My Story

My name is Elizabeth Scott, and

I am a survivor of childhood sexual abuse.

When I was five, we moved to a new city in a new state. Family lived there, and they asked my dad to come help them keep the church going. The move gave us the opportunity to spend time with and get to know family members we’d only casually known before. Some of it was good… and some of it wasn’t. One family member in particular liked to spend time with me. He was a teenager, and he liked hanging out with me and showing me a special time. My parents had no reason not to trust him, so he was allowed to hang out with me without supervision. The teenager (we’ll call him Steven) would take me into his bedroom and I would watch him lift weights and play with some of the different gadgets he had. Frequently, I would lay down on his bed and just drift off ever so slowly into slumberland. And that’s how it started.

I always felt so safe around Steven, like he was my protector. It didn’t seem strange to sleep on his bed, and I felt totally safe doing so. I woke up one day to find him lying right next to me. It was nice, so I just lay there with him. After a few times of that I woke up to find his hand down my pants. The crazy thing is even that felt safe. To my 5-year-old brain, it was gentle, warm, and loving. I didn’t know it was wrong. I also didn’t know that liking it would mess me up for the next several decades, as I struggled with shame and self-hatred.

If things hadn’t progressed beyond light touching, I probably never would have written these poems or put together this website. Unfortunately for me, Steven wanted more gratification than just touching me provided, and his actions escalated. He started raping me, and for the next three years (until we moved) he put me through a hell filled with pain and fear. My memories of what he did to me are disjointed. I have very few complete ones that show me everything from beginning to end. Instead, I see things in snapshots and have to piece together what happened from that. I may never know for sure everything Steven did to me, and I’ve had to come to terms with that. In the end, though, the specifics of what he did aren’t as important as how he made me feel, what the end result of his actions was. I’ve tried working some of that out through my poetry. You’ll notice that I cycle through many of the same issues. I think recovery is like an onion. There are a lot of layers (issues) to peel back, and each issue requires you to go deeper and deeper for best results.

It takes time to heal from our wounds.