The Colonial Cage

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To my readers, this probably sounds like a Lifetime movie or some twisted horror film. I get it. From the outside, the details feel too jagged, too cinematic, too dark to be real. But do you want to know what’s worse than the trauma itself? It’s the fact that my parents say the exact same thing.

I have stood in the kitchen of my adulthood, and I have sat across from them in the stifling silence of my youth, and heard them say to my face: “You watched too many Lifetime movies. You’ve seen so many movies that you actually believe it’s your life.”

Wow. Just wow. What a fucking lie.

They try to tell me that my own scars and my own memories are just something I “picked up” from a television screen, like a stray dog or a bad habit. It’s their ultimate gaslight. See, if they can convince me—and more importantly, convince the world—that I’m just “imaginative,” “dramatic,” or “confused,” they never have to face the blood on the bathroom floor. They never have to account for the neighbor or the belt. If I’m just a girl with a hyperactive imagination, then they get to remain the protagonists of their own comfortable story.

But the tragedy isn’t just their denial. The tragedy is that the entire system they surrounded me with helped them keep that lie alive.

The Veneer of the “Healing” Room

There were moments when the secret started to crack. I saw a therapist for a short time as a child. For a while, we even did the “right” thing—the whole family went to counseling. We sat in those neutral offices with the beige walls and the boxes of tissues, playing the part of a family trying to work things out.

And then, one day, it just ended.

No explanation was given to me. There was no “graduation” ceremony, no final summary of progress. The sessions were simply deleted from the calendar. Looking back through the lens of an adult who knows how secrets work, I know exactly why the plug was pulled. Therapy was the only place where the “veneer” didn’t work.

A child beginning to process the neighbor and the belt is a direct threat to a house built on secrets. In those rooms, under the gaze of a professional, the “imaginative” label started to fail. The truth was starting to leak out, and my parents had to plug the hole. They didn’t stop the sessions because I was “better”; they stopped them because I was starting to speak.

The 1970s Courtroom: A Room of Men

Then came the “Justice” system. If the therapist’s office was a crack in the wall, the courtroom was supposed to be the demolition. But you have to understand the era. This was the 1970s.

I was forced to stand before a judge—a man in a black robe who held the power to validate my existence—and explain my violation in “adult terms.” I was a child being asked to speak a language I shouldn’t even have known. But it wasn’t just the language that was foreign; it was the atmosphere.

The courtroom was a sea of suits. It was a room of men. Back then, women were barely a footnote in the justice system. I was a lone female voice trying to pierce through a wall of masculine “logic.” And when I spoke, that room of men didn’t see a victim. They called me a liar.

They said my parents coached me. The twisted irony of that statement still burns in my throat: my parents were beating me at home to stay silent, while the “justice” system was accusing them of making me speak. The men in that room looked at a terrified child and decided that the most logical explanation wasn’t that I was hurt, but that I was a well-trained actress.

The Colonial “Dream” and the Moat

By fourteen, the “Dream” was fully constructed. When my cousins finally saw the bruises from the brush beatings and called Social Services, I thought the truth would finally matter.

But the investigators didn’t look at my skin. They looked at the real estate. They pulled up to a massive four-bedroom Colonial house. They saw the manicured lawn, the crisp lines of the architecture, and the expensive cars sitting in the driveway. None of those cars were mine. Nothing in that yard belonged to me. But to the investigators, those things were credentials.

They saw the “middle-class dream” and decided I was just a “spoiled little rich bitch” acting out against parents who provided so much luxury. They couldn’t conceive that abuse could happen in a house with a colonial silhouette. To them, the architectural “perfection” was proof of moral “perfection.”

That pool in the back? It wasn’t a luxury; it was a moat. It was the bribe they showed the world to keep them from looking inside. Every splash in that water was a sound designed to drown out the screams.

Retaliation: The Three-Bolt Locks

The investigators left. They closed the case. And that’s when the true imprisonment began.

The three-bolt locks didn’t come first. The bars on the windows weren’t there when the investigators visited. Those were the consequences. Because I had dared to let the truth out—because I had “failed” to stay silent—my parents turned that colonial house into a literal fortress. They installed the bars. They turned the deadbolts. They cut me off from the rest of the family entirely, isolating me in a high-security cell that looked like a suburban home from the street.

I wasn’t just a child anymore; I was a prisoner of war in my own living room.

The Adult Curse: “You’re Too Strong”

You would think that once I escaped that house, the silencing would stop. But the “Professional Silencers” just changed their uniforms.

As an adult, seeking the healing I was denied as a child, I went to seven different therapists. Seven people who were paid to hear the things the court and the social workers ignored. I sat on seven different couches, laid out the map of my scars, and waited for someone to help me.

And do you know what the consensus was?

“You’re too strong. You don’t need therapy.”

It is a specialized, modern kind of abandonment. They saw the armor I had spent decades forging—the “Refined Casual” exterior, the managed life—and they mistook it for a lack of trauma. They saw my resilience and used it as an excuse to stop listening. Because I wasn’t falling apart in their office, they assumed I was whole.

They didn’t realize that “strength” is often just the final stage of survival. When you are told your whole life that your memories are a movie script, you learn how to perform “okay” very, very well. You learn how to be “strong” because the alternative was death.

Taking Back the Pen

So, this is where the “Lifetime” lie ends.

I am over fifty years old. I live in Tucson. I have a husband who sees me. I have a life filled with “Spirit & Wonder.” But most importantly, I have a keyboard.

I don’t go to the therapist’s couch anymore. I don’t wait for a judge to gavel in the truth. And I don’t care if the backyard looks like a dream or a prison. If the therapists won’t hear it, and the courts won’t believe it, and the “middle-class dream” tries to hide it—I will write it.

The ink doesn’t lie. My scars aren’t a script written by a bored screenwriter in Hollywood. They were written in blood on the bathroom floor, etched into my memory behind the bars they installed after the system failed me, and ignored by every “professional” who was too blinded by a manicured lawn or a room full of men to see the girl drowning in the pool.

To my parents: I didn’t watch too many movies. I lived through a horror film you directed. But the credits are rolling on your version of the story. From now on, the narrative belongs to me.

This is Vividly Rae, and I am finally speaking my own language.