How To Talk To A Childhood Sexual Abuse Survivor

Every story is valid, and our pain isn’t a competition

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Trigger Warning: childhood s**ual abuse

I’ve never had a good experience when it comes to talking about what happened to me.

I was around ten years old. It only happened once; I remember freezing as he groped my chest and tried to force my hand to return those uncomfortable, dangerous touches. At the time, I remember feeling confused and unable to move, but I wasn’t frightened, and the only reason why was because I didn’t understand what he was doing. It wasn’t until I hit my teen years and was on antidepressants, suffering from severe depression and anxiety coupled with flashbacks that I realized what happened. I was eighteen when I finally said those four words I had dreaded to my mother and sister: ‘He touched me too.’

There was no textbook titled “How To Deal With Pedophilia In The Family” to help us navigate these highly abnormal circumstances. And at the time, none of us understood how trauma and grooming worked — it gaslights you into believing you’re wrong, that you should feel ashamed for what happened, and it silences you.

As a survivor that has stopped being silent, however, I have learned the hard way that I cannot always trust people with my story, even the people I loved most in the world. At eighteen I fell in love with an older man and I told him everything that happened to me with this romanticized, picture-perfect image of him knowing everything about me making him love me more. I knew so much about him (now I realize that this is because he was a narcissist who loved the sound of his own voice) but at the time, I wanted him to know everything about me and still love me with all his heart. But when I told him about my childhood, his response was this: ‘Get the violins out.’

After that, I learned that no one understands. Unless they’ve experienced it, no one cares. And so followed more years of staying silent, burying what happened to me deep within me and trying to live a life like I was normal and nothing so cruel had ever happened to me. If people asked about family, which people do more often than you think, I’d tell them the relative who hurt me was dead. I didn’t have to talk about my relative or his…