Understanding, Surviving, and Healing from the Invisible Wounds of Incest
I. The Wound Beneath the World
They say trauma touches everyone — and they’re right. But what they don’t tell you is that incest trauma doesn’t just touch you. It crawls inside your skin and sets up camp in the deepest corners of your being. It learns your rhythms, mimics your heartbeat, and disguises itself as your personality. You start to mistake hypervigilance for intuition, people-pleasing for kindness, and dissociation for peace.
For many of us, the impact of trauma didn’t come from a single event. It came from a series of betrayals — sometimes daily, sometimes nightly — that carved silence into our bones. Incest isn’t just abuse; it’s an annihilation of innocence and safety from the very people who were supposed to protect us. It’s the kind of trauma that doesn’t leave bruises on the skin but burns through generations like an unspoken curse.
Seventy percent of adults in the U.S. have experienced at least one traumatic event. That number sounds massive — but it doesn’t account for the unspeakable. It doesn’t count the little girls who learned to smile through terror, the boys who were told it was “just a game,” or the children who never learned that “no” was supposed to mean something. It doesn’t account for us — the incest survivors — who learned early that love and harm could coexist in the same hands.
When trauma begins in the home, it becomes the air you breathe. You learn to read danger in the silence between footsteps, to hide emotion like contraband, to perform normalcy while your body screams for safety. And yet, somehow, you grow up. You get degrees, jobs, families. You function. But the body remembers. Always.
II. How the Body Keeps the Secret
Before the world ever teaches us language, our nervous system becomes fluent in survival. It learns the dialect of fear — heart racing, breath shallow, muscles tight. The brain rewires itself around one question: Am I safe?
When you’re raised in an environment where the answer is “never,” your body learns to live in a state of emergency.
This is why survivors often say, “I don’t know why I’m like this.” Why they feel unsafe in safe rooms. Why a gentle touch can send their body into panic. Why love can feel suffocating. Trauma isn’t a choice. It’s an imprint — a biological inheritance of terror.
For incest survivors, the confusion runs even deeper because the abuser was often someone loved, trusted, or depended on. That betrayal fractures the brain’s sense of logic. Love becomes tangled with fear. Safety becomes synonymous with silence. Your nervous system starts to believe that love hurts — and so, even in adulthood, it confuses peace with boredom and chaos with connection.
Bessel van der Kolk wrote that “the body keeps the score.” But for incest survivors, the body doesn’t just keep the score — it becomes the score. Every symptom, every panic attack, every racing heartbeat in a moment of calm is a message from the body whispering, “It wasn’t your fault, but it’s still not over.”
III. The Echo of Generations: When Pain Becomes Legacy
Some families pass down recipes. Others pass down shame.
Intergenerational trauma is real, and nowhere is it more visible than in families built on secrets.
Maybe your mother was emotionally distant. Maybe your father drank to forget his own pain. Maybe nobody talked about what happened to Aunt Lisa, or why Grandpa never hugged anyone. That silence wasn’t an accident — it was protection, passed down like a ritual. Each generation learned to swallow pain so the next wouldn’t have to feel it, not realizing that silence itself becomes the inheritance.
Research on Holocaust survivors showed that the trauma of one generation can echo into the DNA of the next. But you don’t need a lab to prove that truth. You’ve seen it. You’ve lived it.
The unspoken becomes embodied — the anxiety, the shame, the mistrust, the constant need to control. And so, trauma doesn’t just live in your mind; it lives in your lineage.
Racial trauma, religious trauma, gender trauma — they all intertwine with incest trauma, compounding layers of invisibility. When your culture already tells you not to speak, your abuse becomes buried under centuries of silence. But here’s the thing about buried things: they grow roots. And what grows in silence will demand to be unearthed.
Healing, then, isn’t rebellion — it’s reclamation. It’s saying, “The pain stops here.”
IV. Survival Was Your Superpower — Until It Became Your Prison
Every survivor develops coping strategies. We had to. That’s not weakness — it’s brilliance. When you were small and powerless, your body crafted ways to endure the unbearable. You froze to avoid detection. You fawned to keep the peace. You fled in your mind when your body couldn’t. You fought back — even if only internally — by holding onto the belief that you could survive this.
These coping strategies were sacred. They kept you alive. But over time, what saved you starts to imprison you.
The vigilance that once protected you becomes exhaustion. The people-pleasing that kept you safe becomes resentment. The walls you built to keep danger out now keep love out too.
We call it maladaptive coping, but that language misses the point. There’s nothing “mal” about surviving. The problem isn’t that you coped “wrong.” It’s that no one ever taught you that you were safe enough to stop.
And so, the adult survivor often lives in a paradox: desperate for closeness but terrified of it, craving peace but addicted to intensity. The very strategies that ensured survival in childhood now sabotage intimacy in adulthood. Not because you’re broken — but because your body still thinks it’s protecting a child.
