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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.

In my original shared story, IT STARTED WITH MY BROTHER, I talked about my abuse from a bird’s eye view. It was my abuse life as I was able to share it at the time. I have been working up to sharing 3 instances of rapes that I only avoided by allowing the men to take what they wanted instead of fighting. The most traumatic of the three incidents I mentioned involved a police officer. This is that account. I was pulled over on my way home from a study group as junior at the university on a week night. We had shared two drinks toward the end. I DO NOT condone driving and drinking but I was not drunk, as the breathalyzer later confirmed. I was pulled over and already had the nerves associated with that, amplified by the fact that I was under the legal drinking age for another three weeks. That is when I first met the cop I will just call SIK. He gave me a creepy vibe when I first saw him and that never stopped. Still, I flirted with him to an extent desperate to not get it huge trouble. He had me get out of the car, take of my hoodie, under which I only had a basic sports bra. It was only sixty degrees or so that night. I was cold and shivering from fear and the temperature. I saw him look at my body with no filter. Another cop car pulled up with two officers while I was doing the field sobriety tests. He had already searched me in an uncomfortable way. One of the officers who arrived was female and also searched me after he had said I had some problems with the sobriety tests. Walking backwards on an imaginary line heel to toe was the only thing I had trouble with. It is hard! The female cop brought out the breath test I had asked for. I blew 0.035. That is less than half the legal limit. At that point SIK said he was just going to follow me home, rather than arrest me, and the other car left. The whole stop took maybe an hour. Cars drove by on the side street I had pulled onto. Headlights and tail lights in the dark. After the other car left SIK talked to me more harshly and threatening than ever. He said a girl like me is probably used to getting away with everything. He asserted that he could still take me to jail anytime he decides as as he takes me home and makes sure I am safe everything I do is still a test. He could bust me for possession of alcohol and I would lose my license. I was scared. I told him my roommate was home. She was a student too and was supposed to be there. After following me inside my apartment I called out for my roommate. Then I checked her room. She was not there! SIK then accused me of lying to a police officer and locked the deadbolt from the inside. He made me stand with my hands on my own dining room wall with my legs spread. I wanted to call her so he could talk to her and confirm she was usually there, but he stopped me and made me just text her to see when she would be home. He gave instruction not to ask or say anything more and checked before I sent it. She was at her sisters and would not be back until late. At that point he took off his utility belt and put it on my kitchen counter. He told me after all he had done for me was no longer free, since I lied to him. His gun was right there next to us. He made sure I saw it and he even twisted it so it was pointed toward me. I was scared and pleading with him. I really was willing to do anything. I am not sure but I think I told him that. He radioed from his shoulder thing that he was taking a “lunch” break. What I definitely remember was when he said he was going to do a proper strip search this time, down to full nudity and asked if I agreed to that. At that point I no longer had a doubt what was happening. I made the mental adjustment but what he did was more than I had prepared for. He gave me vulgar compliments about my body as he blatantly molested me. He kneaded my breasts like dough. He fingered me as asked if you could use a special appendage he had that went farther in. I knew what he meant. I was repulsed but I agreed. After the initial eager sex with me still having my hands on the wall leaning forward he slowed down. I had been hoping it was almost over but he decided to prolong it. He commanded me to my bedroom. He took off all his clothes besides his socks. He complemented his own anatomy and made me agree. His member was well above average in size but I doubt, if he had not had a wedding band on, that he would ever get to use it. He was half bald, had a prominent eyebrow like a neanderthal, and a pale beer belly with lots of moles all over his body. He had a mustache and goatee that did not completely hide his poor complexion that looked like he had scars from severe acne. Almost all men all taller than me but he was short and only towered over me by a few inches. Never had I lied bigger than when I told him what he wanted to hear about being sexy and wanting him. The only truth was about his large penis. SIK spoke a lot, mostly degrading me and confirming that I agree with him. Cliche stuff, like me being a whore, slut, dirty, and liking what he made me do to him, but also asked about my sex life and abuse history. He wanted me to say that my dad and coaches abused me, but I would not lie about that. Instead I told him some of the truth about my brother abusing me. That was probably the worst part. Saying out loud to SIK what I never used to admit to anyone, for his great pleasure, harmed me. That was worse that the physical stuff. Worse than making me kiss him during parts of it. He was also cruel. He tried to gag me and push all the way down my throat while he made him do oral. He pushed my ankles behind my head while he pounded me with his abusing thrusts. I could see the cruel lust in his eyes. I could see his wicked smile. He slapped my face many times, just not very hard. He did spank me hard. He realized he had me captive and vulnerable to his whim and he was finally living his darkest fantasies. I was doing anything he wanted and encouraging it because I wanted it to stop. So many times he stopped himself right before he was going to climax! He did not want it to end. SIK tried to have anal sex with me and I was accommodating him but he was just too big to fit. I was crying during most of this out of pain but trying to act like an eager partner to make it end. I later thought that might have prolonged it. SIK was probably the time that would prefer I suffer more, like I was being raped instead of hiding my pain. It was not much longer than twenty minutes but it was so bad and I relived it so many times in my mind before I got smashed drunk and high the next night after work. So the memory lived much more prominently in my head than a simple 25 minute encounter. I do reach climax easily, but I never had one orgasm from him because of his preference for causing sexual pain. When he suddenly released inside me he got quiet and barely said another word as he dressed, gun belt and all, and left quietly. I have no idea what that meant. It scared me. I was afraid while driving for a while, and avoided sleeping at home as much as I could, which sometimes meant sleeping with men and even male friends just to not go home. It was the main reason I did not renew my lease and moved it to a smaller apartment by myself. This was the same roommate whose father had already slept with me without my initial blessing. I did tell my roommate a short version of it and she reacted like it was cool story. I did kind of tell it that way, as a way of dealing with it. The easy path of least resistance. To not admit it may have been the worse sexual thing to happen to me. The true worst things that happened to me in my college years were broken hearts from losing men I loved. But those are stories for a different forum. I don’t put my heart out there to be trampled anymore. This incident was one of the wake up calls that stood out as an omen for me to change my whole lifestyle and try to salvage myself. It was also one of the things that took me the longest to mention to my therapist even though I thought about it during sessions.

