One day you finally knew
what you had to do, and began,
though the voices around you
kept shouting
their bad advice—
though the whole house
began to tremble…
— Mary Oliver

Sexual trauma is a profound betrayal. It shakes the brain like a snow globe. What you have known for certain is suddenly stripped away, creating chaos, grief—and overwhelming confusion. Confusion is the brain trying to make sense of such cognitive dissonance.

Your mind may be noisy and crowded and empty. You don't quite know how to explain what you know or feel anymore. You stand blind in the sandstorm of confusion as lingering tapes of the past fight with growth. You grapple with the updated map of your interior terrain, and the loneliness that first comes with new alignments.

But what if this confusion is serving a purpose?

What if along the journey, you connect the dots about the pain and grief you’ve lived through with respect for what you could not recognize in yourself until now?

What if you awaken to what may not be the depression or hopelessness from your past, but something new stirring in the chaos?¹

It may take a while for the sandstorm to subside, and the dust to clear. Perhaps there are fresh disruptions and reckonings. New revelations about your relationships and priorities challenge the lies you came to believe about yourself. The space inside may not feel like peace—yet.

But listen again, even if the silence is deafening. In recovery, something clear and real is echoing the wisest part of you.²

You are giving birth to yourself.

¹Yawar, A. (2025). The Void.

²What you don’t know is older than you.—Haitian proverb.