The Broken Sanctity of a Home Invasion

Violating the Sanctity of a Home Invasion

A home is a castle – a place where you can seek refuge and safety from the outside world as its walls and other barriers give you the privacy, peace of mind and intimacy that makes you feel like you can let your guard down and enjoy the tranquility of the moment inside the comforts of your own home. Theoretically, nothing should strip you of these pleasures and joys today but in today’s society, the risks are getting higher you will be victimized sooner or later.

Once you are victimized, there is much to be said about the impacts of a home invasions occurrence that will always remain inside your head. A major step in reducing your risk or anxiety level is to install a burglar alarm system that notifies the police or security company who owns the equipment.

Psychologically, a home invasion is detrimental to your faith in society and mankind. It does, after all is said, strip you bare of your trust in people. Once your protective barriers, physical or psychologically have been broken or breached, there are difficult times ahead to regain the trust and intimacy once achieved in your life before the rude and criminal breach of being tormented and kept hostage inside your own home.

Psychologically, the home is a refuge from the outside world and a family’s niche of privacy and intimacy. Nothing can strip the peace and tranquility that is felt in one’s home better than a home invasion. It has to be the embodiment of terror and fear combined. Once the protective emotional barrier has been breached, the family’s fortress is no longer considered or felt to be a safe haven or sanctuary like before, and the emotional toll taken from the family can have far-reaching consequences.

One has to ask; why me and why my house for this dreadful violation of human decency and vulnerable emotions? Some would say it is your house’s accessibility and visibility that made it a target. Perhaps it was your display of your material possessions tempted or attracted attention for a potential reward by robbing you of your property or many other valuable things.  

Another reason could be your occupancy as to who lives there with you or perhaps yourself as you have allowed your routine and habits to be exposed to become a familiar event to the prospective burglar who allows his own greed to steal from you what you have. Regardless of what you see or what others think, your vulnerability is always high and the price you pay once victimized, impacts your mind in many different ways.

Let’s start of this discussion that once you are burglarized or terrorized inside your own home, the loss is not only in the pocketbook as they carry your possessions away. Home insurance will cover most of your losses but what can’t be recovered is your trust in people and how you survived a potentially lethal situation making your materialistic losses seem less unimportant.

Priority should be in protecting yourself, your family and every occupant inside the house. Steps should be taken daily to ensure no one is harmed and although a home invasion begins as a burglary, many botched attempts have turned fatal where hostages were taken to try to escape from the crime scene and not get caught.

The impact of such a dramatic event inside your home can last forever. Once your emotions have been triggered by such a disgusting and vile offense, your sense of trust will turn into anger, fear, and a gross perception you have been violated in many ways.

It is not uncommon to associate panic, shock, and extreme psychological pain to be a part of an uncontrolled tirade of hateful emotions and ever-lasting post-traumatic stress symptoms at the most medium to severe levels of distrust and rage often associated with

Sadly, whenever such an event takes place, your sense of security is forever impacted as you become fearful in your own environment or setting you once felt secure in. the fact you were vulnerable builds a fear inside you it can happen again and makes you worry more about the future than ever before. Some even turn this fear into an obsession and change their entire lifestyle to address their worries or concerns.

Feeling uneasy inside your own house is natural once you have been violated. The insecurity will always be there it could happen again and worrying about another break-in or worse, makes you a nervous wreck to be around, particularly if staying at home alone is normal or you work late at night and fear another attack on your privacy or that second home invasion.

Home invasions are two pronged. One is the kind where they burglarize you when you are not home and take your possessions but leave behind a mess and signs they violated your personal and private space. The second means, consider the more risky and worst feared, is the kind where someone attacks in your home while you or your family members are there and force their way into the house seeking whatever it is they want to take. Unfortunately, such invasions usually result in physical and sexual assaults, serious bodily harm or homicides. These kinds of events occur much more than we realize.

They could be armed with knives of guns; they could strong arm you and your family by threats and physically assaulting you as you attempt to resist. The methods vary but regardless how it is done, whoever committed this crime is less concerned about your safety and more concerned about their own not to get caught so they instill the most fear they are capable of in this critical period of terror.

This terror is usually spontaneous and can be twisted in many ways. You may be bound, gagged or blindfolded to protect the identity of the invaders. There are many risks involved in such a dreadful scenario and there is no way to prepare yourself for such a tragic event as they have caught you completely off guard when they invaded your home.

Quickly after such an invasion, you become distrustful of all who you don’t know well enough to vouch for and your attention drifts to wondering who committed the crime, becoming suspect of even friends and neighbors. This festering distrust could potentially complicate personal relationships, causing even more stresses for the victim.

Unfortunately most people don’t cope very well after being violated. Wrestling with the psychological after-effects of a home invasion is tough, and some people deal with the anxiety in many different ways. Some let their anger direct them to more extreme methods to protect themselves in the future and focus on augmenting home security measures with steel bars on the doors and windows. Others go as far as selling their house and moving to a new home and neighborhood to regain peace of mind. Sadly the effects of this type of crime can be long lasting and difficult to overcome. It’s not just money and material possessions at stake here; it could result in the loss of a human life.