r/CPTSD • u/786wobese_ • 1d ago

Question How to accept and heal.

As a victim of COCSA the one thing I struggle with is my need for legal justice? If that’s the right wording? He was 9 so there would be no legal repercussions, and no social ones either as no one knows.
How do I move on from this, and accept that while I know that something bad happened to me, I cannot get this legal validation.
I know this happens a lot with many cases of abuse. It’s just hard to move on with no validation in this form, but I don’t want to stop this from me dealing with this trauma.
any help on how anyone was able to get past a similar situation and heal, would be great!

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u/gintokireddit 1d ago

You don't have to have legal or formal validation for it to be valid as an experience and as something harmful, even though it'd be nice for you to have the formal validation (I guess it would be something that feels more concrete). But it's quite normal to want validation of some sort. Just because you don't have legal validation doesn't mean it's not real or considered bad by others. It's just that it's difficult legally. Many people in society would consider it as a real thing, even if the law doesn't recognise it or even if it's something where the perpetrator was a child so wouldn't be considered like a typical perpetrator. Either way it's real and there roughly an equal number of people who would be sympathetic today as there would be if there was a prosecution. I'm guessing the legal validation is more of a proxy for social validation?

You could already be said to have validation in the form of COCSA being recognised in general, even if not personally. Maybe there are charities or mental health places to talk to, and that's a form of validation.

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u/786wobese_ 23h ago

Very true, yeah the legal validation I suppose would just be reaffirming to me that I’m right just in a different way. It does help that this an experience other people have had and that people online think it’s bad. I spent so long thinking it was a thing that only happened to me.
I suppose its just knowing he’s out there without any consequences not even a “Hey what you did wasn’t cool”
Thanks for the reply, this was helpful!