> ## Content Index > Fetch the complete content index at: https://ofstarlightandsoil.ghost.io/llms.txt > Use this file to discover other available public pages before exploring further. # Let's Talk About Abuse + Mental Health - URL: https://ofstarlightandsoil.ghost.io/lets-talk-about-abuse-mental-health/ - Published: 2026-10-23T03:32:24.000Z - Updated: 2026-10-23T04:39:43.000Z - Author: Ari *What happens to the human psyche when the people who are supposed to love and protect us become the ones who hurt us? And why are survivors so often the ones left carrying the consequences?* From my own life experience, I have gained a deeply personal understanding of abuse and its effects on mental health. I have been diagnosed with CPTSD, BPD, and MDD. These aren't just letters on a medical record. They represent struggles that have affected my relationships, my nervous system, and the way I experience the world. Sometimes I look at the entire DSM, the *Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders*, and wonder how differently we might understand the human psyche if we started by asking what happened to someone rather than immediately asking what is wrong with them. In my opinion, we need to have a much bigger conversation about the relationship between abuse, trauma, and mental health. Sometimes I think the entire DSM could be retitled: **"The Effects of Rape and Abuse on the Psyche of Survivors."** I'm not claiming that every mental health condition has the same cause. Genetics, biology, neurodevelopment, and other experiences matter, too. But I question why we so often separate a person's symptoms from the environments and experiences that may have shaped them. Why are we so comfortable diagnosing someone's response to suffering while remaining uncomfortable fully naming the suffering itself? Why do we teach survivors how to regulate their emotions, manage their triggers, and adjust to the world around them, while the people who harmed them may never be expected to change? And why does the person who finally speaks up so often become the person everyone thinks needs to be fixed? ## What counts as abuse? When people hear the word *abuse*, many imagine a black eye, a broken bone, or an obviously violent incident. But abuse isn't always visible. It isn't always loud. And it doesn't always come from someone who appears cruel to everyone else. Sometimes the person hurting you is charming, respected, religious, successful, or beloved by an entire community. The best, most methodical abusers hide in plain sight within the systems that we've been told are "good for us". Abuse can take many forms, including: **Physical and sexual abuse:** Rape, sexual assault, hitting, choking, threats of physical violence, restraining someone, blocking someone from leaving, human trafficking, drugging, and using reckless driving or physical intimidation to frighten or control another person. **Psychological, mental, and emotional abuse:** Gaslighting, chronic invalidation, verbal degradation, manipulation, threats, isolation, humiliation, blame-shifting, coercive control, and repeatedly denying someone's reality. This can also include patterns of betrayal and deception used to manipulate or undermine a partner. **Spiritual abuse:** Using religion, spiritual authority, or claims of divine approval to control someone, excuse mistreatment, suppress questions, demand obedience, or convince survivors that leaving an abusive situation makes them immoral or unworthy. **Financial abuse:** Withholding money, concealing financial information, restricting access to shared resources, creating financial dependence, or using money to control someone's choices. This can include treating a stay-at-home mother as though she contributes nothing because she doesn't receive a paycheck, despite the essential work she does caring for children and maintaining a household. **Reproductive abuse:** Sabotaging contraception, coercing pregnancy decisions, interfering with reproductive healthcare, or using threats involving children and parenthood to control someone. **Neglect and withholding care:** Failing to provide essential needs or deliberately withholding food, medication, shelter, protection, affection, or support as a means of punishment or control. Not every disagreement, mistake, lie, or hurtful interaction is abuse. Context, patterns, coercion, power, and intent matter. But we need to stop pretending that harm is harmless simply because it doesn't leave a bruise. Your body is not public property. Your spirituality should not be used against you. Your financial dependence should not become someone else's weapon. And loving someone does not give them ownership of you. ## The effects of abuse on the brain and body This is personal for me. Abuse has affected my life so profoundly that there are times I genuinely feel like my brain is damaged. I struggle with exhaustion, the weight of everything I've lived through, and the reality of trying to function while carrying experiences that other people may never fully understand. I have CPTSD, BPD, and MDD. I also live with Crohn's disease. My health, energy, and ability to function have all been affected by