There's been talk about the impacts of child sexual abuse during the early years... I've noticed it in me for the last 7-9 years... I don't have many memories without it... mine started around when my younger brother was born... before I even went to pre-kindy... it went on for over 20 years...
The impacts of CSA varies for individuals, but one thing I have learned is that up until the age is 7 you're still developing the neural pathways associated with who you are and what is your purpose.
When those pathways aren't nurtured and developed in a loving and caring environment it leaves lasting and very damaging consequences, consequences we will spend the rest of our lives dealing with.
In 2023 I wrote this about the unseen consequences of trauma, the impacts my CSA had on me that I was noticing...
"Abuse though means that you don't see yourself ever getting out, and that's exactly what the abuser wants, so that when you do get out, you have no one. There is no one to help you because they think your abuser is a good person who could never hurt anyone, let alone their daughter, so you run.
You try to find somewhere, you try to find someone to help you, but you're alone and you know it. You don't know how to live outside of an abusive environment, what normal looks like, that you move somewhere only to have them kick you out because you don't know how to live somewhere else, somewhere where they don't control your every move. You learn though and each house gets longer that you stay at.
Your relationships are the most confusing part though, you don't know how you should be treated because all you have known is abuse and nobody helped you then, so you get taken advantage of now. People see you differently, the damaged girl, the broken girl, she has no one, something must have happened to her, she has no family, she's alone.
When someone treats you nicely it scares you that you run from it because that's how it all starts and you don't want to get hurt again. You don't trust anyone and you don't trust yourself. You don't know where to find help or whether you would let them help you anyway.
People ask you about your family and you don't how to respond because you can't go back to them when you fought so hard to get away and it takes everything in you to stay away. You grieve when you see other families, what you consider normal and nobody seems to understand that, that your normal was different, your normal was abuse. Family gives you a bad taste in your mouth and that you may never see yours again and that people asking about them leads to you struggling because it hurts too much.
We think the trauma ends when we escape the abuse but it doesn't, it's uncertain if it ever really ends, because the unseen consequences of the trauma follow you into adulthood, because you were never prepared for something other than abuse. That's why people go back, they don't know anything else, how they're meant to be treated, how to live somewhere else, how to do something else, how to interact with society and we feel that nobody can help us because those that are meant to never have and we're too scared to let anyone else try.
The trauma we experience sets us up for failure and only the strong make it out as functional human beings. It displaces what should have been our childhood into our future that leaves us at a disadvantage because of the lack of learning and the cost it takes to learn later in life, a cost that not all are willing to bear."
I know for me now... the wiring in my brain became different... it wired for survival rather than love and so my brain protected me and adapted... found that libraries are safe... but no where else really was...
Being a CSA survivor, I am going to be honest, with our current system... we're set up to fail.
All our lives the system has failed us from failing to protect us as children, failing to see us as adults and failing to hear us as survivors.
It takes a community to raise a child/person
It takes a community to abuse a child/person
It takes a community to heal that child/person
So where is that community*? Where is the help we do desperately need to recover and live the lives we never dared to dream?
*Not counting sane
