What Happened in Second Grade (My story: Part two)

Content warning: This post discusses childhood sexual abuse. There are no graphic descriptions, but the reality of what happened is named directly. If this is difficult material for you, please take care of yourself first. You can come back to this later, or not at all. Your pace is the right pace.

I was in first/second grade. Not always easy to remember when exactly this story takes place. Trauma. My father was recently deployed overseas. My mother was holding things together the way military spouses do…barely, and with no one watching.

Two boys in my class, kids my age, assaulted me. Molested and raped me. I was seven or eight years old. And it happened frequently.

I found out later that those boys were being abused by an older cousin. That doesn't make what happened to me less real. But it taught me something I didn't have language for until much later in life: trauma is contagious. It moves through people. Through families. Through communities. If it isn't treated, it doesn't stay contained. It spreads. And it landed on me that year in ways that would shape the next twenty two years of my life.

I'm telling you this not because I want your pity. I need you to understand that clearly. I'm telling you because this is the part of the story that most people skip. The polished version of a healer's bio says "overcame childhood adversity." The honest version says: a child was sexually violated, and the adults around him didn't catch it, and nobody helped him process it, and it detonated inside him slowly for years.

That's the honest version. And if you're reading this because you carry something similar… or something you've never spoken out loud…I want you to know that someone who's been exactly where you are is on the other end of these words. Not someone who studied it in graduate school. Someone who lived it.

What Happens When a Child's Trauma Goes Unprocessed

Here's what the research says and what my body confirmed: when a child experiences sexual trauma and there is no safe adult to help them process it, the nervous system adapts. It doesn't "get over it." It reorganizes around the wound.

For me, that reorganization looked like hypersexualization. I became sexually preoccupied at an age when I shouldn't have known what sex was. That's a textbook trauma response in children who've experienced sexual abuse… the nervous system gets locked into a loop, replaying and reenacting what happened because the body is trying to complete a stress cycle it never got to finish.

But nobody told me that at the time. Nobody told me anything. Because nobody knew.

I carried that into every year that followed. Into middle school, where I was already being teased for being different. Into adolescence, where being gay in the South added another layer of shame on top of a wound that was already infected. Into my teen years, where I was groomed and sexually exploited by adult men, men in their mid-twenties and thirtied who saw a traumatized, love starved kid and used him.

I thought I liked it. That's maybe the most painful sentence I've ever written. I thought I liked the attention. The validation. The illusion that someone wanted me. It took me years…and serious therapeutic work… to understand that a thirteen-year-old doesn't "like" being pursued by a thirty year old. That's not a relationship. That's predation. And my trauma had primed me to accept it because I didn't know what safe attention felt like.

Why I'm Telling You This

Because I sit across from people every single week who carry versions of this story and have never said it out loud.

The client who can't relax during a session because being touched…even hands hovering above her body… activates something she buried twenty years ago. The client whose anxiety has no "logical explanation" but whose body is still running a survival program that started in childhood. The client who keeps ending up in toxic relationships and can't figure out why. The client who feels broken and doesn't know that what happened to them is the reason.

I see it. Not metaphorically. I literally see it in the energy field… the disruption, the guarding, the freeze pattern that's been running since they were small. And I know what it is because I lived inside it.

This is what makes trauma-informed practice different from regular practice. When I say my work is trauma-informed, I don't mean I took a workshop and got a certificate. I mean I understand trauma from the inside out. I know what dissociation feels like. I know what hypervigilance feels like. I know what it's like to be in a body that doesn't feel safe… because mine didn't feel safe for most of my life.

And I know what it feels like when that finally starts to change.

The Body Keeps Score. The Body Also Keeps the Cure.

That's not a bumper sticker. That's the most important thing I've learned in over a decade of healing work.

The trauma lives in your body. The tension in your shoulders. The knot in your stomach. The chronic pain that no scan can explain. The jaw you clench in your sleep. The chest tightness that hits when you're not even anxious about anything specific. Your body is holding what your mind has tried to bury.

Reiki and trauma-informed yoga work directly with the body. Not around it. Not above it. Through it. When I place my hands on a client and feel the heat, the resistance, the places where energy has been locked for years. I'm not guessing. I'm responding to what the body is telling me. And when that energy begins to move, when the nervous system finally gets the signal that it's safe enough to release… that's when things actually change.

Not intellectually. Not "I understand my trauma now." Physically. Cellularly. The held breath releases. The shoulders drop. The gut unclenches. The heart rate slows. The tears come…not from thinking about the pain, but from the body finally letting it go.

That's the work. That's what I offer. Not because I read about it, but because I crawled through it myself, found the tools that actually work, and spent the last decade refining them with over a thousand people.

To the Person Reading This Who's Never Told Anyone

I see you. Not in a vague, spiritual Avatar blue alien way. I see you the way my grandmother saw me (part 1)… directly, without flinching, without looking away from the hard parts.

What happened to you was not your fault. It does not define you. But it does live in your body until someone helps you move it. That's not weakness. That's biology.

You don't need to be ready. You don't need to have your story perfectly organized. You don't need to be articulate about your pain. You just need to walk through the door. We will handle the rest. Together.

That's what I'm trained to do. That's what I was built to do. And at this point, after everything I've survived and everything I've studied, it's what I do with precision and care that I'd put against anyone in this field.

If you're a survivor of childhood sexual abuse and you're exploring healing options, you can book a session at Rainbow Reiki Center with the knowledge that your practitioner understands what you carry…not theoretically, but from lived experience. All sessions are trauma-informed, LGBTQ+ affirming, and built around your safety and autonomy.