---
title: When I was 11, my "best friend" spent three years systematically pulling me into things I knew were wrong -- stealing, lying -- and used what she knew about me as leverage to keep me from ever leaving. It felt less like friendship and more like being held hostage. After three years of her pushing her way into every part of my life, she started signaling that she wanted something physical, and I went along with it. I felt convinced I wanted it at the time. How could I have been so disconnected from my real feelings? I feel betrayed by my own mind, and I'm terrified it will happen again. Now, whenever I realize I was wrong about something I thought I believed -- even something small like a fashion trend -- I feel this panic that I'm going to lose myself again. ~ Our Wave Community
description: <p>Thank you for trusting us with something this complicated and this painful. The fact that you have thought through what happened so carefully, named the...
url: https://community.ourwave.org/en/answer/when-i-was-11-i-was-sexually-assaulted-by-my-best-friend-she-had-spent-3-years-getting-me-to-participate-in-things-i-knew-were-wrong-like-stealing-lying-etc-and-that-created-kind-of-an-emotional-black-926.md
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# When I was 11, my "best friend" spent three years systematically pulling me into things I knew were wrong -- stealing, lying -- and used what she knew about me as leverage to keep me from ever leaving. It felt less like friendship and more like being held hostage. After three years of her pushing her way into every part of my life, she started signaling that she wanted something physical, and I went along with it. I felt convinced I wanted it at the time. How could I have been so disconnected from my real feelings? I feel betrayed by my own mind, and I'm terrified it will happen again. Now, whenever I realize I was wrong about something I thought I believed -- even something small like a fashion trend -- I feel this panic that I'm going to lose myself again.

\[Image: Dr. Laura\]

Answer by **Dr. Laura**

PhD Mental Health Nurse & Sexual Assault Nurse Examiner

Topics:[Making sense of childhood experiences](/en/learn?tags=making-sense-of-childhood-experiences)

Thank you for trusting us with something this complicated and this painful. The fact that you have thought through what happened so carefully, named the patterns so clearly, and are asking these questions with this much honesty, all of that matters. It tells me something important: you are not lost inside yourself right now. You are working hard to understand what happened, and that is the opposite of being lost.

Let me reflect back what you described, because you named it exactly right. The stealing, the lying, the shared secrets she made sure you could never escape, none of that was coincidence or a friendship that simply went wrong. It sounds like it was a slow, steady wearing down of your sense of self and your freedom to make your own choices. Whether she planned it consciously or not, it was designed to make you feel trapped, to make you feel you belonged to her and that leaving would cost you everything. The closeness was a cage. And that started long before anything physical happened.

What you are describing has features that many survivors recognize when they look back at relationships where one person held significantly more control than the other. Only you get to decide what language, if any, fits your experience. But it may be worth knowing that what you lived through has a shape that researchers and clinicians recognize, and that recognition exists because you are not the first person to have lived inside something that looked like friendship from the outside and felt like captivity from the inside.

Now to the question that is clearly at the center of your pain: how could you have felt convinced you wanted it?

When someone has been under sustained psychological control over a long period of time, the brain begins to adapt. Researchers who study coercive relationships document how a person's sense of their own desires can become so shaped by the controlling person's wants and expectations that the two become genuinely difficult to separate from the inside. Your wants, your reactions, even your sense of what felt good or right, had been steadily redirected over three years. By the time anything physical happened, the version of you responding to those signals had already been significantly reshaped. Your mind was not betraying you. It was doing what it had been conditioned to do, which was to orient toward her, to read her cues, to bring your feelings into alignment with hers in order to stay safe within the relationship.

At the same time, children in situations like this sometimes develop what researchers call traumatic bonding, where the alternating warmth and control from the person causing harm creates a genuine attachment response. Some of it may have felt like closeness, even like love. That is not a character flaw. It is a predictable response to a dynamic that was designed to produce exactly that result. The feeling of wanting it was real in the sense that you genuinely experienced it. And it was also not freely yours, because it had been shaped by years of pressure that no eleven-year-old had the tools to defend against.