I didn't realise until over a year after the separation that the relationship I had been in for almost a decade was abusive. I was confused, I was lost, I doubted every thought and memory I had because that's what I'd been conditioned to do. He used to tell me I had a bad memory, that I remembered the incident wrongly; he would start an argument in the car on the way to what was supposed to be a pleasant gathering with friends; he would criticise me all the time and when I finally snapped and shouted at him to stop criticising, he said I was crazy. He didn't let me sleep a full night for 4 years after our baby was born, I was exhausted, I was extremely anxious about everything. I was in fight or flight mode all the time. The last straw was him shouting at our child all the time because he made a noise, because he made a mess, because of something. I know all this now, but I didn't understand what was happening at the time. I will still second guess myself if anyone vaguely questions my choice or my decision. I was strong before and I lost my voice. I'm fighting hard to get it back but post separation abuse is real and it's difficult when someone is constantly trying to invalidate you and dismiss your concerns. No more. We have to talk about it, join together and eradicate a permissiveness that allows victims to be suppressed and perpetrators to continue unchecked.

*TRIGGER WARNING IN ADVANCE* So, it all began when I was like 5 or 6 and ended when I was around 10 or 11. I think. My own grandad was sexually abusing me. I couldn’t tell you all the events in chronological order because I can’t remember every single time or what order they went in. I can just share the types of things that would be done. When I would stay at my grandparents house, my grandad would read a bedtime story every night. However, it wasn’t just a bedtime story… no… it would end up with him holding my hand through a hole in his pocket making me touch his penis. Sometimes I’d be asleep and he’d come upstairs and rub his penis on my body and pull up my top and lick my nipples. I used to love insects as a child so his excuse was that his penis was a glow worm called Name and “Name would want a tickle”… he would draw bizarre pictures of different sexual poses and say that those would help with a spell because I was into magic… he would buy me things all the time like a phone, credit for my phone, an Xbox but this wasn’t on birthdays or Christmas this was just random and my brother wouldn’t get anything other than birthday and Christmas presents… I used to do acting and I loved it, he then made a script about a girl called poppy longstockings and bought a whole outfit for me to dress up in and gave me a script and I had to act out and let’s say the costume was certainly not PG… He would always try and do anal on me and I mean always… in his shed, at his work (which he was like a handyman and he’d work on student flats and stuff) I’d go on jobs with him sometimes. Listen. I was young I didn’t understand what was happening was wrong. Anyway… Let’s get to where it all got found out… When I was around 11 I told my friend that I thought what he was doing was wrong and that’s when it all stopped was when I realised or learned that it was wrong. Didn’t tell anybody else. Years later in secondary school me and my friend were in a lesson together and somehow it came up in conversation and someone overheard and then they went and told someone, then that person told someone, then so on… the whole year knew… I didn’t know everyone knew until I was sat next to my other friend who didn’t know and he texted me saying I know what your grandad did and I just bursted out crying… anyway I got taken out and a teacher spoke to me so I told her and that’s when I had to speak to the police… the weekend went by and I had to pretend everything was fine to my mum, dad and brother because they had no clue about anything… Monday came around and I get a knock on my class, it’s my brother asking to see me, we stand in the hall and he just hugs me and starts crying so then I start crying. Anyway, end up going home and my mum gives me a hug and then my dad comes home and gives me a hug and we’ve never been closer as a family…. Then comes court… What a horrible horrible experience…. But it was absolutely worth it! To see him go down for 15 years for what he did to me (wasn’t enough in my opinion but still better than nothing and I’m very grateful for that)… t This is not the end of my story but my entire mood has changed since the beginning of writing so I’m going to take a little break:) lots of love <3 x

