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I was being wheeled through A&E on a gurney, unable to move yet, and when I would my range of motion would be slowed after the brutality my body and soul and psyche had just survived. As the gurney was taken into a side room right at the end of the ward I said to the people standing by me “I’m not talking about demons, there are groups of people abusing children and everybody knows, everybody knows that.”
Here in a brand-new year, 2026, I am five years on from that experience and everybody does, undeniably, know. With the release of the heavily redacted Epstein files, we can see clear as day the network of abuse; what survivors have been saying for decades, if not longer.
As a survivor of child abuse, I have dedicated much of my adult life to advocating for other survivors. My over-responsibility, a symptom of my trauma, and probably just part of my personality that may have always been present, but I can’t know either way. Becoming parentified as my mother grappled with the grief of the loss of her son, my baby brother, from Sudden Infant Death Syndrome when I was eight, the already unstable foundations we were standing on was just crumbling into dust around us all. The men and boy who hurt me so badly, their abuse relentless, the secrets I carried for them in silence.
I distinctly remember being a little girl and looking so clearly through and into my abusers and everyone around me. I could see their pain, I was living in terror every day of my life, but I felt bad for them. I needed to parent them. If I just love enough maybe, it’ll fix this.
A phrase I learnt a couple of years ago resonated so much with me – “even a worm will turn” meaning even the most docile, gentle creature will retaliate or avenge themselves after being pushed too far, bullied or abused too long. Eventually any being will push back after enough is enough. Enough for me took twenty-nine years and I didn’t even realise my retaliation was on the horizon. I was trying to heal and improve my life after all the pain I had carried so long, it ended up becoming about the collective trauma of the whole world, this was unexpected, I did not know it was coming or that I would end up fighting back that way for all of us.
During my recovery in adulthood, I have had to approach it all differently, I didn’t need to forgive because I already had, I needed to learn how to not forgive, to stop being kind to my detriment, to begin to not understand what is not understandable. I never saw myself as a child, I was a responsible adult with the world on my shoulders. I had never been treated age appropriately and so much was expected of me whilst trying to hang on during the unending cruelty, the flash flood of abuse, torrents of pain, humiliation as a weapon. She pressed on.
A shell of a human, a completely numb teenage girl with a flame inside her so bright that was not extinguished despite best efforts. It is her who carried me through what would be the worst years of my adult life, what led me to that A&E, that would lead me back there again two more times with terror gripping me. She kept me breathing.
The inexorable wave of my life, when that storm hit, taking me to the exact moment my life would be cleaved in two. A before and after. I look at photos of myself in the months leading up to February 2021, any photo from around the summer/autumn of 2020 and the closer they get to that fated date the more emotional they make me. I look into that girls’ eyes and see a baby who had no idea what was about to happen to her. If I tried to tell her she simply wouldn’t believe me.
My first good therapist in my early twenties told me she thought the reason I’d loved horror movies so much growing up is because my life had been like one. I was puzzled at first then made the connection, how what is comforting to us is what is familiar and the haunted hallowed horror movie characters were what I could see myself in. For a while a few years ago, there were so many films made where the monsters had come to life from the abuse the main character had suffered in childhood, consistently creating tangible ghosts or demons from sexual abuse. The haunting of the lead being something made manifest from her own past. We can only block things out for so long before they come screaming into our reality, burning brightly into harsh focus, you cannot look away.
My own monsters bled into reality, but how they had always been with me. Clawed my neck as I screamed, played with my hair as I was trying to sleep.
I would have tried anything to heal the pain inside me, to find some solace from the wounds. I did not actually comprehend that my methods may be unusual, I didn’t really have a guidance system beyond myself, something that would come to be exploited later on. Being on the outside of things my whole life but trying to build things in my own way made me quite inventive and adaptable, I always just figured it out as I went and trusted myself to do so.
When I was in the first year of upper school I used to have a recurring dream, I was walking down the big hill from the school into town, and all the other children were long gone. I was alone and the usually busy street completely empty and still. I could hardly move, I was being held down, held back, crushed and slowed. As if my bag were full of heavy rocks or bricks, as if something had hold of me and wouldn’t let me progress.
I think about that dream often. I remember nearly all my dreams and have nightmares at a consistent rate. This one I remember because unlike the complexity and millions of details of my usual dreams and nightmares, it is its message of simplicity – you are being held back, you are being held down, you cannot get ahead.
It can be difficult for me to not see my childhood as a punishment of some sort. I think of how many men and boys abused me, how so many people had opportunities to help but never did. I think about how improbable it is that so many who were meant to love me treated me so viciously. How because I was clever or forced to be mature or any other adjective I was supposed to be able to not only deal with it alone but also love those who hurt me and hated me.