the life I've lived, and I am tired. Not just the kind of tired that a good night's sleep fixes. The kind of tired that comes from trying to keep going when your body and mind have already been through so much. Trauma can affect the brain's stress-response systems, emotional regulation, memory, concentration, sleep, and sense of safety. Chronic stress can take a real toll on the body. Physical violence, strangulation, and other traumatic injuries can also cause actual brain injuries. I know what it feels like to wonder how much of myself has been changed by everything I've experienced. Crohn's disease is a complex inflammatory condition, and its causes are not fully understood. Many researchers are showing how interconnected the mind, body and soul are, the work by Dr. Gabor Maté, illustrates this connection between ACE scores and negative health outcomes. While it may still not be "canonized in medical textbooks", I know my healthy issues, both physically and mentally have stemmed from abuse and rape. And I know I am not the only survivor who feels this way. Trauma can leave people hypervigilant, emotionally overwhelmed, disconnected, fearful, or constantly scanning their surroundings for signs of danger. Some people become people-pleasers because keeping everyone happy once felt like the safest option. Others become fiercely independent because relying on someone else has repeatedly led to pain. Some survivors overexplain because they've learned that being misunderstood has consequences. Some struggle to trust their memories because their experiences were repeatedly denied. Some become so accustomed to chaos that peace feels unfamiliar. And sometimes the very responses that helped someone survive one environment become the things they struggle with later. ### Trauma, neurodivergence, and the nervous system Trauma can affect how we communicate, process information, regulate emotions, respond to sensory input, and navigate relationships. Some trauma responses can resemble traits associated with autism or ADHD, including social withdrawal, sensory overwhelm, difficulty concentrating, emotional dysregulation, and a heightened need for predictability. While trauma does not cause autism, these overlapping traits can sometimes make it harder to understand what someone is experiencing. For people who are already neurodivergent, trauma can add another layer of exhaustion to a nervous system that may already be working overtime to navigate the world. Masking, sensory sensitivities, executive functioning challenges, and being repeatedly misunderstood can make recovering from abuse even more complicated. And when survivors' communication differences or emotional responses are used to discredit them, the harm can continue long after the abuse itself. **A person can be autistic and traumatized, have ADHD and PTSD, and struggle emotionally while still accurately recognizing the harm they've experienced.** We deserve care that considers the whole person rather than reducing them to a diagnosis. *Survival responses do not appear out of nowhere. And a person's distress does not automatically invalidate their perception of reality.* ## When Childhood Trauma Comes Back Years Later One part of trauma that deserves so much more understanding is what happens when memories of childhood abuse begin surfacing years, sometimes decades, later. For some survivors of childhood sexual abuse, there are no clear, continuous memories of what happened. There may be fragments, flashes, sensations, nightmares, intense emotional reactions, or a feeling that something happened without being able to explain exactly what it was. Sometimes a memory comes back suddenly in adulthood, leaving the person trying to understand an experience they were not able to access or make sense of as a child. This is part of my own story. I experienced my first flashback of childhood rape when I was 27 years old. Since then, more pieces and fragments have surfaced. It has been a deeply personal process of trying to understand what I experienced, what I remember, and how those experiences may have affected me. Imagine reaching adulthood believing you know your own story, only to have something emerge that changes how you understand your childhood. Imagine trying to process something so painful when you don't have a complete timeline, when certain pieces are clear but others remain confusing, and when you may not even have the words to explain what is happening inside you. That can be frightening, disorienting, and exhausting. ### Why might memories surface later in life? Childhood is a period when the brain is still developing. When a child experiences overwhelming fear, sexual abuse, or other trauma, their mind may respond through a range of survival mechanisms. Dissociation, for example, can involve feeling disconnected from one's body, emotions, surroundings, or sense of self. Some survivors describe gaps in their memories or difficulty accessing parts of their childhood. Others remember what happened but feel emotionally disconnected from it. Some experience intrusive memories or flashbacks much later, perhaps after reaching a new stage of life, entering a