Small Town Secrets: The Story of a Little Girl

By Gracie Wright

My book encapsulates the journey of a young girl growing up in a small town with an abusive father. Her story is shared through journal entries as written years ago detailing some of her childhood memories of actual incidents of the abuse as well as the family dynamics not only within the household but also within the small community. The book also takes you through the horrific encounter of being gang raped in my own home and living to tell about it. Never underestimate the power of love by friends and family for within them it is possible to find your courage to speak the horrible truths behind closed doors.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Xlibris US
• Release date: Nov 20, 2017
• ISBN: 9781543467758

Gracie Wright

I am a loving wife and mother to three amazing sons. My passions include riding motorcycle and helping others. This book has led me on a journey of self-discovery. My hope in sharing my story with others is to give voice to not only the shame that one carries as survivors of rape and abuse but to also give a sense of hope, a sense of self-worth as one walks down the path to healing and finding a life worth living again.

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Copyright © 2017 by Gracie Wright.

Library of Congress Control Number:     2017917975

ISBN:                  Hardcover                  978-1-5434-6777-2

                            Softcover                     978-1-5434-6776-5

                            eBook                          978-1-5434-6775-8

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the copyright owner.

Any people depicted in stock imagery provided by Thinkstock are models, and such images are being used for illustrative purposes only.

Certain stock imagery © Thinkstock.

Rev. date: 11/20/2017

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Contents

Preface

Suicide

My Journal

I am a survivor of childhood sexual abuse

Thoughts

I’m haunted by memories of my past that I can’t seem to hide.

I thought I was finished with the past, only to be haunted by it.

I can’t help but wonder when or if the past will ever set me free.

This book has become a reality because someone believed in me, my hopes, my dreams, but more importantly, because someone believed that I was worth taking a chance on.

For my best friend—you hold my heart!

Friends like Us

Maybe it’s because we’re more like family than friends.

Maybe it’s because we know enough about each other to fill a couple of books and a pretty crazy movie.

Maybe it’s because I can’t imagine life without the two of us up to something fun and always there for each other to count on.

Actually, it’s all that and more that makes our friendship mean so much to me!

In case I haven’t told you today,

You matter to me

You mean the world to me

Your friendship brings me great joy and happiness

I want you to know

I love you!

My gratitude for your perpetual motto for me!

"Don’t quit. Don’t give up!

Rest if you must, but never quit."

You have taught me much, and I am forever grateful for the time you have given, your expertise, your wit, your wisdom, your sense of humor, and your love and passion that you have for your work and the people you work with. You have blessed and touched my life in a very special way. I pray you never forget that. You are a kind, compassionate, and caring woman. Thanks for everything you have done!

Peace!

Preface

I am writing this for the sole purpose of healing. Maybe if I tell my story, then all those secrets that have festered within me for so many years will leave me with a sense of peace that I have longed for, for so many years. My story isn’t very pretty. Like all abuse victims, I hurt to tell you my story just as much as it may hurt you to hear. But in my healing process, maybe others will join me in their healing as well.

I read the following: Yet we still tell them because we can see that beauty exists in both darkness and light. We tell them because hearing them helps others, but mainly because telling them liberates ourselves. In silence, we forget the sound of our own voices. We lose sight of the future because we lost sight of the past. We don’t always remember that when we’re consumed by darkness, we only need to gaze upward to see the stars. How poignant is that!

Truth: 90 percent of abused children are victimized by someone they know. When it comes to sexual abuse, the statistics are equally staggering. Our imaginations strain to come to terms with the fact that the very people who are meant to care for their children commit these vicious acts of brutality, so we do our best to keep this reality at a safe distance and tell ourselves, Not in my family, not among my friends, not in my community. Trust me when I say, it happens!

I have to trust myself as I write my story that the voices I still hear in my head of the threats that if I ever told my secrets to others reminding me of all the bad things that would happen, it will also be a healing power of strength and courage as I am an adult now and those threats made so many years ago need to go back to the past, and all the power they have bound me to be gone as well. Although I still feel that in sharing my story that those that threatened me will now know I have broken my promise if I told but I also know that I am now safe and it will be OK.

