Alice's Perspective for Parents: An Adult Daughter's Journey

This month's guest blog is another from Alice Perle, author of Resolve: A Story of Courage, Healthy Inquiry, and Recovery from Sibling Sexual Abuse. Alice provides valuable insight for parents whose adult child has taken the huge step of talking about their sibling's past abusive sexual behavior toward them.

When an adult child discloses sexual abuse by a sibling, it can be one of the most deeply shocking and painful moments a parent will face. As a survivor myself, I have experienced and witnessed the flood of emotions that follow—both for the survivor and the parent.

Over 30 years have passed since I disclosed my abuse to my mother. I was 25 at the time. The words I spoke were, "[My brother] abused me when I was a child." She was shocked and immediately responded by saying I was lying. In an effort to explain, I tried to give her moments of evidence, but she denied the possibility of it being true.

That short conversation shattered my trust in her and left me feeling abandoned, hurt, and discarded. But I did the “good daughter” thing and fell back into silence. When she didn’t raise it again, I realized I wasn’t supposed to speak of it either—for fear of losing her love. I continued to play the role of ‘happy family’ for several years, until I finally knew I couldn’t keep doing that anymore.

Now, with the benefit of time, research, the work I do as a transformational coach and facilitator, and years of recovery through therapy, I feel equipped to offer insights into what might be going on beneath the surface for your adult child, and how you, as a parent, can begin navigating this difficult terrain.

Key Steps for Parents from a Survivor's Perspective:

1. Listen with Your Heart

When we finally disclose, it’s not just words we’re offering—it’s the release of years of held pain, fear, and shame. Please hear us. Your first response is so important. Simply saying, "I believe you, and I’m so sorry this happened to you" can create a sense of safety. The road we’ve walked has been long and lonely. Now that we’ve shared this, we need to feel less alone.

2. Acknowledge This is Just the Beginning

Disclosure is just the first step for us. We may not fully know what we want or need in that moment. We’re likely still processing the trauma and its impact on our lives. It’s critical that you walk this journey with us without the expectation that everything will be resolved quickly. Healing takes time, and it will require ongoing support. Be prepared for ups and downs as we work through layers of our pain and begin to redefine what safety, love, and connection look like in our lives.

3. Support for the Child Who Did Wrong

This is one of the hardest parts for parents—navigating the relationship with the child who harmed. Know that their road to healing is as necessary as ours, but it is not your responsibility to fix it for them. Support them in finding the help they need, whether that’s therapy, rehabilitation, or other forms of professional intervention. While it’s essential to acknowledge that their actions caused harm, it’s also critical to give them the tools to change. This is not a free pass, but it’s a lifeline that may prevent further

harm to themselves and others.

4. Understand the Depth of the Survivor’s Pain

One thing I’ve learned through years of therapy is that the pain of sibling sexual abuse goes beyond the abuse itself. It seeps into our relationships, sense of self, and ability to trust others. It can feel safer for us to pretend everything is okay, especially if we’ve spent years navigating family dynamics where we’ve had to play the role of the “good daughter” or “good son.” It’s vital that you take the initiative and tell us that you understand if we don’t want to gather as a family right now or ever again. Give us the

space to decide what feels safe for us, and let us know that our well-being matters more than maintaining family appearances.

5. Respect Boundaries and Allow Us to Lead

In many cases, the survivor may choose to go no contact with the sibling who harmed them. Respect this decision and let them lead when it comes to determining what feels safe. The pressure to maintain family harmony can feel suffocating for survivors—especially when that harmony comes at the cost of our own peace and safety. We’ve spent too long prioritising others, and now is the time for us to prioritise ourselves.

6. Therapy is Essential for All

Therapy is not just for the survivor—it’s essential for the entire family. The parent needs therapy to process their own feelings of guilt, shame, or responsibility. The child who harmed needs professional help to understand the magnitude of their actions and to break destructive patterns. And the survivor needs a safe space to heal from the trauma. The healing process will be long and painful, but without therapy, the wounds will remain open and continue to affect the entire family.

7. Recognise Trauma Responses

Many survivors of sibling sexual abuse live with complex PTSD (cPTSD), which manifests in hypervigilance, anxiety, and other emotional triggers. These trauma responses aren’t always easy to spot, but understanding them can help you support your child in ways that make them feel safer. Whether they appear as anger, withdrawal, or avoidance, these responses are ways we’ve learned to survive. Your awareness of them will help us navigate this healing journey with more trust in you.

8. Be Proactive About Family Dynamics

The family system was likely already damaged long before the disclosure happened. Abuse often creates fractures in the family unit that go unnoticed for years. It’s important to reassess the dynamics at play. What roles have we all been playing? What unspoken rules have governed our interactions? If the family is to heal, these underlying dynamics need to be addressed, and that can only happen if everyone is willing to face the truth, however painful that may be.

