Mikey Brennan Opens Up About Traumatic Childhood Experience

Mikey Brennan, hard-charging Shipstern Bluff surfer from Tasmania, recently opened up on his Instagram about a traumatic childhood experience and how it still affects him today.

From Mikey:

When I was 8 I was raped. 

The incident was traumatizing and psychologically annihilating, leading to the labels they often called complex post-traumatic stress disorder, depression and anxiety.

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What was clear to me was the suffering of pervasive and rigid negative thoughts and beliefs about myself.

What should have been a fun summer turned into a living nightmare that changed my life forever.

27 years later and I am still healing.

I want to bring awareness to trauma and childhood sexual abuse as well as mental health but also shed light on suppression, guilt, shame, insecurity, abandonment and betrayal. All feelings I was undeservingly given at such a young age and all of which I’ve carried as broken pieces of myself. But they aren’t broken pieces they are big and beautiful and amazing.

In those moments something changed, being raped changed me and although I’d been hurt in the worst way, I’d also forcibly grown in cognitive awareness. I faced the fear and threat of telling my mother. I also broke the spell of my predator that I would never tell a soul, and in total discomfort I’ve patiently waited to let it all go.

I have stumbled but somehow regained myself, my personal space and now I have the distance within to never look back. I am a survivor. I have survived the trauma and pain and all the suffering that everyone expected me to suppress and now open heartedly I offer this as a gesture to others don’t be foolish and allow predators to continue to harm children in fact call it out, our lives are worth it, speak out so that others feel they can because we’re never alone. Even amongst our greatest fears the truth is always here.