Being anchored in strong family attachments – and his own accelerated maturity – have given Brigham the strength and the emotional resources to survive years of betrayal and abuse by an uncle, and the cataclysms that followed Brigham’s disclosure at the age of 18. Brigham has not only survived. With the unwavering support of his parents, the help of a therapist, and his own inner strength, Brigham is now beginning to look beyond the years of trauma, to a future “without this backpack weighing me down.”

But getting to this place was not easy. Brigham endured years of isolation, threatened into silence by an uncle who groomed and then terrorized and abused him from the age of nine to sixteen. He endured years of depression. The way back from those years of isolation and despair has been a journey requiring reserves of fortitude that not many 21-year-olds are challenged to find within themselves. Hours and hours in therapy. Hours spent bent over a pad of paper, writing out his pain and anger, transforming them into poetry, finding ways finally to express what he was for so long forced to hold in silence. “Coming alive has been a liberation. Not all at once. It is happening day by day.”