Dear Younger Ann,

This month's blog is from "Dale." He wrote this letter to his late wife, as the person she was as a girl. He shared it for the sake of other survivors, of all ages and genders, who have trouble believing they are loved or worthy of love.

Dear Younger Ann,

This is going to be hard for you to believe but PLEASE keep reading! I know your secret, you are safe!

My name is Dale and I am your future husband.... So now I have this idea about writing a letter to you, my deceased wife, to say what I would love to be able to say to child sexual abuse and rape survivors.

There is a lot of time and space between us right now but I want you to know that I’m alive and I will love you like few women have ever been loved! We only had 22 years together and it went by so fast. I know it's a lot to take in... We will meet and fall in love and it's going to be epic!

I can only imagine how unsettling this is going to sound to you, knowing how you felt about things in the time and place that you are reading this, so brace yourself, I know your secret because you told me when we were dating and then, over the years, you told me everything. My love and esteem for you didn't diminish.... it grew….. I wish we had known then what I know now, we could have gotten to the healing part so much quicker than we did…. That’s what this letter is for.

What happened to you is what happened but it's not who you are!

The shame belongs to them baby, not you.

It’s not your fault.

I know it hurts and I know that you keep it hidden. I know you can't tell anyone right now but let the knowledge that someday you will be able to tell your story, be the start of your healing.

I have watched your face while you told close friends what happened to you, your voice before, during and after and I watched their responses to you.... baby it was beautiful! You are so much stronger than you know!

When you told me, we were dating. You said that you had to tell me a secret that you had only ever told two people. You told me that you loved me, but I may not want you. You said that you were trusting me and that if I told anyone, we were through. You made me promise and then you gave me the condensed version of what happened. I remember your eyes when you told me. You were so afraid.

We were married and I don’t regret it. We had a good marriage. People envied us but they didn’t know the whole story. The things that those boys did to you had left wounds and our secret left wounds on the inside. I just wanted to feel close to you and accepted by you, you just wanted to feel loved and pure,

it's okay baby! We just talked and talked until you fell asleep in my arms.... I had never felt closer to you. From that moment things began to change, and they were beautiful changes. You began having more self-confidence and you stopped being so quick to apologize for every little thing... your countenance was changing and our intimacy was growing and growing...

Five years before you died, you were 35 and that's when you told your mom. It was after your first bout with terminal cancer, you told your mom that you intended to just tell everybody and, well, it was healing for you to tell your mom and I'm sure that had you lived longer, you would have told your whole story.

You held onto life so hard.... you lingered for months, and it took so much pain medication to keep you comfortable... I feel like I failed you by not urging you harder to tell the world your story... I feel like you had that unfinished business that you needed to do and that kept you from having the peace to go on to the next world.

Maybe someone will read my letter to you and take that next step for you. I love you baby, thank you for being a good wife and a good friend...

To you the reader, thanks for reading my letter. Please know that you are loved more than you know.

Dale

Read Dale's companion letter here: To the Partners (of child sexual abuse survivors)

A Mother's Lament: Irreparable Damage

Image by freepik

I cannot hate you,

but I hate what you’ve done.

And I don’t know if I’ll ever be able

to forgive you.

Our family is broken now.

And I can’t find the pieces I need

to fix this.

Maybe I can try to glue whatever we had

back together,

but the picture will never look the same.

And I don’t think you understand.

We’re all hurting from a wound

that may never heal.

You cut way too deep and

the pain is way too intense to manage.

You selfishly destroyed your little sister’s peace

and there is no excuse for that,

nor is there an explanation that would make

ANY of this ok.

You helped yourself to something

that was not yours

and you changed the way my baby saw the world

forever.

You detonated a bomb

in her bedroom,

causing the most devastating explosion.

And you burnt our entire home down

in the process.

And I couldn’t have stopped this.

By the time I saw the flames,

it was way too late.

The irreversible damage had been done.

And we can’t rebuild here.

This foundation is no longer safe.

And we’ve all been misplaced,

experiencing our own versions of hell.

Your sister’s nightmares, the worst of all.

And I can’t stop replaying that day.

I can’t stop wondering

how I didn’t know,

how I couldn’t see

what you were capable of…

because I never believed

you’d be capable of any of this.

I carried you,

I birthed you,

I loved you and now

I am forced to mourn the loss of you.

Because I cannot accept

the “new” you.

I refuse.

The person I love would have never done this.

The baby I held in my arms

would have never grown up to be so…

twisted.

And I miss my son.

I really do.

But he died to me on June 17th.

And everyone knows what’s dead is gone

and there’s never any coming back

from that.

Brandy's note: Amber shared this poem in our online SST parent support group. The response from the group was overwhelming; dozens of parents thanked her for putting words to their current or past realities, in full or in part. Our journeys are unique, but we all go through a grieving process. Amber captured common and vital parts of that grief: the loss of the families we dreamed of and thought we had, the torture of watching our children suffer, and the death of the image we held of children we loved and thought we knew. (For those wondering about the significance of the date given, that is the date that Amber discovered her son had assaulted her daughter, 3 years ago. It is almost universal that parents within our group carry instant recall of the date of disclosure and how much time has passed since that moment.)

