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I was raped by my uncle when I was 11 years old. Most of my family didn't believe me. That was really painful and prevented me from getting the support and help I needed at the time. I developed an eating disorder and started self-harming as a trauma response. I had no other way of coping. I wish I had known more about SA when I was younger. Not to prevent it because I believe that it's the perpetrator that makes the choice to harm. But to understand that it wasn't my fault, that I was a victim and to report it when I still had time.

it still hurts. sometimes i feel like i am too harsh on myself. i only spoke up about waht happened when many years have passed. i knew i wasnt comfortable with what happened but i could expressed it, i kept it deep down and try to supress it from my mind. when i finally spoke up a long time have happened, i am hard on me because i knew it could have get better sooner, i am hard on myself because sometimes i feel like i am making a big deal out of something small. i try to remind myself that i am strong, that i am caring and this shall pass too.

The first time I saw a penis I was 11 years old. A man flashed open his coat when he passed me by in the street and there I saw it, that odd fleshy bit hanging out of his open zip. I remember feeling panic, disgust and shame, as if it was my fault somehow. When I was 12 and on a holiday camp, one of the older guys working there invited me to his cabin to play some music and made me wait while he took a shower, coming out from the bathroom with his robe semi open. Again, panic and shame. In my first job, age 20, the boss became obsessed with me and I had to literally run around the conference table in order to avoid his hands on my body. Every time I was called into his office I asked my colleagues to interrupt the meeting after 5 minutes, so I could safely escape his harassment. I told my mother and she laughed it off, saying it was just classic men behaviour. I eventually had to leave the job cause he was becoming more and more persistent. I'm 56 years old and I personally don't know ANY woman of my generation who hasn't been through similar situations.

