u/riyoriyo

A few days ago, I found out something about my childhood that has completely changed how I see my family and my past, and I’m still struggling to process it.

When I was around 6, I was abused by a neighbor. For most of my life, I only had fragmented memories of it. I was so young that I couldn’t fully place what had happened, and over time I started doubting myself, wondering if I had mixed reality with intrusive thoughts. I never felt certain enough to speak about it openly.

Recently, while talking to my sister, I found out that my family actually knew about it at the time. She told me I had mentioned it as a child in a very unclear way, and that my parents were informed. I had no idea this had ever been acknowledged or carried by anyone else in the family.

What’s been hardest for me isn’t only the abuse itself, but the realization of that it was known. And yet, life continued as normal.

The neighbor remained in their (my family’s) life. Relationships stayed intact. Nothing about the way things were handled seemed to change in a way that reflected what had happened to me.. It didn’t seem to change anything.

I can’t tell whether it was minimized, avoided, or simply absorbed into silence, but whatever it was, it left me growing up believing I had imagined it, or that it wasn’t significant enough to disrupt anything around me.

Since learning this, I’ve been feeling shock, anger, confusion, and a kind of emotional numbness that comes and goes. I feel like I’m trying to re-understand my entire childhood in real time.

I’m struggling with three things: why was this never spoken about with me? why did nothing about the relationship with them change in a visible way? how do I sit with the feeling that something so serious existed alongside “normal life” afterward?

I also don’t really know how to approach my family about this yet. My relationships with my mother is already strained for unrelated reasons, and I haven’t spoken to my father since learning all of this, which makes everything feel even more complicated.

I’m not looking for anyone to tell me what my family “should” have done. I’m trying to understand how people even begin to process sth like this when it surfaces years later, and how you’re supposed to hold all these contradictions at once.