Childhood Sexual Abuse Therapy

Maybe this happened decades ago. Maybe you’ve never said it out loud, or only recently started calling it what it actually was.

Many survivors of childhood sexual abuse spend years without language for what happened to them, whether out of confusion, a strange loyalty to the person who hurt them, or simply because a child doesn’t have the framework to understand abuse while it’s happening, only the feeling that something is wrong. That feeling can sit there for decades, unnamed, until something finally gives it a shape.

Our clinicians work with adult survivors of childhood sexual abuse regularly, and we’ve come to understand how differently this shows up from one person to the next. Some clients have always known what happened to them. Others pieced it together slowly, sometimes well into adulthood. Both are valid starting points for this work.

Explore our areas of trauma expertise:
Growing Up With Anger | Betrayal Trauma | Sexual Assault | Raised to Take Care of Everyone but Yourself | When Your Feelings Weren't OK

What this might look like for you now

Your memories might come in pieces, sounds and rooms and sensations without a clear timeline attached, rather than one continuous story you can tell start to finish. That’s common with childhood trauma, and you don’t need a complete narrative for what you remember to be real or worth addressing in therapy.

You might still feel responsible somehow, like you should have said no or told someone sooner or found a way to stop it, even though you were a child and none of those options were really available to you. A child cannot consent and a child cannot stop an adult. That was true then, even if it doesn’t feel true now, and even if some part of you has spent years arguing otherwise.

Trust is often where this shows up most, especially in close relationships. When the person who hurt you was supposed to protect you, your sense of who’s safe gets rewired early, and that rewiring doesn’t undo itself just because you grew up and gained more control over your life. Some survivors carry a complicated relationship with their own body too, feeling disconnected from it, uneasy with touch, or like they’re watching their life happen from somewhere just outside it instead of being fully inside it.

Maybe you told someone and weren’t believed, or were believed and watched nothing change afterward. Maybe some part of you decided a long time ago that telling wasn’t safe, and that decision has held for years, even into adulthood, even with people who would probably believe you now.

If the person who hurt you was family

This carries its own weight, different from abuse by someone outside the family. Holidays, family events, the people who still love that person, none of it disappears just because you’ve named what happened, and none of it gets simpler just because you’re an adult now. You might feel pressure, spoken or unspoken, to keep the peace anyway, to not be the one who disrupts things. What relationship you want with that history, and with the people connected to it, is yours to decide. There’s no required outcome here, and our therapists won’t push you toward one.

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