Disclaimer: This post refers to DSM and ICD diagnostic classifications mostly unquestioningly, not because of a lack of personal engagement with critical discussions on this topic, but simply for pragmatic reasons, since I am trying to explain something which is currently affecting and debilitating for me. CW: includes descriptions of severe, complex and childhood sexual, trauma. Severe bullying. I haven’t written for a while. I haven’t had the cognitive energy, nor has my mind possessed a state of functioning that would allow me to get the words down in print. Every survivor living with complex dissociative forms of post-traumatic stress knows the exhaustion of living with the inner chaos that accompanies survival - no matter our attempts to bring ourselves closer to thriving, closer to being more than the sum of what happened to us. This year, I got a lion tattooed on my upper arm. It is a motif that has been with me since I was only three years old; the first time I can recall sitting alone on my bedroom floor, trying to figure out how to stretch my mouth wide enough to roar. I remember my father walking in to find me and asking what on earth I was doing, his only response being to laugh at my attempt and to tell me something else I could do with my mouth for him instead. There was nothing I could do, so the lion withdrew, but he stayed with me. He resurfaced again - as far as I can recall - only at two specific moments in my life, possibly two of the worst, in different ways, when my consciousness was so overwhelmed by the horror of what was happening that it likely would have shattered into pieces if he hadn’t stepped in. The first of these moments was just two years later. I was only five years old, already living in circumstances unbearable enough to produce a variety of delusional experiences which functioned to keep my little mind going: talking trees, talking teddy bears, and spirits from the world unknown beyond - each of whom became compassionate witnesses to the pain I was enduring. This memory originally returned to me through a recurring nightmare. At the time, I rationalised it away as symbolic, for I could not then bring myself to admit that the scene I was remembering had been literal. That my mother had in fact stood by and watched as my father r****d me on the floor in plain sight. It wasn’t a symbolic representation for how it felt to be living in a house where one caregiver abused me and the other pretended she knew nothing about it. My mother had witnessed it happening, and then walked right away. I fought with myself and defended against this interpretation in my therapy sessions, not wanting the wall of denial that was protecting the innocent version of my mother to break. It was one I had constructed to survive and maintain a relationship with her, and if it broke, I knew I would be even more alone than I already was. Unfortunately, as more and more details resurfaced, enabling me to piece together in full what really happened that day, my mind and body only had more heartbreak to prepare for. The fullness of my being wanted the fragile love of at least one of my negligent parents to have been real, albeit even if insufficient. But my parts? They knew the truth. At least, some of them did. Some of them knew the terror of what it felt like to be abused and degraded, and treated with a total lack of empathy by those who were meant to protect them. Some of them knew that the testimonies given by each of my parents would never be credible. In order to explain what I mean by that, I am going to have to tell you about one book I have managed to slowly begin making my way through over the last couple of weeks - if only by listening to the audio version, going over and over the same paragraphs multiple times in attempt to process at least some of the information. It is called The Haunted Self: Structural Dissociation and The Treatment of Chronic Traumatization, by Onno Van der Hart et al. It has been helping me (finally) to make some actual sense out of the bewildering symptoms I’ve been experiencing for some time, and the often-unsettling experiences I encountered during Internal Family Systems (IFS) therapy towards the end of last year. How to escape when you cannot For those who are not familiar with IFS or structural dissociation, there are two things I should first make clear: IFS is a model of therapy which focuses on working collaboratively with various ‘parts’ within each person, which the theory explains have developed through the internalisation of certain specific roles and functions in childhood in response to family dynamics (these are known as firefighters, exiles, and managers). In contrast, the clinical literature on structural dissociation outlines what happens to the personalities of those exposed to chronic and prolonged trauma in the developmental period: how it effectively fragments into component parts to survive, instead of becoming whole. The authors of the book define the personality as ‘a system comprised of various psychobiological states or subsystems that function in a coordinated manner’, which in healthy subjects function together cohesively: ‘An integrated personality is a developmental achievement’, not a given, the authors helpfully note. In cases of structural dissociation, however, what happens is that instead of developing towards integration, these subsystems become adaptively organized around the traumatic environment in such a way that a division occurs between two categories of subsystems: Those which support the individual in efforts to adapt to daily life Those built for detection of, and defense from, threats These are the action-systems which characterise an individual’s interoceptive (awareness of internal bodily signals) and exteroceptive (awareness of external) worlds, comprising their propensity to act in accordance with certain types of basic motivations. They are always shaped in order to best adaptively respond to their environment. Effectively, the more that prolonged exposure to trauma makes integration between the various goal-directed actions (i.e., those oriented toward exploration, caretaking, and attachment, vs. those oriented towards defence, hypervigilance, and fight/flight responses) unfeasible, the more rigidified and hardened these subsystems can become, leading to the emergence of dissociative ‘parts’. These parts are not like those postulated by IFS, though their functions can overlap: “Dissociative parts together constitute the whole personality, yet are self-conscious, have rudimentary senses of self, and are more complex than a single psychobiological state.” These parts can possess varying degrees of elaboration - referring to how differentiated and distinct they are with regard to characteristics such as names, age, gender, etc - and emancipation - referring to how much separation and autonomy they have from the trauma itself. This variation depends significantly upon the severity and complexity of trauma, and how chronic it is. Most people are aware of Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD). In cases of PTSD, structural dissociation exists, but it is not as complex as those seen in cases where secondary, or even tertiary forms are present. The key difference between them has to do with the presence of one or more of different types of parts: Apparently Normal Parts (ANP’s): which are dominated by the action systems which are oriented towards exploration, caretaking and attachment and Emotional Parts (EP’s): which are dominated by defence systems These parts are not reducible to these action-systems, but they are mediated by them. This is why a person can consist of parts which are in conflict with one another. For example, an emotional part can contain the raw sensory trauma and all its accompanying feelings of fear, shame, and guilt, while another ‘apparently normal’ part goes about its business of focusing on the avoidance of those feelings through engagements in various activities which compensate for them and bring them esteem; not just because the raw feeling is in itself overwhelming - the authors refer to these emotions as ‘vehement’ because of just how overwhelming they can be, and how they can lead to maladaptive coping mechanisms when the person lacks the resources to cope effectively - but also because those action-systems we outlined are structured around meeting our need for attachment to others, and regulating our social position. If the vehement emotions the trauma instilled feel like they pose a threat to our most significant relationships, or even our social standing, EP’s are forced to contain them, and often banished from vision - both others and our own. In cases of primary dissociation, like PTSD, it has only been adaptively necessary for a single ANP and a single EP to develop. In secondary dissociation, as is often seen in cases of C-PTSD and those which more frequently invite the diagnosis of ‘borderline personality disorder’ (don’t get me started on that), further fragmentation has led to the development of multiple EP’s, each containing different fragments of the traumatic experience: moments of terror, raw emotions, and a variety of defensive responses. Tertiary dissociation is where things get really complicated. Most people are broadly aware of something known as Dissociative Identity Disorder (DID) - inaccurately popularised as ‘split personality disorder’ - mostly as a result of horribly stigmatising portrayals in the media. In reality, DID is itself far more complicated, and individual experiences far more varying, than is commonly thought. The key thing which differentiates it from the other dissociative disorders already mentioned is that there is evidence for tertiary structural dissociation: which not only involves multiple EP’s, but also more than one ANP. Contrary to belief, however, these ANP’s do not necessarily possess the most extreme degrees of elaboration and emancipation. It is not always the case that a person can be seen to shift between completely distinct identities whose ages, memories and personalities are themselves entirely different. There are a range of Other and unspecified Dissociative Disorders (OSDD) listed in the DSM-5 - whatever you think of its validity - which point to these variations. For me personally, this has manifested differently at different times in my life. Let’s go back to the memory I started describing, when the lion motif first tried to reappear, to unpack some of them. The first of the worst I was just five years old and something awful was happening to me. Not only was the act itself something so painful, so gut-wrenchingly horrifying it could traumatise even an adult, but it was being perpetrated by one primary caregiver while the other stood by and did nothing. This is a profound form of betrayal and neglect, and ultimately, abandonment. In that moment, my dependence on my caregivers to survive meant that I had limited options to process what was happening to me if I wanted to live. On the one hand, I could accept that neither of my parents were capable of providing me with the care and nurture I needed. I could accept that no one was coming to save me, that no one was going to defend me from either of them, but then I would have to face a reality with no hope of ever being safe, or being loved, or being protected. Not only was I smaller than small - let’s be clear, I was tiny - there was no chance in hell I was ever going to muster up the strength to protect myself. I just didn’t have it. I don’t quite know how to clinically describe what happened in my consciousness after that. It wasn’t the dramatic dissociative break that came seven years later when the lion reappeared once again (more on that later) - it was subtler than that. I simply gathered whatever crumbs of evidence I could to construct a narrative in which help would be coming in the end. And if it didn’t? Then I would become something that could defend and protect itself instead. After my mother walked away from me, somehow, I dragged myself up from the floor and went running in the direction I saw straight ahead: to the closed door of my brother’s bedroom. I burst in unannounced and declared my new reality to him: “Name Everything is going to be okay.” I said. Whatever had just happened didn’t matter. The fact that I had not even felt it didn’t matter to me either; that part of me had already been buried while another took over through numbness and desensitization. If my body had been burned, I had left it. My father of course followed me into the room and wasn’t having any of it. He told me to back away from his son, referring to me again as a little slut, having only moments before branded both my mother and I filthy whores. But my body didn’t shake. “I was just telling him that everything is going to be okay.” I repeated. In that moment, whichever part of my father had been incensed to violate me so grossly immediately left him, I saw the flicker in his eyes. “What?” He asked gently, half-smiling. “What are you saying, my dear? What do you mean everything is going to be okay? Why wouldn’t it be okay?” He laughed again. As he lowered himself to me to pick me up onto his lap, I continued. “Everything is going to be okay because I know that it isn’t my fault when you get angry with me” I elaborated plainly. Actually, I had told myself that everything was going to be okay because I thought the look in my mother’s eyes when she stared blankly into the distance had told me that what she was seeing was enough to finally shift her into leaving him - which she eventually did. “Have I been angry with you today?” He asked. I rolled my eyes and decided to change the conversation. “I’m going to be a lion when I grow up.” I explained proudly to him. But of course, he just laughed. “You’re not a lion! You’re a little girl, a ballerina…” I continued to educate him on imposing limitations on what I could be. I’m well aware that there is something in this very real sequence of events which sounds almost artificial. How does a child of five years endure such trauma, only to emerge as if untarnished, even heroic, just a few seconds after? That is dissociation. Instead of shattering under the weight of cruel circumstances, my psyche reached for two things to keep itself alive instead: 1. A rationalisation which meant that the abandonment and betrayal I had just experienced wasn’t really abandonment at all: “Mummy knows now. Now, she knows how bad it is for me, and she is going to do something about it.” 2. An identification with a future-promise of transcendence from my own limitations “I am going to be a lion one day.” Not only did I need to hold onto the attachment I still had to my mother, I needed something to gestate within myself that could one day be birthed to contain, and even transmute, the experience of absolute vulnerability. While the part of me that held all the pain got pushed further down into a space I could not access, not even if I wanted, another stood tall in its place, clinging to its own source of esteem. The truth was that my mother had already known before this how bad the abuse was for me already. She had seen the blood-stained sheets in the aftermath of r*** and complained about having to clean them, this was no revelation. The reason I thought that she had not understood was because of what had been happening moments earlier, before my father had entered the room to see it, and become violently enraged. The descent into… Instead of taking you back to those moments, I want to take you forwards in time, to the second reappearance of the lion. This was a far more dramatic occurrence than the first, when the lion became somewhat real for me, not just an idea. Around seven years had passed, and in that time my mother had left my father, taking my older brother and I with her. By then, the court investigation had concluded that my father was innocent of the allegations made against him. Some of these allegations had been my own, but the original witness allegations were made by a friend of my brother’s about what he had seen for himself my father was doing to him. “I couldn’t understand why she didn’t leave him immediately” a distant aunt of mine explained to me recently, over the phone. “She kept saying innocent until proven guilty, I kept telling her children don’t lie about these things”. This aunt had grown up with my father - though she was fifteen years younger than him - and it seems had known very well that he was capable of real darkness. She and her sibling - my uncle, my father’s half-brother - had seen how he was controlling and manipulative. They had witnessed him go from the disgrace of living in absolute poverty as an immigrant child to a high-achiever in elite universities and official church positions. She knew the tell-tale signs of my father’s deflection from painstaking questions. I don’t quite know how or why it is that she eventually lost contact with my mother, living all the way over in the States was obviously a part of it, but I do know that she didn’t hesitate to drop him immediately out of her own life when she heard about how he was refusing to cooperate with the process, or talk honestly about things. My aunt saw my father’s darkness and used the light of truth and discernment to deal with it. Meanwhile, my mother stared his darkness right in the face and adorned it with grace. The other aunts on my mother’s side of the family were instructed to stay out of the situation; not to attempt to even talk to us about it, not to risk contamination. My American aunt told me that my uncle, had he still been alive, would have