I noticed her ruby red ankle boots with fringe detailing first. I gave her mad respect because damn, she was rocking the heck out of that look.

Before I realized the gravity of the situation I took in a long, deep, belly breath. My thirteen year old daughter’s response was, “What’s wrong? Did you see the sign that person was holding? In big letters it said SEX.”

What my innocent little girl did not see were the additional words, “Trafficking Victim.”  I felt as if I had been punched in the gut.

I’m not naive to the fact that the society we live in today, in my opinion, is broken.

What you, the reader, do not see is that I’m a survivor. I am a survivor of childhood sexual abuse. I am a survivor of sexual assault. I am a survivor of domestic violence. It is because of all of these events do I understand what this young woman must have experienced. What her feelings were. I understand and can relate.

I developed a quite extensive collection of tools to dissociate from my feelings over the years. Sadly, I do not know that I truly felt much of anything until I was fifty-one years of age.

A traumatic brain injury shook all of the memories loose and left me swimming in a dark abyss. Not only was I facing substantial trauma work surrounding the sexual abuse, but I came to a much deeper understanding that I never faced the domestic violence situation from which I escaped. My self-worth was so low when I left that I honestly didn’t think anything he did to me was out of the ordinary from any other marriage.

I sat in despair, betrayal, and crushing shame for more time than I care to think about. I mourned the person I thought I had lost until one day I told myself to stop living in the past. I had become so focused on doing all of the work that goes along with healing from trauma that I wouldn’t allow myself to see me as anything other than “broken.”

I’m slowly learning how to nurture my inner child. I’m giving her what she has craved for so long.

More than that, I understand that the universe has given me the rare opportunity to use my experiences for good. I have been given the gift of My Story to help others. This, among many other reasons far too great to list here, is the benefit of being sexually abused.

What is Your Story and how can you use it to better humanity?