The Silence & Not Being Believed After Sexual Trauma

We name the deep wound of not being believed after sexual trauma, including the quiet cruelty of life continuing as if nothing happened. We talk about how family image, minimization, and forced secrecy shape rage, grief, and the long road back to trusting your own truth.
• the “do nothing” response after disclosure as its own form of disbelief
• how family culture teaches silence and punishes honesty
• being believed but minimized and why it hurts so much
• why abusers stay included while survivors do the healing work
• neurodivergent women, credibility bias, and how autistic and ADHD communication gets misread
• how gaslighting makes you doubt your memory and perception
• reclaiming your story as yours to tell or not tell
• practical ways to tell the truth safely through therapy, writing, or one trusted person
• witnessing as a core ingredient of trauma healing, even years later
Share it with someone that may need it.
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• Complex trauma
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Good Music for Healing

🎵 **Divine Woman Playlist (Apple Music):** https://music.apple.com/us/playlist/divine-woman/pl.u-leyl096uMoD885j

Episodes Mentioned in this Episode

BONUS EPI: Lilith And The Power of No

https://www.buzzsprout.com/2467345/episodes/19327346-bonus-epi-lilith-and-the-power-of-no

BONUS EPI: Lilith And The Backlash Against Boundaries

https://www.buzzsprout.com/2467345/episodes/19363858-bonus-epi-lilith-and-the-backlash-against-boundaries

You’re not alone. 

We’re healing together.

Transcript

Rage Season And The Core Wound

SPEAKER_01 0:00

Hey, hey, hey. Welcome back to the Awaken Heart, a podcast for healing women. I'm Audemaran, your host, your fellow late diagnosed, trauma experience, neurodivergent woman. On a healing path, just as you are, sharing my wisdom, sharing my knowledge. I'm also a licensed professional counselor, life coach, yoga instructor, and just overall fan of helping people be happy, feel better, live the life, live life on their terms. Right now, we're still in the rage season. There's a lot to rage about when it comes to sexual trauma. And today I want to talk about two things that are really wound into one. I had these set up as two different episodes, but the closer I got to recording and scripting these episodes, I felt that they were just one and the same. And that was not being believed and also maybe being forced to keep a secret. Because I think they come from the same place. I think they get the same message. It's the same fucking devastating experience of having your truth exist in you. Real, heavy, undeniable, but also at the same time having the world around you act like it isn't there, never was there, nothing ever happened. My experience with this is pretty specific in the sense that when my mom passed away when I was 13, I had I had been carrying a whole lot of sexual trauma. It came out, I told people. And you know what happened? Life continued without skipping even the faintest beat. No therapy, no conversation, no one asking if I was okay. Nothing. Just the world kept moving. And I kept standing there with this enormous, devastating thing inside of me, while also processing an enormous, devastating loss of my mother. Watching everyone else live life like nothing had happened was so hard. It it was something I experienced well into my 20s, well into probably up until my 30s, with that feeling of watching everyone's life just supersede mine or go on without falter. And that taught me that I was not worth stopping for, that my pain was not worth interrupting the normal flow of things, that whatever was inside me was mine to carry, absolutely alone. I grew up in a family that was far more concerned with

When Disclosure Changes Nothing

SPEAKER_01 2:50

what people think of them than with being good, loving, healthy people. I remember being about 18 years old out to eat with my family and running into someone I used to work with at a restaurant because I served tables at that time. I was in cosmetology school. I am a beauty school dropout. Don't ask me to cut your hair. She asked me how I was doing. And I was honest. I was in between jobs, figuring things out. And I just kind of answered like that normal life stuff, nothing dramatic. And the second she walked away, my aunt leaned over to share her adult wisdom. And that her wisdom, she parted on me, was never tell people what's really going on. Don't share the hard things, don't let people see that. And I can remember thinking, like, if I can't be honest about being between jobs, which is absolutely okay, I'm 18, calm down. What would happen if I told them something real?

SPEAKER_00 3:56

I mean. I knew.

SPEAKER_01 4:04

If you're with me for the long haul and have listened to the episodes, when I became pregnant after a sexual assault, I was hidden. No one came around me that could talk about me. No one could come around me that wasn't inside the family or inside the home. Yeah, I just disappeared. So I knew what happened. It was just another evidence of like, God, these people just aren't deep. Don't get it. They're just pretend. They play pretend. I can remember thinking, I already knew this answer. I'd always known the answer. I'm too emotional, too sensitive, too much. I'm the problem. That's what we're talking about today. Like, let's jump into it. So,

