Photo by Andrei Lazarev on Unsplash

The Art of Healing: When a Story Is too Big to Tell

5:00 a.m. I’m awake, but not by choice.I knew I wouldn’t go back to sleep, so I’m downstairs with my laptop, facing a long day. Starting to write.

…How do you tell a huge story when it doesn’t feel true? It was true when you lived it! No, not really true — but also not a lie lie. But it’s not real. Something in the story misses the mark. Erasure follows fast.

Here I default to adult language, and I’m up and running.. This is how young children experience trauma. You grow up carrying two stories that conflict. Young kids know instinctively that if they don’t adapt to their caregivers’ view of reality, they won’t survive. It also means, in most cases, that the caregivers are guilty of some kind of abuse.

In my case, the parental abuse was “invisible.” It was emotional neglect. The original trauma was visceral, a full-body sexual attack by an adult male cousin whom my parents admired. He got to me in secret on a Saturday just shy of my sixth birthday. He had flown in to visit us from another country, and when he left, he was gone. No problem! I didn’t see him again until I was a teenager, and that was only a brief visit. I haven’t seen him since. Now, he’s dead.

My parents knew I had been attacked, as my mother mentioned to me two decades later. “Mentioned” reveals her attitude. It…