Firstly I want to thank ourwave for creating this safe space and thank anyone who takes their time to read my story, when my mum was a teen she fell pregnant with me, once I was born we didn’t have a stable home we lived between houses the main house was my nanas, where my uncle lived too. I was 5 he was 15 and When no one was in my uncle would take it upon himself to rape me I don’t remember everything as I was so young and somethings slowly come back especially since my police report but I vividly remember him taking out his penis and putting it my face telling me to suck it..the other memory I have it him sitting me on my nanas bed and him attempting to rape me..he used pliers to try make it easier and also asked me to try help too which I did.. these memories stuck so well in my head and I can never shake them..I also remember my mum bathing me and she has since stated she saw very sore red skin around my lady area and asked “who’s been touching you” to which I replied “name” …now I may not remember everything I may not have been pinned down but that day a piece of me died and I haven’t been the same since, I went my whole life my mum telling me it never happened all my family went against us told everyone i was lying and he was protected whilst I questioned should I even be alive right now at the small age of 9 years old..because I did question my mum on the night terrors and I asked why I got moved so far away and why I have memories of it and I went all this time thinking I had made it up I told myself I was a freak an attention seeker but all along I was right I was a survivor and now I’m 21 years old I’ve just recently reported my uncle to the police and I have my own baby to protect..I don’t get why everyone or how anyone can hurt a child the way so many are hurt

I was around 14-15 I was assaulted by someone I know I was so scared for such a long time scared to share my story but now I’m ready He used to always make me feel really guilty for the things he did to me He used to touch me inappropriately he was older I thought I was to blame for a while I blamed myself for what happened but I realise now that I need to share my story to help others out there struggling I fell into unhealthy coping mechanisms everyone handles trauma differently but I found help and reached out to friends and family and shared it with them

I was 9 when it started. I mean it really started. There was a boy in my class who openly liked me. It didn’t bother me too much, except when he’s chase me around the field telling me he was in love with me. We were 7. It was ‘how kids were’ said my school when I said I wanted him to stop. But then later on in the years he got obsessed. Taking photos of me around school. Following me home. Getting in calls with me online (we were somewhat friends) and asking me to take my shirt off. Asking me to take my clothes off so he could screenshot. We were 9. It’s just how kids are? Right? Well that’s what I told myself. And still do. Then he got aggressive, telling his friends about how ‘sexy I was’ I didn’t know what sexy meant until he told me: “it means I want to take your clothes off and feel you” I remember his words so clearly. After that his friends got weird around me too. Especially another boy. I always thought we were friends until a girl ran up to me at break saying “—— HAD A DREAM ABOUT YOU” I didn’t know what she meant until the boy whispered in my ear how he dreamt of me giving him a blow job. That’s the day when I found out what blow jobs were. 9 fucking years old. He told me in detail and I sat there and cried. I wanted to run away. I wanted to scream. But I froze. Instead I fucking froze. I hate myself for it. But I know it’s ‘normal’. The main boy started to grow more and more aggressive. Grabbing my arm, hugging me and never letting go. And more and more pictures. More following home. More standing outside my house pretending to read when he watched me get changed. But for some reason i forgot to shut my curtains. Why? Did I like him? Was it all my fault? Did I tempt him? Those are questions I ask myself every day. He did bad things to me. Until I left primary school. Free. I was away from that horrible boy. And then we had a school reunion last year. I’m not going into detail. Mainly because I can’t I just can’t. He didn’t rape me. But he made bleed in the wrong place. He groped my chest. I still have a scar. And the at was the last time I saw him. I hate him. I pity him. I love him. No I don’t. I don’t. What if i did? What if it’s all my fault? Fuck, did I want him to do those things! I was only 12! I was only 9! and I had no one. no one helped me. No one saved me from that nightmare. I still look back on my younger self. My memory is hazy. Traumatic response my therapist says. But what if it never happened. Am I just like those people I see on the internet who lie about SA? I don’t want to be. They make me so angry. I still am not okay. No one sees me. I hate him. I hate all the people who made people suffer like I have. If you experienced COCSA I’m so sorry. I love you. You are more than them. You are braze and special. And I love you. Stay fucking safe.

