If you have carried the weight of childhood sexual abuse, you know a particular kind of tension. The abuse carved itself into your story with such violence that it can feel like the only story you have. When people ask you who you are, the first thing that comes to mind is what was done to you, and everything else feels like footnotes.
But here is a question worth sitting with: what if the abuse, as devastating as it was, did not get everything? What if there are parts of you it touched but could not take?
The Lie That Says It Got Everything
Trauma is a thief, and one of its most effective tactics is convincing you that it stole more than it actually did. It tells you that your capacity for trust is gone, that your ability to love is ruined, that the man you were supposed to become was destroyed before you had a chance. And because those messages were installed during the most formative years of your life, they carry the weight of truth even when they are lies.
But look at what you have done. You got up this morning. You went to work. You came home to the people who depend on you. You are reading this, which means something in you is still searching, still hungry for a better story. That hunger did not come from the abuse. It came from the part of you the abuse could not reach.
What Survived the Wreckage
Think about what is still here. Your desire to be a good father, even though you never had one. Your longing for genuine intimacy, even though intimacy was corrupted before you understood what it meant. Your sense that something is not right, that the way things were is not the way things should be. That sense of injustice did not come from the abuse. It came from a soul that still knows the difference between harm and wholeness.
Your compassion for other people’s pain. Your refusal to give up entirely. Your capacity to feel, even when feeling costs you something. These are not residual functions of a broken machine. They are evidence of a man whose core was touched but not destroyed.
The Image That Cannot Be Erased
Scripture makes a claim that is worth considering, even if it is hard to believe on your worst days. It says you were made in the image of God. Not the image of your abuser. Not the image of what was done to you. The image of the God who formed you with intention and declared you good before anyone had a chance to touch you.
“So God created human beings in his own image. In the image of God he created them; male and female he created them.”
Genesis 1:27 (NLT)
The abuse did not overwrite this. It could not. The image of God in you is not a performance or an achievement. It is the bedrock beneath the wreckage, the thing that persists even when you cannot feel it. And healing is not about manufacturing something new. It is about uncovering what was always there, buried under the rubble of what was done to you.
Reclaiming What Is Yours
Healing from sexual abuse is not about getting back to who you were before. You cannot go backward. But you can move toward the man you were always meant to become, the man whose story includes suffering but is not defined by it, whose scars are real but do not determine his destination.
You might start by making a list of what the abuse did not get. Your humor. Your work ethic. Your love for your kids. The way you notice when someone else is struggling because you know what struggling looks like from the inside. These things are not consolation prizes. They are the proof that you are more than what happened to you.
The trauma was real. What survived it is also real. And the man who carries both of those truths is a man with a story worth telling.
For Further Reflection
- What parts of you survived the worst of your story? What qualities do you carry that the abuse could not take?
- When you think about who you are, does the abuse dominate the picture? What else is there?
- What would it mean to believe that the image of God in you was never erased, only buried?
If something here named what you’ve been carrying, story coaching might be the next step. Visit reclaimingshalom.com to learn more.