How Families Train You To Hide

SPEAKER_01 4:58

of course, I don't I don't want to say of course, because if you're here the first time, welcome, thank you. If you're here for more than the first time, welcome, thank you. Everyone that is here listening, thank you so much. But my first goal is to kind of tell you, define what we're talking about, and then we'll get into the meat of it. Because uh, you know, a lot of this stuff I talk about in this rage arc or in this healing season of healing after sexual trauma, like this stuff just doesn't get talked about enough. And the narrative around not being believed assumes you told someone. But many survivors never had that opportunity or have it. There was no one safe to tell, no adult who felt trustworthy, no relationship that felt secure enough to hold that kind of disclosure. So you carried it alone from the very freaking beginning. Nobody dismissed your truth because nobody heard your truth. You were your only witness. And that's really specific when it comes to like feeling devastating. It's a really it's the silence wasn't even a response to your disclosure. It was the condition you lived in before you could even get to disclosure. So if you didn't share, if you weren't able to share, if you haven't been able to share, you've carried something enormous for a long time, and that's heavy.

SPEAKER_00 6:33

And like with my experience, sometimes you're told and nothing happens.

SPEAKER_01 6:39

The telling happened and then nothing. Life continued. No one stopped, no one said, we need to address this. No one created any kind of response. The do nothing is its own form of not being believed, because if they believed you, truly believed the weight and the reality of what you shared, they couldn't have continued without a response. The normalcy that followed is proof that on some level your truth didn't land or landed and was set aside because dealing with it was too much, too inconvenient, too uncomfortable, too raw, too real. And then sometimes maybe you were believed, but then minimized. But he's family. Are you sure that's what happened? That was so long ago. He's not like that. You might be misremembering. Why didn't you say something sooner? Being believed and then minimized is something very fucking cruel. Because there's a moment right when you first disclose when something shifts. When it feels like maybe this time, maybe this person, maybe this will be different. And then the minimizing starts, and you realize they believe you just enough to be uncomfortable, but not enough to act. The predator continues to show up at family events, maybe. Maybe they get invited to holidays, maybe they're defended in family group chats, maybe they're still loved, adored, and included while you navigate the aftermath alone. While you're in therapy, while you're working through the trauma, while you're trying to rebuild a relationship with your own body, they're living their best freaking lives, included, sometimes even celebrated. This is one of the most enraging realities of family sexual trauma. The person who caused the harm often suffers no consequences. The family closes ranks around them, and the survivor is left to do all the work of healing from something that everyone else has collectively decided not to acknowledge. What the actual fuck, right? What

Why Neurodivergent Survivors Aren’t Believed

SPEAKER_01 9:03

a mind fuck. And I wanna I want to talk about the research that is included when it comes to being a neurodivergent woman. You're significantly more likely to experience sexual abuse and significant significantly less likely to be believed when you do disclose. Neurodivergent individuals are two to ten times more likely to experience sexual violence than neurotypical people. Some studies suggest that up to 90% of people with developmental disabilities will experience sexual abuse at some point in their lives. And the disclosure rates are low, belief rates are low, the prosecution rates are even lower. This is not a coincidence. This is a pattern, and it's it's shaped by specific identifiable reasons. Hello, culture, hello conditioning, hello, patriarchy. And sometimes how we communicate is used against us. Autistic and ADHD women often communicate directly from what institutions expect from a credible victim. We may deliver information in a nonlinear way. Memory doesn't always work in a neat chronological order. Maybe you appear flat or emotionless without when discussing your trauma. Maybe you appear too emotional or too dysregulated, so you seem unstable and unreliable. Maybe you have difficulty with being specific on dates, times, and details. Maybe you struggle to maintain eye contact in interviews, which gets read as being mishonest. Maybe you mass so effectively during interviews that the distress doesn't even show. Maybe you communicate in a way that is so overly literal, or you miss the subtext of leading questions. They just mean you're neurodivergent in a system designed to assess credibility that's not designed for your mind with us in mind, with our neurological makeup. So we get pathologized, right? Survivors may present as flat and matter-of-fact about their abuse because that's how their nervous system responds to overwhelming material. It gets read as suspicious, right? So when we're flat, when we're like just yeah, and that's what happened. And then he touched me there and I said, No, it was uncomfortable. I don't remember the details. That doesn't sound like someone that had experience. It sounds like someone just telling a story, right? It's all misconstrued because you're fucking traumatized. It's so infuriating. So I just want you to know that you're not alone. Also, being neurodivergent makes you a vulnerable party because there are predators out there that are looking for people that are like us, that are caring, that are honest, that are fawning, that are playing a part, that are masking, that are camouflaging, that are just trying to stay safe. If you weren't believed, or if you were afraid to tell because you already knew you wouldn't be believed, the system was working exactly as it's currently built. That's not a reflection of your truth. It's a reflection of a system with a documented evidence bias against survivors like us. Your truth is real, your memory is real, your experience is real. The failure to be believed was theirs, not yours.

Silence, Gaslighting, And Self Doubt

SPEAKER_00 13:24

What happens when you have to force silence?