When I was approximately 12 year olds I was 'playing doctor' with a neighbour, who was a year or two younger, she initiated the game despite me not been interested. She initially touched me, and then asked me to touch her, when I refused she persisted despite my discomfort and she threatened to say I'd done something to her if I didn't comply. I also remember she had a younger sibling she shared a room with and she would make sure he was out of the room when this happened, and he would often bang at the door trying to get in. I'm now of the belief he was kept out so he wouldn't see and report what the girl was doing.

It took me years to come to terms with what was really happening. When I was 9 years old, I met a boy online, and we quickly became friends. We knew everything about each other - He was 15 when we first met. When I was 10 and he was 16, he asked to be my boyfriend. Being a naive 10 year old girl I said yes. I can’t be mad at her for that. It was innocent at first. Just what you’d expect from a childhood relationship - “I love you, goodnight.” “Hope you’re doing okay.” “Let’s play some games together!” The only difference was that one of us were nearly an adult. Someone who should have known better to not even THINK about being romantically involved with a 10 year old girl. However, it went sour. He started talking to me about sexual subjects. Stuff I wasn’t at all familiar with. He’d make us roleplay situations, what he’d do to me if he got ahold of me in real life. Asking for photos. Guilt tripping me for seeming “off” or uninterested. I began to feel distressed at the time, but I was so young, that wasn’t really an emotion I had felt before. I told myself, this sick feeling must be love. That must be why I feel so nervous, why I feel knots in my stomach when I see his name pop up on my screen. I was very attached to him, at least I thought I was. I was always picked on in school and the few friends I had were awful to me, so he was my only real friend. My worst fear was somehow losing him, and he must have known that I thought that. He took advantage of that, and would guilt trip me at any opportunity to make sure I did whatever he wanted me to. After a while, he broke up with me, but we were still very much so “friends”. We would talk everyday, and he was still just as inappropriate and creepy with me as he was before. Throughout the years, he would begin to talk to me about worse and worse stuff. He explicitly told me about his attraction to children, and that he worked as a teaching assistant in a primary school. I tried to brush it off and keep it at the back of my mind, but I got to tipping point last year when he started to pressure me into meeting with him in real life. It went on for 7 years. I hate to say it, and it makes me sad for the little girl that I was, but the rest of my childhood was stolen from me. I’m 17 now, about the same age he was when we met. The thought of EVER saying the stuff to a 10,11,12 year old that he did makes me feel physically ill. I still haven’t fully processed what happened to me, but I’ve been working on it. I’m yet to cry, at least properly, about it. The thing that sucks about this is that this went on for so long, that it felt completely normal. The people in my life who know all cried when I told them. It felt unfair, really - that they could cry about it. And I’m just stuck in a mindset I’m desperately trying to get out of where this is normal, and I feel completely numb. Recently, I decided I wanted to do something about it. I went to the police. This night, I sent off old screenshots of conversations between us to a detective working on my case. It’s terrifying, being that vulnerable. But I feel obligated to do it. The thought of him being around children all day makes me sick. I don’t care if he doesn’t go to prison - as long as he’s never near a child again I’ll be happy. That’s why I’m doing it. I won’t let shame and embarrassment stop me from doing this, and I especially won’t let my brain tell me he doesn’t deserve punishment. Because that’s exactly what he’d want me to think, too.

I met him when I was 4. We became friends quickly and so did our families ; my parents gave his family a voucher for him to join the same out of school sports group and it stayed like that for a good ten years . By this time we had gone to different secondary schools however we still saw each other at sports clubs once a week. Eventually we both quit and I began going to his house instead; soon we began dating. The communication between the two of us was terrible as expected at such a young age which led to lines being crossed. One of these lines was consent. I said no and expressed that I didn’t want to multiple times yet it was ignored and laughed off; he told me he wouldn’t talk to me if I didn’t and even set a timer for how long it would last saying it would only be quick. I went home and cried . It wasn’t a cry I’d experienced before- it’s truly indescribable. Despite this I remained with him however tried my very best to avoid anything similar occurring again. This didn’t work as it occurred I’d estimate another 3 times. You’d maybe wonder why I stayed with him; the simple answer is that I liked him and couldn’t comprehend what was happening to me. We eventually broke up for somewhat unrelated reasons and two years on i’m still dealing with the sexual trauma. For a while I questioned whether I was asexual however I came to the conclusion I wasn’t and instead I am simply sexually repulsed. He was the first person I was with and it has completely ruined my view on sex and intimacy. If someone else with a similar experience is reading this I read some advice this morning which helped me: Rape is not a form of sex. It is a form of assault. Sex feels good. Assault is traumatising.

