Abstract
As I considered writing this article I thought, I guess I'll have to use a false name. That determined it. After all this time I still felt too ashamed to own that as a child aged seven to sixteen I had been sexually abused by two men in their 40s-50s. From this realisation the article has been born and written without a pseudonym—I have had the courage to own it.
I going to start by telling the story of the abuse in the form of a fairy tale, and then go on to consider some of the effects having been abused has had upon my adult life. Telling of a trauma, in the form of a fairy tale, does not indicate there is any less truth is what is told, but it is a vehicle whereby the child is more able to speak and feel herself heard, is what is more her language. I first learned of this method by reading an essay by Roz Oliver, a Core Process Psychotherapist working in London.