9. What Do We Really Want?

After disclosure, we may not be able to articulate what we want right away. Healing is about more than just feeling better in the moment—it’s about reclaiming our sense of self, finding peace, and feeling safe in our own skin again. We might want distance, quiet, and space to reflect. Or we might need connection, validation, and someone to sit with us through the pain. Ask us what we need, and be willing to hear our answers, even if they’re uncomfortable or different from what you expected.

10. Healing is Possible, but It Takes Time

Healing isn’t linear, and it doesn’t happen overnight. It may take months or even years for us to feel like we’ve made progress. There will also be times when therapy cannot continue; life gets in the way, and we’ve perhaps healed one or two aspects of our life but are not ready to move on to tackle more. So, there will be months or years when it feels like everything is over and therapy is done. Your role is to offer steady support without trying to rush the process. Keep showing up, listening, interested and believing in our ability to heal.

Final Thoughts

As a parent, you are likely feeling lost, overwhelmed, and unsure of how to navigate the relationships with both the survivor and the sibling who harmed. These are complex emotions and difficult decisions, but with professional help and a commitment to the healing process, there is hope for your family. Healing takes time, bravery, and ongoing support, but it is possible.

The Trauma Prism

This guest blog is an edited excerpt from a story posted on Medium: Essays from, and for, Mothers On the Aftermath of Sibling Sexual Abuse. The authors introduce themselves: We met through 5WAVES’ support group, Parents Coping with Sibling Sexual Trauma and Abuse. We connected through our similarities of being the biological mother of both children–for both of us, a daughter who was sexually abused by an older brother, in her pre-pubescent years. Both of us are in committed, long-term relationships. We are both health professionals with over 70 years combined clinical experience.

We write under the alias “WhatWas” to maintain anonymity. This signifies how, in an instant, What Was our life evaporated. We look back, longingly now, and with inescapable sorrow, for what we thought was our family. A family where we believed everyone was generally safe, and felt loved and cared for, even though it was not, and never could be, a perfect family. In telling our own stories of what was then, and what is now, we will not share any information that could reveal the identities of our families. Throughout these essays, details of our stories will be altered to protect the identities of the people we love most in this world from accidental disclosure.

We both learned about the SSA when our daughters were on the verge of young adulthood. Disclosure of SSA is always fraught with hazards ahead, but disclosure at this age brings a unique set of them. Our daughters had just been launched out into the world, where, as parents, we were legally no longer a required part of their lives and it was developmentally appropriate to be “letting them go”.

We had both engaged in years of struggle in our relationships with our first and only daughters as they moved through adolescence. In these struggles, it was difficult to know how much of the relationship tension was due to what might be considered ‘normal’; expected tendencies for adolescent girls to pull away from their mothers.

There was nothing fundamentally different in what we were experiencing, relative to other mothers we talked to and other relationships directly observed. One of us saw a therapist during her daughter’s adolescence to obtain support and guidance around building her mother-daughter relationship, recognising the strain on both herself and her daughter at times when relating was particularly difficult. The other consumed many resources and sought the advice of others on a continual basis in search of how to navigate the relationship with her daughter.

Years of Relationship Struggle with Our CWWH

Given our professional backgrounds, we understood how reacting to the distress we were seeing through the Western medical model had the potential to pathologize them. This could include labeling them in ways that their medical records would never allow them to shed for the rest of their lives. Because of this, we monitored our daughters for signs of concern, encouraged and supported them in their school, social and family activities, worked toward understanding them, and were always seeking ways to improve our mother-daughter relationships.

Like many teens, our girls were desperate for autonomy, so we held space for them to tell us if and when they needed help, ready to usher them into the health system if needed. Both of our daughters had sought therapy for different reasons by the time they told someone about the SSA: one continued with her therapist through disclosure, the other’s mother worked feverishly to find a trauma-based therapist, which happened very promptly.

Despite the parenting and relationship challenges in the years during and since the SSA, both young women are managing to grow and develop their unique qualities and potential — an absolute testament to their strength. They both have a circle of long-term friends, have worked and traveled, completed schooling and have entered university studies. Many of the people they subsequently disclosed to, with our support and encouragement, were family friends — some of many years standing. Both of us as mothers cultivated and cherished these long-term friendships, knowing that parents can never fulfill all the needs of a child, teen or young adult.

What we did not realize is that the wounds of sibling sexual abuse had damaged our relationships with our daughters long ago — without us knowing anything about it.