My name is Name. I was born in a town called Location, the capital headquarters of District, located in the Northern part of Sierra Leone. My country was engaged in a brutal civil war (1991-2002), with all manner of atrocities committed against people and property. Sadly, I lost both parents during the war due to the lack of access to medical supplies at that time of the war. I was born into a very strict, loving, and religious family that practices the faith of Islam. We were financially poor, but rich in tradition, cultural value, respect, and a strong support network, whatever that means. My Father was a chief Imam and a farmer, and my mother was a housewife who supported my dad with the farming. I am one of the youngest of 26 children. My first name was given to me after dad was strictly told to name me either Name if I was a girl or Name 2 if I was a boy. He was cautioned that had this name followed instructions, I would have died. The second name was acquired through traditional belief that since my mum had lost seven children from minor illness or sudden death, if I were thrown into a dustbin after my mother gave birth to me, to appear that I was found for her to raise, then I would survive. The name for a dustbin in our native language is ‘Nyama’, meaning dirty. My experience of Africa at that time was a place where the voices of women and girls were often marginalised. That said, even at that young age, I always believed that everyone’s voice was equally important and should be considered and respected. This was fundamental to how we felt valued and appreciated in society, enabling us to give our very best. Yet, my first trauma happened at the age of 12, when I was subjected to the horrendous experience of Female Genital Mutilation (FGM), which is the intentional removal of female genital organs for non-medical reasons. This occurred not once, but twice. One early December morning, I was tied down. An older woman from within my family circle wrapped her legs around me to stop me from escaping. I was placed on the cold gravel floor of the wash yard. The whole process was so quick that by the time you were on the floor, the cut was done. This barbarous act was performed with an unsterilised pen knife, on me and every other girl who had no say in the matter. I remember it vividly. There were eight of us, and I was the first to be circumcised. This experience left me with an infection, unbearable pain and a deep sense of disconnection from my body. I had no idea how to express what I was feeling, or who to talk to about it. After surviving the pain of the first incident, I was called by one of my aunties to bring some water to the washing yard again. There, I saw an image of the lady who inflicted the first trauma on me, waiting to have it done again. The reason for having to redo it was that she was spiritually possessed at the time of the first incident, which led to a poor job. Since I was the first one to be circumcised, I was the only one who had to have it done twice. I was pinned down again against my will, and I remember crying a lot and being extremely upset, as I knew based on my previous experience what was going to happen. I was extremely scared. I knew something had been taken away from me, something that would harm my life. However, I was unable to process, analyse, and determine the impact, as there were no spaces allocated for reflection and processing. It was difficult, not having a safe space to discuss the negative experience of FGM, when the occasion is seen as a positive and significant milestone as a woman. At the time, everyone around me, including some of the victims, was celebrating and appeared overwhelmed with joy at having been cut. They had little regard for the overall impact it had on me. This whole experience left me mute. While healing from the second mutilation, it felt like my tongue had also been removed, because it was seen as bad luck to talk negatively about it. Therefore, everybody kept quiet and moved on with their lives, even for those who were severely affected. The next time I had the opportunity and platform to safely talk about my FGM experience was 25 years later. In 1991, when the Sierra Leone civil war began, my life was again flipped upside down. As a child, the reports of political unrest sounded like something occurring in a world far away from us. It sounded like something for the politician, not us farmers, to be worried about. What felt like a story became real life when rebels attacked my hometown in 1994. They left a devastating legacy on our close-knit community. There was a high death count and destruction of properties, including historical landmarks. We called it ‘the first attack that some of us survived’, and soon enough, death in every form, destruction and the sounds of guns became familiar. At this point, the war had extended from the Southern region of Sierra Leone (where it initially started) to the Northern region, with frequent attacks on the towns and villages in my district. The government seemed to have no control in resolving the situation, and instead, the violence was escalating like a wildfire. Children should not have to experience this level of carnage and destruction. No one should. But there I was, a child in all of that chaos, with no protection from family or the state. Having experienced frequent attacks in my hometown (Location), I decided to travel to Makeni (the headquarters of the Northern region), where they had military barracks. I travelled with my little nephew as we were the only family members still together at this stage as some of our family members were dead and some were displaced. The reason for going was the potential hope of having protection from the military, despite the risk involved. Although I was only 13 years old at the time,I knew there were no other options available. I found myself as a child living in constant fear of being tortured or dead within the next hour or so. I had no idea when my time would come. That feeling of knowing death could be just around the corner is something I wouldn’t wish on my worst enemy. The second trauma (which I thought was the first trauma due to the severity of the impact) occurred when I was 14 years old. The rebels attacked Makeni, and I was hospitalised for Malaria during the second week of December in 1998. Due to the rumours and panic of the rebels’ intention, I was discharged from the hospital to my brother (who was living in Makeni at that time) and nephew so that we could escape together in case of an attack. Before I came home, my nephew had already escaped with some neighbours for safety, and my brother was searching for me. We finally found each other, but it was too late to run away as the rebels were already in the town. The Christmas period of 1998 was like no other I had ever experienced. I was captured by the rebels, who found me hiding inside a toilet seat. I was hit, kicked and dragged to the neighbouring house where the first set of raping took place. I remember that the first man to rape was called Perpetrator Name (he was part of a group of five men). I was raped with a gun in my mouth in case I decided to shout for help. At the start of this brutal gang rape, I prayed for the sky to send me an angel to disappear with me. Since that wasn’t possible, and I did not want to feel any pain, I became numb, leaving only my physical appearance to deal with the minor pain. Once captured, one of the terrible acts the army does is train young children to become child soldiers. They know full well that hunger can lead to death, and with no family or future prospects, there’s no choice. My experience of being a child soldier led me to experience multiple rapes and other horrendous traumas on two separate occasions. It was hard to believe that before the abuse at the hands of adults, I was a happy, bubbly, and intelligent girl. After the FGM and rapes, I often felt very sad, worthless, lonely, and traumatised. The lack of a safe space or trusted individuals to express my feelings and thoughts led me to become even more consumed by the effects of trauma to the point where it became the norm for me. I am sure that millions of other survivors share the same sentiment. The day after these gruesome traumas was like the morning after the night that no one wanted to talk about. As a teenager, I found myself in a position where I had to deal with everything that had happened, with no family member or other adult to turn to for support. No professional or support network to discuss my thoughts with. Living in an environment where survivors of rape are at fault. Many incorrectly assume that the awful rape was partly the fault of the survivor because of how she was dressed or because she was somewhere she shouldn’t have been. I was 14 at the time I was first raped. I didn’t dress inappropriately, and as for being somewhere inappropriate, I was on the run from rebels, fleeing as they torched everything in their path to the ground. Yet, like so many others before me, I have been stigmatised for the actions of others, in this case, the sexual violence of men. Today, I am still here. I now live in London, having been granted asylum. I arrived in the UK with so much baggage, problems, trauma, language barrier, cultural barrier, and the fear of integration and the worries of exclusion. Despite my past in Sierra Leone, which I will never forget, I have built a new life. I am a wife, a mother, a sister, a friend, and a nurse, but above all, I am a survivor who set up her own charity to help other women. Women like you. Women like us. And from the bottom of my heart, I wish nothing but love and strength for you, wherever you are on your journey.

