EstherNelda

For the past several months, I’ve been sharing the story of my childhood through my memoir series, I Was Sexually & physical abused. Those videos tell the story of what happened to me.

This chapter is different.

This is about what healing looks like after the trauma. It’s about navigating relationships, grief, love, forgiveness, and the quiet moments that reveal just how much you’ve changed.

In this video, I share one of those moments.

After nearly forty years, my mother and I have finally found peace with one another. During a recent trip to a petting zoo, I realized I had unknowingly placed all the hopes of my inner child onto one afternoon. I wanted the field trip with my mom that I never had as a little girl.

But my mother lives with dementia and Alzheimer’s disease. During our day together, she didn’t recognize me as her daughter. To her, I was simply a kind stranger.

For a moment, my heart broke.

Then I realized something beautiful. She didn’t have to remember my name for love to exist between us. Her mind couldn’t find me, but her heart still knew me. Mine knew her too.

Healing doesn’t erase grief. It expands your capacity to hold grief and gratitude at the same time.

If there’s one thing I hope you take from this, it’s this:

When life hands you a bouquet of beautiful flowers, don’t spend all of your energy trying to make them last longer. Admire them. Enjoy them. Love them while they’re here.

Thank you for being here with me🥹🤍🕯️🫂

⚠️ Warning Sensitive material ⚠️
👇 Full video on my YouTube
👇 🔗in my bio

We tell children all the time, “Tell a trusted adult. Tell a teacher. Tell a coach. Tell someone safe.”

But what happens next?

What happens when the adult they trusted doesn’t have the capacity to hold what they’ve just heard?

Not because they’re evil. Not because they’re the abuser. But because they’re overwhelmed, uncomfortable, shut down, or carrying wounds of their own they have never faced.

Children are speaking up. Many have been speaking up for a very long time.

The problem isn’t always that children lack courage.

The problem is that too many adults lack capacity.

That was my experience.

I told people. Others told people. Teachers, schools, therapists, organizations, family friends. There were adults who saw, adults who heard, adults who knew enough to ask questions. Yet again and again, nothing happened.

Not because I wasn’t brave enough.

Because the adults around me were not prepared to respond.

This isn’t about shaming people. It’s about shining a light on the weak link in the chain.

We don’t just need awareness. We need adults who have done enough of their own healing that they can remain present in the face of a child’s pain.

Because when a child finally finds the courage to speak and is met with silence, disbelief, avoidance, or inaction, that too can become another form of abuse.

We do not need braver children.

We need braver adults.

Adults willing to do the work now, not later. Adults willing to face their own wounds so they can hold space for others.

Healing ourselves is not just personal work.

It is child protection.

⚠️ Warning Sensitive material ⚠️
👇 Full video on my YouTube
👇 🔗in my bio
There was a moment in my childhood where the abuse itself no longer felt like the hardest part.
The hardest part was finding the courage to ask for help.

I had been groomed from diapers. Abuse wasn’t something happening to me in my mind, it was simply the world I knew. I didn’t know who I was outside of survival. I didn’t know life without fear, manipulation, violation, or control. So advocating for myself, standing up for myself, protecting myself… these were foreign concepts I was trying to learn in real time as a terrified child.

And even then, I did not recognize myself as brave.

I thought I was weak.
I thought I was betraying my father.
I thought I had failed because I could no longer endure what I had been conditioned to survive.

That is one of the most complex parts of grooming. When a child is raised inside of abuse, especially from such a young age, they often do not realize they are being groomed at all. The attachment, loyalty, fear, love, protection, and survival all become tangled together.

Even after being held hostage and abused, I still worried more about what would happen to my father than what had happened to me. I loved him. I had compassion for him. I did not want him to suffer the consequences of his own actions.

But my little body and my big heart had finally reached the end of what they could carry.

And somewhere deep inside myself, beneath all the fear and conditioning, I found the courage to make it stop.

Looking back now, I can finally see that little girl clearly.

She was never weak.
She was extraordinarily brave. 🤍🥹🫂🕯️

⚠️ Warning Sensitive material ⚠️
👇 Full video on my YouTube
👇 🔗in my bio
Part: 6
In this video, I speak about the time I was held hostage, sexually assaulted, neglected, abandoned in the woods, and eventually called the police. I share the moment everything finally came crashing down around me and how the truth that had been hidden for so long could no longer stay buried.

