Content warning: this post discusses childhood sexual abuse and being disbelieved. Please take care of yourself. If you need to close this tab, close it. I mean that.
My Grandmom called me a few days ago.
She had finally done the thing she'd been wanting to do for years. She went to my father, directly, and asked him a simple question: if Alyssa ever wanted a relationship with you again, what would have to change?
And he hemmed. And he hawed. And what he finally landed on was this: I would need to have more empathy for them.
More empathy. For them.
I want to sit in that for a second, because I have been sitting in it for days.
I have spent my entire life drowning in empathy for my parents. I have explained them. Excused them. Softened them for other people. I have done the emotional math a thousand times, always finding a way to carry more of the weight than was mine. And the thing they need from me, still, after everything, is more.
Meanwhile, the thing I needed from them was the simplest thing in the world.
I needed them to believe me.
What he said
My Grandmom told me the rest of it, because she is one of the only people in my family who has ever told me the truth.
He brought up my childhood. Something about how when I was three, they had to hold me down to force-feed me medication, and maybe they could have done that differently. My Grandmom was baffled. That is not why I went no contact. That has never been why. I don't hold any of that against them. I was a kid, they were the parents, that's just what it was.
I went no contact because of how they treated me now. As an adult. Because my father didn't care that I had cancer. Because when I told my mother that her father raped me when I was six years old, she said it never happened.
And then my Grandmom told me what he said about that.
He said it never happened. He said there was no way it ever happened. He said I was never raped.
He thinks I am lying.
They both do.
The thing about being disbelieved
I want to try to explain what this does to a person, because I don't think you can understand it unless you have lived it, and if you have lived it, I want you to know that you are not alone in this specific, particular hell.
When someone doesn't believe you about something like this, they are not just disputing an event. They are telling you that your reality is not real. That the thing you carry in your body every single day is a fiction you invented. That you are, at best, confused, and at worst, a monster who would lie about something this grotesque.
And here is the part that guts me. I have been believed by other people. My Grandmom, when my father denied it to her face, said: Alyssa doesn't lie. Alyssa wouldn't make that up. My husband believes me. My therapist believes me. I have done the work. I have done EMDR. I have spent years and years and so much money and so many tears putting myself back together.
And still. The moment I found out my father doesn't believe me, I went straight back to being six years old, lying in the dark, being told it was a nightmare.
I lay in my bed a few nights ago and I gaslit myself. Thirty-four years old, a whole life built, and I lay there asking myself: did it happen? Was it a dream? Am I making it up?
That is what they did to me. Not just what happened to me at six. What they did every time I tried to tell.
I tried to tell them
I tried at six. Right after. I did not have the words for it, but I tried, and I was told it was a nightmare and to stop crying or they'd give me something to cry about.
I tried at twelve. I had just learned what rape was in seventh grade, and I remember crying so hard I could barely breathe, because it was the worst thing I had ever heard of. And then, weeks later, lying in bed doing crossword puzzles, I had a flashback. A little girl in a dark room. A man. A hand over her mouth. And I felt everything she felt, every single thing, in my own body. And when it ended I sobbed for that little girl. I didn't know who she was.
It took me twenty years to understand that she was me.
I tried at sixteen. My mother was talking about her father one day, and she said he had done something unforgivable, the worst thing someone can do to a little girl. I looked at her and I said: it was me, wasn't it? It happened to me. I remember it.
And she said: no. That was a bad dream. I never left you alone with him. I made sure of it.
And I believed her over myself. Because that is what children do.
What my body knew
Here is what I know now, at thirty-four, that the little girl couldn't articulate.
I wet the bed until I was twelve years old.
At six, I played out rape with my Barbies. Ken covering Barbie's mouth. I did not know what I was doing. I did not learn the word until I was twelve. But my hands knew. My body was telling the story my mouth wasn't allowed to tell.
At eighteen, a man broke the lock on a bathroom door I was barricaded behind, and I came apart in a way that made no sense for what had just happened, because it wasn't about what had just happened. It was the door. It was being trapped. It was six years old all over again. I gained a hundred and forty pounds in a few short years, because I did not want men to look at me anymore. I developed a panic disorder. Five to seven panic attacks a day.
Children do not manufacture that. Bodies do not invent that kind of evidence for fun.
I know what happened to me.
The thing I need you to hear
If you are reading this and someone did not believe you, I need you to hear this, and I need you to hear it in the part of you that still doubts:
Their disbelief is not evidence about what happened to you. It is evidence about them.
A person's refusal to look at a horror does not unmake the horror. My parents need it to be false so that they can sleep at night, so that they can go on being who they think they are, so that they never have to sit for one single second in the reality of a six-year-old who tried to tell the truth and was handed a nightmare instead.
That is about their guilt. Their comfort. Their limits. Their cowardice.
It is not a fact about my memory. It is not a verdict on my truth.
And I do not have to keep building the case. I have spent my whole life marshaling evidence, laying out the exhibits, trying to prove myself to a jury that voted before the trial started. I am allowed to set the prosecutor's job down. Believing myself was never supposed to require winning an argument with people who are committed to not hearing me.
The grief underneath
I'll tell you the strangest part, the part I only understood after I stopped crying.
For years, there was a thin, awful comfort in something my father used to say about it. He would say she needs to get over it already, it happened so long ago.
Get over it. Which meant there was an it. Which meant, in some small buried way, that he believed me.
And a few days ago, that last thread got cut. There is no it. He thinks I made it up.
So I'm grieving something I didn't even know I was still holding. A crumb. A splinter of being believed by my own father. And it turns out I was holding onto that splinter with both hands.
I'm allowed to grieve that. I can grieve the parents I needed and still be completely, unshakably done with the parents I got. Those two things live together just fine.
"Better off without them" isn't bitterness. Sometimes it's just accurate.
I believe her
I don't have to be over this. There is no clock. "I'm thirty-four, I should be past this" is just one more way of telling myself that my pain is wrong for existing, and I am done doing their job for them.
A wound that gets reopened is allowed to hurt. That's not weakness. That's a nervous system telling the truth.
So here is where I have landed, and it took me a lot of crying to get here.
The six-year-old in that dark room needed exactly one person to believe her. She didn't get one. Not her mother, not her father, not anyone she was brave enough to tell.
She has one now.
I believe her. I have got her. And I am the only verdict that was ever mine to give.
If any part of this is your story too: I believe you. You are not crazy, you are not lying, and you did not make it up.
If you need support, RAINN's National Sexual Assault Hotline is available 24/7 at 1-800-656-4673, and the 988 Suicide & Crisis Lifeline can be reached by calling or texting 988.
10% of proceeds from Self-Care Shirts is donated to 988 and The Trevor Project.
