There are some beliefs we carry that don’t feel like thoughts—they feel like survival.
For much of my life, I believed that if I was happy, I was betraying the truth of what had been done to me. That if I found peace, I was letting my abusers go unpunished. That if I shone, it would mean they’d won.
So I dimmed. I suffered. I stayed small. Not because I didn’t want to heal—but because I thought my pain was the proof that what happened was wrong.
But pain is not proof.
Suffering is not justice.
Self-betrayal is not loyalty to truth.
This realisation came through one of the deepest healing conversations I’ve ever had—with a friend and spiritual companion who asked me to return to the place of pain: to the little boy inside me who was raped, silenced, and made to believe that love was pain.
I spoke to that boy. I told him I was sorry.
That he was good. That he was loved. That it wasn’t his fault.
And something broke open.
I began to see that all these years, I wasn’t just surviving abuse—I was still living under its rule. I thought that by holding onto hatred, I was holding onto justice. But in truth, I was still giving them control.
That’s when this anchor came to me:
“I no longer need to punish myself to prove the truth. I am no longer the evidence. I am the witness.”
Read that again. Let it sink into the part of you that’s still holding the weight of your story like a cross you must carry forever.
Because here’s the truth I am reclaiming, and you can too:
* You do not need to suffer to prove it happened.
* You do not need to sabotage joy to honour your pain.
* You do not need to hate yourself to keep their darkness out.
Every time I chose self-hatred over light, I thought I was protecting myself from becoming like them, and for a while that was true, my so called father was so desperate to make me like him, so desperate to ‘love’ me, that I swore to myself I’d never be anything like him, and so by choosing to punish him in the only way that I could, by hating myself so I never could make him believe that what he did was good because LOOK what a happy boy Daniel is… But the truth is, especially as I got older, I was betraying the boy they tried to destroy—the boy who survived because he refused to become like them.
Now, I choose to honour him not by punishing myself, but by loving him fiercely.
Not with performance. Not with perfection. But with presence. With tenderness. With the quiet, radical act of letting myself live.
—
### If you’re carrying what I carried, hear this:
You are not the crime. You are the resurrection.
You are not the pain. You are the healing.
You are not the evidence. You are the witness.
And your joy is not a betrayal.
It’s the most powerful form of justice there is.
—
If this speaks to you, know that you’re not alone.
This is why I built Survivors Story — for the sacred right to heal.
And if you’re not ready to forgive, to feel joy, to shine—that’s okay too.
Just begin here:
“I choose not to betray myself anymore.”
That’s how healing begins.
That’s how we win.
That’s how we come home.
The Anchor of My Healing: I No Longer Need to Punish Myself to Prove the Truth