relationship, becoming a parent, or encountering something that reminds them of the past. There is no single response to trauma, and not every survivor experiences memory gaps. We also do not fully understand every mechanism involved in how traumatic memories are encoded, retained, and recalled. But I think we need to talk more openly about the possibility that someone may begin processing childhood experiences long after those experiences occurred. A child does not have the same resources, language, power, or understanding as an adult. When something overwhelming happens, that child may have no safe person to tell, no way to leave, and no framework for understanding what was done to them. Their immediate priority may simply be getting through it. For me, the idea of a protective split speaks to something profound about survival. Sometimes the psyche can feel divided between the part that continues functioning and the part that carries experiences too overwhelming to process. I think of this as a kind of soul-deep rupture, a wound that can affect a person's relationship with their body, their identity, their safety, and their understanding of themselves. I use the phrase *soul death* to describe the depth of that feeling, not to suggest that a survivor's soul is literally destroyed. A person can feel shattered and still be here. A person can lose their sense of safety and still find their way back to themselves. Our minds can respond to overwhelming experiences in ways we may not understand until much later. And sometimes healing means slowly approaching painful material with support, at a pace that feels safe enough to tolerate. ### When I think about deliberate psychological harm I also believe we need to take seriously the possibility that some perpetrators deliberately exploit a child's vulnerability, fear, dependency, and capacity for dissociation. In cases of severe abuse, perpetrators may use threats, isolation, humiliation, coercion, repetition, sleep deprivation, manipulation, or other forms of control to frighten and dominate a child. Such tactics can have profound psychological consequences. A child who is terrified and powerless may develop ways of mentally disconnecting from what is happening simply to endure it. I have also heard survivors describe experiences they understand through the language of Satanic Ritual Abuse, or SRA, including accounts of perpetrators deliberately trying to create altered states, divisions in identity, or extreme psychological conditioning. I believe survivors deserve to be heard with compassion and that allegations of abuse deserve careful, serious investigation. I use the language of *dark magic* to describe the way I understand the deliberate weaponization of fear, symbolism, ritual, secrecy, and psychological control. When someone uses a child's deepest fears, beliefs, or need for safety as instruments of domination, the experience can feel profoundly violating on a psychological and spiritual level. At the same time, we should distinguish a survivor's lived experience and interpretation from claims about particular methods or organized practices that have not been independently established. We do not need to assume every detail in advance to take a disclosure seriously, investigate it responsibly, and recognize that deliberate child abuse can have devastating effects. What matters most is that children are protected, disclosures are handled with care, and survivors are not shamed or abandoned when they begin talking about what happened to them. ### The difficulty of remembering, and the right to heal When memories surface years later, survivors may face a second struggle: trying to make sense of their experiences while other people question them, dismiss them, or demand certainty before offering compassion. Memory is not a perfect recording of the past. Trauma memories can be fragmented, and people can experience genuine uncertainty about timing, sequence, or details. Memories can also be influenced by suggestion, repeated questioning, and the expectations of others. That is why survivors deserve support that does not pressure them toward a particular interpretation or demand that they fill in every gap. You do not have to force yourself to remember more. You do not have to search for memories, reconstruct a complete story immediately, or make a decision about every unanswered question today. If memories or flashbacks are emerging, working with a trauma-informed therapist who understands dissociation and childhood sexual abuse can help you explore what is coming up without leading you toward a conclusion. You deserve to move at your own pace, with your present-day safety and stability at the center. And if your memories are incomplete, that does not make your pain meaningless. If you feel confused, that does not make you broken. If it takes years to find words for what you experienced, that does not mean you should have been able to explain it as a child. For me, this is another reason we need to change how we talk about mental health. A survivor may be trying to understand their own life while also navigating diagnoses, physical symptoms, emotional exhaustion, and memories they never expected to face. Instead of immediately asking what is wrong with them, we should be willing to ask what support they need now. **Healing is not about forcing every memory into place. It is about creating enough safety, compassion, and understanding to live in the present while making sense of the past, one piece at a time.