Being expected to love those who could not love me and forgiveness coming to me as naturally as breathing required of me to sort of go above normal human expectations as a child. Now as an adult discovering that any desire or need for things such as advice or friendship can be exploited requires me to once again reach higher than what is expected of humans. As a child I had to be a guide to others and my fortitude rested on my moral and ethical theories and ability to see the bigger picture rather than hate individuals. As an adult it has been cultivating an imperviousness to desire so as not to be exploited in the name of that which you’re seeking whether consciously or subconsciously. Say I desired guidance from someone who seems to know answers, that is exploitable and can be used by bad actors with their own agenda. So, the challenge lies in being able to push forward beyond that desire for something which can be used to harm you. That can apply to anything.
Being able to love or forgive those who have abused and exploited me over the years not only set me up to be revictimised sexually as an adult; abusive men seem to see a glowing neon sign above the heads of survivors of CSA, but also revictimised in terms of people on the ASPD spectrum coming towards me, my being able to tolerate cold callous personalities. I believe just like those who were sexually abused are statistically more likely to be abused again in adulthood, there is also a correlation between those of us who grew up with actual psychopaths and ones in the future coming towards you too.
I sometimes think of tardigrades and how they can survive deep space and the deepest ocean trenches, able to carry on with things at pressures and temperatures that would surely kill all other life. I think about how when you grow up adapted around severe trauma, you can carry on through conditions that others would simply give up in. I think about the extremes of my life and how it has taken those extremes to find the equilibrium.
When you can keep going despite things like intense humiliation, scrutiny, violation and cruelty I suppose that does open you up to a whole heap more of it. I’m in the early stages of processing my near-death experience, I started thinking more deeply about details, they come in in pieces, my fragmented mind trying to build the puzzle and now I have distance I can think about certain areas longer. I think about the gloating hints that someone I believed to be my friend would say at times that he knew I couldn’t question or argue because I was in total dissociation.
When he told me openly, he had been spying on me, during the same visit he referenced something I had only mentioned to my private therapist, he did so because he thought he had done well enough at manufacturing codependence, manufacturing consent to things he knew I did not want and was not saying yes to. If he was the one spying (as part of a group) maybe he was the one who put a “bedtime” on my phone as if I was a child, moved around my apps and deleted photos I had kept just in case for evidence for something else that had happened to me. If so and a person believed that another person was so vulnerable they literally need an external party to tell them when bedtime is (9.45pm apparently) then how is that person not also too vulnerable to consent. I had always said no to what he was after, always. Trying to create consent from fear when I’m in a state where I didn’t even know what day of the week it is is not consent at all. There is no logic in it, just disgusting violation and rampant hypocrisy.
His hubris and arrogance made him believe I was vulnerable enough that he could exploit me and I would still allow him in my life after recovering. He thought he had undermined and brainwashed me enough, he used to tell me he was the only person who would ever help me and everyone else will hurt me. I challenged this at first but as I became more lost in the fear, the frequencies, the confusion and amnesia I started to believe him because he seemed to know things about what was happening to me. He played it that this was “help” and instead it was abuse and a complete violation of my human rights. The constant undermining me ultimately led to a traumatic experience with him which would be the last time I ever saw him. I believe he hated me all along even though he said he loved me; I think his only emotion is hatred.
Thank God I went into recovery shortly after that, it was the wake-up call I needed. Never put faith in false prophets. The situation reminded me of an experience I had as a teenager, I met a counsellor who was a vicar, he would “counsel” me between the ages of 15-17. Unfortunately, he became obsessive over me, told me he loved me and did all manner of other crazy things, and he did a similar tactic, a grooming tactic, like we are the only clever people and everyone else is stupid. As a teenager I defied this, I knew it was lies, this was an extremely clever charismatic man, but I could see right through him and never gave in.
With this “friend” in adulthood doing many of the same grooming tactics it puts into harsh focus for me now how when we are traumatised our brains and development can be frozen in time. I was able to be groomed like a child would because I had already been through it and during these times of intense fear which sent me spiralling into age regression, amnesia and blackouts it actually was effective this time. The same patterns played out of them using me to feel big, to feel important or needed, to cover up their insecurities and weaknesses. I think men like that intentionally target strong-minded and intelligent girls and women as they then feel powerful if they can break you down. That is not power that is the opposite of power. Real power does not need to perpetuate falsehoods, prey on the most vulnerable painful moments in peoples lives just to get their hooks in finally. It hurts to know what I fought and defied as a teenager from someone actually accomplished ended up happening to me again and worse from someone so useless, but I have let go of the shame connected to it and only feel rage at the perpetrator.
