I 100% agree with this:
You Can’t Be Who You Were Before The Abuse
https://irreverenthealing.substack.com/p/strange-healing-is-still-healing
If you read the link above, you’ll see that going back doesn’t make sense. I often say that I was nine when my sexual abuse started, younger than that when I was being physically abused. I can’t go back to being a nine-year-old. That doesn’t make any sense. Even if you were abused at an older age, trying to go back doesn’t make much sense either. How do you take the things you’ve done to survive and all of the new knowledge you have and go backwards from there? Why not embrace the fact that you are moving forward into something new?
My biggest epiphany in therapy was the freedom to make my own life moving forward, because I had never felt I was allowed to. Going back to the person I was before I was abused would not have been that.
After all, everyone is changing all the time. Trauma or not, people move forward in their lives and change. Going back isn’t a solution.