SPEAKER_01 13:30

Every time you told the truth about your abuse, about your pain, about how you were really doing, and the response was being dismissed, being minimized, or being punished, your nervous system learned the truth is dangerous. Truth leads to being told you're too emotional. Truth makes you end up feeling like you're the problem. Or maybe your truth leads to the person who hurt you being protected while you stand alone. So maybe you've stopped telling your truth or you started hiding it, or you have found a way to shrink, right? To shrink your problem, to push it away. When your truth is denied consistently enough, when the world around you insists nothing happened or nothing is wrong or you're overreacting, you start to wonder if maybe they're right. Maybe it wasn't that bad. Maybe you're misremembering, maybe you are too sensitive, maybe you're making something out of nothing. This is gaslighting in the most devastating way. It doesn't just make you doubt specific events, it makes you doubt your own perception, your own reliability as a witness to your own life. And for us women that are neurodivergent, who have already had complicated relationships with our own perception, who have been told our entire lives that our experience in the world is too much or is incorrect, this additional layer of having specific disclosures denied is so particularly damaging. You're already fighting to trust your own neurodivergent experience. And then the people who were supposed to keep you safe told you in words or in actions that this wasn't real. This too wasn't real. You know what I mean? So you become your own witness, your only witness. If it was as a child, entertaining myself, playing with my dolls, playing pretend and using my imagination all the way up into adulthood, doing things with myself, for myself, as a best friend would. But that didn't start as a choice, it started as a necessity when no one else held my truth. I had to hold it myself. I mean, there's strength in that for anyone that's done that. That's real strength. But it's also tremendous loneliness and grief for witnessing what you deserved and you didn't get it. But other people got it. People that didn't deserve it. So what's the rage, right? I mean, do you hear the rage? Do you hear my voice and that rage and my voice? They knew, they heard, they did nothing. Life continued. Not because they were incapable of doing something, but because doing something would have required them to disrupt the image, to take sides, to acknowledge that something real and wrong had happened in their family.

SPEAKER_00 16:47

You were less important than their comfort, and that is enraging.

SPEAKER_01 16:56

Every time you showed up as a full human being with feelings, with needs, with a body that had been hurt, you were managed, redirected, minimized, made to understand that your experience was too inconvenient to be held. You weren't helped, you were handled, and that's the fury. Maybe they chose the predator. Maybe they chose the image. Maybe they chose their own comfort over helping you heal. An abuser who is still loved, still included, still defended while you do the work alone, pay for therapy alone, carry the weight alone. They made a fucking choice. And they chose wrong. And maybe you didn't even have those outlets to do therapy or work or anything, but just carry it on your own. And you have every right to be furious about that. Because that that can cost you your sanity, your ability to trust your own perception. It it interferes with your relationship with yourself, with the truth of your relationship. Maybe it it helped it hinders your ability to be honest, even about the small things. The cost of silence wasn't just the silence itself. It was everything the silence grew into, every way it shaped how you moved through the world, how you showed up in relationships, how you learned to take up space, or maybe you didn't take up space. That's a real fucking cost, and you didn't choose it, and you have every right to be furious about it.

Reclaiming Your Story And Your Voice

SPEAKER_00 18:42

So, what do we get to do with all this?

SPEAKER_01 18:44

Because I, you know, if you're here for the first time or if you're here for a millionth time, it's always sandwiched together. Hey, how are you? Let's talk about what we're gonna talk about. Let's get into the meat of it and like how can we work with this? What can we tangibly do with this pain, this trauma to feel better, to heal. How can we heal? So here's the healing component. Your story belongs to you, not to your family, not to the image they've been protecting, not to the abuser who's still getting holiday invites, not to the people who told you to keep quiet. Your story belongs to you. What happened to you happened to you, and you get to decide what you do with it, who you tell, when you tell, how much you share, what platforms you use, what relationships you use, what spaces get access to it. And I say that like this is always yours. This is you're allowed to share it or not, and do what you want with it. One of the things for me was leaving up to this season and really deciding and giving myself permission to go all in on this season and really sharing. It has really pushed me to be vulnerable in a way that I haven't been vulnerable in a long time. Because when I am vulnerable like this and share my truth, I have had naysayers, I have had silencers, I have had gaslighters. And it's scary to put myself out there, but I am, and I'm sharing it so that you can see that we can heal. Like there's there's happiness in life on the other side. But this is your story. You don't need anyone's permission to tell it. You don't need the family to acknowledge what happened before you're allowed to speak about it. You don't need the abuser to confess. You don't need the people who minimized you to finally believe you. Your truth doesn't require anyone's validation to be real. It was real before anyone believed it. It remains real regardless of whether they ever do. And telling your story is not a betrayal. You may have been made to feel that speaking about abuse, about family dynamics, about what it cost you is a betrayal of the family, that good people don't air their kind of thing. But who made that rule? The people who benefited from your silence, the people who needed to protect their image, the people who were uncomfortable with feelings and realness. You owe them nothing. And telling your truth is not betrayal. It is reclaiming, it is claiming your life. Telling your story doesn't mean you have to confront family members. It doesn't have to mean legal action or public disclosure or any particular form. Telling your story can look like therapy, can look like this podcast, hearing your experience named out loud and feeling less alone. It can be done in group therapy or support. Support groups. You can do it through writing, journaling, letters, essays, anything that gets it out of your body. You can do it through trusted relationships, choosing one safe person and letting them hear. Not necessarily trauma dumping, but someone that can can hear and hold space. And eventually, if it's right, publicly, using your voice to reach others who need it. There's nothing wrong with the way to tell there's no, there's no wrong way to tell your truth. There is only your way in your time. Like the way I share in this season is not everyone's way, but this is my way. You are my safe space to share some heavy things, but also be able to utilize this heavy stuff to help you feel better and heal. What you didn't get when you first disclose or when you never got to disclose at all was witnessing. Someone just say, I hear you, I believe you, what happened to you was wrong, you didn't deserve it. You're not too much, you're not the problem. Part of healing is finding that witnessing now, even late, even decades later. The body doesn't care about the timeline. When it finally receives the witnessing is needed, something shifts. That's where that's what therapy can do, what this community can do, what the right relationship can do. You can receive your witnessing now, and it's not too late. When