I also speak about being sexually tortured in my bedroom at night by my father and the complicated relationship I had with my mother, who also abused me and was deeply abused, groomed, and limited herself. There were moments she would stand outside my bedroom door listening after putting me to bed. Sometimes she would interrupt when she sensed something was wrong. It did not stop the abuse, but it would pause it.

It took me decades and an immense amount of healing to understand that, in her own limited capacity, she was trying to help me in the only ways she knew how. I could not access those layers of compassion or understanding until I began healing my relationship with her and choosing forgiveness.

Forgiveness is not about excusing harm or making peace for the people who hurt you. Most people you forgive may never even know they’ve been forgiven. Forgiveness is for you. It is setting down the weight you were never meant to carry forever.

For so long, I carried pain, resentment, grief, anger, and survival inside my body and nervous system. Healing taught me that I had to slowly make space for something different. Love. Peace. Support. Compassion. Joy. Connection.

The more I heal, the more capacity I have for love, softness, kindness, and connection. And one of the deepest realizations I’ve had is that the first person sharing my story out loud truly helped was me.

There is a way out of extreme darkness. It begins with learning that you are worthy of love, especially from yourself.

I’m so glad you’re here. Thank you for witnessing me. 🕯️

⚠️ Warning Sensitive material ⚠️
👇 Full video on my YouTube
👇 🔗in my bio
Part: 5.2
As a child, my nervous system learned the schedule of survival before it ever understood safety. There was a rhythm to the environment I grew up in. During the day, my mother was physically, mentally, and emotionally harmful toward me. Food was withheld, fear was constant, and I learned very quickly how unpredictable love could feel. At night, the sexual abuse from my dad took place….. That cycle became the only consistency my little body understood.

What complicated things even more was that when my mother harmed me, I would sometimes tell my father. He would not tolerate her behavior toward me, and he would then “deal”with her in whatever way happened behind closed doors. But the next day, that pain would often return to me through her anger and resentment. So my child mind began believing that maybe if I stayed quiet, maybe if I tolerated more, maybe if I became easier/ better to handle, the harm would lessen. I thought I could somehow manage the pain around me by managing myself perfectly.

That is the heartbreaking logic of a child trying to survive environments that were never safe to begin with.

As an adult now, with quantum healing, nervous system work, and a deeper understanding of CPTSD, I can see that none of it was my responsibility to carry. Children adapt. Children normalize what they live inside of. Children create meaning in places where there is none because the mind is always trying to create safety, even in unsafe places.

When I began sharing pieces of my story publicly, I didn’t realize how much compassion it would unlock inside of me for the younger version of myself. Not pity. Not shame. Compassion.

Because that little girl was never weak. She was surviving the only way she knew how.

⚠️ Warning Sensitive material ⚠️
👇 Full video on my YouTube
👇 🔗in my bio
Part: 5

My childhood best friend was at my house less than six hours after my mother abandoned me, took my brother, and told me I wasn’t allowed to come with her.

I ended up having my friend over, and she witnessed my father behaving in a way that was deeply alarming and unsafe while under the influence. In that moment, the secrets I had spent my entire childhood trying to hold together began unraveling right before my eyes, and I didn’t know what to do.

At nine years old, I had reached the limit of what I was capable of carrying alone.

Up until then, everything painful, confusing, and inappropriate existed quietly inside the dynamic between my mother, my father, and myself. It was hidden behind closed doors, and suddenly it was no longer contained there. My friend had now witnessed a small part of the chaos I had been living inside for years.

I remember feeling overwhelming fear, shame, panic, and heartbreak. Not only for myself, but because someone I loved had now been impacted too.

My friend called her mother terrified, and when her mother came to pick her up, I remember feeling as though she looked at me like I was somehow part of the problem. That moment stayed with me for decades.

It followed me through childhood, my teenage years, and well into adulthood. I carried a deep fear that I was somehow harmful to other people simply because painful things had happened around me. It affected nearly every relationship in my life. I kept people at a distance because I was afraid of bringing pain into their lives.

After that day, I never spoke to or had any interaction with my childhood best friend again. I don’t know where life took her, but I hope with my whole heart that she is doing well. And despite everything, I will always hold gratitude for the friendship we shared because those moments of innocence, silliness, and connection with her were the happiest moments of my childhood.