handled things differently. “He’d have been on the first plane over there to beat it out of him.” My aunt lovingly explained to me. “He was that sort of man.” Somehow, I myself had understood that about him from the few times we had visited him in America, before he passed away. Whether real or hallucinatory like the other experiences I was having, I had been experiencing visitations from his spirit ever since I had learned of his death. I spoke to him - and my teddy bears - about everything that was happening to me. They became my closest friends. It was the involvement of social services that eventually triggered my mother to leave almost a year after that, probably sometime soon after they explained to her that if my father was eventually found to be guilty, she could herself potentially be found to have been complicit as well. Again, the truth contradicts my mother’s claims about how this all went. Her version conveniently forgets the many times I tried to speak up on my own for myself before she finally allowed me to say the minimal things that I did, at eight years of age. My brother stayed silent throughout, choked by the fear of what would happen if he dare betray his kin. The outcome of all of this was that I was forced into contact with my father throughout the investigation with varying degrees of supervision, and thereafter none. This meant that every other week, I was to be collected by him from school, in full view of the public. This might not have been so bad had my father’s name not been printed in the papers, or televised on the local news for all to see, and given that his name was Polish and therefore very uncommon, the dots were not hard to connect. We had been moved by the council to a relatively deprived area, none of the other mother’s spoke or behaved in the way my own mother did, and all of them knew each other. Gossip easily spread. Having dropped down the social ladder already in the move from my town of birth - the time spent at the women’s refuge and the school we attended there being particularly difficult - I had already become accustomed to bullying. But the cruelty I experienced from older children who knew about my father took things to a whole new level. Sadism is apparently more common than we would like to admit. One girl in particular went out of her way to make my life a misery. “It’s no wonder you’re daddy rapes you” she used to tell me plainly as she towered over me. “You’re the vilest thing I’ve ever seen.” I have no doubt that this particular bully was going through the worst of it herself in her own home looking back on it now, the conditions were right for it, but that didn’t make it easier. And the actions of her peers - whose disgust towards me paralleled her own - unfortunately went further in their bullying. By the time I reached twelve, I had already experienced repeated sexual assaults and abuses from other lads in the area who knew about my vulnerability and ‘openness to experience’. Some of these incidents were sadly the result of my own active propositioning - or at least, a specific dissociative part of myself who applied all the lessons she had learned about how to appease males (more on that another day). I had been reminded over and over again by the aforementioned group of bullies that my dad was a paedophile. I knew very well that I was dirty, gross, not okay. What I had not yet experienced was the humiliation of being targeted specifically because of the abuse, like I was some sort of prey. The second worst memory A predator does not hunt immediately; first, he surveys. If I wanted to give the lads I mentioned the benefit of the doubt - to show them their own grace - I’d spend these next few lines telling you all about how that dissociative part acted like a little slut, how she got herself into it, and how their ignorance about my history of abuse was its own kind of bliss. They didn’t really know about daddy, I’d tell you, they thought I was just sexually mature for my tiny little age. They didn’t know about his friends. Actually, in their own words - thanks to how daddy’s friends had trained me to act - they thought I ‘must have been born gagging for it’. So who can really blame them? These bullies were different. They might not have known about the full extent of sexual exploitation my father had put me through in those earliest years, but they knew about him. And for years they had seen that I was helpless, without a defender, even after I’d escaped living with him. My older brother, they also knew very well, was himself his own target. Everyone knew who he was and considered him a freak. Perhaps they even knew that without another person to unleash his anger onto about everything, even that came spilling out onto me. Either way, they knew that they could cross him in the street and make jokes about these encounters - without so much as risking a punch in the face. “Oi oi, I know your sister, wink wink.” By this point, thanks to the extent of my dissociative capacities, these people knew far more than I did. I didn’t know about the girl that came out in the night when nobody was watching, or about all the things that had never really happened, because that’s what they kept saying. “That sounds like an awful nightmare” my godmother (an enabler) once told me. “I wouldn’t say that to anybody else if I were you, they might think worse of you than me.” They did think worse of me. When I retracted my allegations, I had been forced - even convinced - to tell them that it had all been a lie: the product of imagination. That’s what my father told me, that I was just sick in the head. “I’m sorry for causing all the problems and telling lies mummy”, I wrote to her in a card that year. This was my ANP running full-steam ahead, taking the lead in the show, keeping it all stitched together. As long as it could do well enough to cover up the many little cracks; the other parts holding all the trauma, including the gaslighting, could fade into the distance. “Whose going to believe you?” Is what my mother herself had actually said to me, the time I finally threatened to speak out about her own abuse. “You and whose army?” She continued. “Everyone knows you’re the girl who cried wolf. It will be unfortunate if one day you really are in trouble, no one will be coming to save you.” My bullies knew this well. They had seen me through primary and, now, I was beneath them in secondary. It would not surprise me if they had heard rumours from the other lads in their year and above about all the other incidents. They certainly knew that I was fair game, and that the secrets which passed quietly between them would never be allowed to reach a soul who would step in and do something. I guess they followed me home one time to determine the exact house that I lived in, because one evening, late in the night, one of them came to pay me a visit. It was another girl I had known since primary, who hung out with the group of older boys who used to watch me as I walked away from school with my father - throwing pebbles in our direction as they chanted over and over again ‘PAEDO’. This wasn’t the one who had towered over me those times to tell me I was vile. It was another who had punched me in the face when I was only eight or nine. She fractured my nose, or at least seriously bruised it - I can’t tell you the real damage, although my septum is still deviated; my mother refused to take me to the doctors to have it examined. She just laughed at me instead and told me about how she had been bullied for her appearance when she was a kid, so I should get over it. But it wasn’t my appearance this girl was targeting me for, at least not that I could tell. Whatever the reason, I knew that she wasn’t my friend. So when she pulled up to my house on her bike and called up to me in the window asking me to ‘come out’, I didn’t exactly smile. “Why?” I asked. “To have some fun!” she said. We exchanged various arguments for and against my trusting her sudden display of kindness. “You’re not my friend, you’re never nice to me in school!” I barked. Eventually she managed to coax me out. I can’t tell you why a young girl in my position would be so foolishly easy to manipulate, except what is already obvious: these relationships had quite literally shaped my entire life, and my nervous system. They were the food to my existence. Those action-systems I mentioned? The push-pull threads which weaved together my longing for safety and belonging - well, they were twisted to fuck. When the girl gave me reason to think I had a chance to impress her, to have a little fun, to ‘have a laugh’; the little girl in me choked up. I sat on the back of her bike and we rode into the dark. By the time we reached the park, my consciousness had already been flickering in and out of the moment - going back to times lived before which mimicked the power dynamic I was suddenly frozen in: the taking of my hand by an older person leading me into a situation I had no control in, the promises of ‘games’ we were going to play, the trust that was about to be broken. The lads themselves were already drunk and more than willing to do it. What followed begs not to be spoken. All I can repeat for you now are the words that continued to ring in my ear as I collapsed on the floor that night, soon after I got home: “Isn’t she gross?” “Isn’t she vile?” “Oh my god, the sick little bitch - do you think that she actually liked it?” The last question was of course referring to the act of being r***d by my father. In their own sick little fantasies - the very ones which I had been accused of having by my father myself - they envisioned me actually enjoying being assaulted in childhood. Together, they mocked me in sync as they groaned, and they moaned, and they yelled: “Yeah daddy. F*ck me harder.” I can’t tell you exactly what happened. The moment the older girl turned her face from me and left me alone - apparently shocked at the scene that was unfolding precisely as they told her it was going to, convinced that they must have been joking - this was the moment I blacked out of consciousness completely and saw the lion take over. While my body was most likely limp and unable to move, something in me escaped. This makes sense in the context of structural dissociation. The full scale of betrayal and abandonment - across communities, institutions, families, entire systems - should have been enough to break me altogether. I don’t know how to make sense of what I experienced in that moment: all I know is that if my body could not fight its way to freedom, then some part of my psyche had to try. Had to find some kind of strength. When I first accessed this memory, the image I saw I can only describe as a spirit rising out from my body in the shape of a lion, this time roaring; set free from everything which bound him and cast him down as prey, without dignity or respect. The rest is mostly black. I don’t know if I screamed, I don’t know if I attempted to fight back, or if my mind simply vanished, leaving my face looking empty, blank. Perhaps I never will. All I know is that the apparently normal part of me banished it from memory, until I was ready to remember. A reckoning Unfortunately, this wasn’t the last time my sexual abuse history was weaponised by males as a pretext to take what they wanted. This memory was brought forward intentionally, along with others, by my parts during a session of trauma-informed hypnosis. The night before the session I went to bed in extreme agony, feeling like the pain I knew I was going to be forced to face the next day might actually be enough to kill me. Remembering what I did in that session went against everything the script my therapist was reading to me was meant to evoke: it was a standard protocol, the first of six sessions. Everything in it had been about calming my mind and evoking a sense of complete safety; it was setting the scene for my parts to come forward to release all the emotions and dysfunctional behaviours they were still clinging to, which supposedly kept holding the adult part of me back from moving forward from the past, and into a better future. I knew for myself that this wasn’t what my parts had in mind: that they had new information to share with me. Crucial information they refused to leave hidden in the dark, in any thinly-veiled attempt at ‘recovery’. There was no way they were going to allow me to move forward without reaching this part of my consciousness. But why is that? My parts know that what happened to them happens to others. While much of my abuse was experienced in isolation, it involved witnessing the abuse of other children, not only my brother - who these parts felt abandon them for years as he defaulted to identifying with and defending my parents, instead of joining hands with them to fight back - but also other children. And just as they held onto the truth of what happened so that I did not have to hold it myself, these parts watched as other ‘Apparently Normal Parts’ took over in other children just the same, to keep them alive. Both of my parents relied upon my brother’s silence to isolate me. While they abused him in their own way, they made perfectly sure he had a vested interest in playing their game, in taking their sides. Not only did my brother have parts of himself split off to keep him functioning, parts which knew the truth for themselves and had their own memories of deep pain inflicted by my parents, but he also had parts of himself that just wanted to belong, to have some power, to feel safe. Beyond the bullying he faced, the abuse we both witnessed involving other children had happened across multiple contexts: in the teddy-bears picnics my father held, organised through his role as a vicar and enabled by church members who owned significant land and wealth; and then again in his position as a vicar overseeing young children’s first communions, which allowed him to have access to them without the presence of their parents, for twelve whole private sessions. Eventually, my brother found a way to become more like the big friendly giant my uncle had been. He put aside the misogynistic, homophobic and other-phobic bullshit he’d internalised to defend against his shame. But for a long time, in both childhood and adolescence, my brother had learned that nowhere else could bring him that safety. And he had learned that there was always someone beneath him he could redirect his anger and violence about it onto, without facing accountability. There are other things which happened in other contexts we were exposed to, some of which only further inflamed my mother’s own capacity to abuse, knowing that no one spoke up about these things when they themselves witnessed them. The more my mother saw others turn a blind eye and herself got away with it, the more she slipped from passive victim into enabler, and perpetrator. The details I will not go into here, and I admit my theory about her own process here is somewhat speculation. I have no way of knowing if my mother had abused what little power she had managed to hold over other children before in her relatively low-status occupations. The important point is that my parts know very well what it means to be powerless and small in a system that is built on coercion in the place of autonomy, on oppression, and on exploitation. They know that where accountability fails, evil thrives, and that dwindling reserves of empathy can bring out the worst in everyone. They know the darkness of shadows cast by people parading as the light; and they know the pain of being marginalised by a system that centres might as right. And what about me? I know that none of this is inevitable. Thanks to the higher-functioning parts of me who got me through higher education, I know that men aren’t born rapists and children aren’t born into cruelty. I know that hierarchies are not fixed in nature, and that neither is patriarchy. But that’s for another essay. I also know that (unfortunately) I am not a lion, nor will I ever be. But the archetypal traits that humans associate with them are ones which we, too, can possess: leadership, courage, protection, the instinct to defend. I got the lion tattooed on my arm to remind me of this. That those parts of myself whose raw and primal urges were suppressed could be harnessed again. The parts which tried to fight back, which said no, which protested. The parts which often tried to protect vulnerable others, even at their own expense. This, too, is part of our mammalian legacy. Part of our DNA. There is another part of me which was exiled for quite some time, banished into its own hiding. It was a part who had wanted to know for itself why the abusers were doing what they did: a part who tried to re-enact what she had witnessed to try to make sense of it, but only traumatised itself. She had learned that that was what people did: took turns in taking the baton, and going crazy wielding it, as soon as they had the opportunity. But for every part which fawned and folded itself into whatever they wanted - the good girl, the slut, the follower - there was a part who fought to preserve dignity, empathy, and truth, parts which always threatened them. None of my parts want me to forget or let go of the past. They want healing, they want witnesses. In fact, more than that, they want a collective reckoning. They also want to hear that their abusers were wrong when they drilled it into them that no one would ever believe them. As the person now sitting in the driver’s seat, in charge of this system - it is my job to get those younger parts what they are telling me they need. At least, to finally try.