Think of it this way: if someone slowly turns up the heat in a room over three years, you will not notice how hot it has gotten. That does not mean you chose to be warm. It means the change happened so gradually that your body adjusted before your mind could register what was happening.

The fear you feel now makes complete sense, and it is worth understanding precisely, because what you are describing is not just general anxiety. The specific trigger you named, discovering that you believed something and were wrong about it, is a wound to what some clinicians call epistemic trust, which is your sense of your own ability to know what is real. When that trust gets damaged at a formative age, the mind starts treating even small moments of being wrong as evidence that your perceptions can be hijacked again. So a fashion trend is not really about a fashion trend. It is evidence that your mind can be mistaken, and to your nervous system, that feels like the edge of a cliff. Your brain learned, at a critical age, that your own perceptions could be reshaped without you knowing it. Now it runs a constant background check, scanning for signs that it is happening again. That state of high alert is called hypervigilance, and it is a trauma response, not a flaw in who you are. The alarm system is overcalibrated, but it is not irrational. It was built to protect you.

The work is not to destroy the detector but to slowly teach it the difference between toast and fire. One small practice that research on self-trust after coercive harm supports is what some clinicians call opinion tracking, which simply means beginning to notice and record small personal preferences, reactions, and opinions without evaluating them. Not because the content matters, but because it gradually rebuilds the muscle of recognizing what is actually yours. It does not have to be formal. It can be as simple as pausing when you notice a reaction and asking: what do I actually think about this? Writing it down somewhere private. Letting it exist without checking it against anyone else.

A therapist who works specifically with coercive control and relational trauma would be a real asset here. Two approaches that tend to be particularly helpful after this kind of sustained harm are [EMDR](https://community.ourwave.org/_external/link?url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.emdria.org%2Fabout-emdr-therapy%2F&resourceId=non_specific&localeId=en&countryId=us&src=answer&questionId=953560f1-590f-4e45-b6fe-01642d627f0f&sig=8a5e97499e4f67cc6fa5ebdf5cf86abd489090d90077882ef3592ccf03327e4f), which works with the way the body holds onto a sense of threat without requiring you to retell the story repeatedly, and [Internal Family Systems therapy,](https://www.simplepractice.com/blog/internal-family-systems-model/?g_campaignid=19638552931&g_keywordid=&g_acctid=419-488-5451&g_adid=&g_network=x&g_campaign=PMAX+%7C+Features+%7C+All+In+One+%7C+Exploration&g_adtype=none&g_adgroupid=&g_keyword=&utm_source=google&utm_medium=cpc&network=x&utm_campaign=PMAX_Features_EHR&utm_term=&device=c&matchtype=&gad_source=1&gad_campaignid=19638566590&gbraid=0AAAAADqOPoM6QVMYI9MfCExJxQm4OoHoy&gclid=Cj0KCQjw_vnQBhCxARIsADcZyxIsVa5dU1HgdzidG-ZCHh9kfw_Tzd0B7Oz9mram_A-au_ejEyP-VnAaAuOoEALw_wcB) which is specifically designed to help people reconnect with their own sense of self after someone else has overridden it for a long time. [The Psychology Today therapist finder](https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/therapists?_gl=1*s3t9ku*_up*MQ..*_gs*MQ..&gclid=Cj0KCQjw_vnQBhCxARIsADcZyxJ33KmeLfmczrNXxoPGTdGXkK1VB-o37IIByHeNXEaSrutS2crtyDEaAiwsEALw_wcB&gbraid=0AAAAAD_gfuxZ9HPhw5VG_nwemXVReDFmj) lets you filter by specialty, including trauma and coercive control, and by sliding scale fees if cost is a concern.

You asked how you could have been so disconnected from your real feelings. The truer question might be: how could any eleven-year-old have stayed connected to themselves after three years of someone steadily dismantling that connection? The instinct that brought you here to ask this question is yours. It was yours then, it survived everything that happened, and it is yours now. You are still in there.

