An Awakening: How Incest Survivors Find Truth Through the Ruins of Their Pain
By Holey House
There’s a kind of awakening that doesn’t come from meditation cushions or moonlit beaches.
It doesn’t arrive wrapped in calm or whispered by the wind.
It begins in agony.
Mine did.
Those who knew me best would tell you that my awakening began in the depth of suffering—when life had stripped me to bone and nerve and memory. I had spent decades repeating the same heartbreak, the same betrayals, the same invisible wounds in different faces and different settings. I was reenacting the story my body had memorized long before I had words for it.
One day, a friend—exasperated by my endless self-destruction—looked at me and said, “If the same thing keeps happening in every situation, maybe you’re the problem.”
It cut through me like glass. I wanted to scream, You don’t understand what it’s like to live in this skin. I wanted to defend myself, to protest that I was the one who had been hurt, not the one who caused it.
But when the anger settled, what was left was humility—and a small, painful crack in the armor of denial I’d worn my whole life.
Through that crack, truth began to seep in.
The Moment the Blindfold Starts to Slip
For survivors of incest, awakening often begins not with light, but with devastation.
When the subconscious reenactments finally stop “working.” When love turns to pain too many times to ignore. When the patterns stop looking like bad luck and start looking like a map.
My awakening wasn’t some grand spiritual event. It was the slow death of every illusion that kept me surviving but not living.
I began to see that I wasn’t broken by chance—I was shaped by trauma.
Every self-sabotaging behavior was a language my nervous system had been speaking for years.
Every toxic relationship was an echo of what had been normalized in my childhood home.
For incest survivors, awakening is often realizing that the very instincts meant to protect us—obedience, dissociation, silence, compliance—are the same ones that keep us stuck later in life. We were trained to survive captivity, not to live in freedom.
Awakening is when you finally see the difference.
The Mirror of Self-Responsibility
When I first heard the words, “maybe you’re the problem,” it felt cruel. But what I’ve learned since is that the truth in that statement isn’t self-blame—it’s self-power.
As incest survivors, we were conditioned to see ourselves only through the eyes of those who hurt us. Our sense of worth, identity, and truth was programmed by people who exploited our vulnerability.
So we internalized their messages:
“You’re too sensitive.”
“You’re imagining things.”
“You wanted it.”
“You made me do it.”
Those lies became the architecture of our adult lives.
We repeated the same dynamics—not because we wanted pain, but because our bodies recognized pain as home.
The awakening comes when we finally stop looking outward for rescuers and start reclaiming the responsibility to re-parent ourselves—to become the safe person we always needed.
Healing begins when you stop asking, “Why did they do this to me?” and start asking, “Why do I still carry what they left behind?”
That question isn’t a condemnation—it’s an invitation.
The Obsession with Wholeness
Once the door of awareness cracks open, it’s nearly impossible to close again.
I became obsessed with understanding myself. Every book on trauma, every workshop, every therapy session—I devoured them.
It wasn’t intellectual curiosity; it was survival.
Because once you see how trauma shapes your entire identity, you can’t unsee it.
You realize that the version of “you” who has been running your life isn’t your true self at all—it’s a collection of trauma responses dressed up as personality.
I wanted to find who I was before the harm. I wanted to meet the self that existed before fear became my language. I wanted to know what love would feel like if it wasn’t something I had to earn.
That’s what trauma recovery is, in essence: not becoming someone new, but remembering who you were before the world told you you weren’t enough.
The Great Lie: That Suffering Is Random
As I grew more aware, I began to realize that my personal awakening was connected to something much bigger. The more I learned about trauma, the more I saw how society’s “common sense” was built on collective disconnection—on denying pain rather than understanding it.
We live in a world that treats symptoms as problems and pain as pathology.
We medicate grief, spiritualize abuse, and label survivors as “damaged” instead of asking what broke them in the first place.
That’s not healing—it’s avoidance dressed as progress.
When I began reading Judith Herman’s Trauma and Recovery and Sandra Butler’s Conspiracy of Silence, I realized something chilling: The denial of trauma—especially incest trauma—is not accidental. It’s systemic.
The suppression of truth benefits the powerful.
If you can convince survivors that their suffering is self-inflicted, you never have to confront the structures that caused it.
That’s the real reason Complex PTSD still fights for recognition—because to name it fully would mean naming the family, the church, the government, and the patriarchy as complicit.
The Power of Connection—and the Cost of Disconnection
When I started connecting the dots, everything came back to one root wound: disconnection.
Incest doesn’t just violate the body—it severs the spirit from itself.
It teaches a child to distrust their own sensations, to detach from their body, to live outside themselves because being “in” themselves was unsafe.
That’s why disconnection is at the heart of Complex PTSD.
And reconnection is at the heart of healing.
The universe, by design, is binary—connection or disconnection, truth or lie, love or fear.