You Are Not Alone You are not alone. So many of us had so much taken from us by people who put pleasing their basal urges over our sanity. For their moments of bliss and dominance we suffer. We blame ourselves for their sickness. THEIR pathology. There is an army of us. That is what these stories teach us. They show us we are legion. We are strong. Our psychological reactions of fear, mistrust, hatred are not crazy. They are normal. It is also normal, but not easy, to climb out the darkness together. I grew up in a large low income black of flats that was like a village. My mum worked and we went about by ourselves. In the winter we were never expected to be seen if we left. We were in some flat mucking about with some kids or neighbor, and it all worked out fine. I did lose my virginity when I was eleven to a friend of my older brother who was in year ten. But that was no bother because it was not uncommon there, sadly. I am half Brazilian on my absent father’s side and was considered quite exotic and fit. My secondary sexual characteristics developed early. I was reasonably careful and in control. True abuse began years later when we moved out to a proper house with HIM. HE was my mom’s dream man. HE was fit for a middle-aged man. By that time my brother wasn’t with us because he took work in Alaska on a fishing boat. HE was ex-Army and seemed like a good man at first. I was a bit of trouble maker and over-cheeky and my mom gave HIM carte blanche to discipline me like father. We weren’t there the length of a full season when HE started treating me like a tart. The spanking part mom knew about and thought it was funny, even with me being fifteen. HE spanked my bare bum even when she was home. She said I’d always needed a man’s hand to block of my rough edges. It was cringe, humiliating, but nothing compared to what HE did when mum was away. Not to get detailed, HE soon got to a point where I was going to get HIS load whenever there was the chance. Since HE got to set my schedule he made sure there were regular chances. It was my HELL and HE was the Prince of Darkness. He was rough but careful not to leave any marks. Unless time was short I had to shower first. Sometimes after there would be something specific sitting out to wear, like a costume or lingerie, or my netball kit. The grating anticipation of what was going to follow was the real torture. HE would tell me to “Pick a hole”. My holes! My foof was one, my mouth was two, and you’d think I would never select three. But you’d be wrong. I hated HIM. I am very sensitive sexually and if I went with one I looked like I loved it and if I chose two I was doing work to please HIM. Three was the way I could shut down and brace myself without him ever seeing me smile, even if I was facing toward him. When I was strong with hatred I would choose three. I compartmentalized that small but brutal part of my life for my mum. If was a mere thirty to one hundred twenty minutes per a week of 10080 minutes. And I saw no other way then. Mum, for the first time was living a happy life. I could have won a BAFTA for how I seemed so cozy and content for her. It gutted me that my fear of upsetting HIM made it appear that HE had smoothed out my rough edges and made me into a proper lady. I kept my marks up and stayed on the netball team in spite of being the shortest. I kept going. I developed a habit of stabbing mechanical pencil tips into my skin and biting my nailbeds to illicit pain. I had one boyfriend for a short time. I went to the dances. Home was my hell so I did everything HE would allow to be anywhere else. I could not work but he made my mum keep her job so he could have me. My birthdays I would get my way of having a just girls’ night out with mum. There were only two birthdays before I got free of him. College cost 1000 pounds and when HE paid it HE did not know I was not going to be his tart anymore. I had a friend with a home much closer to my school. They had spare bedroom because an older sibling had moved out. Being seventeen, HE couldn’t force me to live with them if I had other safe accommodations. I took employment and paid the meager rent. He got me one more time when I was sleeping back at his house on Christmas eve. Probably drugged mum to keep her sleeping. I made sure he never got a chance again. Through my Portuguese class I met a man who lived in Portugal and invited me to come stay with him as long as I wanted rent free. I finished one year of sixth form and went to Portugal. I had fleeting relations with the man I stayed with but he traveled often we both had our own things. I worked at an American-themed restaurant as a server then. I spoke with my mum on the phone most days. She visited once, with HIM. I missed her and tried not to show much of my sorrow about being forced apart from her. Seeing HIM was horrendous, yet I kept it contained inside like a cancer. It helped solidify my decision. I traveled with a friend to Florida and got a job serving in a posh restaurant. I applied for a work VISA and on my second try I got it. I am thirty-eight now. Only three years ago did I confront my demons because I read online stories about other abuse survivors. It opened up a deep wound so I could start to heal. It was and still is hard work and an ongoing process. I confessed to my mum who had split with HIM after years of her own abuse that she also kept hidden. HE had let her go when she started having health problems, showing his true black heart. She lives with my brother and his family. I regret losing years with mum and my brother and being chased away from my home when I was young but it made me stronger. I have never married but I have a loving partner, two dogs and I speak three languages. I am a physical trainer and work near the beach where I go to meditate and body surf. Our journeys and stories are individual but we are in this together. Worldwide. You are not alone in carrying the pain and the shame and the fear and the flashbacks! Even if you are in the dark, start toward a path that looks like others are using to try to climb out. Use the resources, even if just right there on your computer, and build from there. Just start and keep climbing, especially when it seems too hard.

