Once the abuse by my best friend started happening often, I always washed myself before seeing him. I've heard of survivors keeping themselves dirty to avoid abuse, but I did the opposite. I constantly had the feeling of being dirty. At the time I didn't even know I was being abused, and I was more worried that he would tell our mutual friends I was disgusting. I'm very clear that I tried to stay clean because I feared judgment, not because I wanted what was happening. But the fact that I worried more about what others would think than about my own discomfort makes me feel wrong, like it diminishes the importance of what happened. If I didn't give it the importance it deserved at the time, how could it be important at all? Is there any information about this?

Thank you for trusting us with something you have clearly thought about a lot. Let me share some information with you that I think may change how you see your younger self.

Starting with the feeling of being dirty. Many survivors describe a persistent sense of dirtiness that has nothing to do with anything on their skin. Researchers sometimes call it "mental contamination," meaning a feeling of being unclean that comes from an experience or a person rather than from physical dirt. Washing may bring brief relief, but the feeling usually comes back, since its source is the experience itself. Seen in that light, your washing before seeing him makes a lot of sense.

Now to the part that makes you feel wrong. Shame is one of our most socially wired emotions. At its core, it is the fear of being seen as unacceptable by the people around us. When the person hurting you is also your best friend and has the power to humiliate you in front of your shared friends, the threat of exposure is real and immediate. Your fear of what he might tell them reflects how much power he held, and the way it shaped what you did suggests that power was already at work. When harm comes from someone who is also a source of friendship and belonging, the mind often focuses on the danger it can manage and sets aside what feels too big or confusing to face. Given everything he could have done to your standing with your friends, focusing on their judgment was a way of protecting yourself from the danger you could actually see.

The weight of an experience is decided over time, by how it lives in you afterward, and what you felt in the moment is only one part of that. Many survivors only recognize what happened years later, especially when it involved someone they trusted, and it is common for people to wait a long time before naming sexual harm or telling anyone about it. Minimizing is one of the most common ways people get through something they can't yet face.

Even then, you were treating it as important in the ways available to you. You washed every time. You carried a constant feeling of being dirty. You were afraid of being seen as disgusting. Those are the responses of someone for whom something significant was happening. The importance was there all along, showing up in your body and your behavior before you had the language to recognize it. What something was and how we understood it at the time are two different things, and you get to give it the weight it deserves now. Only you get to decide what it means to you, though the care you put into asking suggests you already sense that it matters.

One small thing you might try is writing down what you remember feeling in your body back then, separate from what you were worried others would think. Seeing those two side by side can make it clearer that your discomfort was there all along, quietly speaking up. You were paying attention to yourself in the only way you could. Thank you for sharing this with us.