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Twilight: My story 1

The beginning of my abuse...


I think my nervous system learned fear through twilight.

Not darkness itself. Not night. But the hour before it.

That moment when the light began to thin at the windows and the house subtly changed shape around us. When day withdrew from the rooms and uncertainty entered with the coming dark.


It was usually then that the men arrived.


My mother was a single mother abandoned by my father, abandoned by much of her family, and ultimately abandoned by many of the systems supposedly there to help her. By the time I was born, alcoholism had consumed much of her life. Looking back now, I suspect there may also have been severe untreated mental illness beneath it all — perhaps bipolar disorder, perhaps trauma of her own — but in those days such women were often reduced to a single word: alcoholic.

In my social services file there is a record of her telephoning a local hospital in distress, crying:

“Please help me, I think I’m mental.”

Yet the report simply moves on. There is no investigation. No urgency. No attempt to look beneath the addiction to the frightened, collapsing woman underneath it.

Alcohol became her sole identity in the eyes of the authorities. And once a person becomes a category rather than a human being, genuine help often disappears.

Social workers described our small council house as a “pig sty,” with broken windows, empty bottles, and mattresses on the floor. Unable to cope, Mum’s home gradually became what one report called a “doss-house” for local addicts and drifters. Neighbours described a constant stream of unsavoury people passing through the open door at all hours of the day and night.


When they heard a baby crying for hours on end, they would call my grandfather.

He would arrive quietly, step over the unconscious bodies scattered across the floor, find me somewhere amongst the chaos, and carry me home.

There, another world existed.


I would be bathed in the kitchen sink beside floating plastic ducks. Fed properly. Wrapped in clean blankets. My colic-ridden nights soothed with stories softly read beside me until morning came.


Then eventually Mum would realise I had gone.


She'd call the Police, acuse my grandad of kidnapping and theyd come and get me, take me back to the men with sticky fingers. Amongst the drifting bodies and half-conscious adults, there were sometimes men who paid too much attention to the small silent girl curled into a chair pretending to sleep. Men with stale breath and wandering hands. Men who touched children where no adult should ever touch a child.


This was sexual abuse.


There is no softer name for it.


And though this was not the only abuse that shaped my childhood, it was one of the first experiences that taught my nervous system a terrible lesson: danger arrived with evening.

Later, when I finally met my sister and saw parts of her own records, some of the questions I had carried for years were answered. It became clear that my mother had known far more than I had once wanted to believe. Pills had been used to sedate my sister too — so excessively that she was eventually hospitalised.


For a long time I wondered why my mother bought me the Wendy House.

Did she know what was happening downstairs? Did she see? Did someone tell her?Was it guilt? Protection? Desperation?

Perhaps, in her own damaged way, it was the only refuge she knew how to offer me.

That tiny house became sacred in my psyche.

A place with walls. A door. A boundary between myself and the world beyond.

Even now, decades later, I still long for tiny safe spaces whenever life becomes overwhelming: cabins, caravans, garden sheds, small hidden rooms, anywhere enclosed enough to keep the world outside.

Trauma leaves strange fingerprints on a life.

Even now, as evening approaches, I often feel something tighten subtly inside me. Not consciously at first. Just a shift in the body. An alertness. A need to secure the house before night fully settles.

For years I believed this was merely anxiety. A quirk of temperament.

But trauma survives in the nervous system long after the conscious mind has learned to minimise it.


To this day, I check doors, windows, locks, handles. During periods of stress, I sometimes find myself returning repeatedly to touch them again and again, as though some ancient part of my nervous system still believes danger can be kept outside if vigilance is maintained long enough.

For traumatised children, safety often stops being a feeling.

It becomes a task.

Something maintained through rituals, anticipation, hypervigilance, and the exhausting attempt to predict danger before it arrives.

As a child, I learned early that danger had rhythms.

And one of them was twilight.


Support & Resources

If themes in this piece resonate with you, or if you are affected by childhood abuse, trauma, coercive control, addiction within the family, or sexual abuse, the following organisations may offer support, information, or a safe place to speak.

UK Support Organisations

Trauma & Complex PTSD Resources

Recommended Reading

  • The Body Keeps the Score — Bessel van der Kolk

  • Complex PTSD: From Surviving to Thriving — Pete Walker

  • Adult Children of Emotionally Immature Parents — Lindsay C. Gibson

  • Trauma and Recovery — Judith Lewis Herman

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© 2026 Sinead Spearing

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