CONTENT WARNNG: Contains depictions of incest and sexual assault.

You did not come back from hell with empty hands. – André Malraux

I picture myself standing outside the modest, gray-green Cape Cod at the end of the quiet cul de sac in West Lafayette, Indiana, where I grew up. It’s been thirty-six years since I lived in this house with my mom, dad and sister, thirteen years since I confronted them with my memories of abuse. My relationships with them now range from tenuous reconnection with my sister to complete estrangement from my dad. In between lies my mother, whom I will spend time with this fall for the first time in six years. After more than a decade of healing work ranging from cognitive behavioral therapy to various somatic therapies, I’m now fifty-one years old and closer to whole than I’ve ever been.

The last step is going back for the little girl inside me I had to abandon to survive.

I shiver on the front steps of my old house. It’s a chilly day in early March, but I don’t want to go inside. I dread going inside.

Then I steel myself, remembering I’m here to tell ten-year-old me all that I’ve learned to help sustain her through this lonely period she must endure.

Inside. Up the old stairs. At the top, to the left, my old bedroom.

I nudge the door open and it’s as if it’s still 1981. The low, round play table sits atop the pink shag carpet, and there’s a big pile of stuffed animals on the floor at the foot of the bed.

And then I see her, in the far corner of the room: ten-year-old me, sweetly sleeping on top of her Charlie Brown pillowcase, hugging her favorite stuffed animal, Fozzie Bear.

I close the door behind me, stand, and watch her. Though there’s no imminent threat, I’m struck by her vulnerability. Probably because I know she won’t get to sleep peacefully for long.

As if on cue, the bedroom door behind us opens. She wakes quickly to the sound; her body tenses and I feel it mirrored in my own. She is facing the wall, where, if she opens her eyes, she will see only the outline of the tiny pink and green flowers on her wallpaper.

My father stumbles into the room, clomps over, and clumsily makes space for his 6’3”, 200-pound frame beside her in the tiny twin bed. He reeks of beer, pungent and overpowering.

At first, I’m frozen myself. But then I make myself move toward them, sit my own middle-aged body on the edge of her bed—ghosts-of-future-selves don’t take up much space—and rub her back, just as I would today, with my own kids. Just as I did when my own kids were her age. I lean over, whisper into her ear.

“I’m here to tell you to hang on,” I say, careful not to look at my father at all. He is inconsequential to this moment. I tell this younger version of me that I’m here. Here to help her understand what’s happening as she endures this abuse at the hands of the father we so desperately love.

Her breath is labored, ragged, and I feel the old demons gathering in the pit of my stomach.

And then I shore myself up.

“This thing you’re doing right now—escaping into your mind—separates your mind and body so you don’t have to know the details of what he’s doing to you,” I whisper. Her body is warm to my touch, and her tension seems to slacken a little as she hears me—somehow—and part of me gets this message, sent four decades from the future.

I stroke her auburn hair as I continue telling her what this abuse will mean for her—how it will shape her life. I explain that her denial will protect her while she still has to live with her parents, and for some years after. It will let her believe that her father would never hurt her. I tell her that, believe it or not, she won’t even remember any of this for a long, long time.

Except her body will know the truth. It will remember. It will not fully exhale for thirty years, holding onto both the fear and the associated pleasure from something that never should have happened to her—let alone happen repeatedly—and it will prevent her from exploring sex and love the way people who haven’t grown up with sexual trauma get to do.

I warn her that this disassociated material will come back to her: first in her extreme reactions to things her friends find completely natural, like when her boyfriends want to touch her sexually, or just be naked around her. “You’ll even make your high school boyfriend wear underwear when you take a bath with him!” I laugh, because I can laugh about it now, and I want her to know that one day, she’ll be able to laugh about it, too.

“For so long,” I continue, “it will feel wrong when men touch you.”

I explain that she’ll be swimming with shame without knowing why until she’s in her mid-thirties, and then a moment where our dad is holding her down on his bedroom carpet will come back all at once, in a flashback. I warn her that the memory will be so visceral she’ll feel the carpet scratching her face, except parts of the memory will be missing, and she won’t know what to do, whether to tell, who to tell.

“This memory will haunt you, at once helping you understand yourself better and question everything you thought you knew, and for a while, you’ll just live with it.”

Then a noise from downstairs, the sounds of Mom returning from her evening nursing shift. Before I know it she is up the stairs, throwing open the door. “Herb, come to bed!” Then they’re gone, and it’s just the two of us.

 Little Sarah hugs her knees into her chest, curls up into that old, familiar ball. I lie down next to her, hold her.

I tell her I can’t protect her, but I’m hoping that, somehow, my being here will make her know deep in her body and brain that it’s not her fault, and she is not alone. I warn her that she’ll feel different, apart, but most people won’t ever know she feels that way, which will make her feel even more alone. Eventually, I explain to her, she’ll decide to share her secret with some of the people closest to her, and even they will mostly let her down.

She’s fallen asleep, her breath slow and rhythmic. My own breath deepens in response.

But I have more to tell her.

“I’m not going to lie—it’s going to be a long, hard road. You’ll be walking it alone for a long time, but keep going, because eventually, you’ll begin to find the helpers.”

I want to tell her about every single one of them—the therapist she’ll work with for fifteen years, the bodyworker who will help bring movement back to her spine—how they will all play a critical role in our healing, our future ability to forgive and let go. But instead I tell her I’ve written a memoir chronicling it all to help her and other kids like her. It might even help her dad, or dads like hers. (This last part is probably wishful thinking, to which even grown-up Sarah is not immune.)

“Telling our story will alienate some people, too,” I say, feeling for the thousandth time the crushing sadness of being separated from my mom and dad, of never getting to connect with who I imagine they could have been without their own traumas.

“But you’ll learn to follow the guidance of your own heart, and it will never, ever lead you astray.”

When I get to the best part—telling her about those gorgeous kids she’ll get to mother, that feeling of finally falling in love with her whole being that she’ll have in her late thirties—I’m almost tempted to wake her. Instead, I lean over to kiss her goodbye, trusting she somehow gets it now, and is seeing it all, as she lies dreaming.

I walk back down the stairs and out the door, but I’ll never leave her again.

Sarah Archibald is currently shopping for a publisher for her memoir on the subject, Wicked Love Me. She recently settled on Cape Cod and is working on a novel about two women who become empty nesters and find themselves wanting each other, not their husbands.