On my blog entry entitled Trauma Tuesday: Traumatized Adopted Child and Disconnection From the Body, Scrapsbynobody posted the following insightful comment:

On the subject of trauma, and trying to deal with it in your adopted child, this is a very difficult issue. Most traumatic experiences are not in your child's file, and often until they begin to feel secure, they will not be able to reveal them...if ever. – Scrapsbynobody

Amen … and amen.

My trauma was so severe that I was in my mid-thirties before I felt safe and secure enough to start revealing my own history to myself and then heal from it. I truly believed that, if I ever told anyone about my child abuse history, my abusers would kill my sister. They killed my beloved dog right in front of me to prove that they had no qualms about taking a life to ensure my silence. In order to make sure that I never told the secret, I had to repress all of the memories deep inside of myself. My life screamed my truths through a wide variety of symptoms, but I had no conscious memory of most of my childhood. For the most part, my memories of my childhood were simply blank.

Your traumatized adopted child has a huge advantage in having loving adoptive parents in his life. I had nobody in my corner, other than my equally traumatized sister, to make me feel safe. Your traumatized adopted child is now living in a loving home where he can sleep through the night without having to worry about being awakened to be raped or beaten. That makes a huge difference in a child’s ability to heal from trauma.

Until your traumatized adopted child feels safe, he is not going to start revealing his abuse history. And what is in his case file is likely to be the tip of the iceberg in what he experienced. Unfortunately, abuse can go on for many years without anyone finding out about it. To this day, nobody would know about my abuse unless my sister or I shared the story. Our abusers got away with all that they did to us.

Some things may never be revealed. Unfortunately, abuse comes with shame, even though the child has no reason to feel shame. I cannot tell you how many adult survivors of child abuse have told me that they have one abusive experience that they can never share with another person because it is so bad. I respond by providing a bulleted list of the worst things that happened to me, and in most cases, what they are talking about is on that list, which frees them to share the story.

I will talk more about sharing with other abuse survivors in my next blog entry.

Photo credit: Lynda Bernhardt