If it wasn’t for the work of two therapists who believed in me, who were caring in their responses, treated me with respect, left me with my dignity in all that I revealed, and opened their hearts and saw in me a woman who wanted not only life but also a life worth living, I wouldn’t be alive to share this with you now. For both of them went way beyond their call of duty and gave selflessly to keep me on this journey. To them, I owe my life. I am grateful to each of them in their own special ways of keeping me on the path to healing and to life. My husband has also been wonderful through it all. He has been as supportive and loving through the years as I have battled these demons and still he sees me as not only a woman and the mother of his children but also his bride whom he says he would marry all over again, even knowing all that I have been through. His love and support has been unwavering, and to him I say, you are my best friend and the love of my life.

I have also relied on my faith. I know but still have to remind myself that I was born innocent. The things that happened to me weren’t because I was bad or that I wanted it to. I was too young to know what was happening or how to stop it or that it wasn’t normal. I knew my faith was strong, wavering at times, but ultimately it has remained ever present even in my therapy sessions. I started my journaling with devotions as I was on a mission trip with my church when the flashbacks started. I was sitting alone in a little rundown church with my flashlight in hand praying because of the events that were now coming back to me after blocking them out for years. I was praying for the strength and courage to guide me but also to make me a better person, a servant who could be strong enough one day to not only live but to also tell my story. I figured that God has gotten me through this somehow, but it is my core beliefs of goodness and kindness to ourselves and to others that enables one to find our own inner peace and joy. We can’t rely on others to make us happy, or many of us who were abused will spend our lifetime waiting for a kind and loving word from those who hurt us.

Our deepest fear is not that we are inadequate. Our deepest fear is that we are powerful beyond measure. It is our light, not our darkness that most frightens us. We ask ourselves, ‘Who am I to be brilliant, beautiful or talented?’ When actually, ‘Why can’t I be those things? Why can’t that be me?’ We are all children of God. Our misconceptions about ourselves do not serve us or those around us. There is nothing enlightened within us when we do not believe in ourselves, when we shrink or shy away from what is really inside all of us if we just take the time and truly listen to our inner self. When we shy away, we allow ourselves to feel insecure around others. We are all made to be equal in God’s eyes so let the glory of Him manifest inside you. Let your light shine and when we do, we unconsciously give others permission to do the same. As we are liberated from our own fears, our presence will also liberate others as well.

I don’t know how else to share my story with you without being graphic in some of the details, but my hope is that in my words, you too will find strength and validity to believe in and love the person you are, and not what or who others want you to be. It has been a long ongoing process in my own healing, and I empathize with anyone who has been a victim of any kind of abuse. For some of us, it is a lifelong process, a day-to-day fight to be able to look in the mirror and be kind to yourself in who and what you see. For many years, I avoided mirrors whenever possible, but I am finally seeing the woman I am, and not the child within me that was so damaged, so fearful, and so ashamed.

Although the abuse spanned several years and multiple abusers and rapists, I promise to keep it as clean as possible, for even after so many years and times that the abuse happened, I remember each time as if it were yesterday. I believe children are resilient, and somehow God gave me the inner strength to block it out for years until I was strong enough to handle it. I will admit that I have been overwhelmed too often and have questioned the strength that God believes I have in trying to deal with everything. Even during the abuse, somehow it seemed as though after a period of time I watched from a distance as the child within was being victimized time and again. Some places where it happened changed and the severity changed from time to time, but the end result of being abused was always the same, a child living in what seemed like hell.

I have expressed my thoughts and feelings in different ways as you will see. You may feel like you are reading a novel or a journal. For many of us who have suffered at the hands of others understand that we write what is on our mind and out of necessity, it was my only way of communication for years. My hope for anyone reading this is that you find comfort, validation, and healing in some way as I share with you my story. With all of the years and abusers, my story as I tell it to you will be told as I write, not in any specific order but more like my journal and not in the chronological order that these incidences occurred.

There are times we are confronted with someone in pain, and their story breaks our heart. As they stand there before us pouring out painful details that appall us, we wonder what we’ll say or do. But the truth of it is, we won’t always have words that will fix things in a moment of time. We won’t have a solution, an easy answer, glossy advice, or verbal salve that makes everything fine. But it could very well be they just need to talk, and our job is to earnestly listen, to hear. For sometimes the best ministering and therapy isn’t done with our mouths but with a shoulder and two willing ears.

