I’m Done Confusing Silence With Healing

The abuse didn't end when the abuse stopped.

For a long time, I thought healing meant becoming less affected by what happened to me.

Being able to talk about it without crying.
Sleeping through the night.
Feeling safe in my body.
Trusting people.
Being intimate with someone I love.
Working and functioning without my nervous system constantly sounding an alarm.

But trauma doesn't work that way.

When someone experiences sexual abuse—especially during childhood—the experience doesn't simply become a memory when the person is no longer being harmed.

The body remembers.

The nervous system remembers.

Sleep remembers.

Relationships can remember.

And sometimes, decades later, the person is still living with adaptations that once helped them survive.

The abuse may have stopped. The nervous system didn't get the message.

Some of my earliest experiences of sexual violation happened while I was sleeping.

Sleep is supposed to be one of the places where our bodies can let go. It's where we become vulnerable enough to restore ourselves.

But if your nervous system learns that vulnerability can be dangerous, sleep can stop feeling completely safe.

Sometimes I have woken screaming or crying decades after the abuse occurred.

That isn't because I am choosing to live in the past.

It's because the nervous system doesn't experience trauma as a simple story that happened once upon a time.

Trauma can become embedded in the way we anticipate danger, interpret sensations, relate to our bodies, experience intimacy, and respond to vulnerability.

And when those adaptations interfere with your life for years, it can be tempting to ask:

Why am I still affected by this?

I've asked myself that question.

But I think there is a more compassionate question:

What happened to me that taught my body it needed to respond this way?

That question changes everything.

I didn't cause this. I didn't choose this.

I want to say something clearly because survivors are so often asked to carry responsibility that doesn't belong to them:

It wasn't my fault.

I didn't cause the abuse by being vulnerable.

I didn't cause it by freezing.

I didn't cause it by not fighting hard enough.

I didn't cause it by adapting to what was happening.

And I didn't choose it because some part of me supposedly needed the experience.

The responsibility belongs to the people who made the choices to violate another person's autonomy.

Period.

My healing is my responsibility now.

But that is very different from saying the trauma was my responsibility.

Those are not the same thing.

My body belongs to me.

Sexual trauma can profoundly affect our relationship with our own bodies.

What does it mean to feel safe in your body when your body has been treated as though someone else had a right to it?

What does intimacy mean when vulnerability has been associated with danger?

What does saying no mean when someone has taught you—through words, pressure, manipulation, or force—that your no doesn't matter?

These are not abstract questions.

They can affect sexuality, relationships, sleep, trust, boundaries, self-worth, and the ability to simply relax inside yourself.

And I am done believing that survivors should have to become comfortable with what happened to them in order to be considered healed.

I don't need to make the abuse okay.

I don't need to forgive someone who harmed me.

I don't need to stop being angry.

I don't need to find a beautiful lesson that makes the violence meaningful.

I get to decide what healing means for me.

And for me, part of healing is coming home to the truth that my body belongs to me.

My sexuality belongs to me.

My vulnerability belongs to me.

My yes belongs to me.

My no belongs to me.

And changing my mind is still allowed.

Anger can be part of healing, too.

There was a time when I thought healing meant becoming peaceful about everything.

But sometimes peace can become another way of silencing ourselves.

Sometimes anger is the part of us that finally recognizes:

That should not have happened.

Anger can tell us that a boundary was violated.

That something mattered.

That something was wrong.

That we deserved protection.

I am extremely angry.

And I think I have every right to be.

I don't want to pathologize that anger simply because it makes other people uncomfortable.

At the same time, healing doesn't mean allowing anger to control my life forever.

For me, the work is learning to listen to it without becoming consumed by it.

To let it tell me what mattered.

To let it restore boundaries.

To let it give voice to the parts of me that were silenced.

And eventually, to allow those parts to experience something different.

Not silence.

Safety.

I don't believe survivors need to turn trauma into a spiritual lesson.

Spirituality has been an important part of my healing.

But I have become increasingly careful about the spiritual stories we tell about suffering.

I don't believe we need to tell survivors that they chose their abuse.

Or that their soul volunteered for it.

Or that they needed violence in order to grow.

Or that everything happens for a reason.

Those ideas may be meaningful to some people. They aren't meaningful to me.

My understanding of God is not that God requires human beings to be violated so they can learn how to love.

I don't believe I needed abuse in order to become who I am.

I believe other people's choices had consequences.

I believe human beings can cause tremendous harm when trauma, disconnection, power, and unconsciousness go unexamined.

And I believe we can make meaning from what happened to us without pretending we needed it to happen.

There is a difference between saying:

“I found meaning in my suffering.”

and saying:

“My suffering was necessary.”

I can choose the first without believing the second.

I can believe in love without making violence sacred.

I can honor the mystery of life without blaming the person who was harmed.

Healing isn't pretending it didn't happen.

For me, healing has involved years of learning about trauma, psychology, neuroscience, the body, spirituality, and the ways our protective parts develop.

I've learned to become curious about the reactions that once confused or frightened me.

Instead of asking, What's wrong with me?

I can ask:

What is this part of me trying to protect?

Instead of:

Why can't I just get over this?

I can ask:

What does my nervous system still believe it needs to protect me from?

That doesn't mean every reaction is accurate in the present.

It means I can understand the reaction before trying to change it.

And that distinction matters.

Because many of the things we later judge ourselves for were once intelligent adaptations to circumstances we didn't have the power to control.

Healing, then, isn't about conquering those parts of ourselves.

It's about helping them discover that they don't have to do the same job forever.

And I am done confusing silence with healing.

For years, I thought perhaps I needed to become less angry.

Less affected.

Less vocal.

More forgiving.

More understanding.

More spiritual.

More evolved.

But I don't think healing requires me to disappear.

I don't have to make my story palatable for other people.

I don't have to protect people from the discomfort of hearing what sexual violence can actually do to a human being.

And I don't have to convince anyone that what happened to me was real.

I finally believe the little girl who experienced it.

I finally see her.

She doesn't need me to tell her that everything happened for a reason.

She doesn't need me to tell her she chose it.

She doesn't need me to tell her to forgive.

She needs me to tell her:

It wasn't your fault.

You didn't deserve it.

You didn't cause it.

And you don't have to carry someone else's choices as your shame.

She gets to speak her truth.

And so do I.

Not because I need the world to see me.

Because I finally see me.

And that is enough.

If you're healing from trauma

You don't have to approach healing from someone else's timeline, belief system, or definition of forgiveness.

You can seek support that helps you feel safer in your body, understand your nervous system, develop boundaries, reconnect with yourself, and make meaning in ways that don't require you to deny what happened.

And you can hold complexity:

You can be healing and angry.

You can love people and have boundaries.

You can find meaning without believing you needed the suffering.

You can be spiritual without blaming yourself for what happened.

You can move forward without pretending the past didn't matter.

Healing doesn't require silence.

Sometimes healing begins when we finally feel safe enough to tell the truth.

This article reflects my personal experience and understanding of trauma, healing, spirituality, and the nervous system. It is not intended as universal truth or a substitute for individualized professional care.

About My Work

My work brings together spirituality, psychology, nervous-system awareness, relational healing, and embodied practice. I offer spiritual mentorship, wellness coaching, and energy healing for people who want to explore their inner lives without abandoning their humanity.

My book, The Divine Within: Healing Ourselves to Heal the World, explores a trauma-informed approach to reconnecting with our inner divinity through psychology, neuroscience, spirituality, and experiential practices.

The work isn't about becoming someone new. It's about coming home to who you already are.

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