My name is Survivor and when I was around age 3, my father started raping me. My mother helped hold me down. He was raping her, and she offered me up in her place. This continued until age 23, maybe 24, shortly before my wedding. By the time I was 6, he was raping other members of my family too. He’d come into my room at night and would throw my nightgown up into the headboard and then I’d have to wait my turn in fear and naked shame while others were raped. We had a large waterbed and I still remember the bed rolling up and down, up, and down, up, and down like on a boat. Once done, he wiped me down roughly with a red shop rag he used in cleaning the garage. It allowed him to keep the rag around to smell it and hold it close with no one questioning why it was so dirty with red stains. Most of the time, my dad was friendly and polite. But once he turned into the monster no one did anything to stop him. He never did these things when he was nice. Only when he was the monster. But he used the nice times to make it easier to attack. He would lull you into a false sense of safety and peace which really made you question your intuition and gut instincts that this was a bad man. This made it easier for him to sexually assault other children and adults. As I got older, my parents controlled the narrative of our lives, every aspect was carefully controlled. Like my mom knowing how to force miscarriages. The first abortion forced on me was when I was 15. I don’t know how I managed to make it to adulthood. I continue to remember more and more of the abuse by other family and church members. And other things my dad did within the church where he was pastor and then later deacon. But I still can’t talk about those memories. I think my dad felt like anything he did was inevitable, therefore, never his fault because he couldn’t control himself and when it happened God would forgive him, so it was all right. I know this because I overheard him grooming another family member to do the same things when he was 11 years old. Males in our family were groomed to be abusers too. I was groomed too. To always be the abused. Forced to keep silent, I learned quickly what happens to people who stand up to my dad. They die or get assaulted. As you can imagine, I had terrible anxiety growing up about being sexually assaulted and worked hard to fade into the background. I thought that might help. I thought it mattered what I wore, color of my hair, how much I weighed. It’s taken years and it will probably continue to take years to unlearn the lies I was taught. The worry made me constantly ill with one thing after another-- I got cancer when I was 32 and before that incapacitating vertigo and motion sickness. My parents met while working down in Texas for an independent fundamental Baptist preacher. Lester Roloff—an Independent Fundamental Baptist preacher who opened homes across the country for “troubled” children, teens, and adults. He liked to say he was saving dope fiends, whores, and hippies. I believe many of the children in the homes had already experienced abuse growing up and Lester Roloff homes should have been a safe place to heal. Instead, the kids met caretakers like my parents. My mom was in a charge of the 16 and older home and my dad flew around the country raising money and preaching the party line: men were akin to gods and women were lower than dirt—their only worth was in being a virgin and then baby factories once married. Very masochistic and minimizing of abuse of any kind, my parents ate up the evil rhetoric being preached from the pulpit My parents eventually took their brand of abuse from Lester Roloff’s out into the churches and communities where we lived-from Texas to Washington and eventually into Alaska. He disappeared in a plane over the waters near Anchorage in 2006. The events surrounding his disappearance were always very suspect but intense pressure from my family kept me quiet. Every day for almost three years straight, a family member called and reminded me talking about “our family issues” was causing generational sin to 4 generations. The pressure to keep quiet and do what my family told me to do was so significant I would have rather died than disappoint them. It wasn’t until I set out to heal from all the trauma, that I found out my dad faked his death. I had always been told since he was gone, there was nothing to be done for what I experienced growing up. But let me tell you, knowing he’s still out there perpetrating on other children and men and women really compelled me to come forward. I finally felt free to start talking. Getting past the pressure to stay silent was the hardest thing I’ve ever done. Harder, even, than fighting cancer. I have spent many years in intensive CBT, EMDR and Polyvagal therapy learning how to process my wounds in a healthy way. I had pushed for criminal and civil suits against my perpetrators but the Texas statute of limitations don’t allow for justice to be done. So now, I spend my time now speaking on panels, podcasts, and community platforms about the intersections of trauma, faith, and advocacy. One of the biggest honors of my life has been sharing my story and advocating for Trey’s Law on the Texas Senate floor in Spring 2025. Forcing a sexual assault victim to keep quiet is what allowed people like my parents to continue their mistreatment for so many years. I will do what I can to make sure justice isn’t minimized by NDAs and Statute of Limitations. My efforts connect me with survivors, true crime audiences, mental health communities, and faith groups seeking to understand and confront abuse. I invest my time in mentoring survivors, creating resources for healing, and building digital tools to expand access to supportive materials. Because living a life whole and healthy is what I really want for me, all the victims and their families. We make our own opportunities to heal.

