Who I Chose to Become | How Surviving the Unthinkable Became My Greatest Gift | by Rebecca Armstrong-Corbett | Story #246

The back door. That was my barometer.

Every day as a little girl, I would open it and press my skin into the air — reading the atmosphere of the house before I dared step inside. Was it safe? Was she calm? Would today be one of those days? I learned to sense danger before I could even name it.

I was three years old the first time I was abused.

A World With No Safe Place

The man who hurt me wasn’t a stranger lurking in the shadows. He was given a position of trust — by my own father, a leader within our high-control religious community. Truth didn’t matter. Protection didn’t matter. Only how things looked to the outside world.

So the abuse continued; three, sometimes four times a week, for nine years.

Home wasn’t safe. Religion wasn’t safe. Even school offered no refuge — at six years old, a vicar grabbed me by the hair and shoved me into a broom cupboard because of my parents' religion.

When I got home from school, if I didn’t wipe the draining board correctly, a palette knife came across my legs. If my shoes weren’t polished to standard, I was dragged by my hair.

Even joy wasn’t permitted. When I sang — as children do, naturally, freely — my mother mocked every sound that came out of my mouth, until I stopped altogether. Not just in song. In everything.

I hated myself. I hated being a girl. I hated existing in a body that felt like it belonged to everyone but me.

The only soft place in my world was my grandmother, an hour and a half away. Close enough to dream about. Too far away to save me.

The Day I Refused to Stay Silent

Escaping took years. Healing took longer. But in 2017, I did something that terrified me more than anything my childhood had thrown at me — I took my abuser to court.

The little girl who had been silenced even in song finally refused to be.

He went to prison.

And then my family shunned me.

Every last one of them.

The people who should have believed me as a child, who should have protected me, who should have stood beside me in that courtroom — they turned their backs instead. Because even then, reputation mattered more than truth. Even then, the little girl who had been failed for decades was failed once more.

I want to be honest about what that does to a person. The abuse was devastating. But there is a particular kind of grief in being abandoned by your family for surviving it — for daring to speak, for refusing to stay silent so that others could stay comfortable. That grief is its own wound entirely.

And I had to heal that one too.

I Didn’t Stop There

I took part in IICSA* and became a participant in proceedings at the UK Parliament, advocating for mandatory reporting of childhood sexual abuse and the removal of clergy privilege — still fighting so that other children might be believed where I never was. The child who had no voice was now using it in one of the most powerful rooms in the country.

Then I trained as a therapist.

Turning the Wound into the Work

Something remarkable happens when you sit across from someone who has survived what you survived. There is so much they don’t have to explain, so much they don’t have to justify or defend. They can simply be in their pain, and know they are understood.

Watching my clients make strides they never thought possible — that is not work to me. That is an honour.

Because here is what I know now, having lived it and witnessed it dozens of times over: we are not broken. We were never broken. Every single thing we needed to heal was already inside us. Sometimes we just need someone to hand us a tool or two, point us toward the light, and then step back — because the rebuilding? That’s ours. We do that ourselves.

The human mind is staggeringly resilient. More resilient than any of us realise until we are forced to discover it.

The Question I Used to Dread

People sometimes ask me: do you wish it never happened?

For a long time, I couldn’t answer that. Now I can.

No.

My answer isn’t no because what happened was acceptable — it wasn’t. And it isn’t no because that little girl didn’t deserve better — she deserved the world. It’s no because of who I became, and because of who I’ve been able to help. Because of every extraordinary, resilient human being I would never have met. Because of everything I now know about the staggering capacity of the human spirit.

What happened to us in the past does not have to define us. What we do with it — that is where our power lives.

And we are all, every one of us, far more powerful than we know.

*IICSA — The Independent Inquiry into Child Sexual Abuse. A landmark UK statutory inquiry established to examine how institutions failed to protect children from sexual abuse. Rebecca gave evidence as a core participant, contributing to its findings and recommendations for systemic change, including mandatory reporting. Her participation, which involved naming the religious institution where the abuse took place, ultimately led to her family cutting off all contact with her.