Adena M'lynn's Voice

Childhood sexual abuse (CSA) is a traumatic experience that leaves lasting effects on a survivor’s mental, emotional, and even physical well-being. When CSA is untreated or unacknowledged, the child’s developmental trajectory can be profoundly altered, leading to a cascade of difficult and often self-destructive coping mechanisms. Survivors often grapple with dissociation, self-harm, eating disorders, compulsive lying, and impaired trust and love. These outcomes, intertwined with the survivor’s developmental stage during the abuse, underscore the critical importance of early intervention and therapeutic support. Childhood Perception and Processing of Trauma Children process their environment differently from adults. Their cognitive and emotional frameworks are not fully developed, which means they often lack the ability to make sense of experiences—especially traumatic ones. Children may not even fully understand what has happened to them, nor can they easily articulate their feeli...

  I am not making excuses for myself—I truly didn’t know any better. For as long as I can remember, when I didn’t have the answers, I made things up. It wasn’t because I wanted to deceive anyone; it’s just how my mind has operated since childhood, I was told to keep his secret. Lying became a way of coping, a habit that started small but grew into something far to hard to control. I learned to lie, to protect a secret. From a young age, I learned to bend the truth, to hide behind lies—first out of keeping secrets, then fear, then out of survival. As a child, I didn’t understand that this was wrong; it was simply how I navigated the world, especially when things didn’t make sense (memory lapses) or felt too overwhelming. But looking back after years of therapy and prison, I see how that pattern of behavior has shaped my life in ways I never anticipated, trapping me in cycles of deception that I didn’t even realize I created.    I will add another thing, knowing now about...