We lost the camper eventually, and spent more than a year couch surfing, my body always half-braced for the next move. At one point, my mother abandoned us with a family friend for months. We eventually returned to her.

Underneath the moving, the cold, the not knowing, there was sexual abuse. Things I still struggle to name out loud.

At twelve, a man online found me and used me until I couldn’t see a way out. I tried to take my own life. I came home, started therapy again, and just over a year later, scared and ashamed, told my therapist what was still happening at home. Maybe that disclosure protected us. It also broke us apart – my siblings and I scattered into strangers’ homes, split by age like we were being sorted, not saved.

Two months in, a trauma assessment gave me words for what I carried: CPTSD. Depression. Anxiety. I kept going to therapy because that’s what foster youth do by requirement.

About three months into care, I started seeing my youngest brother in the waiting room of the same community mental health building. Then one day, my therapist brought him into my session. I remember the fluorescent light overhead, how small he looked in the chair, his eyes on me, waiting. I was told to tell him about the abuse. I was told to tell him we were never going home.
Instead of an adult telling my brother that we would not be returning home, they made me do it. I was still a child trying to understand my own trauma, and I had to watch a boy barely old enough for elementary school come undone in front of me because of words I was made to hand him.
I already believed it was my fault – that if I’d stayed quiet, we’d still be together. That afternoon turned the belief into something I couldn’t out-argue. I heard myself say it out loud: I did this. I am the reason we were separated. I am the reason we’ll never go home. It’s my fault because I said something.

Watching my brother break confirmed it.

A few months later, I tried again to end my life.

Years later, I learned my two younger siblings’ relationship had fractured entirely.

I stopped taking care of myself. Every placement change meant a new therapist, and every time, I would have to retell the story of how everything was my fault, how it was my fault that we didn’t all live together anymore, how it was my fault that we never would again. And over time, I started to realize that therapy didn’t feel effective. And eventually, I stopped going.

It took years, another attempt in undergrad, homelessness, two more years of refusing to let anyone close, before I tried again. Three years ago, I found a therapist trained in PTSD, the foster system, and adoption competency. For the first time, therapy worked.

Now, looking back, I understand that therapy didn’t work for me because my therapists were not trained to practice adoption competency in their work. I understand that an adoption-competent therapist would not have forced me to reveal my trauma to someone so dear to me without considering the effects it would have on me, them, and our relationship. I understand that an adoption-competent therapist would have recognized the guilt and shame I carried as a child and supported me in identifying the root of those feelings and finding techniques to work through those feelings and my CPTSD. And I understand all of this now because I have an adoption-competent therapist.

I still feel that blame sometimes. But I understand it now – that speaking up likely saved my life and my siblings’ lives, even as it cost us each other. I read once that the price of love is loss. I believe that. I just wish someone had told us sooner that we didn’t have to carry it alone.