I knew what my parents had done.

I had been there; it had been done to me; the truth of it was as solid and certain in my mind as anything I have ever known.

And yet I watched that truth be denied, and inverted, and turned against me, watched people who had known me my whole life choose my parents’ version over mine, and I began to feel the ground of my own reality shifting under me, began, in my worst moments, to wonder whether I was the one who was wrong, whether a person can be so thoroughly disbelieved that she starts to disbelieve herself.

That is what abuse followed by denial does; it does not only hurt you, it makes you doubt your own mind, isolates you inside a truth no one will share.