I was only 15. I convince myself it was my fault for not speaking up or saying no more clearly. For just freezing up and letting it happen. I wish I didn’t feel this pain. The flashbacks and feeling the crawl under my skin. I cant enjoy the beach anymore. I get scared if someone tries to grab or hold my wrist. The certain way water touches my skin makes me sick and relive. I cant wear certain clothes anymore. All I want is to heal. To come to some sort of peace with this. I’ve only just started to speak out about my rape after 2 years and I’m glad I have, but it’s still so overwhelming.

Name HE LIVED IN THE HOUSE BY THE ROAD AND I CANT PASS IT WITHOUT CRYING OR EVEN GO TO MY HOMETOWN HE LIED ABOUT ME HE HAD FRIENDS WHO I LIKED WHO NEVER KNEW AND STILL LIKE HIM NO ONE KNOWS THAT I AM REALLY TELLING THE TRUTH HE CALLED ME UGLY HE HID ME IN A CLOSET HE LIED TO ME HE TOLD ME I WAS FAT HE SCARED ME SO MUCH HE THREATENED ME IN THE SCHOOL HALLWAY WITH MURDER IN THE PARK AT SCHOOL IN THE HOUSE IN THE BASEMENT HE GOES ABOUT HIS LIFE LIKE HE NEVER HURT ME I HATE HIM I WANT HIM DEAD I WOULD OUT HIM BUT IM SO AFRAID OF BEING OUTED FOR STUFF I DID AS A KID I WOULD LIE AND SAY THINGS THAT WERENT TRUE BECAUSE I WAS AFRAID OF BEING LEFT ALONE PEOPLE WILL REMEMBER THAT AND NOT BELIEVE ME BUT ITS TRUE

