Wildheart Press

There is a kind of trauma people rarely acknowledge.

It’s not the heavily visible trauma of being physically attacked, nor the trauma of witnessing violence firsthand. It’s the under-discussed trauma of discovering that someone you loved, trusted, laughed beside, defended, welcomed into your home, and built memories with… was capable of great and terrible violence. I have lived with that kind of trauma for over a decade now. Even typing that sentence out feels strange.

It’s subtle, because from the outside, people assume time should erase it. That eventually your brain should “move on.” I admit, I used to think that way. However, trauma does not always leave because the calendar changed…sometimes it waits quietly until a memory touches it. It could be a road, …a river, a familiar town, an old photo, certain personalities, a sentence that someone mutters casually, or for me, a video detailing a very similar crime….and then your nervous system remembers all over again. It plays through the details, it remembers all the close moments leading up to the fateful event, and plays everything in a new light.

When I was younger, there were people in my life everyone trusted. People described them as loyal, and protective, rough around the edges maybe, but ultimately harmless. “They wouldn’t hurt a fly,” people used to say. It’s a quote that still reverberates against my skull, because it’s a blatant lie that everyone tends to overlook.

They fought constantly. Violence was always around them somehow. It wasn’t always catastrophic violence…sometimes it was just fights, sometimes just aggression with temper and intimidation. Though I remember them telling me stories about hurting people, stories about making people disappear…They were the kinds of things young people sometimes dismiss as bravado or dark humor or testosterone-fueled nonsense.

Until one day it isn’t nonsense anymore.

And once someone crosses that line into real violence, your entire past rearranges itself. The conversations you once ignored begin replaying in unbearable detail. Your brain starts digging through old memories like rubble after a storm, searching desperately for the moment where you should have known.

You begin asking impossible questions:

• Did I miss signs?
• How could they be this way with me and others if they could show that level of cruelty and unjust behavior to someone defenseless?
• How could someone comfort me while carrying that kind of darkness?
• If they were capable of hurting someone else, could they have hurt me too?
• Could I have prevented them from doing that??

People often think trauma only belongs to direct victims. But proximity to violence can alter a person profoundly, especially when the violent person once sat in your living room, often, when they defended you during vulnerable moments, and especially when your spouse shared a home with them for years.

The mind struggles to reconcile those contradictions. Part of you remembers laughter and friendship and ordinary life, and another part remembers what they became capable of. Those two realities wage war inside you.

There is also a strange kind of grief that comes with all of this.

It’s not grief in the traditional sense, but the grief of losing someone while they are still physically alive somewhere in the world. After criminal violence enters the picture, the person you knew becomes fractured in your memory. Every experience shared with them changes shape retroactively. Moments that once felt warm become stained by what you later learned they were capable of.

For me, everything was haunted. I couldn’t look at anything or anyone the same. I started slowly, though maybe it was quickly, cutting off everyone I knew. Everyone that defended the actions this person committed, especially. I found it difficult to trust others and their judgment, especially in a trying time of my life. I was busy building a family with my husband and didn’t want that life tangled in their precious sense of well-being.

The changes that we endured were astounding. It is grief morphed together with disgust, confusion, betrayal, fear, and longing for a version of reality that no longer exists, and perhaps one of the cruelest parts is this is that the memories themselves do not disappear.

You still remember the kindness, the humanity and the moments where they protected you, comforted you, sat beside you, made you feel safe….but now those memories exist beside the knowledge of what they later chose to do. You will always remember; it won’t ever fade. It will just become something you sit with for a hot minute. It’s been over a decade, and I am still contemplating it.

That contradiction can make mourning feel almost shameful, even though grief is a natural response to losing the person you thought you knew, because in a very real way, they are gone. The person your heart trusted no longer exists untouched inside your memory. I’ve found learning how to carry that is its own form of survival. For years, I buried it, cut ties, and stopped speaking about it. Life moved forward the way life does…children growing older, responsibilities piling higher, and new routines replacing old ones. But buried trauma is not healed trauma.

What nobody tells you is that discovering hidden violence inside someone familiar can permanently alter your relationship with safety.

Such as:

• You start looking at people differently, almost like you’re scanning them for danger.
• You question your instincts.
• You wonder whether danger always hides behind the good qualities the person possesses.
• you become hyper aware of aggression in others.
• You start to remember things differently.

And perhaps hardest of all:
you grieve someone who existed and didn’t exist at the same time.

The friend I knew was real. The memories happened. The laughter, playful adventures and anecdotes, they all happened…but so did the crime. And that contradiction leaves behind a wound society rarely recognizes. There are individuals trained for these experiences and they even have names now: secondary trauma, betrayal trauma, and vicarious trauma. Though clinical language still feels too small sometimes for what it actually does to a human soul.

This is what I want you to know, dearest readers. What you may have experienced is uniquely yours, but you don’t need to share it alone. I am writing this because I know I cannot be the only person carrying this kind of invisible aftermath.

The world often focuses on the crime itself. The headlines and courtroom images paint a spectacle of violence, but very little attention is given to the people standing quietly at the edges of it afterward. The friends, former loved ones, partners, communities, and families trying to reconcile memory with reality are dealing with the overflow that just broke upon them. Violence ripples outward, sometimes for decades. And healing, I am learning slowly, begins with admitting: “Yes. This injured me too.” And real wounds deserve care.