This Is No Longer My Secret

Before starting, I just want to caution you to the content of this post. It is about child sexual abuse and maybe you may want to check within yourself if this is a good time for you to read it. 

If you have been affected by this in your own life and are in need of support, I have recently found out about The National Association for People Abused in Childhood (NAPAC) and you can ring them on a free confidential helpline: 0808 801 0331 or visit their website for more information on how you can be supported: https://napac.org.uk/

For those of you who feel ready to continue, thank you for bearing witness.

Those of you who have been reading my posts for some time, may remember the post I wrote back in April 2019, talking about having experienced sexual abuse as a child. If you are new to this blog or need a reminder, you can read it here: ‘Remembering Trauma - my story’, as well as the post before ‘Agony’, where I shared about being in agony about an untold story. 

I guess I feel in this place again. Why?

Because I shared this memory, but I withheld part of it. 

Because I am keeping this secret, and I realised that it is not so much for myself but for others, for the members of my family. 

Because it already felt like an incredible step, and I was afraid of so many other things if I shared anything else. 

Last year, when I felt called to take a step back from social media, I did not know at the time, but it opened the door to another part of my forgotten trauma.

I was watching a series, and an image within it, together with a couple of other scenes, and I was taken back to another part of the trauma from my past. If I had been shocked and shaken back in 2016 when I first remembered part of it, it was like another earthquake. One I was not expecting and knew nothing about. It was a potent flashback that took me a while to understand the many parts of. One I am still processing. 

And here I am now. The glimpse of the possibility of releasing the rest of the secret showed up to me a few weeks back, and I pressed it back into a hidden corner of my mind. I did not want to deal with it. 

But of course, I am not quite allowed to leave it alone, and things conspired to bring the theme of secrets back into my life. A documentary on Netflix called ‘Tell Me Who I Am’, that I stumbled into and knew I needed to watch. To hearing of this quote for the first time ‘Silence encourages the tormentor, never the tormented’ by Elie Wiesel. A chapter on a book I had stopped reading and started again, where the theme was keeping secrets and where it said ‘A woman who carries a secret is an exhausted woman’ by Clarissa Pinkola Estes in ‘Women Who Run With The Wolves’. 

And I am ever so tired and tormented. 

I have been feeling tormented for a very long time. I am tired of feeling tormented. Of holding on to this part of the secret for someone who does not deserve to be protected. 

So here is the secret, part of a journal entry, when I finally decided to face this and only a small yet big sample of the things I have been facing and experiencing:

‘It was my father. He was the one who sexually abused me as a very young child. A baby. I do not know how many times and how frequently, but it happened more than once, and in such a way that I spent a considerable amount of my childhood, expecting him to show up in my bed. The thing is, I did not know that at some point I had crossed the threshold of age that he no longer considered ‘attractive’; I believe it stopped between the age of 5 and 7, I am not sure of the exact age. I spent a considerable amount of my childhood in constant terror. Waiting for that thing to happen again. The thing that happened again and again before. That thing that terrified me so much that my only reaction was to freeze completely and go somewhere else with my mind. That thing that I am now starting to remember through nightmares. My body, my child self, continues to be in that cycle of waiting, feeling the terror, knowing the inevitability of it happening again, but never knowing when. My life is in this repeating cycle, and I am currently stuck. Wanting to set myself free, but not knowing how to do it!

I do not know how to convince my body and the memory of waiting within me, that it is ok, that it will never happen again. I do not know how to show my child self, that all of this is in the past and that it will not repeat itself. That now, I get to choose who I have in my life.

But these nightmares often feel so real and happen in the environment that I am currently in, that I feel so afraid that it will happen again and that a stranger (because I can never see his face) will get into my space and lie down next to me in my bed and do horrible things that I do not want to do. And that I will not be able to fight him or move away or scream for help.’

I have been spending a lot of time feeling afraid and in terror in the last few months. I may continue to do so for a while, until I face whatever else I am supposed to face. 

Last year, the flashback I mentioned before, showed me that it was not only my father who sexually abused me. That there were other men. That my father was somehow involved in this too. 

I am yet to uncover and remember more on this. 

But now, this secret is no longer mine to keep. I am setting it free from within me. 

Let them feel the shame.