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Ecuador\]Ecuador](/answer/when-i-was-11-i-was-sexually-assaulted-by-my-best-friend-she-had-spent-3-years-getting-me-to-participate-in-things-i-knew-were-wrong-like-stealing-lying-etc-and-that-created-kind-of-an-emotional-black-926?country=ec)[\[Image: El Salvador\]El Salvador](/answer/when-i-was-11-i-was-sexually-assaulted-by-my-best-friend-she-had-spent-3-years-getting-me-to-participate-in-things-i-knew-were-wrong-like-stealing-lying-etc-and-that-created-kind-of-an-emotional-black-926?country=sv)[\[Image: Equatorial Guinea\]Equatorial Guinea](/answer/when-i-was-11-i-was-sexually-assaulted-by-my-best-friend-she-had-spent-3-years-getting-me-to-participate-in-things-i-knew-were-wrong-like-stealing-lying-etc-and-that-created-kind-of-an-emotional-black-926?country=gq)[\[Image: Guatemala\]Guatemala](/answer/when-i-was-11-i-was-sexually-assaulted-by-my-best-friend-she-had-spent-3-years-getting-me-to-participate-in-things-i-knew-were-wrong-like-stealing-lying-etc-and-that-created-kind-of-an-emotional-black-926?country=gt)[\[Image: Honduras\]Honduras](/answer/when-i-was-11-i-was-sexually-assaulted-by-my-best-friend-she-had-spent-3-years-getting-me-to-participate-in-things-i-knew-were-wrong-like-stealing-lying-etc-and-that-created-kind-of-an-emotional-black-926?country=hn)[\[Image: Ireland\]Ireland](/answer/when-i-was-11-i-was-sexually-assaulted-by-my-best-friend-she-had-spent-3-years-getting-me-to-participate-in-things-i-knew-were-wrong-like-stealing-lying-etc-and-that-created-kind-of-an-emotional-black-926?country=ie)[\[Image: Japan\]Japan](/answer/when-i-was-11-i-was-sexually-assaulted-by-my-best-friend-she-had-spent-3-years-getting-me-to-participate-in-things-i-knew-were-wrong-like-stealing-lying-etc-and-that-created-kind-of-an-emotional-black-926?country=jp)[\[Image: Mexico\]Mexico](/answer/when-i-was-11-i-was-sexually-assaulted-by-my-best-friend-she-had-spent-3-years-getting-me-to-participate-in-things-i-knew-were-wrong-like-stealing-lying-etc-and-that-created-kind-of-an-emotional-black-926?country=mx)[\[Image: Nicaragua\]Nicaragua](/answer/when-i-was-11-i-was-sexually-assaulted-by-my-best-friend-she-had-spent-3-years-getting-me-to-participate-in-things-i-knew-were-wrong-like-stealing-lying-etc-and-that-created-kind-of-an-emotional-black-926?country=ni)[\[Image: New Zealand\]New Zealand](/answer/when-i-was-11-i-was-sexually-assaulted-by-my-best-friend-she-had-spent-3-years-getting-me-to-participate-in-things-i-knew-were-wrong-like-stealing-lying-etc-and-that-created-kind-of-an-emotional-black-926?country=nz)[\[Image: Panama\]Panama](/answer/when-i-was-11-i-was-sexually-assaulted-by-my-best-friend-she-had-spent-3-years-getting-me-to-participate-in-things-i-knew-were-wrong-like-stealing-lying-etc-and-that-created-kind-of-an-emotional-black-926?country=pa)[\[Image: Paraguay\]Paraguay](/answer/when-i-was-11-i-was-sexually-assaulted-by-my-best-friend-she-had-spent-3-years-getting-me-to-participate-in-things-i-knew-were-wrong-like-stealing-lying-etc-and-that-created-kind-of-an-emotional-black-926?country=py)[\[Image: Peru\]Peru](/answer/when-i-was-11-i-was-sexually-assaulted-by-my-best-friend-she-had-spent-3-years-getting-me-to-participate-in-things-i-knew-were-wrong-like-stealing-lying-etc-and-that-created-kind-of-an-emotional-black-926?country=pe)[\[Image: Puerto Rico\]Puerto Rico](/answer/when-i-was-11-i-was-sexually-assaulted-by-my-best-friend-she-had-spent-3-years-getting-me-to-participate-in-things-i-knew-were-wrong-like-stealing-lying-etc-and-that-created-kind-of-an-emotional-black-926?country=pr)[\[Image: Spain\]Spain](/answer/when-i-was-11-i-was-sexually-assaulted-by-my-best-friend-she-had-spent-3-years-getting-me-to-participate-in-things-i-knew-were-wrong-like-stealing-lying-etc-and-that-created-kind-of-an-emotional-black-926?country=es)[\[Image: United Kingdom\]United Kingdom](/answer/when-i-was-11-i-was-sexually-assaulted-by-my-best-friend-she-had-spent-3-years-getting-me-to-participate-in-things-i-knew-were-wrong-like-stealing-lying-etc-and-that-created-kind-of-an-emotional-black-926?country=gb)[\[Image: Uruguay\]Uruguay](/answer/when-i-was-11-i-was-sexually-assaulted-by-my-best-friend-she-had-spent-3-years-getting-me-to-participate-in-things-i-knew-were-wrong-like-stealing-lying-etc-and-that-created-kind-of-an-emotional-black-926?country=uy)[\[Image: Venezuela\]Venezuela](/answer/when-i-was-11-i-was-sexually-assaulted-by-my-best-friend-she-had-spent-3-years-getting-me-to-participate-in-things-i-knew-were-wrong-like-stealing-lying-etc-and-that-created-kind-of-an-emotional-black-926?country=ve)