In hindsight, this explained so much of the years of struggle with them, and what came after disclosure…

Relationships with the child who was harmed: The Trauma Prism

What this meant for us was that we both had daughters who were deeply harmed early in life. In part or in whole, they could only see us through what we will refer to as the trauma prism, or the ability to view us only through the neural, automated responses developed given the trauma they had endured. These responses are, and remain, protective for them. They are, simultaneously, destructive to building or maintaining supportive relationships.

As a “medium that distorts, slants, or colors whatever is viewed through it”, the prism our daughters viewed us through for most of their developmental years was one of not providing the safety or love for them as they expected us to, as the abuse was happening.

We are unaware of what our daughters were told during the abuse by their siblings. It is not uncommon for children who are carrying out harmful sexual behavior to tell their sibling anything necessary to keep the abusive behavior hidden from parents. It is not unimaginable, then, that our sons may have suggested something along the lines of “mom knows and says it is ok” or “don’t tell mom because she will be really angry at us both.”

What, then, were our daughters conditioned to believe about us, as mothers?

We will likely never really know.

How unloved and confused our daughters must have felt at that time, as they may have been told things that were untrue to keep the abuse shrouded in secrecy. The longer term, extensive damage such messaging caused in our relationships with them is something we think about every day. The role of the trauma prism is something we have intensified our efforts to understand, in our current attempts to build a relationship with our daughters after disclosure.

Given our rocky relationships with our daughters, and the timing of them bringing the SSA to the surface to disclose and begin processing, made launching them into adulthood a complex and painful proposition.

We knew how much they would need their mothers going out into the world, after having suffered for years from the SSA. Yet we were at times out of reach from our daughters relationally, bringing us both to feelings of deep despair.

A young adult is just starting to more clearly see their parents as human beings, with all of the usual flaws and qualities. Our daughters also have to discern the differences between their thoughts, fears, and trauma-based expectations about us, and how we have, in fact, responded and acted in ways to support them, and how we can in the future…

As we process through the heaviness of the complexities of being mothers of children who were harmed by and harmed their siblings, we plan to share what might be helpful to others going through their own versions of the hell on earth that is SSA…

For now, if you’re a mother trying to survive in the aftermath of SSA, know that your story matters, and that you are not alone.

To the Partners...

This is the follow-up to Dale's first letter, Dear Younger Ann, written to the girl version of his late wife, to all the survivors out there who have a hard time believing they are truly loved and worthy of love. This blog is written to partners of child sexual abuse survivors.

Supplemental, to the husbands,

(I’m sorry, I can only speak specifically to the husbands whose wife was abused, but I suspect that some of these truths will cross over.)

You guys, I know it’s only natural to want your wife. I know the pain of rejection. I know what it’s like when your wife feels that something natural is dirty but she can’t put it into words. Those feelings are natural, I know, and I have had them all! It stinks! It’s completely natural to want your wife…. The thing is, marriage is not only natural, it’s supernatural! For us though, the one that we love, the one that we would take a bullet for, she is wounded and although our love for her wants her healed more than it wants our glandular urges met… the way that often works itself out in life, is that it ebbs and flows.

Ann was nearing the end of her life and she had been in bed for almost 24 hours, so I got her up and walked backwards, from the bedroom to the living room, holding her up and steady.  So there we were, slowly trudging as I mostly held her frail body up, as we walked. She was getting weak, so I held her close to me. It was getting precarious, and I was forced to hold her up, without hurting her. Picture a bearhug….

Off and on during our marriage, she had begged me to dance with her and I would not…. I’m just not that guy. I had playfully told her once “not even for love! I am NOT a dancer”. But that night I was. I gently held her up and swept her around the room as I hummed “Peaceful Easy Feeling” in her ear. She told me that she didn’t know that I loved her like this, and I said “I didn’t know it either baby” as I started singing, about that time I realized that I was almost to the place in the song that says “I want to sleep with you in the desert night with a billion stars all around” so I started humming again. She realized what I did and she started crying…

She said that she couldn’t even make love to her husband and that she was so sorry for all those times… The man that I wished that I had been all those years answered her “I’m counting it as if you rocked my world every time” … The inspiration came directly from the Bible, in Romans 4, where it talks about how God counted righteousness to those that didn’t do the work. That was one of my better moments as a husband and follower of Christ.

I wish I had an easy answer for you but the truth is, it’s a hard road that you are on and my very best advice is: just look at her, observe the way she moves, think about how she trusts you….

Let yourself fall in love with her a hundred times a day… you married a living feeling human that loves you and chose you. If she had a broken leg, you would want it healed, you would help her get it fixed. This is a lifetime work and, if you keep the right attitude about it, the journey can be just as joyful as the destination.

Dale