EstherNelda

08/31/2026

I spent the better part of 35 years masking, dissociating, and running from my past. To do that, I had to disconnect almost completely from my body.

Eventually, that disconnection caught up with me. It manifested as a host of autoimmune disorders that nearly took my life in 2021. My body had been carrying what I had spent decades trying not to feel.

I didn’t want to be the little girl who was r***d, molested, and tortured by her parents. I didn’t want to be the little girl who was kidnapped and held hostage by her father and eventually had to call the police to save herself.

I didn’t want that story to be mine.

So I became very, very good at pretending.

Or so I thought.

I believed I had kept this enormous secret from everyone around me. Then, two years ago, I learned something that changed the way I understood my entire life:

Not only had they known.

They had known the whole time.

My aunts, uncles, and brother knew. While I spent decades believing I was carrying this secret alone, the people around me already knew.

And no one came for me.

No one acknowledged it. No one offered that little girl the protection, tenderness, or compassion she needed.

At 10 years old, after being abused since I was in diapers, I was the one who found the courage to call the police during a hostage situation with my father.

A little girl became her own protector.

For a long time, part of me was still waiting for my “family” to become the family I needed.

When I finally let go of that expectation, something beautiful happened:

I made room for people who knew how to love me.

I found real connection, compassion, kindness, and safety.

Sometimes the family you’re born into is part of the lesson, and the family you choose becomes your family.

Please don’t stay in an unhealthy relationship simply because someone is “family.” Unhealthy is unhealthy. Family or not.

Take care of yourself. You’re allowed to choose you.

08/26/2026

08/23/2026

Sometimes healing comes with this strange kind of imposter syndrome. We convince ourselves we’re not ready yet. Not healed enough. Not strong enough. That we need to get somewhere else before we’re allowed to move forward.

That’s a lie.

You don’t have to be fully healed to begin living.

Healing can feel a little like discovering the Wild West inside yourself.

You start uncovering parts of yourself you didn’t know were there. Some are beautiful. Some are hard to look at. Some are scary. And some of the things you’ve been carrying around your entire life, you begin to realize were never yours to begin with.

We carry so much in our emotional baggage. Trauma. Shame. Fear. Responsibility. Other people’s pain. Other people’s expectations. Stories handed to us before we were old enough to question whether they belonged to us.

And we shoulder it all like it’s ours.

But sometimes healing is realizing you can simply set it down.

It was never yours to carry.

And the beautiful part is, you can set down the things that were yours too.

You can decide you don’t want to carry them anymore. You can look at what happened. Look at the choices you’ve made because of it. Take accountability for the role you may be playing in your own suffering now, and choose differently.

That takes awareness. It takes courage. It takes a willingness to look at yourself without abandoning yourself.

Healing is incredibly hard, but the choices themselves can be simple.

Face it.
Feel it.
Tell the truth about it.
Take responsibility for what is yours.
Put down what isn’t.
And choose what you want to carry forward.

A lot of people opt out of healing. I did for 35 years.

And then something shifted in my life and I was forced into it.

For me, it became very simple.

Heal or die.

And I chose to live.

I chose myself.

08/09/2026

If you were born and raised in trauma, dysfunction, abuse, neglect, or pain, your nervous system learned what was familiar long before you had any choice in the matter.

I think of it like a comfort TV show.

You’ve watched every season. You know every episode. You know the characters, who you can trust, who you can’t, and what happens next. Even if your comfort show is The Walking Dead, it can still feel safe because it’s predictable.

Trauma patterns can work the same way.

If all you’ve ever known is “Tuesday pain,” “Tuesday pain” can feel strangely safer than the possibility of “Wednesday peace.”

Not because you want pain. Not because you’re choosing suffering. Because your nervous system knows that “show.”

Peace? Ease? Healthy love? Being treated well? Those can feel like the scary “show” because you don’t know what happens next.

If your life has always felt like The Walking Dead, Little House on the Prairie might make your nervous system wonder, “Okay… but when does something bad happen?”

This is the loop.

And recognizing that you’re in it is powerful information.

Notice the relationships you repeatedly find yourself in. Notice the situations that feel strangely familiar. Notice how you feel around certain people. Notice what you tolerate because some part of you already knows how to survive it.

That is data.

And once you have the data, you can begin the practical application of breaking the loop. It doesn’t have to begin with some enormous life-changing decision. Sometimes it begins with sitting with yourself long enough to recognize the pattern.

You have sovereignty. You have choice. And you can begin creating safety inside your body little by little.

The unfamiliar can become familiar.

“Wednesday peace” can become familiar.

