This excerpt is part of the chapter describing the various creative ways children survive emotionally and physically in the face of abuse and trauma.

Forgetting 

so we can live

Of course sometimes big people thought we were “recanting our story” because we forgot what happened after telling someone. (“Recanting” is a fancy word for taking back what we said.)

They just didn’t understand, did they? We weren’t lying or making up things or “recanting.” We just were being smart to forget sometimes..

The Next Chapter

a preview of the book

☼Sometimes we made our bodies numb so we wouldn’t feel the hitting and the other bad touches. Some of us could even make those parts of our body disappear before our eyes. We could look in a mirror and see our feet and our heads and nothing in between.  We knew, even if the adults didn’t, that little kids shouldn’t feel such pain.

☼Sometimes we forgot what happened because we needed to be calm, if only for a few hours.  Wasn’t that smart of our Protectors Spirits to teach us to forget?  We could go to school, play piano, dress ourselves, eat food and do other things every day because we weren’t frozen in our tracks by the memory of what was happening. 

Some of us even forgot for hours or days or months or even years so we could have hope and grow up.