This is a space where survivors of trauma and abuse share their stories alongside supportive allies. These stories remind us that hope exists even in dark times. You are never alone in your experience. Healing is possible for everyone.
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Original story
This is a horrible journey for any person to go through. We all will heal on our own time, in our own terms, through our own processes. It is a hard journey to travel through but try to find a community around you that can help you through all of this. People who will pick you up, people who will not let you fall, people who will hold your hand and continue to check in and make sure that what is happening is safe for you to go through. If I did not have my friends throughout this journey, it would be a harder process for me. Find your family (either biological or the family that you have created because we all need that), find a community around you of people who are there for you. In order to heal we need safe spaces; we need people who love us checking in on us. You can do this. You can start the process of healing. It has taken me 22 years to finally want to confront the reality of what happened to me as a child and at this point I am ready to fully confront those things. I am a decidedly logical person who wants answers to questions that will never get answers, and there just are not answers when you have gone through this type of trauma. In order to heal you need to do what is good for you, not for anyone else. Do this for you.
Healing is doing things on your own terms and when you need to do them. Not when other people decide you need to do them. It took me 22 years to finally want to confront what happened to me and start the process to letting go everything that happened to me and stop inviting the unwanted people that did these horrible things to me into my life. I will control the narrative from now on, not him, not any man that has ever done anything unwanted to me.
It started as me being 16 and him being 28. He and I met on an AOL chatroom, and it started with the generic a/s/l question. He ended up driving from his home over 1.5 hours away to my mom's home. The graphic nature of it is I felt dehumanized during the entire experience, he stated later when he turned himself in that I had invited him to the house for sex. Never mind that I was a literal child, and he was a fully grown adult. Later on, he would apologize to me and in my not being ready to process the full extent of what happened I had told him that it was consensual (it was not) and that it was not his fault (it most definitely was). I decided that to fully heal from my experience with him I took a friend to the federal courthouse 22 years later to see what exactly he said to the police when he had turned himself in. There were lies and manipulations within him trying to paint himself as the "good guy" who had "guilt" towards the situation. He said he picked me because of geographic location, that due to my age I would probably not expect marriage from him, and he could control when we would meet and talk. He lied about the number of times that we had had sex and also the location where the sex took place. The bulk of the file is a psychiatric evaluation. I recall the Sheriff coming to our house, but I could also tell that 1) it was not taken very seriously because I talked to a Sheriff very briefly and 2) it was a complete violation of what I had told him I actually wanted to happen. Like always, he had to control the narrative, not the victim. He knew that if I had come forward with the truth of what happened, had I opened up to my therapist, friends or dad about what this man had done then he would have gotten way more than 3 years' probation and a slap on the wrist fine with very minimal sex offender classes. It has taken me 22 years to want to regain control of what happened to me at 16 years old. It has taken me 22 years to realize that I need to heal from the trauma that this man gave me at way too young of an age to fully comprehend said trauma and way too young of an age to ever have given consent to him. Going to the federal courthouse to obtain copies of the lies that he told, including the lies he told in order to get friends and acquaintances to write character references (one mentioned a job, and another mentioned a program he was wanting to enter). I know the truth about what happened, even if a court of law never did, he knows the truth about what happened as well, but wants to continue to control the narrative, because that is just how he wants to be perceived. His life is in a whirlwind, but as long as he believes he is in control, then he is in control.
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