A reader found Adoption Under One Roof by searching for the answer to this question:

Is it normal to dream of the person who sexually abused you?

The short answer is yes – this is completely normal. It is also normal for the abuser never to appear in your dreams. It all ties into how ready a sexual abuse survivor is to begin dealing with the aftermath of the sexual abuse.

After my father passed away, I used to dream about him all the time. This is because my subconscious was trying to process the fact that my father was dead. He died suddenly in his early forties, so I had a lot to process as a teenager. However, I never dreamed about my mother, who sexually abused me throughout my childhood. That did not happen until I was ready to begin healing from the sexual abuse.

Dreams after sexual abuse can be very scary and disturbing.

On Trauma Tuesday, I wrote about sexually abused children who feel responsible for being sexually abused by older siblings. Today, I would like to broaden the scope to talk about children who feel responsible for the sexual abuse they endured.

If you were never sexually abused yourself, you might be surprised to learn that many sexual abuse survivors believe that they are at least partially responsible for the sexual abuse that they endured, even though they were only children when the abuse happened. To an adult who was never sexually abused, the truth that a child cannot possibly invite or consent to a sexual relationship is obvious. However, a normal aftereffect of sexual abuse is for the traumatized foster or adopted child to believe that he is, at least in part, responsible for the sexual abuse, even if the perpetrator was an adult.

There is actually a rational reason for sexual abuse survivors embracing this belief.

A common form of sexual abuse is by siblings or cousins. If you are parenting a foster or adopted child who was sexually abused by an older child, particularly by a sibling or cousin, you will have added issues to deal with. The most difficult one is the adopted child feeling responsible for the abuse.

I see this issue frequently among adult survivors of sexual abuse. They believe that, because the abuser was also a child, they must have consented to the abuse or be partially responsible for it. You might hear this line of reasoning from older adopted children, particularly those in their teens. The problem is that, as abused children grow older, they judge themselves through their teen or adult eyes and lose sight of their vulnerability as a young child. They forget that a 12-year-old child is not a peer of an eight-year-old.

In most cases, the abusive sibling is older, often by three or more years. Think about an eight-year-old’s “power” over a five-year-old. They are hardly peers. The younger child views the older child as a “big kid” and typically views the older child as an authority figure of sorts. So, there not a mutual relationship between the siblings.

Unfortunately, child abuse survivors tend to discount the difference in age.

Whenever someone talks to me about adopting an older child, I always encourage him to adopt in birth order. For example, if you have a seven-year-old child in the home, I strongly encourage the adoptive parents to adopt a child who will be the youngest. One reason for this is that I have heard too many stories of older adoptive children coming into the home and abusing their younger adopted siblings.

This scenario happens more frequently than you might appreciate, and it is not only limited to the scenario I laid out above. Sometimes the adoptive parents adopt a sexually abused child out of foster care and then later adopt an infant. In some cases, the older adopted child will sexually abuse the younger adopted children.

Fortunately, the vast majority of sexual abuse survivors do not become abusers themselves, but, unfortunately, a number of sexual abuse survivors do sexually abuse others. When we are talking about children abusing other children, the issue can also be that the older child is trying to work through what happened to him when he was younger. Regardless of the reason, his actions create more victims that need healing.

Adopted or foster children who have been traumatized have a difficult time feeling “normal.” It is hard to feel like you fit in when your experiences are so vastly different than the experiences of your peers. Even after the traumatized child has been removed from an abusive household and goes to live in a “normal” environment, the foster or adopted child still brings along his or her own baggage, which causes the child to feel like a fish out of water.

Frequently, traumatized children have unmet needs that cause them to feel different from their peers. For example, while peers might already know that they fit in somewhere (whether that is at home, with friends, or as a member of a team), the traumatized child frequently has not yet had the experience of feeling like a part of something bigger – at least not in a good way. That makes the traumatized child feel like he does not fit in, which only fuels the child’s shame and insecurities.

Another big area in which a traumatized child might not feel like she fits in is when it comes to relationships with the opposite sex.