Survivors often lose family and friends when they speak of sexual abuse. Supporters of survivors frequently experience the same. It is part of the agony of abuse.

A thread.

Close kin can, and often do, turn on the truth teller. Letters are often written, extensive ones, outlining the truth teller as betraying unwritten family rules. Abusive families don't tell, don't feel, don't reveal. Allegiance to the family means allegiance to abuse.

I have not only experienced this in my own truth telling, I have inflicted this in my child hood ignorance on another's truth telling. The truth teller disrupts the deception and family dysfunction and things go from bearably bad — to unbearably worse.

I have been forgiven for my ignorance and made right the wrong of long ago. I am to be understood in thinking like a child, because I WAS a child.

In adulthood, I have been wounded the most by those closest to me who not only did not believe me, but brutally disbelieved me.

Some of these relationships are no more; one has healed completely, other I have deep gashes in trust and the absolute obliteration of any possible increase.

Even frank sexual abuse did not level me the same way disbelief upon disclosure did.

End thread.