I have seen over and over again in my own life and the life of other survivors that when people see you as vulnerable, they exploit that for their own gain, taking advantage of your pain for their satisfaction.
One thing I know to be universally true – those who prey on vulnerable innocent women and children are the weakest most pathetic among us. Seneca said, “all cruelty springs from weakness” That they repeatedly pick on the most vulnerable members of society to attempt to control and dominate is the clearest example of this. At the time this part of the story happened to me in 2023 I had become so unwell that I lost two months of my life, I do not remember it save a few flashes of memory. This “friend” even saw me with my hospital wrist band on and admitted later on he considered trying to have sex with me then at that time. At the same time, I was considering running away from him instead of getting in a car because I was in so much fear. I also frequently remember an argument with him stating that he “didn’t care that he was cruel” and how often he lied to me over the years, telling me over and over he was a “safe person” just to turn out to be the very opposite.
Now, I pushed on through the constant violation of privacy, the humiliation of something so deplorable and unworthy judging me and relentlessly criticising me at my lowest ebb because I grew up that way too. Its an odd thing, if I hadn’t been through so much trauma I wouldn’t have been in that position in the first place but if I hadn’t, I also wouldn’t have been able to survive it. If I didn’t have those tools I needed to get through – dissociation, slowing and shutting myself right down to just breathing through it like a deep space tardigrade able to carry on, poetry and stories and my imagination creating better worlds I could escape into. Without that I wouldn’t be here.
It’s a funny thing as well, as deeply as something tries to break you is how deeply you can heal. The depth to which they shamed you is the depth to which you can find self acceptance. How deeply self hatred gets its roots into you is how deeply you can love yourself. If you can look in a mirror and see a stranger staring back imagine the relief and joy of seeing yourself there again. The you who was always just waiting in stasis for the safety to come back home and cheer triumphantly – we survived! Look at us now!
When I look in the mirror now, I see all the things I’ve healed, I see how my relationship with my body, with food, with beauty and self love is in a better place than it ever has been and I’m not sure it would’ve got there if it hadn’t had plummeted so badly before. Sometimes because I’m an optimist, I can end up accidentally glossing over just how brutal and agonising my trauma has been, I don’t want to paste a happy smiling sunshine sticker over my pain, but I do want to acknowledge that without it I don’t know that I would have discovered my immense strength and courage.
I can say truthfully when I look at myself all I see is someone I love so deeply, I have so much care and admiration for her. I finally protect her the way I have fought so hard to protect others. I’m so thankful for her fight and fire and determination, her cleverness and kindness and creativity. When you can see yourself clearly that way it gets harder for small mean people to get to you. You can see why they were trying to, I don’t think so many people would’ve tried to destroy me unless I was worth so much more than they were saying. Their desperation to make me feel small and insignificant a reflection of their own smallness and fear when having to look at someone like me, someone who is who she says she is. I see it now.
Now in this new year of 2026, again I went to start taking steps to heal myself of the things connected to me in this story, focussing on healing from the pain of betrayal and violation from that man I believed was a friend and as I started on that path the entire world got shook up. The news cycles a relentless tale of the worst traumas imaginable, what I could see clearly all those years ago now spilling out into the public consciousness. I am still fighting for justice for all survivors and victims; in fact I demand it. Now my task is to continue that fight whilst using everything I’ve learnt about self care, my human rights, my worth and value and how I should be treated. To keep pushing back in the ways I can on behalf of all innocents without getting lost or hurt in it. It is a difficult road to walk, and it can be lonely too. I’m better positioned now than I was, working with groups full of other survivors and advocates with so much bravery and wisdom. My passion for justice, my rage on behalf of humanity and my desperation to see more compassion for victims is sometimes hard to find a match for in others and maybe I can come off erratic in how much I care but here is another quote I’ve always loved – “unless someone like you cares a whole awful lot, nothing is going to get better, its not”
I’ll leave this article with a simple question for humanity, do you really believe we are powerless against cruelty when cruelty is weakness? Do you want to be divided and bitter thinking of small things like left vs right, man vs woman, black vs white or do you want to be able to reclaim your power from those b******t oppressive structures designed and played out to keep you small, isolated and angry at who should be your friends and neighbours? Do you want to keep playing into the hands of that which holds you in disdain or do you want to come together and realise we’re stronger than what hates us? The love and rage and power is inside you, tap in.
Rachel, Healthwatch Essex Trauma Ambassador