When I was 8 years old, my sister's best friend, who was 11 at the time, repeatedly touched me over the course of several months to over a year. I struggle with being around girls who look like her. I know I want to feel angry but I can't, because she was just a kid too. And the thing that haunts me most is that so much of my childhood is a blur. My memories are so repressed that I worry maybe I said yes at some point, and that what I have believed to be true all these years might not actually be real.

Thank you for trusting us with this. What you are carrying here is heavy, and the fact that the memory piece is the thing haunting you most makes complete sense. Let me try to give you something real to hold onto.

First, the age difference matters. You were 8. She was 11. Those three years are not just a number gap, they represent a real difference in size, understanding, and power, and that difference is exactly why what happened was not something you could have agreed to in any meaningful way. Even if your memory played back every moment in perfect detail, an 8-year-old does not yet have the developmental capacity to understand what sexual contact is or what saying yes to it really means. What children that age can do is comply, which means going along with something because an older child has more power, more confidence, more ability to make something feel like it is just happening. Compliance is not the same as wanting it. It is not the same as choosing it. It does not make you responsible for what she started and continued doing for months.

In terms of the memory piece, what you are describing (large gaps, blurring, a sense that the past is somehow uncertain or unreliable) is one of the most documented responses to childhood trauma. When the brain is overwhelmed by something it cannot process, it does not store memories the way a camera would. Sometimes it holds fragments, body sensations, flashes of feeling, but not a clean, complete story. Trauma researchers connect this to dissociation, which you can think of as the mind pulling an emergency brake when something is too much to hold all at once. The absence of clear memory is not evidence that nothing happened. It is often evidence that something did, and that it was too much for a child to carry. And the painful part is, the doubt tends to get louder precisely because the memories are incomplete. When we cannot see the whole picture, shame and self-questioning rush in to fill the gaps. That is not your mind telling you the truth. That is your mind trying to make sense of something it was never given the tools to process.

The fear response you are describing around girls who look like her is your nervous system doing exactly what it was trained to do. Your body learned that a certain kind of person meant danger, and it has been running that alarm ever since. Trauma researchers call this a somatic memory. Your body is not being irrational. It is telling you something significant happened.

The part about not being able to feel angry is real and complicated, and a lot of survivors who experienced what some people call child-on-child sexual abuse, or COCSA, sit with that same tension. She was 11. She may not have fully understood what she was doing or she may have been acting something out that had been done to her. None of that erases what happened to you. Both of those things get to be true at the same time, and you do not have to resolve them into a single clean feeling.

Because so much of this lives in the body and in fragmented memory, two approaches worth knowing about are EMDR and Somatic Experiencing. Both are specifically designed for early, repeated childhood trauma, and neither requires you to have complete or reliable memories to be effective. When you are ready, and if you are interested, the Psychology Today therapist finder lets you filter by specialty and sliding scale fees. You do not have to have all the answers about your own memory to deserve that support.