Telling the Truth to the Child I Was
Content note: Contains references to child sexual assault and incest.
This document has been edited for publication and to protect privacy.
To the traumatized child part of me:
You love your family very much. Your heart is open and beautiful. You see and feel so many things. You are alive in your body, and your body is precious. Good things have happened to you. Very sad, confusing, and scary things have happened to you, too.
Sometimes, your emotions—sad, mad and scared—feel big and scary and you work really hard to keep them inside. Sometimes they burst out of you, and you feel like you are bad. You are scared a lot of the time. You feel sick to your stomach like you might throw up. You get so angry you feel like you want to hurt something or someone. You can’t sleep. You lie in bed terrified, frozen and holding your breath, or you sleep and have terrible, scary nightmares.
You think you are alone in all of it, and you feel alone, and you don’t know why this is happening to you. You believe there is something wrong with you. You feel unlovable. You are secretly scared you are evil.
I am here with adult Stacey right now to help you understand what’s been happening inside you. If you’ll let me, I’ll explain to you as much as I can and be as honest with you as I can be. Hearing the truth will help make everything you’re experiencing less scary.
Adult Stacey and I want to help it make sense to you. It might not all make sense, but we can keep talking about it. You don’t have to be alone with it anymore.
If you have any questions about what I’m saying or the words I’m using, you can stop and ask me anytime. And if at any time you have anything you want to say, please stop me. I want to hear from you.
The most important thing we want you to know is that none of this is your fault, you are not bad, and there is nothing wrong with you. You are and have always been perfectly lovable.
What I am going to share with you might be scary to hear, but the events I’m telling you about already happened. They are not happening now and will not happen again. You are safe now.
You were badly hurt by a family member, and even though you don’t remember what they did, you haven’t totally forgotten, either. You forgot as much as you could, but the pain and fear you experienced lives in your body and tells you all the time that something is wrong. You know something is wrong, but you don’t know what it is—and because you don’t know that something terrible happened to you, you think you are what’s wrong.
I am now going to tell you what I know of what your family member did to you. You are safe, your body is safe, and adult Stacey and I are right here with you.
You went to sleep one night safe in your bed. While you slept, your family member came into the room. You were very, very scared. You had never been so scared before. Your family member touched your body in places they should not have. They did sexual things to your body that you didn’t understand, that sometimes felt pleasurable and sometimes caused such intense pain you believed you were dying. You didn’t understand what was happening, but you felt the adult’s shame and felt that what they did was wrong.
What was done to your body was bad because they are an adult and you are a child. It is always bad when grownups hurt kids like this. It is never the kid’s fault. It is not your fault your family member hurt you.
They are a grownup, and they know it is wrong to hurt children in this way. They hurt you anyway. What they did to you was wrong and a betrayal of your love and trust. Instead of protecting you and keeping you safe like you trusted them to do, they hurt you terribly.
They knew that you loved and trusted them and so you would not know what they were doing was wrong, even though it felt wrong and confusing to you.
I don’t know if your family member said anything to you before, during, or after hurting you. If they said anything to you, it was to protect themselves, not you. When they hurt you, they broke their adult duty to protect and care for you. You trusted them and they used that trust against you.
While your family member did hurtful things to you, you did everything you could to protect yourself. Your body did the only thing it could to protect you.
You were too little to fight and win. You were too little to be able to get away to safety. Because you couldn’t fight or run, you kept yourself as safe as you could by leaving your body. Your mind protected you by taking you away. Your body protected you by doing what doctors call “freeze.”
Freeze happens when the danger is too great and there is no way to fight or escape. Your body gets tight and it feels like you are locked inside it. You can’t move your body at all, and you can’t speak or yell. It’s very scary if you don’t know what’s happening.
Your body did all this while you were being hurt. It allowed your mind to leave. Because you left as much as you could, you survived the terrible things you experienced and do not have to remember them. This protects you and helps you survive.
Not all grownups hurt children in this way, but some do. When a grownup hurts a child like this, it’s up to the other grownups in the child’s life to notice the signs that a child has been hurt and step in to help the child make sense of it and be okay, and to protect the child from the grownup that hurt them.
You showed signs that you’d been hurt, but no adult in your family or life helped or protected you. You were left alone with what happened to you. This is the second way you were badly hurt.
It is the job of all adults to help and protect children. I don’t know why the adults in your family and life didn’t help and protect you, but I do know it’s not your fault. They protected themselves instead of you, even if that simply meant protecting themselves from knowing what happened to you. This is not fair or just, but it does sometimes happen.
It's important you know that adults do bad things because of pain inside of them and not because of anything about you. You were open, loving, and trusting, exactly how a child who feels safe should be. You never did anything wrong. These bad things didn’t happen to you because you aren’t lovable. You are and have always been very lovable.
It is horribly confusing and painful that a family member you loved did very bad and scary things to you, and none of the other grownups around you stopped them or protected you. This was a terrible betrayal. No one talked to you about it, helped you understand it, or helped you live after it. They left you alone in it. A hurt this big is too much to leave a child alone in. Your family’s abandonment and neglect of you was a second betrayal.
I don’t know the last time you were hurt. You are young now and you were even younger then. You don’t know it’s over. You have no way of knowing it won’t happen again, and you don’t even remember what happened.
But what your mind has forgotten, your body knows. This is why you lie in bed scared and frozen. This is why you can’t breathe, move, or speak, even when nothing bad is happening to you now. You believe you’re waiting for something bad to happen, but you are really reliving something bad that already happened.
You are traumatized by what was done to you and by being left alone afterwards. You live in a lot of fear and confusion. Your body moves between fighting, running, and freezing, often thinking small things are big threats. This is why your body feels tight, painful and uncomfortable. This is why your stomach hurts. This is why you can’t always relax, why you sometimes struggle to sleep, and why you sometimes lose your temper.
Adult Stacey and I are so sorry we couldn’t save you from what was done to you back then. An adult in your life should have and they didn’t.
But now, adult Stacey gets to be here with you. She is the grownup who can sit with you, tell you the truth, answer any questions you have, and help you understand. She loves you very much. She sees how incredible you are.
You may not believe me, but how you live with what happened to you will make you even more incredible. This story is part of your soul, but your soul was never just this story. You are more than your trauma. You are a whole, miraculous life. Stacey wants you to live it.