I was sexually abused for about four years, from when I was nine until I was fourteen, by more than one person. When I tried to get close to telling my parents at the time, they mostly joked about it or brushed me off, so I didn't actually tell anyone until my senior year of high school. I'm nineteen now, and it hasn't been that long since the abuse ended. I think about it almost constantly, I have dreams and flashbacks that feel connected to it, and I really dislike myself and the way I handled things as a kid. Some parts have gotten easier some of the time, but I hate still feeling this way. Is this something I can actually get better from, or should I resign myself to being like this?

Thank you for writing this. Really. What you are carrying is not small. Four years of abuse, multiple people who caused you harm, parents who met your attempts to reach out with jokes and dismissal, and then years of holding most of this alone. You were a child through all of it, and you have been finding your way largely without the support you deserved. 

Now to your actual question...yes. People do get better from this. Not in a way that makes the past stop being real, and not in a straight line, but it is possible. What you are describing, the near-constant thoughts, the dreams and flashbacks, the frustration you turn on yourself about how you handled things as a kid, these are not signs that you are broken or that something has gone permanently wrong with you. They are signs that your nervous system, the part of your body that manages stress and threat and safety, absorbed something enormous over a long period of time. This happened during years when your brain was still forming, and it happened without adults who should have been paying attention.

Trauma, especially repeated trauma across a long stretch of childhood, does not get stored the way ordinary memories do. It gets stored in pieces, in the body, in the nervous system, and it tends to stay active because it never got the chance to be fully processed. Think of it like a fire alarm in a house that was genuinely on fire for years. The alarm is not broken. It learned to do its job under extraordinary circumstances. And now that the fire is out, the alarm has not gotten the signal yet. The dreams and flashbacks are not random. They are your mind still trying to finish something it never got to resolve. That is not a permanent state. It is a process that can move forward with the right support.

Your parents' response, the jokes, the dismissals, the way they made it feel impossible to tell them, added its own layer of harm on top of the original harm. Being made to feel ridiculous when you reach toward safety is its own wound. It makes sense that healing takes longer when the people who should have caught you were not there.

The dislike you feel toward yourself about how you handled things as a kid deserves some compassion. You were a child without safe adults, trying to navigate something that adults with full resources and support systems struggle to navigate. Whatever you did or did not do during those years, you did it as a child who was trying to survive without a map. The standard you are holding your younger self to is an adult standard, and it does not fit. That child deserved protection, not the job of figuring out alone how to stop what was happening. 

Healing from what you are describing is real, and it happens, and it also takes time and support. The research on trauma treatment is actually quite encouraging. Approaches like EMDR (which stands for Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing, a method that helps the brain process stuck memories) and Somatic Experiencing (a method that works with how trauma lives in the body) were developed specifically for the kind of layered, repeated childhood trauma you are describing. They do not require you to talk through every detail of what happened. They work with the nervous system directly, helping it complete what it was never allowed to finish. If you have access to a therapist, looking specifically for someone trained in trauma-focused care, rather than general talk therapy, can make a real difference.

If reaching a therapist feels complicated right now, whether because of cost, location, or anything else, RAINN's National Sexual Assault Hotline at 1-800-656-4673 offers free, confidential support around the clock and can help connect you with local resources, including low-cost and sliding-scale therapy options. You might also find it helpful to explore Our Wave's community at ourwave.org, where people who have lived through experiences like yours share and witness one another's stories. There is something that individual healing cannot always provide on its own: the felt sense of not being alone in this particular thing.

You said some things have gotten easier, at least some of the time. Hold onto that. Not as proof that everything is fine, and as real evidence that your capacity to heal is already working, even without the full support you deserve. Imagine what becomes possible when you have more of it. You are not resigned to staying where you are. This is where you are right now, not where you are going. We are glad you are here.