You think your age makes you less to blame, But I carry the weight, I bear the shame. You crossed the line — no excuse to hide, No softer words can wash this tide. I’m not the one who should feel small, You built this cage, you made me fall. No matter your years, no matter your face, You took from me my safe, my space. But here I stand, I claim my voice, I break the chains, I make the choice. I won’t be silent, I won’t back down, I wear my courage like a crown. So hear me now, and hear me clear, Your actions caused this pain and fear. Age won’t protect what you have done— I am the survivor, I have won.

As an only child, I had no one to look up to really as a kid. But I always looked up to my Dad. Even though he was never really around due to work (although Mam worked more than he did and still found lots of time to spend with me), I still idolised him. He was my hero. He would always say 'Dads know everything - remember that', so lying to my dad (even little white lies) were pointless. Though when I hit 13 I began to realise he actually DID know everything. He knew what myself and my friends would talk about, he would know exactly where I was and who I was with without even needing to ask me, and I would always wonder why. In reality he had my phone tracked and could read all my messages. Now that I have been through the court system and he has been imprisoned for the abuse he inflicted upon me, I can confirm that he was in fact grooming me from the age of 13. About a month after my 18th Birthday, began the horrific 7.5 year abuse that I suffered. My Dad, masked for the first 2 years as a stranger, blackmailed me into performing sexual acts with strange men in our home - the one place I should've felt safe. When I finally realised it was him, I couldn't tell you how it then turned into just open ended abuse and rape from him. He would advertise us as a couple on hook up sites and in order to avoid physical beatings I would go along with it. I feared for my life so much that endless rapes and sexual assaults were easier - imagine that being the easiest choice - until you're in it, you just don't know how you'll react. I stopped going out, I gave up my hobbies, whilst in college I gave up my part time job - he controlled every single part of my life. And if I even let my "everything is rosey' mask slip even for a second, especially in front of my Mam, well it just doesn't bear thinking about. Fortunately for me, once Mam did find out, he was gone out of my life within 30 mins. Unfortunately, he went on to groom and abuse others after that. He was convicted, and is currently serving his prison sentence - but the fear of him stilll remains.