** And no survivor should have to navigate that process alone. ## Unconscious abusers vs. conscious, calculated abusers I believe we need to make an important distinction between people who cause harm without fully recognizing what they are doing and people who knowingly choose to exploit, manipulate, or hurt others. For this conversation, I'll call these **unconscious abusers** and **conscious, calculated abusers**. These are descriptive terms for patterns of behavior, not formal psychiatric diagnoses. Human behavior can be complicated, and a person may show elements of both. ### Unconscious abusers Some people repeat harmful patterns they learned growing up. They may act impulsively, become defensive when confronted, struggle to regulate their emotions, or enter what I think of as a *split state*, where intense emotions or perceived threats overwhelm their ability to reflect on their behavior. They may genuinely struggle to understand why their actions hurt someone else. They may minimize harm because they have normalized it. They may repeat patterns they have never examined. This does not mean they are incapable of change. Awareness, therapy, accountability, and a willingness to change can help people recognize harmful patterns and develop healthier ways of relating to others. **But being unaware of the harm you cause does not mean the harm isn't real.** A survivor should not have to absorb endless mistreatment while waiting for someone else to develop self-awareness. Intent matters, but impact matters, too. And once someone has been made aware that their behavior is hurting another person, what they choose to do next matters enormously. ### Conscious, calculated abusers Then there are people who knowingly deceive, exploit, intimidate, or violate others. This can look like methodically maintaining an affair while repeatedly lying to a partner, deliberately concealing information, manipulating someone to maintain control, or planning ways to exploit another person's vulnerability. It can also include the most horrific forms of abuse: adults who deliberately sexually exploit children, people who groom and traffic vulnerable individuals, and perpetrators who use power, money, threats, and coordinated deception to facilitate abuse. The Epstein files are an example of why we must take the sexual exploitation of children and the enabling of powerful perpetrators seriously. Wealth, status, connections, and a polished public image should never place someone above accountability! These people and systems hiding abuse are truly evil, and we have a responsibility as survivors to expose them all, since the justice system itself is complicit in every single evil thing going on. I also believe allegations of organized, ritualized, or ideologically motivated abuse must be investigated seriously, with survivors treated compassionately and evidence examined carefully. The gravity of an allegation makes a thorough, fair investigation more important, not less. It is clear as day now, that there are MANY truly evil people in a network/cult that I refer to as *The Tree of Death*, many of these people have rewritten our history books, they are the colonizers themselves, they are the KKK, they are literally working with "demons", entities, and "Satan". There is a profound difference between someone who recognizes a harmful pattern and genuinely works to change it and someone who understands exactly what they are doing, plans their actions, and continues because they benefit from another person's suffering. **Understanding why someone causes harm is not the same as excusing what they do. And compassion for a perpetrator should never require abandoning a survivor.** We do not need to diagnose someone as a psychopath, sociopath, or narcissist before we can recognize a pattern of exploitation. We need to examine their behavior, protect the people at risk, and hold them accountable. ## Child sexual abuse: protection must come first I have particularly strong feelings about adults who sexually abuse children. Children cannot be expected to protect themselves from adults who exploit their vulnerability. They depend on adults and institutions to create safety, recognize warning signs, investigate disclosures, and intervene when necessary. When that responsibility is betrayed, the consequences can follow a person throughout their life. I believe people convicted of raping children should face the strongest possible consequences, including life imprisonment or secure forensic confinement when appropriate, with protection of children and the public as the priority. They should not be given opportunities to regain unsupervised access to children simply because time has passed or because they have a respected public image. I also support serious consideration of permanent medical interventions, including surgical castration, for convicted child rapists. I understand that such measures raise profound ethical, medical, and legal questions, and I believe those questions should be addressed openly rather than allowing the discussion to end with the discomfort of the subject. My central conviction is that **a child's safety must come before a perpetrator's access to children.