Early Days

 

Changing for Worse

Trigger Warning: sexual abuse/human trafficking/religious trauma

    It’s really hard to recall most of my traumatic my experiences in a concrete way. Everything was so frequent and normal that I didn’t consider it wrong, let alone label it with a word like “abuse” or “trafficking.” I actually didn’t make the connection that I was being trafficked until my senior year of college. To pinpoint where it started is difficult too. I have more language now, more education, more space for safety to look back and say “that was wrong” or “that shouldn’t have happened,” but as a child growing up with no knowledge of consent or autonomy, I never considered the things happening to me were wrong. Therefore, to figure out when the trafficking started is difficult. To point out the difference between trafficking and domestic abuse is also hard to say. Who’s to say they didn’t happen at the same time, or somehow played a part in each other? It took years of therapy for me to understand the things that happened to me and to then be able to label traumatic events accurately. Traumatic events happened in secret, as they usually do. From an outside perspective, we looked like a loving, normal family. 

         I grew up in a Christian home. More accurately: a Reformed Presbyterian Calvinist Christian home. I grew up in what I can only think of to describe as a cult. We spent all our time surrounded by the church, with the people from the church, through actually going to church, and through after-church activities (AWANA, youth group, Sunday school). All my friends growing up were homeschooled and Christian, and we only spent time with them. I was "sheltered" through most of my childhood, completely ignorant and unaware of the realities of the world. My birth-parents probably thought that they were protecting me, but it obviously did more harm than good. Through this specific culture, I was raised to not stand up for myself, with an understanding that my body was not my own, to pursue suffering for the sake of Christ, above all else to honor my father and mother, that my life's purpose was to glorify God, and with the thought that "God wanted me to be happy" was an incorrect and sinful thought. I can't fathom the type of brainwashing it takes for a couple to raise their children under these circumstances, believing that it can be good for them. I believe they thought they were doing good.

     Living with my birth parents and ex-siblings was complicated. I call them birth-parents and ex-siblings because I have since left that group of people and am not a part of that family anymore. However, I was homeschooled through fifth grade, then went to private schools through ninth grade, then public school to finish high school. 

While living in that house, the topic of sex was completely off limits. I never learned what sex was because of abstinence only education in private schools. I never even knew I had a vagina until someone else made it bleed through an abusive event. I was so out of touch with myself. There was no room for questions, no allowance for curiosity. I had no desire to touch myself or explore my own body. I was afraid of it, I never really considered it mine. 

   Just because I never touched my body doesn’t mean it wasn’t being touched. I remember many counts of older men touching me, above the clothes, under the clothes, or reaching inside me. This didn’t really phase me. Scratch that, I froze most of the time, which is a trauma response. So my body knew something was wrong, but in my mind it was registered as normal. I remember being brought into the men’s bathroom at my church, I was seven or eight, to find someone waiting for me in the stall. That memory goes black after that moment. 

A lot of younger memories go blank after a certain moment. This is both helpful and unhelpful. I get that my brain is trying to protect me from remembering trauma, but it becomes unhelpful when I’m trying to understand what exactly happened to me. Did I run away?  Was I raped? Did I fight back? I rarely fought back. My freeze response is strong AF. It was easier to just let things happen to me then figure it out later. Also, as a child, fighting is not really an option because you’re smaller and weaker. So that response really grew on me, into my adolescence, and through my adulthood I kept freezing whenever someone put their hands on me. 

This is intentional in the trafficking system. They want you to freeze, they train you to freeze. They beat you until you want to freeze. Instilling fear into victims is a strategy they use to keep people quiet and too afraid to stand up for themselves, too afraid to say anything, too afraid to admit what’s happening to them. This is what happened to me.

Like I said, I didn’t realize I was being trafficked until my senior year of college. I thought it was normal since it had been going on for so long, and was too afraid to even think about it too much. Johns get in your head that way, and begin to control the way you think. They own you. You’re not your own. Your body and even your mind is not yours. I used to believe that I was legally owned by another person. I didn’t know trafficking was illegal, and thought that everything happening was completely legal and justified. Trauma was the normal.

My religious upbringing heavily weighed in on my freeze response, and the way I responded to the way that I was being treated. Since sex was a sin, I was convinced I was living in sin. And since I cared about that back then, that meant I kept my mouth shut. In the church, virginity is the most important thing. And since I was no longer a virgin, I was no longer important. All they wanted was for you to not have sex. That's all they cared about. They were obsessed with that concept. But since that didn't apply to me, I. felt that I wasn't a real person, or like I wasn't as real or valid as the other people in church. 

This train of thought took off and controlled the way I thought about myself: less than, unimportant, not "real." And since I wasn't real, it was okay for those things to happen to me. Those things don't happen to real people.