Finding Witnessing Through Community Support

SPEAKER_01 23:42

my returning numbers or my numbers are growing, and I'm putting out some heavy stuff, some real stuff, and I feel that women are talking about it, that is so healing to me. I am on the right path. I am doing the right thing, as scary as it is, as vulnerable as it is, as counterculture as it is. We've needed this community. And I'm so happy we have it. So you can share here. I started a support group, a women's support group at the beginning, at the beginning of spring. And I will most likely offer the group again in the fall. And it is all about doing all of this in a group container with other women, other like-minded women, other listeners that get it. It's such a beautiful container. So just more to come, more to think about. There's ways to tell your story. And tell your story sometimes just writing it out, writing a letter and ripping it, burning it, ritualizing it to whomever you want, as many letters as you want is a good starting spot. Just getting it out of your body for maybe the first time, maybe for the thousandth time. Thousandth time, for the thousandth time? I don't know how to say that. But get it out of your body and get it out of your voice, use your voice in some way. Whether it's pen, paper, recording it on a recorder on your phone, and just getting it out. You'll find what's right. You know it's right. The silence that greeted your disclosure or the environment that made disclosure impossible in the first place. You have every right to be rageful about the family that chose image over you, about the abuser who still gets holiday invites. The message repeated in a thousand ways that your truth was too inconvenient to hold is also okay to rage about. And underneath all of that rage is what we have been known to call grief of a person who deserved to be believed. There's always that grief layer under the rage. You deserve to be protected, you deserve to have someone stop, actually stop and say, I hear you, I'm going to help you. You deserve that. Every single one of us deserves that. And it's okay to be furious that you didn't get it. Your story is yours, your truth is yours. The silence was never protection for you. It was protection for them. And you're no longer obligated to maintain that. Tell your story in whatever way feels right to whoever feels safe and whatever pace your nervous system can tolerate. The louder we are, the more we voice these things that are going on behind closed doors, the more we can change the social culture, the more we can change the predatory, pedophilic culture we live in. You have the right to be a witness to your own life. You have the right to say what happened. You have the right to take up space with your truth, even when the people around you spent years trying to shrink it. Your truth was always, always, always real. Even when no one was holding it but you. Share it with someone that may need it. Talk about it with another woman. I'm not on social media, I'm not in any marketing. This is all growing word of mouth. So the more you share, the more we talk, the more we share our rage. The more we can help women heal, the more we can heal ourselves.

Lilith Energy And Closing Affirmation

SPEAKER_01 28:34

And I want to say we it's about Lilith. So a little bit more Lilith work while we're in the rage season, how to just harness her energy in the real way, not the social demonic eating babies negative light, which is garbage. And if you don't know what I'm talking about, I will link the show, the link the episodes in the show notes of part one and two of Lilith and what I discovered when I just read about her and learned about her. But yeah, she can definitely, we can definitely harness her energy. She just she didn't take no shit. And for that, she got punished and made lies made up about her. So like just don't take no shit and don't let anybody stop you from not taking shit. All right, my dears. Until next time. Take the gentlest possible care of your awakened heart and know that I believe you. What happened to you was real, and I believe you. And you deserved so much better. You still deserve so much better from yourself, from others, from the world. Listen to the good music episode playlist in the show notes. Look at the link tree for all the goodies and everything about me if you want to work one on one. Take care of you, and I'll see you soon.