An Email I Sent My Family
Content note: This email contains references to child sexual assault and incest.
This document has been edited for publication and to protect privacy.
Hi Family,
I hadn't planned to send this email now, but a spark of fury compelled me to begin writing on Monday morning. I kept writing after the fury passed and noticed that it felt good. It feels good to recognize that I am finally safe enough to speak my truth. This email is about the sexual trauma I experienced as a child. Please take care of yourself while reading it.
The timing of this email doesn't seem ideal. I considered not sending it because I don't want to have a negative impact on your Thanksgivings. 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 is grave and profound. Recently, in painful moments on the hardest days, it feels like it's cost me most of my life.
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 without 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 sexual assault is awful. Reading about it is awful. Living with it is awful. This is painful. It's okay if it causes you pain.
Several years ago, I went to my parents 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 visual 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 repeatedly told my parents that I wasn't accusing anyone of anything. I said those exact words. I explained that I didn't know what had happened to me, only that my symptoms pointed toward early childhood sexual abuse and incest. I came to them openly and vulnerably, asking for help.
Unbeknownst to me at the time, my parents had a very different experience of that conversation. I was attacked viciously and meanly over text later that night. It was terrible. I was also stonewalled. I protected myself by setting a no contact boundary.
My healing work didn’t stop because of their reactions. Instead, I took their reactions as evidence that incest and early childhood sexual abuse were part of this family's history. 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 now know that I was sexually assaulted as a child. I was terrorized and I was traumatized. My perpetrator was a family member.
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 to be killed. 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 with it for some months before it dissipates. I’ve tried countless ways to feel safe enough to sleep. None of them worked. I've lost untold nights of sleep. There was a season in my early 30s when I waited every night until the sun rose.
When the terror came back last fall, I brought it into my 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. One day I suddenly realized, "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, 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 my symptoms were telling me about what I survived. 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 shielded me from for a very long time: the place where I felt the most unsafe in the whole world had been 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, I would lie in a freeze state—my body flooded with terror—while my mind created catastrophic fantasies to explain what I felt. I now understand those fantasies were my child’s mind trying to make sense of a terror it couldn’t safely understand.
As a child I believed I was not safe in my own bed, in my own house, at night. I now understand that belief wasn't irrational. I wasn't safe there.
I am still uncovering the truth of what happened to me as a child, but I am uncovering it. My body has been telling me the truth all along. I’m finally listening, and I believe it.
All I did in that conversation with my parents 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 provoke all kinds of defenses against knowing the truth and lead to scapegoating of the person telling the truth. 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. Perpetrators of sexual abuse against children are.
The impact this email has on you is yours to live with. I have to live with the effects of childhood sexual assault. I was a victim of sexual abuse as a young girl and I was neglected by adults 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.
What you choose to do with this information is ultimately up to you. 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 with the same respect. 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 with the same care and honesty I’m offering you.
Despite all I’ve shared in this email, you really have no idea what I've lived through.
Stacey