Content note: This page references childhood sexual abuse, family violence, and coercive control. Please read at your own pace and take breaks as needed.

It's taken me most of my life to write this.

Not because I forgot. You don't forget. But because remembering has a cost — one I've paid in sleepless nights, panic attacks, and moments where putting these words on a page made my body revolt. That's the truth no one tells you about trauma: sometimes, speaking it aloud hurts almost as much as living through it.

From the outside, we looked like any other family. A whirlwind romance. A wedding. A home with a yard. Children who smiled for photos. My father was charismatic — the kind of man people instinctively trusted, the kind who could light up a room and make you feel like the only person in it.

Behind closed doors, he was someone else entirely.

Controlling. Jealous. Violent. My mum became a prisoner in her own home — monitored, accused of affairs that existed only in his paranoia, punished for crimes she never committed. She learnt to hide bruises under long sleeves. To explain away broken bones with stories about clumsiness. Because telling the truth felt more dangerous than carrying it alone.

We moved cities — Brisbane, Melbourne, Cairns, Adelaide — chasing fresh starts that never came. The violence packed itself into boxes and followed us everywhere. Home wasn't a sanctuary. It was a minefield. Rules that shifted without warning. Consequences that arrived like lightning strikes — sudden, devastating, impossible to predict.

But it wasn't only the violence.

He sexually abused me.

That sentence took me decades to write. Decades to even whisper to myself in the dark. Because I learnt early — the way children learn to breathe — that disclosure could mean more harm. So I stayed quiet. I watched everything. I second-guessed every step, every word, every moment. I survived the only way I knew how: by disappearing into myself.

For years, I told myself that silence was protection. That keeping the secret kept me safe.

Eventually, I realised the unbearable truth: Silence wasn't protecting me. It was protecting him.

I'm not sharing this for shock value. I'm not asking for pity. I'm sharing it because too many men grow up believing they have to "tough it out" — swallow the pain, bury the memories, and move on as if trauma has an off switch. As if surviving means forgetting.

It doesn't.

This is not the whole story. It's the beginning of it. And I'm telling it now because I know what it's like to believe you're the only one — to carry shame that was never yours to carry in the first place.

So if you're reading this and you recognise even a fragment of yourself in these words: You are not alone. What happened to you was not your fault. And your silence doesn't have to protect anyone anymore.

— Steven Neeland, Founder