Little House on the Prairie can become your new “show.” 🤍

This work is nuanced. It takes practice, compassion, patience and trust. But I promise you, coming back to yourself is worth it.

You are allowed to break the loop.

This is me extending my hand to you. Will you take it? 🤝🤍🫂

07/30/2026

⚠️Warning Sensitive Material ⚠️
💙Breaking the silence PART-7💙
After my dad was released from jail, he petitioned for supervised visitation. Every week I was taken to the downtown police station to see him.

My brother refused to go. I refused too.

The difference was that his “no” was respected.

Mine wasn’t.

Before every visit my body would panic. I didn’t have the language for a dysregulated nervous system. I only knew I felt sick. I cried. I begged. I pleaded not to go. I told my aunt how terrified I was.

She would say, “I don’t want people to think I’m keeping you from my dad.”

I would tell her, “I’m scared. I feel sick. I don’t want to go.”

Her response never changed.

“You don’t have to like it. You just have to do it.”

She wasn’t abusing me the way my parents had. She wasn’t starving me, beating me, or sexually abusing me. She loved me. She cared for me. She stepped in when my life had fallen apart.

And two things can be true at once.

The lesson my nervous system learned wasn’t that I was safe. The lesson it learned was that even when I was terrified, I still had to go.

As a child, I couldn’t recognize that as psychological harm because it felt so much safer than the abuse I had known before. My nervous system compared it to the worst thing it had survived and decided, “This is better.”

But “better” isn’t the same as safe.

Looking back, I can see the pattern. Since infancy, I had been conditioned to override my instincts, disconnect from my body, and believe that other people’s comfort, opinions, and expectations mattered more than my own safety.

My brother was allowed to have a boundary.

I wasn’t.

That difference shaped the way I moved through the world.

Healing has been the slow process of teaching my nervous system something it was never taught as a child:

My body isn’t difficult.

My body isn’t overreacting.

My body is worthy of being listened to.

Today, I honor the “no” that little girl was never allowed to have.

06/30/2026

For the past several months, I’ve been sharing the story of my childhood through my memoir series, I Was Sexually & physical abused. Those videos tell the story of what happened to me.

This chapter is different.

This is about what healing looks like after the trauma. It’s about navigating relationships, grief, love, forgiveness, and the quiet moments that reveal just how much you’ve changed.

In this video, I share one of those moments.

After nearly forty years, my mother and I have finally found peace with one another. During a recent trip to a petting zoo, I realized I had unknowingly placed all the hopes of my inner child onto one afternoon. I wanted the field trip with my mom that I never had as a little girl.

But my mother lives with dementia and Alzheimer’s disease. During our day together, she didn’t recognize me as her daughter. To her, I was simply a kind stranger.

For a moment, my heart broke.

Then I realized something beautiful. She didn’t have to remember my name for love to exist between us. Her mind couldn’t find me, but her heart still knew me. Mine knew her too.

Healing doesn’t erase grief. It expands your capacity to hold grief and gratitude at the same time.

If there’s one thing I hope you take from this, it’s this:

When life hands you a bouquet of beautiful flowers, don’t spend all of your energy trying to make them last longer. Admire them. Enjoy them. Love them while they’re here.

Thank you for being here with me🥹🤍🕯️🫂

06/14/2026

⚠️ Warning Sensitive material ⚠️
👇 Full video on my YouTube
👇 🔗in my bio

We tell children all the time, “Tell a trusted adult. Tell a teacher. Tell a coach. Tell someone safe.”

But what happens next?

What happens when the adult they trusted doesn’t have the capacity to hold what they’ve just heard?

Not because they’re evil. Not because they’re the abuser. But because they’re overwhelmed, uncomfortable, shut down, or carrying wounds of their own they have never faced.

Children are speaking up. Many have been speaking up for a very long time.

The problem isn’t always that children lack courage.

The problem is that too many adults lack capacity.

That was my experience.

I told people. Others told people. Teachers, schools, therapists, organizations, family friends. There were adults who saw, adults who heard, adults who knew enough to ask questions. Yet again and again, nothing happened.

Not because I wasn’t brave enough.

Because the adults around me were not prepared to respond.

This isn’t about shaming people. It’s about shining a light on the weak link in the chain.

We don’t just need awareness. We need adults who have done enough of their own healing that they can remain present in the face of a child’s pain.

Because when a child finally finds the courage to speak and is met with silence, disbelief, avoidance, or inaction, that too can become another form of abuse.

We do not need braver children.

We need braver adults.

