why did we not tell someone
when I became older ?
By Starman_uk
(A.E.S.T.) © A.E.S.T.
Some
of us can accept that when we were real young that it may not have
been our fault. For lots of us what we have big guilt problems
with is that the abuse continued while we were a teenager, or for
several years without us been able to do anything to stop it from
happening 
In
many ways it is all to easy to look back as an adult and think
"I should have done or said something". In fact, that is
one of the big problems of hindsight. Having hindsight in
its self means that we have had the passage of time, enough time
to think through possibilities that were not available to us, or
we could not think of when things went wrong. Well that's what
most people think of as hindsight 
There is another side to it though, often forgotten side, is that
hindsight also means that we have forgotten why some of those
options just were not even considered at the time.
So, we
look back and think "why did we not tell someone when we
became older ?"
Well
we did not tell, because at the
time it just was not an option to be able to tell.
This is where the downside of hindsight makes things harder for
us. The following ARE things that most teenagers would think at
the time, and they are all very valid reasons as well 
We may
have felt that, since the abuse had continued for some time, that
we would have been punished for not telling sooner. It is easier
to tell the first time, but how do we tell when it's the 50th
time, the 250th time?
If the
abuser was a family member, the "bread winner" of the
family, not only might we have thought that telling would break up
the family, but there would also have been the thought about who
would pay for the upkeep of the household if the abuser was
arrested. We would I and the rest of the family be able to live...
would we become homeless? Who would the rest of the family blame
if we did become homeless, me or them for what they did to
me? All of these are thoughts the typical teenager thinks
about, all that cause there own circular trap of secrecy
All things that we all too easily forget about when looking back
as an adult. NON of which we should blame ourselves for in the
slightest.
© A.E.S.T.
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