It Was Never a Child’s Fault

When you’re growing up, you believe what is happening around you is normal.

You don’t have anything else to compare it to.

The way people treat you, the things that happen inside your home, the things that are said to you, the things that are done to you — they become part of the world you know.

And when something is familiar, it can feel normal even when it is not.

As a child, I didn’t have the understanding I have now. I didn’t have the words for what was happening. I didn’t know how to look at my life from the outside and say, This is wrong.

I was just a child trying to live inside the only world I knew.

It wasn’t until I got older that I began to understand that some of the things I had accepted as normal never should have happened at all.

That realization can be painful in its own way.

You start looking back with adult eyes and asking questions a child never could have answered.

Why didn’t I tell?

Why didn’t I stop it?

Why didn’t I run?

Why didn’t I do something differently?

And that is where shame can creep in.

Even now, after all these years, there are moments when that old shame tries to come back.

A thought will whisper that maybe I should have been able to stop what was happening.

Maybe I should have known better.

Maybe I should have fought harder.

Maybe somehow it was my fault.

But those thoughts are asking a child to have had the understanding, power, and choices of an adult.

I didn’t.

I was little.

Children depend on the adults around them to protect them, teach them, and keep them safe. A child should never have to figure out how to protect themselves from the very people or situations they should have been protected from.

That responsibility was never mine.

The older I have gotten, the more I have had to remind myself of that.

Knowing something in your mind doesn’t always mean your heart immediately catches up.

I can know that I wasn’t responsible and still have moments when shame shows up.

I can understand what happened differently now and still grieve for the child who didn’t understand any of it then.

Healing doesn’t always mean those old feelings disappear completely.

Sometimes healing is recognizing them when they return and saying:

That shame does not belong to me.

I was a child.

I did not cause what happened.

I was not responsible for stopping it.

It was never my fault.

And it is never a little child’s fault.

The shame belongs with the people who caused the harm, not with the child who survived it.

That is something I am still learning to believe more deeply.

And when the shame creeps back in, I try to remember the truth:

I was a child doing the best I could inside circumstances I never should have been placed in.

The shame was never mine to carry.