Adults willing to do the work now, not later. Adults willing to face their own wounds so they can hold space for others.

Healing ourselves is not just personal work.

It is child protection.

06/02/2026

⚠️ Warning Sensitive material ⚠️
👇 Full video on my YouTube
👇 🔗in my bio
There was a moment in my childhood where the abuse itself no longer felt like the hardest part.
The hardest part was finding the courage to ask for help.

I had been groomed from diapers. Abuse wasn’t something happening to me in my mind, it was simply the world I knew. I didn’t know who I was outside of survival. I didn’t know life without fear, manipulation, violation, or control. So advocating for myself, standing up for myself, protecting myself… these were foreign concepts I was trying to learn in real time as a terrified child.

And even then, I did not recognize myself as brave.

I thought I was weak.
I thought I was betraying my father.
I thought I had failed because I could no longer endure what I had been conditioned to survive.

That is one of the most complex parts of grooming. When a child is raised inside of abuse, especially from such a young age, they often do not realize they are being groomed at all. The attachment, loyalty, fear, love, protection, and survival all become tangled together.

Even after being held hostage and abused, I still worried more about what would happen to my father than what had happened to me. I loved him. I had compassion for him. I did not want him to suffer the consequences of his own actions.

But my little body and my big heart had finally reached the end of what they could carry.

And somewhere deep inside myself, beneath all the fear and conditioning, I found the courage to make it stop.

Looking back now, I can finally see that little girl clearly.

She was never weak.
She was extraordinarily brave. 🤍🥹🫂🕯️

05/26/2026

⚠️ Warning Sensitive material ⚠️
👇 Full video on my YouTube
👇 🔗in my bio
Part: 6
In this video, I speak about the time I was held hostage, sexually assaulted, neglected, abandoned in the woods, and eventually called the police. I share the moment everything finally came crashing down around me and how the truth that had been hidden for so long could no longer stay buried.

I also speak about being sexually tortured in my bedroom at night by my father and the complicated relationship I had with my mother, who also abused me and was deeply abused, groomed, and limited herself. There were moments she would stand outside my bedroom door listening after putting me to bed. Sometimes she would interrupt when she sensed something was wrong. It did not stop the abuse, but it would pause it.

It took me decades and an immense amount of healing to understand that, in her own limited capacity, she was trying to help me in the only ways she knew how. I could not access those layers of compassion or understanding until I began healing my relationship with her and choosing forgiveness.

Forgiveness is not about excusing harm or making peace for the people who hurt you. Most people you forgive may never even know they’ve been forgiven. Forgiveness is for you. It is setting down the weight you were never meant to carry forever.

For so long, I carried pain, resentment, grief, anger, and survival inside my body and nervous system. Healing taught me that I had to slowly make space for something different. Love. Peace. Support. Compassion. Joy. Connection.

The more I heal, the more capacity I have for love, softness, kindness, and connection. And one of the deepest realizations I’ve had is that the first person sharing my story out loud truly helped was me.

There is a way out of extreme darkness. It begins with learning that you are worthy of love, especially from yourself.

I’m so glad you’re here. Thank you for witnessing me. 🕯️

05/12/2026

⚠️ Warning Sensitive material ⚠️
👇 Full video on my YouTube
👇 🔗in my bio
Part: 5.2
As a child, my nervous system learned the schedule of survival before it ever understood safety. There was a rhythm to the environment I grew up in. During the day, my mother was physically, mentally, and emotionally harmful toward me. Food was withheld, fear was constant, and I learned very quickly how unpredictable love could feel. At night, the sexual abuse from my dad took place….. That cycle became the only consistency my little body understood.

What complicated things even more was that when my mother harmed me, I would sometimes tell my father. He would not tolerate her behavior toward me, and he would then “deal”with her in whatever way happened behind closed doors. But the next day, that pain would often return to me through her anger and resentment. So my child mind began believing that maybe if I stayed quiet, maybe if I tolerated more, maybe if I became easier/ better to handle, the harm would lessen. I thought I could somehow manage the pain around me by managing myself perfectly.

That is the heartbreaking logic of a child trying to survive environments that were never safe to begin with.

As an adult now, with quantum healing, nervous system work, and a deeper understanding of CPTSD, I can see that none of it was my responsibility to carry. Children adapt. Children normalize what they live inside of. Children create meaning in places where there is none because the mind is always trying to create safety, even in unsafe places.

When I began sharing pieces of my story publicly, I didn’t realize how much compassion it would unlock inside of me for the younger version of myself. Not pity. Not shame. Compassion.

Because that little girl was never weak. She was surviving the only way she knew how.