For some, there is a specific event that can be called “that night.” A single occurrence that decisively changed the world before it.
For others, what they describe is “before I knew it, that was just daily life.” The harm was woven through ordinary days, and there is no clear line for when it began. Both shapes exist within sexual abuse.
This article walks through why the harm cannot be told, the actual shape of self-blame, and what something like an “exit” might look like.
Suzuka Could Only Put It Into Words in Her Forties
The first time Suzuka spoke about what her father had done was in her forties. The harm had been repeated from before she started elementary school until she entered middle school.
Why could she not tell anyone at the time? Because the option of “telling someone” was not available. It did not exist as a possibility in her world.
In the counseling room, Suzuka swallowed her words several times before finally beginning.
It was a late afternoon when her mother was working a night shift. Her younger sister, still small, was asleep in the living room. Her father came into the children’s room and lowered himself over her. A large hand covered her mouth; she couldn’t draw breath properly.
“This is between you and Dad. Our secret.”
“You like Dad, don’t you. So this is okay.”
From the next day, Suzuka was unable to speak in front of anyone. Even relatives she had been close to became “people I don’t know how to be near anymore.”
The Shape of the Harm Is Not One Shape
Moe — a home where daily life itself was the structure of harm
Moe (a pseudonym) cannot point to “a first time.” There was no clear before. Daily life and the harm were one fabric. Brushing past her stepfather in the hallway, sharing a bath with him, sleeping in the same room — every moment carried something the rest of the family did not see and would not name.
Mai — the loan shark, and a cream puff
Mai’s father was deeply in debt. A man would come to collect, and her father would sometimes leave her alone in the apartment with him. Afterward there would be a cream puff on the table — a payment that bought her silence and her father’s calm. The pairing of pastry and harm became the language of a childhood she could not narrate to anyone.
Yuka — invasion by the mother herself, called “sex education”
Yuka’s mother delivered the harm under the label “I am teaching her about her body.” A mother as the perpetrator falls outside many people’s mental categories of sexual abuse, which makes it more invisible — to outsiders and, for years, to the survivor herself.
Chinatsu — her father’s computer, and a stranger
Chinatsu’s harm involved her father offering her body, in some form, to other adults — through the screen, through the door. Recognition of what those years had been came back later in fragments: a strange light, a strange room, a body that had been left like trash, all of it carried by a “smaller version of me” after the consciousness had been let go.
A structure in which a child’s body is treated as a “commodity” interchangeable with other adults can be built into the home itself.
Why does the survivor’s awareness drift away during these scenes? Why, even years later, can it not be told to anyone? The answers sit in a single mechanism that the child built in order to survive.
Comments