Surviving in silence
I’ve carried something inside me for 46 years that I never fully said out loud until recently.
When I was eight years old, I was sexually abused by my friends father, and I didn’t tell anyone. I tried everything over the years to numb pain. Addiction, bad choices, shame, anger, insecurity, constantly trying to prove my masculinity, constantly terrified of what people would think of me if they ever knew. But the part that haunted me most was not only what happened. It was how my body reacted.
For 46 years I carried this confusion and shame because my body physically responded, and my mind twisted that into believing maybe something was wrong with me. Maybe I had wanted it. Maybe I was weak. Maybe I didn’t want him to stop it. Maybe freezing meant I consented somehow. I know now that none of that is true.
An eight year old child is not responsible for how their body reacts during trauma. The body can respond automatically even when the mind is scared and confused. I wish I would have known that decades ago because I carried that misunderstanding like a prison sentence for most of my life.
I’m still working through the anger and the grief. I still have days where memories hit me hard. I still have healing left to do. But for the first time in my life, I’m finally facing what happened instead of hiding.
I am working with my therapist to hopefully one day no longer carry the shame, believing my body’s reaction meant that I wanted it or consented to it.