An Email I Sent My Family

Content note: This email contains discussion of childhood sexual abuse and family denial.
I sent this email to my parents and siblings four years ago. What I know of my trauma history has changed since then, as I’ve become a more faithful listener to my own experience and to my body.
This email marks a step on a path I will always be walking, and I share it as such—a record of where I was then, on my way toward fuller truth.
I insist on making one clarification here: I do not love the men who raped me, nor the adults who were complicit in those rapes.
Everything else remains as written, even where my understanding was incomplete. I share it as an honest record, not a final account. The only changes I made to the email text were minor redactions for privacy.

Hi Family,

I hadn't been planning on doing this now, but a spark of fury drove me
to start this email Monday morning. I kept writing after the fury
passed and noticed that it felt good. It feels good to recognize that
I'm safe enough to speak my truth. This email is about the sexual
trauma I experienced as a child. It's a doozy so please take care of
yourself while reading it.

The timing of this email doesn't seem ideal with the holidays next
week. I considered not sending it because I don't want to have a
negative impact on your Thanksgivings, especially with it being
our nephew’s first. I'm sending it anyway because I’ve already waited too
long to be safe enough to say this. The cost of not having been safe
enough sooner (like when the traumas happened or the years immediately
after) is grave and profound. Recently, in really painful moments on
the hardest days, it's felt like it's cost me most of my life.

I don’t believe Mom or Dad sexually abused me. I never accused either
of them of doing so, and I’ll get to that in a moment.

I expect reading this email might be hard. In sharing what I know of
what happened to me, I hope to free myself from the burdens of secrecy
and denial that have restricted and lessened my life. I write with no
meanness or anger, the fury that sparked this email has long since
passed. I strive to be honest and kind. But I’m also not going to take
care of you here. Child rape is awful. Reading about it is awful.
Living with it is awful. This is painful. It's okay if it causes you
pain.

First, I want to address any lingering misunderstandings or
misrepresentations of the events that led to my estrangement from Mom
& Dad in 2016. I went to Mom & Dad and asked for their help in healing
work I was doing around trauma symptoms that were impairing my life. I
was getting closer to material related to early childhood sexual abuse
and incest, but it was muddled and confusing. I don't have cognitive
memories of my abuse (as is commonly the case when the abuse happens
so young), and back then I didn't trust my own knowing like I do now.

I was very clear with Mom & Dad during that conversation that I was
not accusing anyone of anything. I said those exact words multiple
times. I said I didn’t know what happened to me. I also said there are
things about how I experience myself that suggest incest and early
childhood sexual abuse are part of my past. I said I suspected my body
had been violated, but I also said I didn’t know that for sure. I said
it's possible I didn't experience direct abuse but the effects of
trauma that happened in an earlier generation (intergenerational
trauma). I said maybe something happened to me at daycare or by
someone outside the family. I said many times and in lots of different
ways that I didn’t know what happened to me.  I was not angry during
the conversation. I was very open and vulnerable. I came to them,
opened up, and asked them for help.

Unbeknownst to me at the time, both Mom & Dad left that conversation
believing I had accused them of sexually abusing me as a child. Mom
attacked me viciously and meanly over text later that night. It was
terrible. Her response was rageful and violent. Dad was completely
silent. I protected myself by setting a no contact boundary that Mom
then repeatedly violated over the next couple years. I'm not saying
any of this to shame Mom or Dad, but to simply report the facts of
what happened.

My healing work didn’t stop because of their reactions. To the
contrary, I took their reactions as support that incest and early
child sexual abuse is part of this family. People who have no reason
to be so defensive aren’t. I understand much better now the power and
viciousness of denial and how aggressive it can be in the face of
unwanted truth. I've been dealing with it inside myself a lot lately
and it's taught me what a powerful force it is. I don't blame Mom &
Dad. I've forgiven them and re-established what relationships I can
with them. I love them, and I hope they know that.

I now know that I was raped as a child. I'll say it again because it's
worth repeating. I was raped as a child. I was younger than 5 when it
happened. I suspect I was younger than 4. I was terrorized and I was
traumatized. My perpetrator was a family member, someone inside the
same house as me. I believe that person to have been Grandpa Dave. I
don't know how many times, how old I was when it started, what exactly
was done to my body, or when it stopped. I do know that it hurt, that
I believed he might kill me, and that it was impossible to live with
the knowledge that someone who loved me (because he did love me) could
hurt me so badly and seem to enjoy it. This last bit has been at the
heart of the terror I've lived with ever since.

Early last fall I found myself once again seized by an experience of
nighttime terror that has plagued me since I was a child. Every night
I lie in bed in a freeze state (a trauma state that happens when fight
or flight fails to get you to safety). Every muscle in my body locks
down and terror floods my system. My whole life I have waited in the
dark for an unknown sadistic man to come into my room, torture, and
kill me. Gripped by terror, I wait to hear his footsteps on the
stairs. I expect to see him over my bed any moment. My body braced, I
wait with no doubt that he's coming. A part of me is always convinced
I won't live to see morning. It's like living inside horror and I have
spent thousands of nights like this over the course of my life.

