my childhood (may trigger)

I've never been very good at talking about what I went through as a child, but I wanted to try and open up a little on here, and hopefully let others know that they are not alone dealing with these things.

I'm not going to go into any detail about the things that happened, but outline the situation a bit and get a few of the feelings out in the open, I'm hoping this helps me heal a little.

I guess I need to explain right from before I was born. My mum is married and had 3 children with her husband, then she had an affair and got pregnant with me. Right from then, I was her dirty secret.

My mum's family are very religious and she wanted to keep this all secret, even from her family as she knew they would disown her. She came to an agreement with my dad that he could see me whenever he wanted as long as he never collected me from school and he remained a secret.

I'm not exactly sure how old I was when the abuse started but I was very young. It started with just one of his friends. My dad would watch him do things to me and then tuck me into bed like any normal dad.

Things escalated very quickly and by the time I was 5, he was letting several friends do whatever they wanted with me for money. He turned me into a prostitute at 5 years old.

By the time I was 7/8years old, he was taking me to a warehouse type place where lots of people met and swapped children and paid to do things with them. My dad always said that I had to do it if I wanted him to buy me nice things.

I never told anyone anything that was going on. Looking back, I cant really understand why I stayed silent. I guess I was so young when it stated, that part of me thought this was normal, the other part I guess was scared to tell. It had been drilled in to me from as soon as I learnt to talk that my dad and everything relating to him had to be kept a secret, even from the rest of my family.

To this day I have no idea if my mum knew what was going on. Part of me thinks she did, how could she not notice? I used to come home to her with bruises, cuts and even burns sometimes, which my dad always gave an excuse about.

I am now trying to move on, I have a good psychiatrist to manage my meds and have been having therapy for just over 3 years now (which is due to end soon which is really scary!). I can't even explain how much my therapy has helped. When I first started seeing her, I was silent. I couldn't hardly say a word, but now I have been able to put the outline of my story on here and although I still struggle sometimes with my PTSD, I am so much better now, and I hope I can continue to heal even when my therapy ends.

Anyways, that's my story, thank you for reading