At the beginning of April, I shared a piece of my story about childhood sexual abuse and grooming at the hands of my parents, beginning when I was an infant. Since then, I’ve been in what I can only describe as a deep internal reconstruction.

As I’ve been moving through that process, more layers have come to the surface. This is one of them.

18 years ago, I had an abortion. For a long time, I carried a deep, quiet shame around that choice. I’ve worked through much of it, but some of it lingered in the corners.

For years, I believed I was being punished. I believed I was unworthy of love. That something in me was fundamentally broken. I now understand that God was not punishing me. That was never what was happening.

At that time, I didn’t understand what I was living with. My CPTSD wasn’t something I had language for yet. That awareness came later.

I only knew how I felt
defective, unlovable, filled with self-hatred.

My sense of self was shaped by a childhood rooted in sexual, physical, and emotional abuse from both of my parents. That was the lens I saw myself through. That was the voice I believed.

What I understand now is this
that was never the truth of me.

I was carrying pain that was never mine to hold. And slowly, gently, I’ve been setting it down, doing the deep, soul-level healing work.

Be kind to yourself…… Always🕯️🫂🤍

When I made this video, my account was three months old and I had about 35 followers. I had no idea it would reach 1.5 million people in a matter of days, or what that would truly entail.

I am a survivor of childhood sexual abuse at the hands of both of my parents. It began with sexual abuse, grooming, and included physical and psychological abuse. I carried this silently for nearly four decades before breaking that silence.

We are not the sum of what happened to us.
We are not reduced to the trauma we endured.
We are not alone.

The shame was never ours to carry. That’s what predators want you to believe, to keep you small, quiet, and compliant. No longer. We will not stay silent anymore.

We are setting down the shame.
We are setting down the pain.
We are waking up to the truth of who we are.

We are resilient.
We are powerful.
We are love.

What I didn’t expect was what came after… being met, being seen. People holding space for me with kindness, compassion, and care.

For the first time, I’m not just understanding that I’m not alone… I’m feeling it.

And I’ll be honest, my nervous system is stretching to hold all of this love and support. But I’m open to it. I’m integrating. I’m expanding my capacity to receive.

Thank you for being here
Be kind to yourself, always 🤍🥹🫂🕯️

I want to share something with you…

All of this deep, intensive shadow work… the unraveling, the peeling back layer after layer… it changes you. And there comes a point, that you’re fully “done” healing, but you reach a place where you’re healed “enough” to stand in a new kind of space.

And in that space, at first… you brace. You look around, almost waiting. Like, okay… I’m ready. Come at me. I can handle it now. But then… nothing comes. And slowly, you realize that was the thing you needed to prepare for anymore.

Now the question becomes… do you have the capacity to receive?

Because when you’ve lived a life bracing for impact, you learn how to survive. You learn how to endure, how to get yourself out of hard places. But joy… joy is different. Joy requires openness. It requires presence. And that can feel unfamiliar… even a little scary.

To be in your body. To feel safe there. To exist in the present moment without waiting for something to go wrong… that’s a new way of living.

But I promise you… if you keep showing up for yourself in that space, if you allow yuourself to stay open… joy doesn’t just feel safe, it feels
🕯️🫂

⚠️Warning Sensitive material⚠️
📽️Full video in on my YouTube
🔗link in my bio
Part: 3
For decades, I held it all in. I couldn’t acknowledge what was done to me, couldn’t even let the truth fully exist in my mind, so I buried it under every rug and in every closet, slamming the door shut and hoping it would stay there. But the body remembers, not just emotionally, but physically.
I lived in a quiet shame for most of my life, a shame that was never mine to carry. As a child, my body had physiological responses to abuse, not because I wanted it or asked for it, but because the body responds. And when the people hurting you tell you that means you “liked it,” a child believes them. I was told I was bad, that I was dirty, and I believed it because I didn’t have any other perspective.
I learned to say “yes” to stay safe, to be agreeable, to not make him angry, because somewhere deep inside my body knew that was how I survived. I didn’t have language for any of this then, but I do now, and what I know is this:
a child’s body responding is not consent, it is not desire, and it is never something to be ashamed of.
The shame was never ours, it was placed on us by people who couldn’t hold their own darkness. If you’ve ever carried that same weight, I want you to know you are not dirty, you are not broken, and you were never the one who did something wrong.