Literally, the best reward I get from keeping up this site are emails like this one:
It’s been a week since I made the call to Survivors UK, the London-based child abuse organisation. Then I found your site, no.2 when I googled. I get a date for my therapy to start in a few weeks. I’m not brave enough to maintain a blog or site like you though I’m sure I’ll comment on anything I find interesting when I catch up with all of it…..
Right now I am happy that I’m not alone even though you are in a different country.
That makes all the writing, thinking about writing and site maintenance worth it right there.
In a further email, this same reader posed an interesting question that I wanted to share with all of you, and solicit your feed back on.
How did you select which friends to tell first?
That’s a tough question for me, because I think the first few people I told were people I already knew were survivors themselves. Then, when I had a very public breakdown, well, everyone already knew!
Now, as to who I tell now, it tends to fall into two groups. One is people who are going to be deeply involved in my life, on more than an acquaintance level, because the abuse is an important part of understanding who I am, so they need to know, and the second are people who I feel would benefit from know that they aren’t alone.
I am interested in hearing what other survivors did in terms of telling people when they were first starting on the path to healing. What advice would you give to someone in this regard, what pitfalls would you steer them away from? What was your experience like?