Sharing the Words

Performed on the 7th Feb 2026 at ‘Sharing the Words’, an evening of performances from the CSA Survivor community. Part of the UpFront Survivors Weekender, hosted by the Viv Gordon Company.

Hello all. My name is Ennis Welbourne. I use they/them pronouns. I am a survivor of sexual, physical, emotional and neglectful child abuse. I find it difficult to talk about the sexual child abuse in particular because I have so few details of what happened. I don’t know who sexually abused me. I don’t know how old I was or how many times it happened. Because I don’t know these details, it’s been difficult to accept the memories I do have.

I experienced significant memory loss during the first ten years of my life. My reality was intolerable so I would dissociate to survive. I would dissociate all the time. I moved away from pain and distress into a disconnected limbo, a state between life and death. When I would forget, it was like parts of me were getting lost or had died. 

When a parent left and the physical abuse stopped, this had a sudden and dramatic impact on my sense of safety and my ability to be present. I wasn’t able to process this transition at the time, so I shoved my first decade deep down inside, while I tried to start a new life.

That period during the worst of the child abuse has been returning to me in different ways for many years. Sometimes, part of my cognition switches to how it was when I was under ten years old. The past moves up towards my consciousness, lights up old neural pathways with an urgent message of fear and confusion.

I’ve begun to re-frame these experiences as a good thing. I get to feel what it was like again. I get to deeply connect to my childhood self, to someone who no one really listened to or saw. I have another opportunity to remember things about myself that I’ve forgotten.

Every memory of abuse I’ve managed to keep hold of has provide important context to understanding who I am today. I am so grateful to my body for preserving and replaying my memories of child sexual abuse until eventually I was able to truly listen and accept them at twenty-five years old.

It has been important to me to validate my experiences through disclosing them. In my teens, I started using my creative writing as an outlet to process the physical abuse. First, in the form of fiction, then nonfiction as I disclosed to others through my writing. I felt afraid my peers would say I deserved it, or I was lying – and I did experience stigma sharing my story. But my disclosure also encouraged some to share stories of their own. I became aware that I was only one of many young people struggling to process abuse. 

I learnt about the concept of trauma on the internet during this time. I found the labels like CPTSD, OCD and dissociation, which initially felt good. I was recognising parts of my experience in diagnosis criteria and symptom lists. But over time, I saw how poorly fitting these medical labels were for me and others around me. I became uncomfortable with being labelled as mentally ill and disordered for successfully adapting to survive child abuse.

This pathologising framework made me feel like I was socially, emotionally, biologically broken. That I was doomed to live a miserable life because of what was done to me. I was told talking about my experiences was only appropriate in the context of a therapy room with a trained professional. But I knew from experience I needed to tell my story to the people in my life so they could know me, connect with me.

In the last year I’ve been trying to see myself outside of the medical model. To question language around what it means to be healed or recovered, and how I talk about distress and difference. These changes meant I was losing language faster than I could gain new ways of thinking and speaking. I was feeling isolated by this loss, but the upfront creative leadership training programme came at the right time to support me through this period. I was provided a space to practice alternative ways to talk about myself and the CSA survivor community. 

This was possible thanks to Viv and Kate, the co-founders of the Viv Gordon Company. It is so rare for me to be able access opportunities in the arts like this. I was able to complete a 3-month training programme, deliver my first ever in-person writing workshop, and even share my words about child sexual abuse with you, on this stage tonight. I really value those who are open to see me, hold space for me, and challenge me. So thank you Kate and Viv, and all of you here tonight, joining in, ready to witness and uplift our performers tonight. Let’s do this!