** We should invest in prevention, early intervention, survivor support, thorough investigations, and effective systems that prevent known offenders from exploiting children again. And we must stop treating child sexual abuse as a private family matter, an inconvenient scandal, or something that can be resolved by pressuring the survivor to forgive. Children deserve protection. Survivors deserve justice. And adults who sexually exploit children must be held accountable to the full extent – death penalty/life in prison with no access to children ever again in their life. ## Restorative Justice: Survivors Should Have a Say in the Consequences When I think about justice, I believe we need to stop making decisions about survivors without giving them meaningful power in the process. **Not just a jury. Not just a judge. The survivors themselves.** I envision a system where survivors work alongside trained experts in abuse, including survivor-advocates, attorneys, therapists, and other professionals who understand the lifelong effects of trauma. Survivors would have space to share their stories, listen to one another if they choose, identify what they need to feel safe, and help determine what accountability and restoration should look like. Imagine a powerful Catholic priest who sexually abused 100 children or adults. In the system I envision, those 100 survivors would have the opportunity to come together with trained professionals, share their experiences, and help shape the consequences for the person who harmed them. They could consider what justice means to them, from life imprisonment and mandatory ongoing therapy to financial restitution that helps survivors rebuild their lives. The church/systems that enabled or failed to prevent the abuse should also be held accountable and contribute to restitution, including helping cover survivors' ongoing medical, therapeutic, and other living expenses when appropriate. I believe survivors should be able to say what consequences they feel are necessary for their safety and healing. Some might want the perpetrator permanently removed from positions of authority and access to children. Others might want life imprisonment, intensive daily therapy, or financial compensation for the years of harm they have endured. Some survivors may believe the most severe punishment, including the death penalty, is the only consequence that reflects the gravity of what happened to them. Their voices should never be dismissed simply because their pain makes other people uncomfortable. My vision is for survivors to have far more than a symbolic voice. I want their needs, experiences, and wishes to be central to the process, rather than treating them as witnesses who tell their stories and then have no say in what happens next. For collective cases, that would mean developing a process that takes every survivor seriously, including survivors who disagree about what justice should look like. No one should be forced to forgive, reconcile, participate in a group process, or relive their trauma to have their voice heard. Restorative justice should also mean repairing what can be repaired. A perpetrator should not be the only person expected to contribute to that repair when an institution helped enable the abuse or failed to protect people. Institutions must face their own responsibility, too. I recognize that a system giving survivors this much authority would raise difficult questions about conflicting wishes, due process, and who ultimately determines a criminal sentence. Those questions would need thoughtful answers. But I don't believe those complexities justify continuing to sideline the people who have suffered the consequences firsthand. **The people who were harmed deserve a meaningful role in deciding what accountability, safety, and restoration look like.** Justice should not be something done around survivors while everyone else speaks for them. It should be a process that listens to them, respects their autonomy, recognizes the full extent of the harm, and takes their needs seriously. ## When the survivor becomes the problem One of the most devastating parts of abuse can be what happens after the survivor finally speaks. The person who caused harm denies it. They minimize it. They shift the conversation to the survivor's tone, mental health, memory, or history. Suddenly, the survivor is defending their own character instead of discussing what happened. Why are you still talking about it? Why can't you let it go? Why are you so angry? Why are you making everyone uncomfortable? Why can't you forgive? Why are you destroying the family? These questions often place the burden of restoring comfort on the person who was hurt. This is especially damaging when someone uses a pattern known as DARVO: denying the behavior, attacking the person who speaks up, and reversing the roles of victim and offender. It can happen in families, romantic relationships, workplaces, religious institutions, and communities. It can happen when an institution is more concerned with its reputation than with the people harmed within it. And it can happen when a survivor's diagnosis is treated as a reason to dismiss their account while the other person's reputation is treated as evidence of their innocence. **Mental health struggles do not make someone automatically unreliable. A person's reputation does not make them automatically innocent, in fact it may be a sign they could be abusers.