The Silence I Carried: Healing from Childhood Sexual Abuse

For a long time, I didn’t talk about it. I didn’t even let myself fully think about it. What happened to me beginning when I was a child became something I folded up and locked away, like a memory that didn’t belong to me. I wore silence like armor—convinced it would protect me, convinced that if I spoke, everything would shatter.

But silence doesn’t protect. It isolates.

Childhood sexual abuse is a thief—a stealing of safety, of innocence, of self. And the damage isn’t just in the event itself, but in everything it echoes into. I’ve spent years unraveling the ways it’s shown up in my life, often disguised as something else: trust issues, an inability to let people get close to me, fear of being truly seen. I’ve struggled with relationships of all types. I’ve felt undeserving of love. I’ve questioned whether I could ever feel truly safe in someone else’s presence.

Nightmares haunted me. Sometimes they still do. They come from time to time, uninvited, pulling me back into places I’ve worked so hard to leave. They remind me that trauma doesn’t just go away with time—it lives in the body, in the nervous system, in the subconscious. Healing isn’t a simple process. It’s messy and slow and often invisible to the outside world.

One of the hardest parts has been the shame. That deep, aching shame that makes you feel like you’re the one who did something wrong. It took years to understand that what happened wasn’t my fault. Years to even say it out loud. Shame is one of the cruelest companions of abuse—it convinces you to protect your abuser(s) by hiding your own truth.

One of the most painful consequences of my silence was how long it kept me from getting the help I needed. Because I never spoke up, because I didn’t have the tools or the words to speak or the safe space to process what happened, I kept finding myself in situations where I was hurt again. My boundaries were blurred before I ever had the chance to learn what they should be. My sense of self-worth was so damaged that I didn’t always recognize when something wasn’t okay—or I did, but I didn’t believe I had the right to say no.

That’s one of the quiet cruelties of childhood sexual abuse—it doesn’t just harm you in the moment. It conditions you to tolerate abuse later. It teaches you to dissociate, to freeze, to appease, to normalize pain. It makes you vulnerable to further abuse, and then it wraps that into more shame, more silence, more self-blame.

But that wasn’t my fault. And if this is part of your story, it wasn’t your fault either.

I’ve doubted myself constantly. Was it really that bad? Am I overreacting? Do I deserve to be this impacted? These are questions survivors ask too often. But they come from a place of survival—trying to minimize our pain because it’s easier than fully feeling it.

Despite all this, I want to speak—because silence only breeds more shame. And I am done carrying shame that never belonged to me.

Healing, for me, has looked like therapy, writing, crying in the middle of the night, reparenting myself, setting boundaries I never knew I could set. It’s looked like learning to trust myself and my body again. It’s looked like reaching out when I want to isolate. It’s been slow and often painful—but also filled with moments of immense power and clarity.

If you’re reading this and you’ve lived through something similar, I want you to know you are not alone. Your pain is valid. Your story matters. And you deserve healing—not just survival, but healing. You deserve peace.

This is not the end of my story—it’s only one part of it. And I’m still learning, still healing, still choosing myself every day.

If you see yourself in these words, please know you’re not alone. I believe you. I see you. And if you ever need someone to hold space for your story, I’m here.