Healing begins when you realize that your coping mechanisms aren’t bad — they’re outdated. They were never meant to be lifelong habits. They were emergency exits. But now it’s time to learn to stay in the room when it’s safe.
V. The Hidden Symptoms: When the Past Lives in the Present
You might not remember every detail of what happened, but your body does. Symptoms of trauma are not random; they’re sacred messages from a body begging to be heard.
Emotional Symptoms: Mood swings, numbness, anxiety, rage, self-blame. These aren’t signs of instability — they’re the echoes of unprocessed grief.
Physical Symptoms: Chronic pain, digestive issues, insomnia, fatigue. The body literally carries what the psyche cannot.
Relational Symptoms: You might cling, withdraw, test, or sabotage — not because you want to, but because your nervous system doesn’t yet know the difference between intimacy and danger.
Spiritual Symptoms: Loss of faith, feeling detached from life or purpose. Incest trauma shatters the sacred bond of trust — not just with people, but with the universe itself.
Trauma symptoms often show up as what society mislabels as “personality flaws.” The perfectionist? Likely once punished for mistakes. The caretaker? Probably once needed to be the adult in the room. The loner? Maybe learned that connection wasn’t safe.
When survivors finally see these patterns for what they are — trauma adaptations — they stop asking, “What’s wrong with me?” and start asking, “What happened to me?”
That shift changes everything.
VI. Breaking the Cycle: Relearning What Safety Feels Like
Safety isn’t a concept. It’s a sensation.
And for incest survivors, that sensation is foreign. Safety isn’t something we think our way into; it’s something we have to feel our way back to.
The first step in healing is not forgiveness or release — it’s safety. Until your nervous system feels secure, healing cannot take root. This is why therapy, somatic practices, and safe relationships are essential. Healing from incest trauma requires a multi-layered approach: the mind must understand, the body must release, and the heart must believe again.
In therapy, this might look like:
Somatic Experiencing to reconnect to the body.
Internal Family Systems (IFS) to meet and unburden the inner child.
EMDR or trauma-informed CBT to process the memories without being re-traumatized.
Relational healing — learning to trust safe people slowly, at your own pace.
But healing doesn’t only happen in a therapist’s office. It happens in your kitchen when you choose to eat breakfast instead of skipping it. It happens when you say, “No” without apologizing. It happens when you stop explaining your pain to people who refuse to understand. Healing is radical self-loyalty.
And for those of us who were taught to betray ourselves just to survive, that loyalty is a revolution.
VII. The Power of Naming: From Silence to Sovereignty
Incest thrives in silence. It feeds on secrecy, shame, and self-blame.
Breaking that silence — even privately, even softly — is an act of defiance.
When survivors name what happened, the world trembles. Not because we are fragile, but because truth has power.
Speaking the truth out loud reclaims the narrative that was stolen. It dismantles the lies that said we invited it, deserved it, or should have gotten over it by now.
Each survivor who speaks their truth — in therapy, in art, in writing, in whispered conversations with trusted friends — chips away at the wall of denial that keeps others trapped. That’s what Holey House stands for. This is not just healing — this is alchemy. Turning pain into power. Transforming holes into holy space.
And here’s the truth most people avoid: healing doesn’t mean forgetting. It means remembering differently. It means letting the memory live in your past instead of your present. It means learning that you can hold both grief and gratitude in the same breath.
VIII. Returning to the Body, the Self, and the Sacred
At some point in your healing, you’ll stop asking “Why me?” and start asking “What now?”
That’s the moment you shift from victimhood to sovereignty.
Healing from incest trauma isn’t linear. It’s cyclical — a spiral of remembering, feeling, integrating, resting, and rising again. Some days you’ll feel like a warrior. Other days you’ll crumble. Both are sacred. Both are progress.
Your body is not your enemy. Your triggers are not betrayals. They are doorways back to the parts of you that still need love. When you meet them with curiosity instead of judgment, something inside you softens. That’s where the real healing begins — not in perfection, but in permission.
When you finally come home to yourself, you’ll see that your trauma story was never the end — it was the initiation. It broke you open, yes, but only so that light could enter the cracks.
IX. The Invitation
If you’ve made it this far, you’ve already begun.
You’ve looked your pain in the eye instead of turning away. That is courage. That is healing.
You are not your trauma. You are the witness who survived it. The alchemist who’s transforming it. The ancestor who ends it.
And while trauma may have touched everyone, healing is the touch we give back to the world. When we choose to face what others fear, to speak what others silence, to love what others shamed — we don’t just heal ourselves. We heal the lineage. We heal the future.
At Holey House, we believe healing from incest isn’t about becoming who you were before the pain. It’s about becoming who you were meant to be because of it — sacred, whole, powerful beyond measure.
So here’s the truth, plain and holy:
You are not broken.
You are breaking free.