There are times when wisdom tells us to keep silent and let compassion and empathy be visible on our face and in our hearts. For we realize if God put us there in that moment, he’s big enough to show us his grace to help us through if we ask. The time will come for words of wisdom when we will know just what to say to comfort. It is then we may realize that love, comfort, and understanding can help save the lives of those whose souls are lost.

There are people who need the help of others, for they cannot stand up for themselves in their weakness, for they are lost deep within and know not when life stopped for them, for they were so young, but one must not mistake the reality of the lives these people live within themselves—the turmoil is real. Just listen with an open heart and open mind, and someday maybe their souls will be whole again.

You, the frightened child within, please don’t hide anymore.

She recalls it all,

The people who said they cared

She recalls it all,

The happiness and laughter, his hugs and I love you’s

She recalls it all,

The pain, the tears she felt at his touch

She recalls it all

The tastes, the smells, the gagging

Did he know the damage he was causing?

She recalls it all

Her fear of him

Would it ever stop?

Yes, she recalls it all …

I want to get better, stronger, more than life itself. I tell you this because those of us who struggle with any kind of PTSD or anxiety such as myself will understand how hard it is to give your trust to others after years of trauma, whether it was years ago or recent. For me, the trauma has been both, during my childhood and as an adult.

As a child I was sexually abused by family members whom I thought loved me as every father and uncle should. But years later, I realize now that the love and affection they showed me were not anything that any child, any person should have to go through. What I suffered at the hands of these men, the secrets I have held for so long will finally be told, and may the telling of these secrets finally give me peace so that a life worth living will finally be within my grasp.

I have children of my own who know very little of my past. I have tried to raise them to be honest, caring, compassionate men who will live their lives with honor, dignity, love of themselves and of others unconditionally. I have tried to give them the foundation that everybody deserves—to be loved, respected, and treated equally and without judgment.

My husband has been very compassionate and understanding over the years as I was in and out of the hospital to treat my anxiety and PTSD. For when I married the love of my life, the flashbacks and memories had not yet started. We have had a hard road to walk, but he has stood beside me through it all, taking care of the kids and maintaining normalcy at home while I was away, sometimes for several weeks at a time. For those of you who have been down this road, you understand the stress, the fear, and the despair that is part of this journey.

It is time for me to take back my life, to take away the power that my abusers took from me so long ago, and to start living every day, not just day to day or moment to moment. I am tired of living with the shame and guilt that I have learned do not belong to me but to my abusers. I have never had the courage, the self-esteem, or the self-confidence to believe that their actions were not about me. I went through a period in my high school years where I drank a lot but never really knew why. I just knew that I felt more confident when I was drinking.

I know that even as I write this, the town I grew up in would have a hard time believing that this went on in our house as we were one of the prominent families. The big house, the nice cars, the persona of the all-American family. I sometimes wonder now if some people knew what was going on behind closed doors but just didn’t say anything. Was it a small-town secret? Was it a family secret? I would like to think as a parent that nobody knew, or they would have reached out to help me. I don’t understand and will never comprehend how a parent or anyone can inflict so much pain and suffering onto their own child, let alone another person.

As I will go into later, I have been in the hospital for multiple failed attempts at taking my life. I say failed because I truly didn’t want to live anymore. My attempts for the most part were not planned but more impulsive, and I don’t even recall planning the attempts, just waking up in the hospital in the aftermath.

When we, as children, become silent out of fear and necessity, the patterns become so fixed, so hardwired in our way of thinking. That’s why it has been said that our voice is stolen. Stolen because it’s never the individual child’s fault what happened. When the fear sets in, that is when the child, or at least me in my case, shut down and dissociate to survive—to be seen and not heard, but better yet, not to be seen at all. For all of us abused as children, whose voice was taken away or lost and stolen from us, that was our way to cope, to survive, and unfortunately many of our voices stay lost into adulthood, or worse yet, forever inward we live in fear. The threats made during the times of abuse were very real. When I think back how scared I was, I, as well as my abusers, knew I would never tell anyone what was happening. When I see the people who hurt me, I still cringe at the thought of those threats and how I felt. That is why I feel it is so important to speak up now, to take back what was stolen from me.

More often than not, I feel like nobody understands me. Somehow I can’t seem to find the words to say how I feel directly to help them understand. Then I feel that if they don’t understand how I’m feeling and I can’t express it, I start believing that my