My story begins by being coerced into sex with a man I didn't know. I was vulnerable at the time and only came to the understanding of the fact it was rape two decades later. My understanding of rape was that it had to be a violent incident where the victim is kicking and screaming and being physically overpowered. I didn't have the understanding that it is much more complex and I was in fact raped as I was coerced and coerced until I gave in and 'just did it' even though I didn't want to. I knew it wasn't right and that it affected my mental health, I just didn't understand why. At the time I didn't know it was rape. I was then subjected to verbal abuse for being a 'slut'. About a month after this rape, I was quite drunk, and got upset due to both the mental state I was in and the first rapist and his friends calling me names and laughing at me. So I tried to escape by walking away from these people. I was sat at a wall trying to compose myself when a man approached me and asked if I was ok.. To which I clearly wasn't. He told me he would look after me and coaxted me to go with him. I felt as though he was actually going to look after me. He brought me to a hotel and I fell asleep. I woke to him taking my trousers off. I was stunned and froze. He raped me. And I only came to the realisation that that was rape too after said two decades. I didn't realise it was rape as I didn't scream or kick and just 'let it happen'. I've done a lot of beating myself up and believing that I must be the 'slut' I was told I was. Constant questions in my mind. Why didn't you scream? Why did you go to a hotel? Why did you allow yourself to be fooled by the first rapist, then you wouldn't have been in the second situation? 'You idiot' floats around my brain too often. I went to counselling and did some research and realised why these incidents impacted my mental health all these years and realised that rape takes many forms and thats exactly what both of these incidents were, rape. I can say it now. I understand now that my body went into survival mode which is why I froze instead of faught that night. I'm learning to be kind and compassionate to myself now as beating myself up hasn't done me any good. It was not my fault. Only theirs!

I met a guy online, we became close and after around a month of talking we met up for the first time. We talked for hours, had our first kiss, set boundaries (or so i thought). For example, one of my main ones is i struggle with sexual stuff due to being assaulted on a bus when i was 14. As time went in i noticed the only time he’d have a full conversation with me was when it was based on sex. I met up with him a second time and he was touching me in specific places and i froze. Inside, i felt like i couldn’t breathe. But i couldn’t say no. I couldn’t move to get away. I told myself i was being dramatic and ignored how gross i felt when i went home. The third time, it happened again, this time i had tears rolling down my cheek, i was frozen, tense. After a few minutes he stopped and smirked, saying “you’re so tense.” He laughed. Again, i ignored the whole thing and said i was being dramatic. New years, i stayed at his. I woke up to his hand in my shorts. I pretended to be asleep, again, i couldn’t move. I couldn’t breathe. I wanted to scream. I wanted to hit him. But i was frozen. I came home and haven’t spoken about it until today, as i’m writing this, i spoke to my best friends and they said it is assault. I feel so dirty.

When I was 14-18, I was in an abusive relationship, but at the time, I could not see it. This boy was controlling, manipulative and he forced himself on me when I said no. He was physically violent and tried to prevent me from going to university. Whenever I tried to escape the relationship, he would threaten to kill himself, and I was also scared of him. I never had any time to myself as he would be there. I was not allowed to have any male friends on social media, and I could not hang out or talk to any boys. I was not allowed to wear certain clothing, and he told me I was ugly and should wear makeup. I use to self-harm because I cut my emotions out, and I wanted to feel something. One day I told him that I did not want to be with him anymore and that I was going to university. He again told me he would kill himself, but at that point, I told him I did not care, and I managed to get out. He has since been arrested and kicked out of his home. This relationship has scared me since I'm now 28.

I don't even remember how old I was. It was around the time when my parents got divorced, I might've been around 6-8, and this happened over multiple years, that's why it's such a blur to me. I used to go to my auntie's house in the holidays on Thursdays, sometimes Fridays too. Every time I would go, my cousin, who is 2/3 years older than me, would do things to me. I think the first time we ever did anything sexual was just kissing, with tongue of course. But as time went on, she began to just eat me out every time I went, I definitely didn't enjoy it, I was just frozen. I tried to tell her to stop so many times, but she would never listen. We would go to the guest bedroom on the third floor, away from everyone and she would ask to play families, where she would be the dad and me the mum, or she would beg me to role play as 'celebrities' with her. She always said she would be the male and me the female. One time, we went to my nan's house, and she dressed me up in scarves, role playing a 'wedding' with me. She even made me kiss her in front of my nan. I don't see how this was so normalized for my nan to not question her forcefully snogging me and picking me up. She even tried to assault me in front of my brother when he was a toddler once. It was terrible when my parents divorced, when I was with my dad, we stayed with her and my auntie. Of course they made me and her sleep together, because they thought we were close. That's when my world caved in, those were the worst years of my life that I can't even remember much of today. I lived in fear of her for years. One day, I just forgot. I forgot about her, I lost most of my memories of what she had done to me, and we grew close again. I was naive, desperate for my older cousin's attention. So, when I was 10, it almost happened again, and I've not been the same since. It was my birthday yesterday, and she came round, acting normal as she always does. It makes me feel sick. She's moving out from her stepdad's house with her mum, and asked if I wanted to sleepover. No. Never again. I don't think I'll ever tell anyone in my family. My best friend and my ex know but, I genuinely think it doesn't even matter because it happened ages ago and nobody would believe me anyways. So much of my childhood is a blur now and I can't help but feel terrified of intimacy yet I think about it so much. Thank uou for reading.