I want to be a source of hope to the hopeless

It was a cold snowy winter night just before the COVID shutdown spread across the country. I was attending the second-year graduate school class reception with a group of friends from the second-year graduate class. My "date" as my invitation to attend that class's event was really someone everyone knew was in a committed long-distance relationship and just using the extra ticket as a fun excuse to invite me as friend. It was a fun time to explore a historic mansion while having food and wine. An hour later, as it was about to conclude, one of the second-year's partners turns to me and tells me she would really like to meet me at a bar, and a group of people from that class are planning to go there. I turn to my "date" and we both agree to go. We drove to the vintage bar, one I never had been to before. I walk in through the snow and ice in my black high heels in a cocktail dress covered by my winter jacket, trying my best not to trip. A cocktail and a few conversations among classmates of my "date" later, I find myself in the corner chatting with the person who invited me to the bar from the reception. Something seemed off from the start of the conversation -- and it only got worse. The 30-something-appearing cis woman was a faculty member, yet seemed to serial date younger, new students at the same professional school -- a fact a classmate mentioned in passing with an eye-roll earlier. The one-to-one conversation with me appeared to go in circles, with her repeating the same stories over and over again without realizing that she was doing so. Awkward conversation, but it would just be a temporarily annoyance, my thought was. Yet it took an even more bizarre turn. She kept getting closer to closer to me as she was talking. At one point, she touched my shoulder, ostensibly to make a comment about how she liked my dress. She was mentioning her professional expertise and connections in the field I was, and still am, most interested in entering. She then started asking me awkward questions about how I was visibly trans, and then mentioned as a complete non-sequitur how she was the dominant "masculine" partner in her relationship. And then, to my horror, I noticed her abruptly lifting the bottom of my dress up and reaching underneath my dress to attempt to grope either my inner thigh...or worse. This wasn't just a slight motion; her hand was fully underneath my dress and moving fast upwards, from what I could clearly see from the brief glimpse I took. I immediately stepped backwards with a wide-eyed look on my face, in total disbelief of what just happened...and what did not happen that was mere seconds away from fully happening. She turned away in a hurry and walked back to her partner at the bar -- who was oblivious to what just happened -- grabbed him by the arm, and made an excuse to request to leave. This was not the first time I had experience attempted or completed sexual assault. Just like when I experienced rape the year of my college graduation, during a different cold winter night years earlier, I remember feeling puzzled, confused, and very much *not* wanting to put a label on what just happened to me. The events of each night leading up to the sexual assault always seem so random and not predictable as they are happening, but in retrospect, it is so easy to attempt to scrutinize every detail as a possible warning sign of what was to come. Yet I do not even want to think about the likely reality that the attempted sexual assault I experienced that night seemed to happen due to being visibly trans. When people think of post-traumatic stress disorder from an evolutionary perspective, it is typically thought of as an adaptive way to avoid situations of future danger. But when you're scared of social events and comments about personal identity, just think of how unpredictable the healing journey is.

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There is something to be said about coercive convincing. Sometimes people can make an outwardly uncomfortable situation very appealing or just generally ok. It’s easier to fall trap to that when you know the person, think you know the person, have heard good things about the person from others you know, or you allow your curiosity to take over your instincts. You must learn to trust your gut. Don’t silence it. Be ok with their discomfort. You, your health, mentally and physically, are more important.

Hello, My name is Name & I would like to share one of my poems to (hopefully) be read at Event😊 This poem is called "He Didn't Hit Me" and it is based on my own personal experience with an abusive relationship. I hope that anyone reading this poem & it resonates with them will take comfort in knowing that they are not alone ❤️ He Didn't Hit Me He didn't hit me, but his words cut like a knife, He didn't hit me, but he upended my life. He didn't hit me, but he made false accusations, He didn't hit me, but he had unreasonable expectations. He didn't hit me, but destroyed my hopes & dreams, He didn't hit me but ripped my confidence at the seams. He didn't hit me, but I always had to take the blame, For his shortcomings, moods & his manipulative game. Abuse isn't just physical, this I know to be true, Gaslighting & manipulation are powerful tools, Knowing I deserve better, I am finally free, For I am much more than what he tried to make of me.

I guess I am here to share some of the experiences I have been through in the past few years. My therapist introduced me to this page as a way to see support/connect with others who have been through similar experiences. My fiancé and I have been together for YEARS, but when we first got together he tried to force himself on me, and once I pushed him off and started crying he backed off. That should have been my first warning. Throughout the years he had a much higher drive than me and I didn’t always want to have sex like he did. He would practically beg me to have sex and I would eventually cave, which I have now learned is coercion. Once I even still told him know and he still went through with it. And then wondered why I was so upset. One time his sister brought over edibles for him and he let me have 2 and I didn’t think anything of it until I was unable to really move/keep my eyes open. I never smoke or do anything so this was a new experience. I remember at one point waking up to him on top of me starting to try to take my clothes off, luckily I was conscious enough to get him off of me. Moving forward years later this is STILL happening. He pressures me into having sex with him when I really don’t want to. I also don’t want to now because of prior experiences. My last straw was when I finally initiated sex with him and then he rushed through everything and then it started to hurt. And I begged him to stop and he claims he didn’t hear me. As he kept going to the point where I was sobbing and in physical pain. We are now on a break and I called off our engagement and I guess I just am at a loss and don’t know what to do. I love him , but I know this isn’t healthy. There has been other emotional things as well. I am always battling with my mental health and he can be very mean. I once was even self harming and he knew I was and completely ignored it. He really wants another chance to prove he is changing but I just don’t know. Everyone in my family loves him. He can be a great guy so I am just stuck!

In the months following my assasult, I grew so angry. Poetry was my outlet, to not be quiet and be as angry as I wanted. 100 pages of poetry marred by tears, anger, betrayal, hope, and happiness. On the 100th page, it was dedicated to survivors, I hope that whoever reads this, will find some degree of comfort as I did when writing it. Dear Survivors, You are more than enough. You are worthy of all the stars and gold combined on this Earth. What happened does not define you, you are more than that. From one to another, it’s tough, it’s difficult. You’ll have your ups and downs, happy moments and miserably haunting ones. But, I’ll say this; Thrive. In all honesty, thriving will be tough. But it’s the best reward there ever will be. You deserve to thrive and live and have fun and experience life. What happened to you does not define you, but it is a part of you. What happened to you is not shameful, what happened to you is not your fault- it never will be. Do not let those around you shame you and beat down on you, quieting you and your story. You are the writer of your own story. You decide if you want to forgive. You decide if you don’t want to forgive. You decide if you want to be the bigger person or not. You get to decide. Don't let anyone else tell you any differently. C.P.

My life should have been a life of happiness and peace, but oooh how the tables turned. I was an easy going, fun loving, creative, individual who has talents beyond my time. For the most part my life was lived as a typical middle class, every day average Jane. Who had dreams that were all reachable. It started at the age 25, where I met a handsome man that in my eyes was every woman's dream. But ooh my, my I didn't know this was the beginning of a very harsh reality check and the beginning of major changes in my life. We had a quick and fast romance story, fell in love, out of love an in love again. He was my rock and I was his motivating force, until he changed totally on me and became a habitual cheater. His cheating lasted for many years and he eventually met a faith that he too thought, he was untouchable. But being who he was and how care-free he was in his cheating activities, this faith wouldn't have passed him. The sudden faith that landed him to contact a std, to which no one ever wants. But I on the other hand was living my dream of having a husband and kids, with taking care of all their needs an leaving myself undone. Yes you may have an idea so far where this story is going, but I didn't know I would become a victim to my husband. He had the most perfect plan with the cruelest intention. Lets go back a little, yes I was acting like a wife but I was just living in a common- law situation. To which his plans was perfectly executed, he knew, I had little knowledge about his "outside activities " and my greatest desire at the time was to be his wife. And that was his perfect plan to get me, he would avoid being in d same home, or country with me. Often repeatedly saying he's coming on our wedding day, in which I would smile and think nothing of it. I took us roughly 1 week to organize everything, too have a quick and fast wedding. Me not knowing that in my tries of joy there would be sadness on d corner. I got married..had a beautiful harmonious day, fun after fun. Till one day I began feel strange and had to be taken to the doctor, in which multiple test was done. Everything came out ok, but this one result hit me on my chest hard, as if I was out in the rain being hit on my chest repeatedly. I sat in that room alone to my right nothing or no one and to the left nothing or no one, the doctor that stood in front of me became invisible. But my husband was gone again, back to keep away from home and the country of which we stayed. Every little piece of his actions from the most biggest to the smallest came flooding in my head as one slide to the next and it all became clear. I ran out of the room in tears to hide and called him, as he heard me he began to cry and repeatedly say sorry, sorry, sorry. But this man wasn't totally sorry he told me he's going to book a flight an he would be on his way. He came, he hold me, I asked questions he answered, but my biggest shock was when I heard these words, "I didn't want to lose you". His logic for making me his victim was justified with not losing me, my life was weighted on not losing me. The deed was done and I became the walk over troll, I felt as a prisoner in head, life, body and to him. The cheating continued, I tried to protect others,but he would make me seem to be bitter and a liar. I had became a victim to multi forms of abuse, he made a baby outside of the marriage an my kids became as nothing to him as I was. I got verbally abused by his newly baby mother and often called a liar when I tried to warn her, but in all I served.

