How Finally Naming What Happened to Me Gave My Childhood Self Permission to Heal

For sixty-five years I carried something I had no name for. Not because the name did not exist. Because I had never let myself look long enough to find it. The day I finally did, something in me that had been waiting a very long time was allowed to rest.

By Kyle Smith | Author of The Secrets We Must Hold, Volume One

There is a version of healing that looks like forgetting. You get busy. You build a life. You fill the hours well enough that the thing you are not thinking about stays in the place where you put it. For a long time I thought that was the only version available to me. I was wrong. But it took me until I was 72 to find out.

After my third wife passed away, the quiet that grief brought with it was a different kind of quiet than I had managed before. The noise I had relied on for decades was gone. And in its place, the dreams came back. Vivid. Specific. The kind that leave a residue on the day that follows them.

My counselor asked me to write them down. What she was really asking me to do, though neither of us said it in those words, was to stop forgetting on purpose. To look at what had happened to me as a child and let it have a name. That was the beginning of the only healing I have ever actually felt.

What Happens When There Is No Name for It

I was seven years old when a man named Rudy entered my life. My father had died when I was three. Rudy came through my mother’s church. He was warm, patient, and attentive in the way that a lonely boy with no father is completely defenseless against.

What he did to me over the eighteen months that followed, I will not detail here. It is in the book, written as honestly as I could manage. What I will tell you is what it produced in me afterward: a silence that I wore for sixty-five years like a second skin. Not because I chose silence. Because I had made a promise at seven years old and I did not know how to unmake it.

When you carry something without a name, it shapes you in ways you cannot track. You cannot say: this distance I feel in relationships comes from here. You cannot say: this feeling of something unreachable underneath my ordinary life, this is where it lives. You just carry it. You adjust around it. You get very good at moving through the days without pressing on the parts that hurt.

When you carry something without a name, it shapes you in ways you cannot track.

The Day I Gave It a Name

The turning point was not dramatic. It did not happen in a single conversation or a single session. It happened slowly, over the months that I spent writing down what I had spent sixty-five years not writing down. Putting language around the experience, sentence by sentence, forcing myself to stay in the room with the memory long enough to describe it accurately, something shifted.

What I was doing, I came to understand, was giving the child I had been a witness. Not a judge. Not a rescuer. A witness. Someone who would finally look at what had happened to him and say: I see it. I am not going to look away. I am not going to reduce it to something more comfortable or explain it into something more manageable. I am going to write it down exactly as it was and let it be exactly as large as it was.

That boy had been waiting for that since 1959. Sixty-five years is a long time to wait for someone to finally show up and look.

These books are very hard for me to write. Remembering is painful. But I am finally getting some peace.

Kyle Smith — The Secrets We Must Hold, Volume One

Why Naming It Heals in a Way That Forgetting Cannot

There is a reason that survivors who speak about what happened to them, even decades later, often describe it as the first time they felt relief. Not because speaking erases the experience. It does not. But because the experience, once named, can no longer occupy the same position inside you. It moves from the place where unacknowledged things live, which is everywhere, to the place where known things live, which is somewhere specific. Somewhere you can actually look at.

For me, writing the book was the naming. Not just of what Rudy did. Of what it cost me. The marriages I could not fully inhabit. The distances I could not explain. The decades of competence at the surface of a life and the persistent sense of something missing underneath it. Naming those things, tracing them back to their source, did not undo them. But it gave them an address. And things with an address are things you can finally, actually, deal with.

What the Child You Were Needs From the Adult You Are

I want to say something to the people reading this who are carrying their own unnamed thing. The experience they have never written down, never spoken aloud, never let themselves sit with long enough to describe clearly.

The child you were is still waiting. Not for rescue. Not for justice, though that matters too. Waiting for the one thing that child never got at the time: someone to look at what happened and not look away. That someone, now, is you. You are the only one who can give that child what they needed. And you can do it at 30 or 50 or 72. The door does not close.

Writing my book did not make me a different person. It made me a more complete one. The parts of my history that had been living in silence were allowed, finally, to be part of the story I tell about myself. And the boy who made a promise in 1959 and kept it for sixty-five years, he got to see that promise finally released. Not broken. Released. There is a difference.

The child you were is still waiting. Not for rescue. For someone to finally look and not look away.

This Book Is My Witness Statement

The Secrets We Must Hold is three volumes because the story is three volumes long. Volume One is the beginning. The years when it was happening. Written from inside the child’s experience with the understanding only age can bring. Volumes Two and Three carry the story forward.

Together they are the most complete act of naming I know how to make. They are my witness statement for the boy I was. And they are an invitation to anyone who has their own version of that boy or that girl sitting quietly somewhere inside them, still waiting, still holding a promise they should never have been asked to keep.

You do not have to write a book. You just have to start. One word. One sentence. One honest look at something you have been carrying for too long. The rest follows. I promise you it does.

About the Author

Kyle Smith is a survivor, father of four, and first-time author. He began writing The Secrets We Must Hold at the age of 72, following years of counseling after the death of his third wife. The three-volume autobiography is his effort to break a silence that began in childhood and to ensure that others who carry similar experiences know they are not alone.

Content Note

This post discusses themes of childhood sexual abuse and long-term trauma. If you or someone you know needs support, the RAINN National Sexual Assault Hotline is available 24 hours a day at 1-800-656-HOPE (4673) or at rainn.org.