“I was sexually abused when I was really young by my biological father. That has played the biggest part of my whole life for everything. Self confidence, trusting people, hugging people, getting close to people, and anything physical or emotional has always been hard for me. He went to jail for a little while, but that was a long time ago. I haven’t seen my biological father since I was very little. Working out when I was younger really helped. From the time I was 10 to 21 I did boxing, kickboxing and karate. It relieved stress and helped me mentally by focusing on that and not the bad stuff from my past. I had a hard time for so long. I was always in and out of counseling. I used to have night terrors. I used to have a hard time with so many things, but when I had my own kids, everything changed. I don’t know if it’s the fact that I have to take care of them and worry about them that just made me ok. It’s gotten easier to talk about my past, but it’s not something you can get over mentally or physically. I know my dad adopting me, who was my stepdad, helped a lot because I went from having a stepdad and a birth dad to my stepdad adopting me and just becoming my dad. I’ve known him my whole life and it helped because the family became full and that other person is just gone. Your mom and your dad are the two people you should always be able to trust, so when that trust is broken by one of them, it’s really hard. There’s a lot of people who don’t talk about it and who keep it bottled up, which is not healthy. I think it’s important to talk about because there’s a lot of people that go through the same sort of stuff who don’t talk about it and don’t know how other people feel or how they got through it. It took me 21 years to almost completely get over it. I was negative for a long time. One of the counselors I had really helped change my perspective on how I looked at things and made me realize that I’m not a victim and I’m not the one who caused it to happen. I grew from that. Knowing that there wasn’t anything I could have done. It already happened so why be negative and upset about it for my whole life because that just weighs you down and that really plays on your health big time. And now that I have my own kids, I have to make sure they’re healthy and that they understand when bad things happen, you can grow from it. You can get better. You can be happy still. They need to know how to get over things, move past it, be happy, and be healthy. I’m healthy and happy. I’ve had many ups and downs but I always come out of the downs.”