Recovery from childhood abuse is a long, winding, badly paved road.
There are stretches where you think, I’m finally getting somewhere.
Then suddenly you hit a pothole you didn’t know existed.
A memory surfaces.
A feeling you buried twenty years ago walks into the room without knocking.
And then comes the part nobody talks about enough:
Did that really happen?
Am I remembering this correctly?
What if I made it bigger than it was?
What if I misunderstood?
What if I’m actually the problem?
There is a particular kind of insanity in having to reconstruct your own childhood while simultaneously questioning whether you can trust the person doing the reconstruction.
You learn to distrust your own perceptions because, somewhere along the way, trusting yourself became dangerous.
So you examine everything.
The memory.
The timeline.
The details.
Your reactions.
Your sanity.
You become a detective in your own life, searching through fragments of a childhood you were too young to understand when it was happening.
And healing doesn’t always mean suddenly remembering everything perfectly.
Sometimes it means learning that you don’t need a courtroom transcript of your childhood in order to take your pain seriously.
You can hold uncertainty without abandoning yourself.
You can say, I may not remember every detail, but I know something happened inside me.
I know what it cost me.
I know what my body learned.
I know what I became in order to survive.
And slowly, painfully, you begin to trust yourself again.
Not because every question has been answered.
But because you finally stop treating yourself like the enemy.
That, too, is recovery.
Not a clean road.
Not a straight road.
A battered, twisting, sometimes maddening road back to the person you were before you learned that your own reality couldn’t be trusted.
B🤍
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