From Victim to Survivor

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From Victim to Survivor ❗️ Explicit Content Warning: 18+. Poetry, healing, hope, & the journey home.

From surviving child s*x abuse, adoption, & familial trafficking to learning how to live again.

They call her unstable when she questions the lies. Bitter when she remembered. Difficult when she demanded answers. And...
10/17/2026

They call her unstable when she questions the lies. Bitter when she remembered. Difficult when she demanded answers. And crazy when she refuses to be silent. But here’s what they never counted on……

That little girl would grow up.

She would learn to recognize the difference between truth and manipulation. She would start asking questions. Opening files. Reading reports. Following the paper trail that others hoped would remain buried. And eventually, she would understand something that changed everything.

She wasn’t the family secret. What happened to her was. And she was never obligated to protect it.

Crista Johnston 🤍 Advocacy in Action
Survivor Justice Movement™

For generations, women who dared to speak about what happened behind closed doors were dismissed with a single word.CRAZ...
10/17/2026

For generations, women who dared to speak about what happened behind closed doors were dismissed with a single word.

CRAZY.

Not because their stories weren’t true. But because calling a woman crazy was often easier than confronting the people who hurt her.

Families protect reputations. Communities protect appearances. Institutions protect themselves.

And somewhere in the middle of all that protecting, the woman who needed protection was left standing alone.

Crista Johnston 🤍 Advocacy in Action

The cruelest thing about surviving childhood trauma is that the child carries the consequences while the adults carry on...
09/25/2026

The cruelest thing about surviving childhood trauma is that the child carries the consequences while the adults carry on with their lives. Until one day, that child grows up and decides she is done carrying everybody’s else’s secrets.

Crista Johnston | Advocacy in Action 🤍

No one is coming to save you. You have to save yourself.
09/24/2026

No one is coming to save you. You have to save yourself.

Down here in the Deep South in Tennessee, some families bury their dead in the churchyard and their secrets beneath the ...
09/24/2026

Down here in the Deep South in Tennessee, some families bury their dead in the churchyard and their secrets beneath the floorboards. They dress up on Sunday mornings, bow their heads in prayer, and sit beneath stained-glass windows as though God himself has never seen what happens behind their closed doors. But the walls remember. The old houses remember. And so does the little girl who grew up inside them.

A child was s*xually abused. The adults who should have protected her knew more than they ever admitted. The systems entrusted with her safety failed her, and the truth was buried beneath decades of silence, denial, and carefully constructed lies. They thought time would take care of it. That the little girl would grow up, learn to keep her mouth shut, and carry their secrets to her grave.

But they forgot something about the South. The ground has a way of giving up what people bury.

And that little girl grew up. She became a woman who started opening every file, reading every report, examining every contradiction, and following the paper trail straight back to the people who thought their secrets were safe. The ink had faded. The houses had changed hands. The people who knew had grown old. But the truth was still there. Waiting……

And now the little girl they tried to silence has become the woman who is telling the story they never wanted told.

That little girl was me. And I didn’t come back to ask permission. I came back with the receipts.

Crista Johnston
From Victim to Survivor
Advocacy in Action 🤍

I have been thinking about the strange way an entire life can be accounted for incorrectly. Someone hurts you, and someh...
09/22/2026

I have been thinking about the strange way an entire life can be accounted for incorrectly. Someone hurts you, and somehow your reaction becomes the important part. Someone lies about you, and your insistence on correcting the lie becomes the problem. Someone betrays you, and your inability to pretend nothing happened becomes evidence that you are difficult.

Eventually, if you hear their version long enough, you start absorbing it as information about yourself. Maybe I am too sensitive. Too emotional. Too difficult. Too much. Until one day, you start looking at the books.

The accounting of a life…..
⛓️‍💥Who did what.
⛓️‍💥Who knew what.
⛓️‍💥Who said what.
⛓️‍💥What happened first.
⛓️‍💥What happened next.
⛓️‍💥What was documented.
⛓️‍💥What was omitted.
⛓️‍💥What everyone agreed not to talk about.

And when you stop accepting somebody else’s accounting and start examining the original entries, the numbers do not balance. My pain had been entered as the debt when it was actually the RECEIPT. My anger wasn’t the beginning of the story. My refusal to stay quiet wasn’t the damage. Those things were evidence that something had happened.

You can spend years trying to correct something inside yourself that was never actually wrong with you. Sometimes healing isn’t becoming a different person. Sometimes it is finally auditing the story you were given and discovering that they kept the books deceptively wrong. So now YOU know this too.

And if you believed their accounting without ever asking to see the ledger, you should have to sit with what that cost someone who was never allowed in the room to defend herself. I already paid for it.

The weight of knowing the truth is now yours.

— Crista Johnston

Explicit Content Warning ⛔️ In the south, monsters don't always chase children through fields.Sometimes, they abuse them...
07/03/2026

Explicit Content Warning ⛔️
In the south, monsters don't always chase children through fields.
Sometimes, they abuse them numerous times openly, outside on a hammock on Old Hickory Lake and call it love.
While everyone looked the other way, I was crying for help.
I drew a picture of the abuse and handed it to my second-grade teacher at West Elementary.
You ready for this?
I got in trouble.
Me. The child.
Not the abuser.
Not the adults.
When the teacher called my parents that day, my adoptive mom picked me up from school and blamed me.
My adoptive mom said I had watched something inappropriate on TV.
Always blaming me.
No, Mom.
I was drawing an actual picture of your husband s*xually abusing me outside in the hammock on the lake, near the boat dock.
The abuse happened hundreds of times, at two separate addresses, inside, outside, while you were there, while you were gone, it happened to me, it happened to one of my friends, remember or do you suddenly have amnesia again?
THAT was the inappropriate part,
Doris.
And you knew that too.
That's why you let it go on until I turned 13 and I went to the police.
Not to save myself.
To save my sister.
But you have always been only interested in saving yourself, your image, and the dysfunctional household you protected at everyone else's expense.
The proof is in the life you built after choosing yourself over the many children you never protected.
—Crista Johnston

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