For the longest time, I didn’t say it out loud. I couldn’t. Not to friends. Not to family. The people closest to me. Barely to myself. I was living with the effects of childhood sexual abuse, but I didn’t have the words for it. And when I finally did, the words felt too big, too heavy, and too shameful to say.
When I first heard the term CPTSD, it’s when things began to change for me. I started to understand what everything that was going on with me actually was. The hypervigilance. The emotional flashbacks. The deep-rooted shame I couldn’t explain. It wasn’t just anxiety. Or depression. It was all of it, stitched together, a nervous system shaped by survival.
But even knowing what it was didn’t mean I was ready to talk about it. For a long time, putting a name to it made me feel more broken, not less. Saying I had CPTSD felt like admitting there was something fundamentally wrong with me, like it confirmed the fear I’d carried for so long: that I was damaged. I used to think, If people really knew what I’ve been through, if they understood how it still affects me, they’d leave. They’d see me as someone weak, someone too wounded to love.
The shame I felt didn’t come from my healing; it was inherited from the abuse. Born from the silence. The fear of being seen. From the lie that what happened to me defined who I was. But over time, through therapy and self-compassion, I began to understand that the shame was never mine. It belonged to the person who hurt me. Not to me, the child who survived. Not to me, the adult who is still choosing to heal. I may have had to carry the burden, but it wasn’t mine to carry at all.
Healing isn’t pretty, But it’s powerful
When I eventually spoke up about what had happened to me, I chose to tell the one person I trusted the most. I was lucky to have that person in my life. Who accepted me anyway. It meant everything to me to be seen for who I was, and it was the beginning of my healing journey.
Healing from CPTSD hasn’t been easy. Some days I feel grounded, whole, even happy. Other days, I’m still learning how to breathe through the weight of my trauma. But every step forward I am reclaiming myself. There is no shame to be found in that. Only strength. To say I am healing from CPTSD and trauma isn’t a confession. It’s a declaration. I survived. I’m healing. I’m still here. I’m no longer ashamed to say I’m healing from CPTSD and trauma, because I now know what that healing really means.
It means I’m listening to the parts of me that were silenced. That I’m giving myself the care and safety I didn’t get as a child. It also means I‘m coming to know how to love the part of me that only knew how to survive. I am choosing not to see my healing as a weakness, but more a strength. In doing so it’s making space for the person I am becoming.
Embracing My Trauma and Building a Future
I have spent a vast majority of my life living with CPTSD and trauma. It defined me, and now I’m learning to love the version of me that only knew how to survive. Accepting what happened to me has made me who I am today. In this moment. I didn’t ask for the trauma, but I showed up for myself anyway, and I understand people in pain in a way I never could have without living through my own
Healing isn’t about erasing what happened. It’s about learning to live with it. Taking back what was stolen from me. Loving the parts of me that for so long I didn’t know how to love. It’s about learning how to live on my own terms and not what my CPTSD and trauma dictated to me. Surviving isn’t the end of my story it’s only the beginning.
So I’ll keep moving forward, not to forget what happened to me, But because I owe myself to keep doing so. I’m not fixed. I’m not whole. But I’m here. And that has to count for something. I’m not going to carry the shame anymore. Every step is messy, painful, real, but it’s mine. And maybe that’s what healing really is.
Photo by Zac Durant on Unsplash