There are moments on the healing journey when you realize you have entered a new room. Not because you are falling apart, not because you are going backward, but because healing has a way of pulling back the floor beneath what you thought you had already worked through and showing you there is more underneath. That has been my reality lately.
The deeper I go in this work, the more I find myself sitting with a question I cannot shake: have we truly understood the full cost of childhood sexual abuse? Not just the cost to the survivor, not just the cost to the child whose body, innocence, safety, and trust were violated, but the cost to everyone the abuse touched. The families, the relationships, the marriages, the children, the communities, and possibly the generations that follow when wounds are left unnamed and unhealed.
The more I sit with this, the more convinced I become: abuse does not just touch one body. It creates a ripple. And we have barely begun talking about everyone standing inside that ripple.
We Only Tell Half the Story
When we talk about healing from childhood sexual abuse, we almost always center one narrative, and I understand why. The survivor's silence, the survivor's shame, the long road back to themselves after carrying something they were never meant to carry. As a survivor myself, I will always advocate for survivors having access to every resource, every safe space, and every opportunity to reclaim their voices and heal. That story deserves to be centered, and I will never stop saying so.
And here is what has been sitting heavily with me: what about everyone else standing in the aftermath?
Because abuse does not just touch one body. It starts with a child, and then it moves. It moves through families and marriages, through siblings who sensed something was wrong but did not have the words to name it, through parents who found out and had to figure out how to breathe through guilt and grief and helplessness at the same time. It moves through partners who love survivors but cannot always reach the wounds they cannot see. It moves through children being raised by adults carrying unprocessed trauma they were never given tools to address. It moves through generations.
These are what I have started calling collateral survivors.
The Survivors Beside the Survivor
Some trauma-informed spaces use the term secondary survivors to describe the loved ones impacted by another person's trauma, people who were not directly victimized but still carry emotional, relational, and psychological weight because of their proximity to what happened. We acknowledge this in some areas of trauma work. Still, when it comes to childhood sexual abuse specifically, we rarely make space for the full ripple surrounding the survivor. Think about the sibling who grew up in the same house and carried a knowing they could not name. The spouse trying to love someone through wounds they did not create. The parent fractured by guilt. The child of a survivor absorbing pain they never witnessed directly. These people need language, they need support, and they need healing too. Right now, the conversation is leaving them out.
The Ripple Nobody Names
I want you to picture a stone dropped into still water. The stone enters at one point, but the ripple does not stay there. It moves outward, and everything around it feels the movement. Nothing in its path gets to decide whether it will be touched.
That is what childhood sexual abuse does inside families and communities.
The survivor carries wounds we are only beginning to fully understand. But the parent who discovers what happened may carry guilt that consumes them whole. The sibling who did not know may spend years asking themselves why them, why not me, or could I have done something. The family member who trusted the wrong person may carry a remorse that has nowhere to go. The partner may pour love into someone and wonder why love alone cannot seem to reach them. The child of a survivor may feel the weight of pain they never saw and cannot explain. These are different wounds, different experiences, and different levels of impact, but they are still part of the ripple. And every part of that ripple deserves a conversation.
If we are serious about ending these cycles, we cannot only focus on healing what has already been broken. Healing matters deeply, and so does prevention, and we have to be just as aggressive about one as we are about the other. That means becoming willing to have the conversations that generations before us avoided, especially with our children, especially about their bodies, and especially before someone unsafe becomes their first teacher on the subject.
This Is Why Prevention Matters
I know many parents want to protect their children but genuinely do not know where to begin. They wonder what words to use, whether they will scare their child, and whether they will introduce something their child is not ready for. Those concerns are real and I honor them. Here is what I also know: we cannot protect children from conversations and then expect them to recognize situations they were never prepared for. Age-appropriate body safety education is not about planting fear. It is about giving children awareness, language, and the confidence to trust their own instincts and come to a safe adult when something feels wrong.
Something to Think About
Mental health is not always just a personal matter. Sometimes it is relational, sometimes it is generational, and sometimes what shows up as anxiety, disconnection, anger, avoidance, or emotional shutdown is connected to wounds that were never named, never processed, and never given a safe place to land.
If you are a collateral survivor, someone who loves a survivor, someone who was shaped by someone else's abuse, or someone carrying pain you have never known where to place, I want you to know that your healing matters too. Your pain deserves compassion. Your story is valid. You do not have to have been the one in the room to acknowledge that the ripple reached you and left a mark.
The ripple of trauma is real. But so is the ripple of healing, and that is the one we are building together.
Reassign the shame. All of it. Back to the one who created it.
Proverbs 31:8 calls us to speak up for those who cannot speak for themselves. I have always held that close. But lately I have been adding to it: speak also for the ones standing beside them, who have been carrying their silence too.
Reflection Questions
What ripple effects have you minimized because you told yourself your pain did not count?
What patterns are you carrying that may not have started with you?
What conversation can you begin today that could create healing for the generation coming after you?
The ripple of trauma is real. But healing creates ripples too. And that is exactly what we are here to do. Together. As we Journey 2 Free.
Larissa Rhone
Founder | Journey 2 Free Inc.
Survivor. Coach. Defiant Disruptor.
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