Telling the Truth to the Child I Was

Content note: This contains discussion of childhood sexual abuse.

Two years ago, I asked my ancestors for guidance, and the response came immediately as a clear and sudden inspiration.

I asked my therapist if we could work together to create a trauma narrative—one that explained to the terrorized child I once was what she had lived through, in language she could understand.

In session, my therapist read this narrative aloud while I connected with my younger self, supported by EMDR.

I expected it to be difficult. Writing it had been hard. What I did not expect was the profound relief that moved that moved through my body as my early experiences were finally spoken, named, and given language. Truth—even when horrific—feels like sanity to me.

This marked a turning point in the integration of my trauma history. I walked forward from that session settled with the truth in a new and profound way.

My understanding of what I survived continues to deepen, but I offer this narrative unedited, as a step on the path that has brought me here.

You love your family very much. You love your mom and dad, your siblings, and your grandparents. Your heart is open and beautiful. You see and feel so many things. You are alive in your body, and your body is precious. Many good things have happened to you. Some very sad, confusing, and scary things have happened to you too.

Sometimes, your emotions like sad, mad and scared feel big and scary and you work really hard to keep them in. Or, they burst out of you and then 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 a lot. You get so mad sometimes you feel like you want to hurt something or someone. You can’t sleep sometimes. You lie in bed some nights waiting for a man to come kill you, holding your breath and frozen. Or, you sleep and have terrible, scary nightmares. You don’t talk to anyone about any of these things. You think you are alone in all of it, and you feel alone, and you don’t why they are 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. I believe that hearing the truth will help make everything you’re experiencing less scary. Adult Stacey & 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 am saying, or what the words I am using mean, just stop and ask me. Also, if you have anything you want to say at any time, 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, are not happening now, and will not happen again. You are safe now.

Your grandpa Dave, your mommy’s daddy, is a hurt person, and he has hurt people in his family—in your family—very badly. He hurt your mommy when she was a little girl so badly that she won’t let herself remember it. It was big and scary and she decided to protect herself from the pain by forgetting it. People who’ve been hurt as badly as your mommy can do this, and sometimes need to do it to survive.

Your grandpa hurt you in the same way he hurt your mommy, and even though you don’t remember what he did, you haven’t totally forgotten either. You forgot as much of it as you could, but the hurt 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 going to tell you now what I know of what your grandpa did to hurt you. You are safe, your body is safe, and adult Stacey and I am right here with you.

You went to sleep one night safe in a bed in a house with the people you love, and who love you. While you slept, your grandpa came into the room and sat on the bed beside you. He leaned over you. You were very, very scared. You had never been so scared before. Your grandpa did sexual things to your body—touching your body in places he should not have—that you didn’t understand, that sometimes felt good to you, and that sometimes hurt so badly you were afraid he was killing you. You didn’t understand what he was doing, but you felt his shame and you knew what he was doing was wrong.

What your grandpa did to your body was bad because he is a grown up and you are a very young child. It is always bad when grownups hurt kids like this and it is never the kids’ fault. It is not your fault your grandpa hurt you. He is a grownup, and he knows it is wrong to hurt children in this way. He hurt you anyway. What he did to you was wrong and a betrayal of your love and trust. Instead of protecting you and keeping you safe like you trusted him to do, he hurt you terribly. He knew that you loved and trusted him and so you would not know that he was doing something wrong, even though it felt wrong and confusing to you.

I don’t know if your grandpa said anything to you before, during or after hurting your body. Anything he might have said to you about what he was doing was a lie. He broke his duty to protect and care for you when he hurt your body. You trusted him and he used that trust against you. He would have lied to you to protect himself.

I don’t know how many times your grandpa came into a room where you were sleeping and hurt your body. Adult Stacey believes it happened more than one time. I don’t know exactly what he did to your body because it was so terrible and scary that parts of you helped you forget. While your grandpa was doing these things to your body 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 your grandpa 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 out and away. Your body protected you by doing what doctor’s call “freeze.” It happens when the danger is too great and a person or animal can’t do anything else to 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 does other things too without you knowing about them, like in your belly and brain. Your body did all this while your grandpa hurt you, and it allowed your mind to leave. Because you left as much as you could, you survived the terrible things your grandpa did and do not have to remember them. This protects you and helps you cope with the terrible things that happened.

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 one in your family helped or protected you. You were left alone with what happened to you. This is the second way you were badly hurt, and not just by your grandpa, but your grandma, mommy and daddy too.

It is the job of adults to help and protect children. I don’t know why your grandma, mommy and daddy didn’t help and protect you, but I do know it’s not your fault. Your grandma, mommy and daddy might all have been hurt by a grownup in the same or a similar way when they were little kids. If they all decided to forget the terrible things that happened to them, they wouldn’t have let themselves see the terrible things that were happening to you. They protected themselves instead of you. This is not fair or just, but it does sometimes happen.

It's important you know that your mommy, daddy, grandma and even grandpa did 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 your mommy, daddy, grandma and even grandpa didn’t love you. I believe they all loved you very much. You are and have always been very lovable. This can make what happened to you even more confusing.

It is horribly confusing and painful that the grandpa you adored did very bad things to your body, so bad you feared he was killing you, and none of the other grownups around you stopped him or protected you. This was a terrible betrayal. Then, 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 your grandpa came into your room and hurt you. You are young now and you were even younger then. You don’t know it stopped. You will sleep under the same roof as your grandpa many times and never know that it stopped. You have no way of knowing he won’t do it again, and by now, you don’t even remember what he did.

But what your mind has forgotten, your body knows. This is why you lie in bed waiting to be attacked. Your body “freezes” when you are alone in your bed at night just like it did when your grandpa hurt you. This is why you can’t breathe, move or speak even though nothing is happening to you presently. You believe you’re waiting for something bad to happen, but you are really reliving something bad that already happened.

You were traumatized by your grandpa doing terrible things to you and by your parents and grandma leaving you alone in all of it afterwards. You are traumatized. You live in so much fear and confusion. Your body moves between fight, run, and freeze, often thinking small things are big threats. This is why your body feels tight, painful and uncomfortable all the time. This is why your stomach always hurts. This is why you don’t relax, why you never feel safe, why you struggle to sleep, and why you sometimes lose your temper and scream. This is why touch and connecting with others is scary. This is why you hold your breath. This is why parts of you have been trying to help you escape your mind and body as much as they can.

Adult Stacey and I are so sorry we couldn’t save you from what your grandpa and family did back then. Some grownup in your life should have and they didn’t. But now adult Stacey gets to be here with you, and 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.