A week after my thirty-first birthday in October 2020, I disclosed to my now ex-girlfriend that I was sexually abused as a child. I was bullied, beaten, and molested. I shared how my perpetrator tried to rape me in my own bedroom when I was twelve. In September 2021, I reported my perpetrator to the police. He refused to attend a voluntary interview and was on the run from the police between August 2022 and March 2024, when he was finally caught. He will face trial in March 2026.

 The catalyst for revealing I was abused was reading the book The Body Keeps the Score by Bessel van der Kolk during the first COVID lockdown in Spring 2020. Reading the book was like a light switch going off in my brain, which, combined with having all the time in the world to sit and think whilst I was furlough, brought all of my repressed traumatic memories back into consciousness.

 My initial steps to healing were sadly falling into a state of complete collapse. It was a living nightmare and I recognised I couldn’t go on this way, so I began to learn as much about trauma as possible by reading any book I could get hold of. Some of these besides The Body Keeps the Score were: 

 ·         Trauma & Recovery by Judith Herman

·         Complex PTSD: From Surviving to Thriving by Pete Walker

·         Coping with Trauma-Related Dissociation by Onno Van Der Hart, Suzette Boon & Kathy Steele

·         Healing Development Trauma by Laurance Heller

·         The Haunted Self: Structural Dissociation and the Treatment of Chronic Traumatization by Onno Van Der Hart

·         Running on Empty by Jonice Webb

·         Adult Children of Emotionally Immature Parents by Lindsay Gibson

 Through learning how trauma works on the mind and the body, I was able to understand my behaviour, and I began to change it. The healing journey is hard, it means change on every level of your life and as we know change is heavily resisted because we don’t find it comfortable.

So, my first tip for healing is to get comfortable with being uncomfortable. Strap in because it’s quite the ride. The best strategy for healing is becoming familiar with yourself through mindfulness; if you’ve spent a lifetime dissociated like I had, being in tune with yourself and your emotions is going to be alien at first. It will take a lot of time and effort to ground yourself in the now and live in the moment.

You will learn to recognise when you have been triggered and fallen into dysregulation, and then you must learn the tools to re-regulate your nervous system. A good tip early on is to establish your window of tolerance and then slowly widen it so you can handle life’s challenges.

I began to cultivate self-care practices by being kind to myself. The inner critic of most sexual abuse survivors is fierce. It means that you self-loathe instead of self-love, which is a night and day difference in how you experience yourself and the world. I began recognising my needs and catering to them to the best of my ability. A big habit to break when healing from trauma is the habit of self-abandonment, not doing what needs to be done when it’s time to do it. It can all feel very overwhelming at first.

The most important aspect of healing for me was recognising it cannot be done in isolation, reconnecting with the world around me rather than being a bystander, which is how I began to ‘feel’ better.

I decided to tie my photography to my passion for breaking the silence surrounding CSA because I believe the two things can work hand in hand. That was the origin of this project after seeing something similar in the Bristlecone Project in New Zealand. I want to create a place where people can share their healing journeys and bring empowerment to survivors who are still suffering in silence. By living my life as I desire, without any masks or shame, I have reclaimed agency over my life and my future.

Forgiveness is a topic that comes up often with healing and is difficult for me. On a surface level, I can probably contemplate the idea of forgiving my abuser one day, but on a deeper level, I don’t think that would ever be possible. The damage has been too significant. But in terms of forgiving myself for all my mistakes and bad calls over the years, I have been able to do that, although some guilt remains for the people I had hurt in the past.

Reflecting on my journey so far, my advice to other Survivors on their healing path is to embrace everything that comes your way, the good and the bad. It’s tremendously difficult to heal from childhood sexual abuse, in many ways you can’t heal from it you have to learn to live with it. The key is to learn how to live on your own terms and not have your life impeded by trauma longer than you need to. With hard work and dedication, healing is possible.