** We need to stop confusing composure with credibility. A survivor may cry, become angry, struggle to explain events chronologically, or find it difficult to speak about what happened. None of those things, on its own, determines whether their account is true. We should listen, examine evidence fairly, and take disclosures seriously without using someone's emotional presentation as a shortcut for deciding whether they deserve to be heard. ## To the survivor who has been called crazy Maybe you have spent years trying to explain something that other people refuse to understand. Maybe you have questioned your own memories because someone repeatedly told you that you were wrong. Maybe you have been diagnosed with a mental health condition and wondered whether that means you should trust yourself less. Maybe you have been told that you're too emotional, too sensitive, too angry, too difficult, or too damaged to have a valid perspective. Maybe you have spent so much time trying to prove that you are a good person that you have forgotten you are allowed to be a hurt person, too. I want you to know that you do not have to be a perfect survivor to deserve compassion. You do not have to tell your story without crying. You do not have to be calm every time someone invalidates you. You do not have to forgive someone before you are ready. You do not have to reconcile with someone simply because they are family. You do not have to make everyone understand your experience before you are allowed to protect yourself. And you do not have to prove that someone else is a terrible person before you are allowed to decide that their behavior is harmful to you. Your healing is not a performance for the people who hurt you. Your worth is not determined by how gracefully you endure suffering. And your mental health diagnosis does not erase your humanity, your intelligence, your capacity for insight, or your right to be heard. You deserve relationships where accountability goes both ways. You deserve boundaries that are respected. You deserve safety that does not depend on keeping someone else happy. You deserve the opportunity to heal without being expected to pretend that what happened to you was acceptable. And you deserve a life that is about more than surviving. ## We cannot build a healthier world by silencing the people who are hurting I want a world where children are protected before they have to spend their adult lives trying to recover from what was done to them. I want a world where survivors are supported rather than automatically questioned, where diagnoses are used to guide care rather than discredit people, and where those who cause harm are expected to participate in making things right. I want a world where forgiveness does not mean access, empathy does not mean enabling, and love does not mean accepting mistreatment. I want a world where the people who have been harmed have a meaningful voice in what happens next. And I want us to stop demanding that survivors remain silent simply because telling the truth makes other people uncomfortable. Not every person who is distressed is right about everything. Not every conflict is abuse. Not every person who causes harm is beyond change. But no one should have to become perfectly healed, perfectly calm, or perfectly articulate before their experiences deserve to be taken seriously. We cannot create a healthier world by teaching survivors to adapt to abuse while leaving the conditions that enable abuse untouched. We create a healthier world by protecting people, respecting autonomy, telling the truth, supporting healing, and holding ourselves and one another accountable for the ways we affect other human beings. Because the question should never be only, "What is wrong with this person?" We should also be willing to ask: **What happened to them? What is happening to them now? Who is responsible for the harm? What does justice look like to the person who was harmed? And what needs to change so that it doesn't keep happening?** Those questions matter. The answers matter. And the people living with the consequences matter. *If this resonates with you, I'd love to hear your thoughts. What do you think we need to change about the way we talk about abuse, trauma, mental health, and justice?* *And if you're a survivor who has ever felt dismissed, misunderstood, or reduced to a diagnosis, I hope you know that you deserve to be met with compassion, curiosity, and respect.* You deserved safety then. You deserve safety now. And you deserve a future that belongs to you.