulties with trust in their personal and professional lives, issues around sexuality.
I worked with women with a wide range of dissociative disorders. Many had been wrongly diagnosed with a wide range of personality disorders all of which were wrong (in one case a woman was hospitalized for 1 week and received 5 different diagnoses that could not co-exist from 5 different psychiatrists). Another woman had been treated for 16 years before her psychiatrist sent her to me. In one year she had conquered most of her demons and was functioning quite well in her life.
I would say that up to 75% of the people I worked with were high functioners. They had good careers, they were excelling in college or university, they were raising families and doing a good job of it and had made sure not to pass abuse down to their children.
I saw women who had gotten into substance abuse, cutting, prostitution but had found ways out of it and wanted something better for their lives and were willing to work hard to get it.
To be honest there were the women who were too lost or too afraid to look at the past. My sister who committed suicide was one of them. Sad that I could help others but not her. We don't see the ones who ended it all so there is no way to count them.
I wasn't a miracle worker. Just a counselor who knew what the demons were and could help others move into a better life.
All that being said I too was working with a limited population. If you went to a female prison who could say most of the prisoners had been sexually abused and that was why they were in jail. But you can't take any limited population and say that is how all or even most sexual abuse victims turn out. We each see a small part of the long term effects.
And then there are those who learn how to deal with the past and actually have good lives without abuse repeating itself. We don't see them in hospitals or counseling offices. They seem to be able to manage quite well without therapy.