After seeing 'It Ends With Us', I felt I wanted to share my story. I saw this movie alone for the first watch, brought my Atlas to the second, and my bestfriend to the third. Watching it left me feeling empowered to anonymously share my story of abuse and violence. The film and the book brought back so many raw emotions, ones that I still struggle with today. My story started when I was 16 years old and I was with my first 'love', everything was OK in the beginning - but suddenly everything changed. I was constantly told how worthless I was, I got pushed down his stairs - but I wouldn't leave - and I didn't know why. He was controlling and did not like other people talking to me, going to extreme lengths to stop this from happening, and making sure my friends did not see me - people who he saw as a threat. I ended up in the hospital because of him, where he broke my hand. He got that mad at me once, we were in his car and just before I could shut the door and put on my seat belt, he started driving recklessly to scare me. What scared me more was when I was sleeping and I felt his hands around my throat - with no explanation. There were many times that I would say stop and he would carry on because he told me he was in control. I had cigarettes put out on me -multiple times, and was told that I was disgusting and looked like a sl*t, even telling me I was 'fat' - which led to further health issues. When I ended up with a bruise, my friend who is now my Atlas noticed - we worked together. I confined in him, and he was the first person to properly listen to me, and let me share my experiences. Throughout all this, it brought me overwhelming anxiety and depression and even the lengths of having to have therapy because to me it was a nightmare even when it was over, and reported multiple times. My parents never understood, asking me why I didn't just leave, telling me I must've wanted it to carry on. I didn't. I'm nearly 10 years later now, with my Atlas of 5 years, feeling happier and in a better place physically and mentally - I'm still healing. This movie brought me to tears and I related so much to Lily Bloom - some of it felt like my experiences - but the film also brought me a type of feeling of freedom and happiness. Thank you for letting me share my story. ❤️

I look back and am plagued by doubt. It’s less now but still it creeps in - did it happen? Was I too sensitive? Maybe I made too much of it? Have I remembered it wrong? What I know to be true is how I felt and continue to feel when he is mentioned or I see him. FEAR. It’s been 2 years and I still think about if he will like what I am wearing or will have a comment to make. I question my reality - ‘did that happen? Did I say that?’ In lost interactions with him. I met him on line 14 years ago. Things moved quickly, ish. I didn’t see it then but looking back he was ALWAYS there. He gave his friend keys to my flat and I arrived home with it tidied and reorganized. He thought I was messy and that it was a nice thing to do. I felt utterly overwhelmed and very uncomfortable with this but stayed and thanked him as I was left feeling ungrateful. Interestingly I didn’t introduce him to my friends - in fact I kept him quite separate. I think I knew that I didn’t want them to meet him as something was off and they would probably see it and point it out. Or maybe o was afraid that they wouldn’t see it and wouldn’t point it out so it would make me feel even crazier. He didn’t like how I breathed in his direction in bed. He didn’t like how I fiddled with things. (These all felt ok to change for him……. I really had no self love and held myself with very little worth). The first physical element to the abuse (which I can now name as such) was a confusing incident at the time. He was napping and I woke him and he grabbed me by the throat. I was so shocked and I wanted to run a mile but ended up being told that it was my fault as I woke him too quickly. I was brainwashed already (3 months in). I was hard wired for this though as I had be taught not to trust my instincts - how dangerous this was. I stayed for 12 years, 2 children and gradually faded away. I dreamed of leaving, I said I would over and over and I nearly did once but it took so much courage to do it. I was terrified of the financial implications. I was isolated. I was exhausted. And I did it. He would have ‘waking dreams’ during which he would scream at me, push me, throw things, terrify me but would not remember them in the morning or want to talk about them. He would say ‘ well it wasn’t me, I was asleep’. I went to bed in fear most nights. There were never any bruises you could see but so much had been pulverized internally for me. I was on life support. This is part of my story . A start. It continues as he is in my life as our kids are young. The emotional and psychological abuse continues but I am doing the work to reposition myself. I am taking responsibility for my part in my journey and this is both empowering and exhausting. This abuse is very misunderstood- it is dangerous and invisible. I am learning to believe myself and look to myself for validation and answers. With love

My stepdad has abused me and groomed me since I was 12 years old. I have never told anyone about this because I was very afraid and scared as he has threatened me so much. He has tried to get me pregnant on multiple occasions due to this i can’t be in a relationship and struggle with self harming. Such as going in the shower and deep cleansing my self with dettol to feel clean.