English

[English](/en/answer/when-i-was-11-i-was-sexually-assaulted-by-my-best-friend-she-had-spent-3-years-getting-me-to-participate-in-things-i-knew-were-wrong-like-stealing-lying-etc-and-that-created-kind-of-an-emotional-black-926)[Español](/es/answer/when-i-was-11-i-was-sexually-assaulted-by-my-best-friend-she-had-spent-3-years-getting-me-to-participate-in-things-i-knew-were-wrong-like-stealing-lying-etc-and-that-created-kind-of-an-emotional-black-926)[日本語](/ja/answer/when-i-was-11-i-was-sexually-assaulted-by-my-best-friend-she-had-spent-3-years-getting-me-to-participate-in-things-i-knew-were-wrong-like-stealing-lying-etc-and-that-created-kind-of-an-emotional-black-926)

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Grounding activity

Find a comfortable place to sit. Gently close your eyes and take a couple of deep breaths - in through your nose (count to 3), out through your mouth (count of 3). Now open your eyes and look around you. Name the following out loud:

5 – things you can see (you can look within the room and out of the window)

4 – things you can feel (what is in front of you that you can touch?)

3 – things you can hear

2 – things you can smell

1 – thing you like about yourself.

Take a deep breath to end.

From where you are sitting, look around for things that have a texture or are nice or interesting to look at.

Hold an object in your hand and bring your full focus to it. Look at where shadows fall on parts of it or maybe where there are shapes that form within the object. Feel how heavy or light it is in your hand and what the surface texture feels like under your fingers (This can also be done with a pet if you have one).

Take a deep breath to end.

Ask yourself the following questions and answer them out loud:

1\. Where am I?

2\. What day of the week is today?

3\. What is today’s date?

4\. What is the current month?

5\. What is the current year?

6\. How old am I?

7\. What season is it?

Take a deep breath to end.

Put your right hand palm down on your left shoulder. Put your left hand palm down on your right shoulder. Choose a sentence that will strengthen you. For example: “I am powerful.” Say the sentence out loud first and pat your right hand on your left shoulder, then your left hand on your right shoulder.

Alternate the patting. Do ten pats altogether, five on each side, each time repeating your sentences aloud.

Take a deep breath to end.

Cross your arms in front of you and draw them towards your chest. With your right hand, hold your left upper arm. With your left hand, hold your right upper arm. Squeeze gently, and pull your arms inwards. Hold the squeeze for a little while, finding the right amount of squeeze for you in this moment. Hold the tension and release. Then squeeze for a little while again and release. Stay like that for a moment.

Take a deep breath to end.

Try another grounding activity

I feel grounded and ready