(Content warning: child sexual abuse. Only read if your inner children feel safe to do so ❤️. If you need immediate support, please reach out to the Rape, Abuse, and Incest National Network- RAINN– today)
Healing Our Inner Children After Childhood Sexual Abuse
The first time I was gaslit, I was about the age you see in this photo. I know because I remember vividly standing in the kitchen of my grandparent’s house, and the magnet on the dishwasher that said “Dirty” on one side and “Clean” on the other was exactly level with my eyes.
Charity as a child
The person gaslighting me was my grandmother, who was responsible for me and my siblings that weekend while we stayed at her house. Well, her and my grandfather, but he was sneaking into my room at night and raping me, so I was doing the obvious thing and asking her for help.
Except my grandmother looked at me said, “You are lying, Charity. And only very bad little girls lie.”
This was a very confusing moment for me, especially because I knew my grandmother had seen him on a previous weekend taking my pants and underwear off when she walked in while everyone was supposed to be out in the yard. Everyone except me and him. She walked in and saw me, and I saw her see me, and then she walked back out and closed the door behind her. And now she was pretending she didn’t know. And she was calling me a liar. All of that is very confusing when you’re about three years old, but one thing I knew for sure, staring hard at that dishwasher magnet, was which side I must be on, if no one would even help me. I was Dirty.
If you’re a survivor of childhood sexual abuse like me, the gaslighting since the Epstein files were released may be bringing you right back to childhood. Whether the response is “That’s not real” or “Nothing can be done about it,” survivors of childhood abuse of all kinds are used to those responses. And it’s INFURIATING.
It’s infuriating for someone to hear your story and call you a liar.
It’s infuriating for someone to see your pain and then turn around, walk out, and close the door behind them.
It’s infuriating that even when someone does believe you, there’s not a damn thing that can be done about it.
It’s infuriating when you’re advocating for survivors of sexual abuse, like I do every day as part of my role as a trauma therapist, and you hear things like, “Don’t most victims make it up?” or even, “Innocent until proven guilty!”
But worse than that, it’s heartbreaking.
No wonder we were so confused as children being abused. I’m 42 years old now, and the responses I’ve been hearing this past week are still confusing to grown up me!
But you know what’s different now? Now I know that I’m not the dirty one. Now I know that it’s dirty to abuse children, and dirty to protect the abuser, whether it’s a family member or a president. Now I know that the people keeping secrets to protect power are dirty, not me. Now I know that the innocent ones to protect are the children…and that includes my inner child. (Don’t know your inner child? Visit my online course to learn about working with your parts ❤️)
And you know what else is different now? Now I have the kind of autonomy that four year old me could only have dreamt of. I can walk out of houses where I’m being hurt. I can walk away from relationships where I’m gaslit. I can abandon anything else rather than abandon myself.
I hope wherever you find yourself today, dear survivor, you wrap your arms around your inner little one and don’t let go. I hope you tell them that YOU believe them and that YOU’LL protect them now. I hope you tell them that they’re clean…and they always have been ❤️
(PS, if you, like I did, need to process your history of childhood sexual abuse, a trauma therapy intensive is a beautiful way to do that. Reach out to me at https://charityoreilly.com/contact/ to learn more)
