Call It What It Is: I Was Groomed
- Shannon Brown
- Mar 8
- 5 min read
Trigger Warning: This post discusses child abuse, grooming, coercive control, and emotional manipulation. Please read with care and prioritize your emotional safety.
There are words that feel heavy in your mouth.
Words that do not want to be spoken. Words that, once said, change something forever.
For most of my life, I could not say this one out loud.
My stepfather groomed me.
He began when I was five years old.
Even typing that feels unreal. There is something disorienting about realizing that what shaped your childhood has a name, and not just a name, but a definition. Grooming is not a misunderstanding. It is not blurred affection. It is not a child being “confused.” Grooming is a deliberate, manipulative, and often long-term process in which an adult builds trust and emotional connection with a child for the purpose of exploitation or sexual abuse. It is calculated. It is staged. It is designed to lower resistance and reduce the risk of being exposed.
For me, the beginning is something I can now see clearly, even though at the time I did not understand what it meant. I was five years old, running around the kitchen table like children do, laughing and playing. In a moment that should have been ordinary, he grabbed my arm and pulled me close. What followed crossed a boundary that no adult should ever cross with a child. He told me I was beautiful and started kissing up and down my chest. I remember feeling confused and frozen, sensing that something was wrong even though I did not yet have the language to explain it. Moments like that are often how grooming begins, disguised inside normal family spaces, happening so quickly and quietly that a child is left trying to make sense of something they were never supposed to experience.
But when you are five, you do not see stages. You see a grown-up. You see authority. You see someone who tells you what is normal.
A father, or father figure, is supposed to be someone you trust. Someone you rely on to keep you safe. Someone who protects you from harm. That is the role. That is the expectation. That is the foundation children build their understanding of the world upon.
Instead, throughout my childhood and adolescent formative years, the person in that role slowly shaped my world in ways I could not name at the time.
Grooming often begins subtly. It can look like special attention. Like praise, gifts, and being chosen. It creates emotional dependency. It slowly erodes boundaries, sometimes starting with innocent-seeming touch or words that feel slightly uncomfortable but are easy to dismiss. It builds secrecy. It isolates. It convinces the child that the relationship is special, different, not something others would understand.
Looking back now, I can see the patterns clearly.
He made me feel undesirable to anyone but him. He made me feel unwanted by others. He compared me to my mother, usually in ways meant to diminish me, unless it benefited him not to. He controlled who I spoke to. He made it clear I could not date. He threatened to hurt anyone I grew close to.
That is not protection.
That is isolation.
That is control.
That is grooming.
One of the cruelest parts of grooming, especially within families, is that it does not only target the child. Often, the adult also grooms the surrounding community, presenting themselves as trustworthy, upstanding, devoted. When the outside world sees someone charming and involved, it becomes nearly impossible for a child to imagine being believed. Doubt is built into the system before disclosure ever happens.
And children believe adults.
We internalize what we are told about ourselves. If we are told we are unwanted, we believe it. If we are told no one else would want us, we absorb it. If love feels conditional, we adapt to survive it.
For years, I carried feelings I did not have language for. I thought something was wrong with me. I thought I was too sensitive and dramatic. Too broken. I could not understand why I struggled with trust, why relationships felt confusing, why shame sat so heavily in my body.
Grooming does not end when the behavior ends. It embeds itself in your nervous system. It shapes your understanding of safety, intimacy, and worth.
Survivors often experience anxiety, depression, PTSD symptoms, guilt, difficulty forming healthy attachments, and deep confusion around boundaries. The body remembers what the mind sometimes buries.
There is something profoundly unsettling about realizing that what you experienced follows documented stages. That it was not accidental. That it was strategy.
It is a sick and hard reality to say out loud that someone who was supposed to protect me was instead manipulating and isolating me.
But naming it matters.
Silence protects grooming. Language disrupts it.
When we refuse to call it what it was, we continue carrying shame that never belonged to us.
Children do not groom themselves. Adults do. The responsibility was never mine.
Writing my memoir, Because of Jane, was one of the first times I allowed myself to begin naming the truth. The story is told through the voice of Jane, the childhood doll who became my comfort, my protector, and the safe place where my younger self could put feelings she didn’t yet understand. Through Jane’s perspective, I was able to begin exploring the shadows of my childhood and the ways a child searches for safety.
That story has grown into something larger than a single book. Through The Jane Project, I hope to create space for survivors to share their own stories of resilience and the objects, memories, or people that helped them survive. Many survivors had a “Jane, " a stuffed animal, a blanket, a book, an imaginary world, something that helped them endure moments when they felt alone.
Sometimes healing begins with simply being able to say the truth out loud.
If you suspect grooming in a child’s life, trust your intuition. Notice excessive attention toward one child. Notice secret gifts. Notice isolation. Notice when a child seems fearful, withdrawn, or suddenly carrying knowledge beyond their years. Pay attention to adults who seem overly invested or “too good to be true.” Grooming thrives in secrecy and disbelief.
And to the child I was, you were five. You trusted because that is what children do. You were not complicit. You were not responsible. You were surviving in the only way you knew how.
Today, I can say it clearly.
I was groomed.
And saying it out loud is not weakness. It is reclamation.
Silence protected him.
Truth protects me.
And if speaking these words helps even one person recognize grooming, believe a child, or understand their own story a little more clearly, then the silence was worth breaking.
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