How do you all deal with the shame if your silence gave your abuser an opportunity for more victims?

I escaped my mother’s house for good at 16 after she tried to carry out her threats that she would kill me to silence me. There is a lot more to that event to explore some other time.

Post-escape, she could no longer exert physical control over me, but she still had total control. She had threatened that if I talked, she would do believeable physical damage to herself and report to authorities that I had been raping her. And that the things done to me in prison would be far worse than anything she had done. Everyone I had begged for help from in the past told me I was lying and that I had a very sweet mother. They were going to believe her over me.

I spent several deeply suicidal weeks reeling from her attempt to make good on her threat, from the fear that I was free of the abuse but had no safe way to report her crime, and in matricidal internal rage.

I locked all the trauma into my deepest mental vault, firm that I would take these evils to my grave. Hidden away, the toxicity of my trauma poisoned much of my life through my 20’s. I attended some therapy throughout those years to little real achievment, and never spoke of the worst of the abuse- just the verbal and the milder physical abuse.

At 33, for the sake of my nephews who would have been at risk exposed to their grandmother, I disclosed to my family and that has torn some of the family apart.

For eleven of those seventeen years of my silence, she worked as an elementary school nurse.

Many of her predations on me when I was younger involved ‘compulsory medical examinations’ because she was ‘a nurse and needs to check things out down there’. An exam would turn into having my genitals pummelled, scratched, and ripped at, being choked, and sodomizing me with household objects. This was punishment for my ‘sin of masturbation’, to stop me from ‘being a little fag’, and for my ‘sin of watching her undress’ when she forced me to watch her strip under penalty of beating if I looked away.

Because of my cowardly silence, she had eleven years to groom victims in an elementary school. Because of my cowardly failure to end her life back then she had easy access to more boys.

I have carried so much shame for knowing my cowardice let her continue to make victims. I feel like this makes me complicit.