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I wrote a blog post yesterday over at the YA Contemps about Trusting your Gut, in conjunction with the release of April Henry's new release GIRL, STOLEN, which I seriously cannot WAIT to read once I finish editing first pass proofs of WANT TO GO PRIVATE? and revising my graphic novel proposal.

Writing that post got me thinking about WHY it took me so long (into my forties) to REALLY learn to trust my gut. An email discussion with a high school friend last night cemented my thoughts on the issue, and made me realize that even though this is a hard post to write, it's a necessary one.

Did you know that one in three girls and one in five boys will have been sexually abused by the time they reach 18 years of age? Did you know that approximately one third of those victims are under the age of six?

*raises hand*

I do, because I was one of them.

When I look at the list of abuse symptoms, I've experienced some of them - not all. Some, I experienced on and off my whole life. Others more as a teenager. Still others waited to rear their ugly heads until the birth of my own children, particularly my daughter, made me fearful and anxious almost to the point of neurosis that someday this might happen to them and I WOULDN'T BE ABLE TO PROTECT THEM.

Yes, I had low self-esteem. Yes, I grew up thinking that I was defective. Yes, I ended up self-medicating with drugs and alcohol when I was in high school. Today I probably would have been put on prescription medication, and that would have been a good thing, because it really does the trick. But perhaps the worst thing my abuser did - and this continued in subsequent abusive relationships - was to damage, at a very young age, my all important gut instinct.

When you're a very young child, you trust adults to look after you and to be the good guys. Like many abusers, mine was known to our family and welcomed into it. To all appearances, he just doted on me. As my brother said many, many years later, "You were always his favorite." No one knew the price I paid in the middle of the night for the treats and the attention he paid me, and I was too young to really understand what it all meant. All I knew was that I didn't like that part of it. It made me uncomfortable and felt wrong.

Later, when I did come to understand, I was silent. It took me years to speak up about what had happened to me, and at first I always did it in the third person - "It happened to her."

The stage was already set though, for future abusive relationships. I was imprinted with the legacy of a man who was kind one minute and then hurt me the next. I think a big reason for this was because I didn't trust my own inner voice when it spoke to me.

Later, that distrust wasn't just because of my own insecurities. It was reinforced by the dysfunctional relationships I was in. When someone is constantly telling you that you're the crazy one, that your reality is the one at fault, you eventually start to believe them. After all, I was always the one on meds. I was always the one having to see a therapist. So I must be the one who was crazy, right?

But you know what? I finally realized, after a major crisis which required me to reexamine every assumption I'd every made about myself and my life in order to pick myself up off the ground and heal, that maybe, just maybe, I WASN'T the crazy one after all. I mean, yeah, I have my issues just like everyone else, but when it comes down to it, I'm actually pretty sane. (I can hear my kids and my boyfriend laughing when they read this, but humor me, my darlings ... ;-)

Once I had that epiphany, it took a HUGE amount of work, doing what my therapist called "reality testing" until I was finally able to trust my gut. What is reality testing? Well, a situation would occur and my gut would tell me, "This isn't ri