I was sexually abused when I was 13-years old. While the abuse lasted a fairly short period of time, several hours at most, the effects on my life lasted for decades. For many years it was easy to blame all my life’s problems on the abuse I’d experienced, after all I was a victim. Now, from a place of profound healing, I can see how I dragged the trauma and harm forward, day-by-day, into every aspect of my life, including my career, and how that unresolved abuse caused my professional life to stop dead in its tracks on more than one occasion.

The first time I became aware of it I was a member of The Canadian Tenors. The group was just starting out and we had recorded our first album in Sweden and completed two Canadian tours, one in Saskatchewan and one in the lower mainland of British Columbia. The three other tenors had become aware that my contract was more lucrative than theirs, though how they obtained that knowledge I do not know. The four of us were summoned to a meeting with the group’s board of directors and solicitor to discuss and address the inequity in our contracts: the other tenors either wanted to be paid at a level equivalent to me, or have my contractual pay reduced to an equivalent level.

The day of the meeting we were escorted to a legal boardroom in a downtown Vancouver office tower. The board was already present, and we were instructed to sit opposite them at the table. We all waited for the group’s solicitor to arrive for the meeting, and when he did he locked the boardroom door behind him and closed the blinds beside the door, ostensibly to provide privacy for our discussion. The effect of the solicitor’s insignificant actions immediately triggered me and my response to them was vastly different than the rest of the people present. Immediately, I was no longer a talented and recognized tenor in my mid-thirties: I was a 13-year old boy locked in a cabin.

I was sexually assaulted three times over the course of a single weekend, each incidence of abuse was an escalation, until finally I was locked in a small cabin, restrained and forcibly violated. The perpetrator had waited for me to enter the cabin, then bolted the door behind me and closed the curtains to the small windows. I had no means of escape and the sexual assault enacted upon me was hidden from view. These two actions: bolting the door and closing the curtains, to me were signs of something horrific and terrifying to come.

Victims of sexual abuse, when triggered are known to react or respond to the threat at the same chronological age in which the abuse took place. The lawyer’s deliberate locking of the door and closing the blinds immediately triggered my flight or fight response. My goal, in that moment and from the perspective of my 13-year old self, was to escape that room as quickly as possible; in my mind that was the only way to protect myself. The result was that I quit The Canadian Tenors and walked away from a lucrative singing career, and though I would go on to do a little more performing, that meeting and my reaction to it essentially ended my professional singing career.

When we do not take the time to heal we view life through the lens of our past experience, and we react in ways that are not in proportion with the reality of the moment. I was under no real threat with The Canadian Tenors, though I may have been required to renegotiate my contract for the good of the group and the organization; what may have been lost in that renegotiation was nothing compared to the ultimate loss of my career and income. Without having taken the time to heal, I was reacting to threats instinctively and from the perspective of a boy who had been harmed, not as the man I had become. In hindsight it is obvious that my reaction was too extreme for the circumstance, and yet in the moment, and from my perspective as a victim, it seemed perfectly reasonable and in fact warranted.

Healing trauma is necessary, not only to be able to move on with life, but so that you do not compound the trauma and hurt you experience in life. No one was to blame for how I responded in that meeting, and in reality I was the only one who knew what was happening inside my mind. Not taking the time to heal and not facing past trauma head-on had unintended consequences that extended well beyond the original abuse and seeped into every aspect of my life. Only by consciously taking the time to face past traumas and heal from them was I able to step out of the engrained flight or fight response that I believed was keeping me safe, but was actually causing more harm and damage in my life, much more than the scope of the sexual abuse ever could have had on its own.

Healing is a personal responsibility, a choice we make when the time is right for us, but it is important to appreciate the harm we perpetuate. When you are unable or unwilling to move from a state of victimhood to healing you carry forward the effects and triggers that may be associated with the abuse into every aspect of your life. The harm I perpetuated in my life required me to process more traumas, to deal with more consequences, and not the result of the sexual abuse either, but my own actions. I was not responsible for the sexual abuse that happened to me, but I was responsible for what happened afterwards.