Taking My Power Back From Trauma

I struggled for many years with the trauma of my sexual abuse.
For the longest time, I blamed myself for what happened. I was only fifteen, yet I felt like I should have been able to stop it. Because I didn’t, I convinced myself that something must be wrong with me.
“Why didn’t I stop it?”
That question haunted me for decades. It fed my shame and guilt, shaping how I saw myself and the world around me.

When the abuse was happening, I knew deep down something was wrong, but I didn’t want to believe it. My mind would go somewhere else, far away, to escape what my body was enduring. Each time it happened, I became number. I didn’t remember the full reality of what had happened until about three years later.

I had buried the memories as deep as I could, believing that if I pushed them down far enough, they’d never come back. But that’s the thing about trauma, it always finds a way to resurface.

It can show up as anger, addiction, avoidance, or overworking.
You may not even realize that’s what you’re doing.
But eventually, it catches up with you.
And when it does, you face a choice:
you can confront it, or you can keep trying to outrun it.

I chose to run from my pain, my memories, my feelings for over twenty years.
Sometimes the pain would fade for a little while, but it always came back. A conversation, a smell, or a random moment would trigger it all over again. I didn’t understand why I reacted the way I did. I thought something was fundamentally wrong with me. The shame grew heavier with each passing year because I couldn’t seem to “fix” myself.

That’s what survival mode looks like.
It’s different for everyone, but it’s all the same at its core, your mind and body doing whatever they can to protect you from pain.

If there’s one thing I’ve learned on my healing journey, it’s this:
healing isn’t a destination; it’s a lifelong process.

You don’t just wake up one day with “closure” and feel like it never happened.
The past is always a part of you. But with time, that part doesn’t control you anymore. That’s where acceptance comes in.

Healing isn’t about forgetting.
You can’t forget something as powerful as sexual abuse.
Healing is about accepting what happened, without shame or blame.

We accept that it’s a part of who we are and that we did nothing wrong.
We begin rebuilding our identity with intention, no longer letting survival mode define us.

And when we accept, we gain strength.
That’s when the real healing begins.
We stop being prisoners of our trauma and start recognizing how strong we are because of what we’ve survived.

There were times when I wanted to give up completely.
Times when I didn’t think I could go on.
But I fought and I’m still fighting.

And if you’re reading this right now, you’re still here too.
That means today is not the day to give up.

Today can be the day you take your first step toward healing.
It’s not about rushing, it’s about compassion. One step at a time.

You’ll stumble. You’ll have ups and downs.
But over time, the ups will begin to outnumber the downs.
Each step you take builds more strength, more peace, more healing.

You are not your trauma.
Your trauma may have shaped you, but now it’s time to take back your power.

There’s nothing wrong with you.
It wasn’t your fault.

Someone did something terrible to you. That doesn’t define who you are.
The man who abused me was a predator, he knew exactly what he was doing.
To believe I could have stopped it was to take on blame that was never mine to carry.

I didn’t deserve what happened to me.
And neither do you.

I can say that now with conviction, with confidence, and without shame.
I’m no longer defined by my past.
I’m defined by the strength it took to rise from it.

Stay positive and take action!

Thank you for your support!

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