When I was younger (12), my older brother molested me over the course of a few months. He doesn't know that I know, because he thought I was sleeping. Our relationship looks "normal" now, because I don't know what else to do. Some days it's all I can think about and I feel so sick I can't even speak. I have no one to tell. I don't want this to ruin my family, and I don't know if they'd even believe me. I need to know who I can talk to and how to deal with this.

What you are carrying right now is an enormous amount for one person to hold alone and reaching out here took real courage. Thank you for being here. 

What you are describing is something a significant number of survivors have lived through. Some people use the term child-on-child sexual abuse, sometimes shortened to COCSA, to describe experiences like these. You do not have to use that label if it does not feel right to you, but knowing it exists, and knowing you are far from alone in this, matters. Research consistently shows that sibling sexual abuse is one of the most underreported forms of sexual harm, often for exactly the reasons you named...fear of breaking the family, fear of not being believed.

Keeping things "normal" on the surface makes complete sense. When someone who hurt you is also someone you live with, someone your family loves, someone at the dinner table every night, your mind finds ways to manage what feels unmanageable. Psychologists call this compartmentalization, which is essentially building a sealed room inside yourself to hold what is too painful to look at directly. It is not the same as pretending nothing happened. It is survival, and it has carried you this far.

The physical feeling you described, the sickness, the days when you cannot speak, the weight of it, those are signs that your body is holding something that has had nowhere to go. Trauma lives in the nervous system long after the event has passed. Sometimes something small brings everything rushing back and your throat closes, your stomach drops, your words disappear. Nothing about that means something is wrong with you. It means your body is responding to something genuinely overwhelming that it has been carrying without support.

You said you do not want this to ruin your family. That fear makes sense, and here is something worth sitting with...what created this situation was not your potential disclosure. It was what he did. You have been protecting everyone, including him, for years. You are allowed to protect yourself now. You do not have to tell your family right now, or ever, if you are not ready. But you do deserve someone safe to talk to, and that can start somewhere completely private.

RAINN has a free, confidential hotline at 1-800-656-4673, and an online chat if speaking out loud feels too hard. Confidential means what you share stays private. If you are younger, ChildHelp is specifically designed for young people and you can reach them by calling or texting 1-800-422-4453. You do not have to tell the whole story in the first conversation. You can simply say you are going through something hard and you need help figuring out what to do next. That is enough to start.

You have held this alone for a long time. You do not have to keep doing that. Thank you for reaching out to us.