In the last post, I wrote about the four core wounds childhood sexual abuse leaves behind: safety, trust, the body, and identity. This post is about what those wounds turn into when the child grows up and nobody ever taught her they needed to be healed instead of hidden. I'm not writing this one as theory. I'm writing it as my own record, because I lived every pattern I'm about to describe, and I didn't recognize a single one of them until I was already decades deep into the damage.
I jumped from marriage to marriage. Not because I was looking for love, but because I didn't know how to exist without someone else's presence defining whether I was safe. That's codependency, and nobody hands you a diagnosis for it. It just feels like devotion, right up until it collapses another relationship the same way the last one collapsed.
The Empathy That Never Fully Formed
Here's the part that's hardest to say out loud: I had no real emotional awareness, and no real empathy for what the people closest to me were actually experiencing. Not because I didn't love them. I did. But a child who spends her whole childhood in survival mode never gets the chance to develop the part of the brain that reads someone else's pain as real and separate from her own. I couldn't see another person's perspective inside my own story, because I was still, on some level, the child trying to survive hers. Everyone around me became a character in my survival, not a whole person with their own interior life.
Hurting the Ones I Loved Most
That blind spot cost me. It cost my children a mother who was present in the house and absent in the ways that mattered most. It cost relationships I actually wanted to keep. The people closest to you are always the ones who pay for wounds you haven't dealt with yet, because proximity is what survival patterns run on. I'm not writing that sentence for sympathy. I'm writing it because I know I'm not the only parent, the only partner, who did real harm while believing, the entire time, that she was doing her best.
Running From the One Thing I Actually Wanted
And then there's the part that took me longest to admit: I ran from true love because it terrified me. Not the performance of love, I was good at that, the marriages prove it. I mean the real thing, the kind that asks you to be fully known and stay anyway. That kind of love requires safety, and safety was the first thing that was ever taken from me. So the closer real love got, the harder I ran, and I dressed the running up as independence, as being too busy, as not needing anyone, when it was actually the oldest fear I had.
None of this makes me a bad person. It makes me a person who was never taught how to be any other way, until I finally did the work to learn.
I'm not telling you this to excuse the harm I caused. Accountability without victimhood means holding both truths at once: I was wounded as a child, and I still caused real damage as an adult, and only one of those facts was ever within my control. The next post in this series is about what it actually took to break these patterns, starting in 2022 and cracking wide open in February 2023. If you're in the middle of these patterns right now and don't yet see a way out, I want you to know there is one.