This terror experience visits me in waves. It comes into my life and I
live consumed by it for some months before it dissipates. I've
barricaded myself into many rooms. I've slept with knives under my
pillow or bats by my bed. I've lost untold night's of sleep. There was
a season in my early 30's when I waited every night until the sun rose
to try to sleep.

When it came back last fall I brought it into my therapy and healing
work in a way I never have before. It's been such a regular experience
for me that I didn't realize  how terrible it is until I started
really sharing about it and paying attention to it. At first, I just
wanted to make it go away. It was really upsetting to realize I
couldn't. Then, I recognized it as trauma. It seemed silly because I'd
known I have PTSD for years, but suddenly one day I thought, "Oh,
fuck. This is PTSD." I'm not crazy; I'm traumatized. That's when I
became willing to listen.

I have spent the last year befriending my nighttime terror experience
(as much as one can befriend something so fucking awful), tending to
myself around it with love and care, and learning to listen to what my
body has to tell me. While my mind doesn't remember the ways I was
terrorized, my body remembers everything. I realized by listening to
my experience that the sadist I've been waiting for was already inside
the house with me. I learned that I'm not afraid something is about to
happen--despite my mind presenting it to me that way--but reliving
something that has already happened. I see with stunning clarity now
something so blindingly obvious, but that my own denial mechanisms
shielded me from for a very long time: the place where I feel the most
unsafe in the whole world is my own bed, inside my own house, at
night. This is the seat of my terror and trauma.

As a young child in my bed at home, I would lie in a freeze state at
night, my body paralyzed, flooded with terror, while I waited for men
to break into the home and kill us. I used to fall asleep with a book,
my hand, or a stuffed animal over my heart imagining it would stop a
knife or bullet. I used to practice holding my breath so that when one
of these men came into my room they would think I was already dead. I
was a traumatized child. I now understand that my mind created the
image of killer men to make sense of the terror in my body. I
understand that as a child I made the men into outsiders because I
couldn't survive knowing the person who terrorized me was welcome in
the house and someone I lived alongside during the day.

As a child I knew I was not safe in my own bed in my own house at
night. This was true, and I knew it, even when I didn't know why. I
was not safe in my own bed in my own house at night. I went to bed
alone as a child feeling this and lay there terrified. I don't know
when the abuse stopped. When it did stop, I had no way of knowing it
wasn't going to happen again. I have gone to bed every night of my
life since waiting for it to happen. I still wait. I'm 43 years old
and every night my body waits for him.

Growing up, I experienced this nighttime terror in only 2 places: my
bed at home and in the basement of our grandparents’ house. To this day,
I can't sleep in the bedroom in the basement of my own home without
going into a panic attack.

I am still uncovering the truth of what happened to me as a child, but
I am uncovering it. My body is informing me and I am now listening to
it and believing what it tells me.

Back in 2016 all I did in that conversation with Mom and Dad was tell
the truth, and that’s all I’m doing again today. For families carrying
a legacy of incest and early childhood sexual abuse, telling the truth
can seem to some like the worst thing a person can do. It can erupt
all kinds of defenses against knowing the truth and lead to
scapegoating of the person telling the truth. Mom and Dad scapegoated
me in 2016. As I said earlier, denial is powerful. It can also be
violent and mean.

You each get to choose what you do in response to my truth. I have a
lot of empathy and understanding about how my truth might cause you
pain, but I accept no fault or blame for that pain. When a child is
abused and reports it, the child is not to blame for the pain learning
of the abuse causes her loved ones. It’s the same here. I’m not the
cause of your pain. The people in our family ancestry who abused and
sexually violated children are. The man who raped me is.

The impact this email has on you is yours to deal with and live with.
I have to live with rape. I was the victim of a pedophile as a little
girl and I was neglected by parents who refused to see the signs that
I'd been abused, and there were many signs. If my family wants to keep
refusing to see it, I can't do anything about that. Thankfully, your
denial doesn't hurt me anymore. I don’t need your belief. I have my
own.

I don't really care what you choose to do with this information or my
story. I'm done carrying it as a secret and that’s all that matters to
me. I won't tolerate mistreatment or abuse from you though. I don't
tolerate it from anyone. If you want to engage with me in conversation
about this, I'm happy to do that and I expect that conversation to be
respectful and kind. I have a lot of capacity to show up with you in
this, but you have to be willing and able to show up well. If you
can't, I invite you to do some of your own work. Feel free to come to
me anytime in the future when you can meet me as well and respectfully
as I can meet you.

I also invite you to take your time before responding to me. I don't
need immediate replies. I'd rather you take whatever time and space
you need to process this and feel all the feelings you have about it
before coming to me. If you do come to me about this, please do so
privately (no reply all’s to this email) and be kind. Despite all I
shared in this email, you really have no idea what I've lived through.

I love every person in this family. I love Grandpa Dave. I love
myself most of all.

I dedicate the sending of this email to my daughter. May the children in this
family live free from the trauma and terror that's come before them.

I offer a special prayer to Mom: May my healing work bring you peace.

Stacey