I need to tell someone this, I haven't told a single soul not my parents, friends, partner, no one and I need to get it off my chest. I want to start this off by saying I've never had a good family bond, my father was a stoner and barely there, my mother an angry drunk, 2 older sisters who hated me and a twin brother who treated me like a maid. I've had an eating disorder since I was 8 years old, I used to leave the house at 6am everyday, run around the block far too many times and then work out for 2 hours before returning home and starving myself. This went on for around 4 years. One Saturday morning when I was 11 I decided to change it up and ran to the park to run laps of it, I was running circles of the park for around 10 minutes before I was grabbed. A man dragged me into the bathrooms and forced himself on me, I was so malnourished and weak I couldn't fight back. I sat there and sobbed in pain as he did what he wanted, once he finished I thought I was done but I was unbelievably wrong. The man left the bathroom as I laid on the floor sobbing, he came back but with a friend. I was horrified I knew he brought his friend to have 'his turn' but I was also wrong about that. They ended up picking me up and carrying me into a car, they threw me on the backseat and told me to stay down. I complied, afraid of what they would do to me if I didn't. After god knows how long of driving in pure terror they parked and yanked me out. I didn't know where I was but they quickly dragged me into a house where they would then take turns raping me for a few days. After I was all 'used up' they threw me back in the car and drove back to the park and released me; I am still shocked as to why they would release me rather than killing me cause I could have told someone. My parents didn't even notice that I was missing for a few days, I stumbled in the door, bleeding, sobbing, and begging for help. My dad was out with some friends and mum just drunkenly yelled at me to clean the table. No one cared where I had been or what happened to me. Sometimes I wish those men had killed me, I began self harming at only 9 years old and attempted to overdose at 10. Many years later and I still self harm and my most recent attempt was only 2 months ago. I have caused permanent damage to my liver and kidneys from the medication I over dosed on. I wish they killed me.

I was so shocked. Being a single parent my career and professionalism means everything - including basic financial survival. I work for a small male dominated company. Part of my compensation includes a house on the property. I offered one of the rooms as a temporary conference room - 5 years later I had a growing side business and communicated with the appropriate 30 day notice that at the end of the year I would like to take this space in my home back. That set the owner off. He is emotionally unbalanced but I had no idea he would isolate me - came into the office barking for everyone to leave, he wanted to talk to me. Then he cornered me and after what seemed like very rehearsed rantings he talked about he and his wife’s $10k hobbies and in the same breath leaned forward leering and said “I bet your afraid some man is going to lock you in your basement and rape your ass”. I was speechless, and breathless - thinking he is having knee replacement surgery - if he moved closer I could kick that knee . . When he was done ranting at me - he wanted a hug. I was so throughly disgusted - but afraid - so with tears down my face gave him a hug - I just wanted it to end, for him to leave . . I had my first panic attack as soon as he left, I had my next one the next day. A week later I had stroke level HBP - and made sure to document this with my physician. When I finally told someone, I had such a physical reaction I was admitted to the CCU - Cardiac Care Unit for a few days. While I have not had a similar encounter since, I do have pepper spray and a knife in 6 places in and around where I work and live.

I was in location and I had been seeing another guy in the friend group casually. The guy who ended up assaulting me was in that same friend group. We were at a party and this guy said a few of us should go to his for an afters, encouraging the guy I was seeing to go home instead and I didn’t think anything of it in the moment. When we were at his house and it was just me and him alone, he said he wanted to kiss me and I initially said no as it’d be a bit weird as I was seeing one of his friends. He then told me that the guy I had been casually seeing had a girlfriend, everyone knew and didn’t tell me. I felt terrible. So while I’m crying he starts kissing me and things escalate. He starts choking me hard, hurting me physically, restraining me, twisting my nipples really hard, and covering my mouth. I just froze up. After he was done I went upstairs to my friend and asked to leave at like 5 in the morning. The next day I called the guy I was seeing at the time asking him about the girlfriend and apologising about getting with one of his friends. He told me not to apologise and none of it was my fault and also the guy who assaulted me had lied about this whole girlfriend scenario. I didn’t want to think I was assaulted or coerced, I kept blaming myself. I couldn’t get out of bed to the point that I pissed myself. My family didn’t know what was wrong with me. I was so very fortunate to have friends who were with me to help me come to terms with what happened. My friends who had to tell me that wasn’t okay, that was assault. There was one “friend” who was very much a well it takes two, and it was bad out of me to “get with” him when I was seeing his friend. Then informing me the guy who assaulted me tried to kill himself. And I felt so evil but I wish it had worked. The friend group cut him off once they heard what happened, it was also found out he had assaulted someone else in the group too. I eventually texted the guy who assaulted me telling him what he did was wrong and I didn’t consent to violence, he said sorry that he tends to take his problems out in the bedroom and that I wasn’t the first girl to tell him this. I felt so sick and so guilty for not realising sooner, for not saying anything to him sooner. This was a few years ago, I recently saw the guy who assaulted me on a night out, he looked like he saw a ghost but I froze again and just asked my friends to leave, it’s not fair. It’s just not fair. I feel so much anger and it’s not fair. He is not the only man who has assaulted me but he fills me with the most anger and I don’t know why. I hate feeling this anger, I hate feeling frozen, I hate wishing bad upon a person the way I wish bad upon him. I am not one who runs from confrontation usually but I had to run from him, I had to leave and cry on the phone and gulp water. Then walk past him again in the smoking area wishing I could shout that man is a rapist, but instead I walk past not looking back in case he sees me again, I swallow my anger. I worry that I don’t fit the bill of a “perfect” victim but I know now none of it was my fault, it was all his. I feel hopeless sometimes, but I guess getting to talk about it like this helps, it really helps.