Journeys into the LEAG
In this blog, survivors, Shelley Trower and Lauren Harrison, share their journeys of joining the LEAG: Shelley explains that her contribution reflects the project’s central themes: the many ways of recovering and living with experiences of childhood abuse beyond therapy and a PTSD diagnosis. She highlights both the interrelatedness of her own experiences and their connection to the project itself. For Lauren, contributing a reflective piece about her official disclosure provides important context for her engagement with Survivor’s Voices and her subsequent participation in the LEAG.
My Journey with the LEAG – Shelley Trower
Somewhere in the dark days of January 2025 I applied to join the LEAG. I’d recently finished a period of counselling provided through a local charity, which was in many respects excellent but I was also severely retraumatised. I’d embarked on counselling so naively, I think now, with the conviction that it’d surely help me at last to recover from childhood abuse. As so many of us know – it turns out – counselling can also do great harm (in my case, due largely to misuse of boundaries, as discussed in this panel). It had added additional layers to my traumatic past that sent me spiralling; I’d not had such bad mental health for over 20 years. In searching desperately for whatever might help me get through, I came across the Recovery Histories project via the Survivors’ Voices website and felt a glimmer of hope that my painful experiences might be used positively, to inform research and potentially improve things for others as well as myself.
Coincidentally, I did my PhD at Birkbeck about 20 years previously. I am grateful for the excellent supervision and support that enabled me to gain that degree, considering that my experiences of remembering abuse were especially difficult and isolating at a time when the False Memory Society had major cultural and academic influence. All these years later, then, it was amazing to have a phone call with the LEAG coordinator from Survivors’ Voices and feel a strong sense of connection through our experiences. That turned out to be my first taste of such connection that grew in our group of lived-experience advisors in the months following.
Meeting in person with the LEAG and the academic team in May 2025 at Birkbeck, two decades after being a student there, gave me the chance to listen and be listened to, and to feel connected with others across a great range of experiences, ages, cultural backgrounds and perspectives. For a long time, my reality had felt disallowed. Joining the LEAG and Survivors’ Voices have enabled a new kind of connection and understanding.
It has seemed so unfair to me that people who have suffered abuse then suffer further precisely because of that abuse, including with inadequate mental health services and a hostile cultural environment. For me, it has been absolutely necessary to find alternative ways beyond counselling to survive, including through peer support and wider friendships, research and writing.
Official Disclosure – Lauren Harrison
The 2nd of August 2024 was the day that I took one of the most vital and transformational steps towards liberating myself from the suffocating grip of child sexual abuse. I had already spent thirty-two years of my life internalising the pain, shame, and disgust of what happened to me when I was just four years old; of enduring the loneliness and confusion of trying to make sense of the different ways the trauma impacted me and showed up in my life, whilst doing by best to stay silent out of loyalty and the instinct to protect those who should’ve been protecting me. But it all changed on that sweltering summer’s day, for it was the day that I attended my interview at Putney Police Station to give my statement detailing the abuse and naming the abuser, as well as all of those who were complicit. I had done all I could to avoid it before then, but with my son getting older and my depression getting so much worse, I realised that it was no longer about me. I found it difficult to take care of and advocate for myself, but this mama-bear wasn’t about to let the pain trickle down any further. And with him by my side, I finally found the strength to shine a light on the secret that had been suffocating me in the darkness for so long.
So much changed that day. I now categorise my life in two halves – before I went to the police, and after. Disclosure came with a multitude of emotions that fluctuated uncontrollably. Fear, guilt, relief, freedom, anxiety, vulnerability, and panic at what the hell I had just done(!), arrived suddenly and unexpectedly in waves throughout the hours, days and months after speaking out, reaching an overwhelming peak, then crashing violently before subsiding again. I had moved from a space of complete despair which was familiar and predictable, to one of not knowing what was going to happen next – a survivor’s worst nightmare. But a shift had come, and that meant that I could now begin my journey towards healing in a way that I was never able to before, without the burden of unspoken truths and with a level of compassion towards myself that I had been conditioned into believing that I didn’t need or deserve.
For the first time in my life, I was being taken seriously. I felt reassured that it wasn’t my fault and that it didn’t happen because something was wrong with me. I understood explicitly that I was a helpless victim of a terrible crime, and not only did I need specialist support to help put the broken pieces of me back together, but that I was worthy of it.
After several extensive web searches in my pursuit to find that support, I landed on the Survivors’ Voices site and read each page word for word, before eagerly sending in my request to be invited to the peer-support pods. Having completed my master’s in Psychological Sciences the year before (out of desperation to gain insight into how my mental and physical health issues could be related to the CSA, having not been able to access mental health support via the NHS), I readily put my name down to participate in the LEAG and hoped that this would give me an opportunity to use my lived experience to make valid research contributions and deepen the understanding of the survivor’s recovery journey. Thankfully, I was one of the people chosen and I’m excited to share more about that experience with you in the future.
With thanks to the authors and LEAG members, Shelley Trower and Lauren Harrison, who have also contributed to the Spring Issue of the Recovery Histories newsletter.