When we align with disconnection—by denying, minimizing, or abandoning ourselves—we resonate with frequencies that keep us in chaos.
That’s why survivors so often feel like magnets for pain.
Until we reclaim connection—to body, to truth, to others—we keep reenacting the same patterns, not because we want to, but because our trauma knows them by heart.
Why the World Denies What We Know
When you start to wake up, you begin to see how deep the denial runs—not just in your own life, but in the collective.
How could knowledge about trauma, attachment, and healing be so accessible and yet so misunderstood?
Why does society still cling to the myths of “forgive and forget” or “just move on”?
Why does our culture celebrate resilience but punish vulnerability?
The answer is simple but uncomfortable: disinformation protects power.
If the world acknowledged the true scale of sexual violence against children—especially within families—it would have to rewrite everything it believes about morality, safety, and family values.
It’s easier to call survivors “crazy” than to admit how many perpetrators wear wedding rings, pulpits, and lab coats.
This is why awakening feels like exile at first.
When you start to see the truth, you stop fitting neatly into systems built on denial. You question everything—religion, tradition, even love itself.
But questioning is how you heal.
Because trauma thrives on silence, and truth is its antidote.
The Binary of Healing
Healing is not about perfection; it’s about polarity.
It’s the dance between shadow and light, between pain and peace.
For incest survivors, this binary plays out every day:
One part of us wants to love; another part is terrified of being touched.
One part wants to forgive; another part demands justice.
One part wants to rest; another whispers, “You’re not safe.”
Healing means letting all those parts coexist. It’s not forcing harmony—it’s allowing contradiction to become connection.
In the language of trauma, integration is salvation.
The Rabbit Hole of Remembering
Once you begin healing, the layers of realization never stop. Every time I thought I’d reached the bottom, another layer opened up. Memories surfaced. Body sensations returned. Relationships shifted.
It was terrifying and liberating at once.
That’s the paradox of awakening: it hurts more before it hurts less.
You’ll cry like you never did as a child. You’ll rage like your body has been holding it for centuries. You’ll grieve not just what happened—but everything you lost because of it: innocence, trust, safety, identity.
And then—if you stay with it long enough—you’ll start to feel something foreign: peace.
Not the peace of avoidance, but the peace that comes from telling the truth out loud and being met with understanding instead of disbelief.
The Responsibility of Awareness
Once you awaken, you can’t unsee the world as it is.
And that’s both a burden and a gift.
You start noticing how disconnected people are—how entire systems are built on avoidance and fear.
You see how much of our culture is addicted to numbing: constant entertainment, overwork, consumption, comparison.
You start to feel compassion for the asleep, even as you crave connection with the awake.
Awakening turns you into both student and teacher. Your life becomes the curriculum. Your healing becomes your ministry.
And somewhere in the process, you realize that your suffering was never just personal—it was ancestral, systemic, and spiritual. Your awakening becomes a contribution to collective repair.
Healing as a Form of Rebellion
For incest survivors, healing is not just recovery—it’s revolution.
Because every time a survivor tells the truth, a system built on silence loses power.
Every time we reclaim our bodies, patriarchy loses control.
Every time we choose connection over fear, a new world begins to form.
Healing isn’t self-help; it’s self-liberation.
It’s saying, “I will not carry your secrets anymore.”
It’s saying, “My pain will not be inherited by my children.”
It’s saying, “I choose to live in truth, no matter who it makes uncomfortable.”
That’s what awakening really is: not spiritual enlightenment, but embodied truth-telling.
If You’re Just Beginning
If you’re reading this and you’re in the place I once was—still bleeding, still doubting, still wondering if the pain will ever end—please know this:
You are not broken beyond repair.
You are awakening.
The pain is not proof of failure; it’s proof that you’re finally feeling what was once too dangerous to feel.
And every tear you shed, every truth you name, every memory you release brings you closer to freedom.
You are not the problem.
You are the answer your younger self was praying for.
Are You Ready?
Awakening asks for everything—and gives back even more.
It will ask you to shed identities built on survival.
It will demand honesty where denial once felt safer.
It will cost you relationships, illusions, and your tolerance for bullshit.
But it will give you back your life.
When you awaken, you stop living as a collection of wounds and start living as a work of art—cracked but illuminated, scarred but sovereign.
That’s the power of awareness: it turns suffering into wisdom and pain into purpose.
And when you reach that place, you’ll look back and realize:
Every breakdown was an initiation.
Every loss was liberation.
Every “maybe you’re the problem” was really an invitation—to remember you were never the problem at all.
The Invitation
Here, at Holey House, we know awakening doesn’t happen in isolation.
It happens in community, in sacred spaces where survivors can speak the unspeakable and be met with understanding, not judgment.
We are here to remind you:
You are not crazy.
You are not alone.
You are awakening.
And as you rise from the ashes of what was done to you, remember—every crack in your spirit is an opening for light.