Forgiving My Younger Self for Staying Silent About My Sibling Sexual Abuse

the author in 7th grade

This month's guest blog is by Phil Goldstein, poet and author of How to Bury a Boy at Sea,  partner and Dad of fur babies. Phil has also shared his thoughts as a survivor of sibling sexual abuse on the podcast Flushing It Out with Samantha Spittle and Handing the Shame Back with Gloria Masters.

When you think back to what you were like as a tween, around the ages of 10 to 12, what do you remember about yourself? If you had a relatively stable upbringing, you might have specific memories of being in a class at school, or a sports team, with your family at home, or on a vacation. I have all of those. But if you were also sexually abused, you might have other more searing and painful memories. I have those as well. 

From the time I was 10 to about 12 and a half, my older brother sexually abused me. I never told anyone about it until I was 30. The silence of those years burrowed its way into the marrow of my body and into the core of my soul. It was something that, like many survivors of of sibling sexual abuse (SSA), I wanted to forget ever happened. My brother stole my innocence, destroyed my safety and boundaries, and violated my trust as someone who was supposed to look after and protect me. 

To be clear: I never did forget what happened; I simply made a conscious effort to bury it away. I was deeply ashamed of what had happened, and I knew my brother molesting me was wrong, but I couldn’t articulate why. I just knew I couldn’t tell anyone, certainly not my parents. The abuse also happened as I was starting puberty, a fraught and disorienting time for children under normal circumstances. 

I think that as a boy, I was particularly keen to avoid anyone knowing about what happened. I was raised in a society and on a media diet of cartoons, kids’ shows, and movies that portrayed men and masculinity in very particular ways. Men and male characters were muscle-bound, strong, brave, fearless. Think Power Rangers, Batman, Conan the Barbarian, American Gladiators. Men didn’t reveal weakness or vulnerability, they didn’t cry, and they certainly didn’t let or talk about their brother abusing them. 

I was also a scrawny, short kid, and not particularly athletic. I was into writing and reading books, history, and video games. I was definitely not and didn’t think of myself as one of the “cool kids.” Combine all of that with the onset of middle school, when kids are desperate to be liked by their peers and not cast off as “weirdos,” and you have a perfect recipe for a young boy wanting to stay silent about something like SSA. 

The sheer embarrassment and mortification of explaining to a friend or trusted adult what my brother had done was enough to convince me to stay silent. I was also worried my peers – girls and boys alike – would think I was gay, at a time when homophobia was much more rampant than it is now. Society’s expectations of what boys and men should be like definitely inhibited me, even if I couldn’t articulate it. I couldn’t even really describe what happened or how I felt. I just knew it was something that would destroy me, and out of an instinct for self-preservation I buried the trauma away.    

Staying silent for so long – and, of course, the abuse itself – had a profound impact on me. I became a people pleaser, desperately to ensure nothing was ever amiss or that my grades stayed near-perfect, for fear that disorder and dysfunction would invite questions that could uncover what had happened. This behavior carried over into my adult life, making me fearful of upsetting others, and leading me to not state and act on what I wanted, or even know how I felt. As I had when I was younger, I put my emotional needs behind that of others. Also, as I got older and became sexually active, I developed erectile dysfunction and anxiety around sex that marred many dates and relationships with women.  

It took years of intensive, trauma-informed therapy with a wonderful therapist to unpack and truly internalize all of this. I also benefited tremendously from using creative writing, and specifically poetry, to unearth, make sense of, and explore a complex array of emotions that therapy brought up. Sadness. Pain. Anger. Shame. Grief. Longing. Healing. And forgiveness. All of this writing culminated in my book, How to Bury a Boy at Sea. 

For a long time, I blamed myself for not saying anything about the abuse, especially because of how it had affected me. Maybe, I thought, if I had said something earlier, I wouldn’t have suffered so much. I was angry, and I felt enormous grief. It took therapy to recognize that when I was abused, I was just a child. I couldn’t and shouldn’t have been expected to say anything about the abuse or even to really understand what happened. I was just a boy, and I needed to offer that boy forgiveness and grace. I explored these emotions in the poem “A Note to My Younger Self,” which is in my book:

A Note to My Younger Self

You can’t be saved, not now. You must hang on

until the day you are strong enough to climb out.

You can’t be blamed

for staying beneath the water.

There, quiet felt like peace.

You must navigate a thread

so small it’s practically invisible,

the line between what you feel & what you can say:

pushing up a jagged wall everywhere you tread.

You are just a boy, you are just a boy, you are just a boy,

you can’t be anything but a boy.

If you are reading this and you are a survivor of SSA or know someone who is, especially if you are man, I want you to know that you are not alone. And I want you to realize that if you were a child when you were abused, you don’t have anything to apologize for, or be ashamed of. You were a child – remember that. You owe your younger self compassion and love.  

the author's boyhood home