Woman finds healing through local organizations

You are not alone, her therapist would tell Kelsey Wright over and over. A staggering number of girls are sexually abused during childhood.

And Wright, who was working her way through panic and anxiety attacks years after she was sexually abused at the age of 12, would absorb those words without really quite believing it.

She felt so isolated.

Then she joined a teen sexual-abuse survivors' group at Youth Eastside Services. For about eight weeks, she and six other girls grew to know and trust one another. Midway through the sessions, they opened up and talked about their abuse — heartbreaking episodes of victimization by a family friend, a brother, a stepfather, a coach.

"The first time we told our stories, we sobbed," said Wright, who is tall and thin, with pale skin. "The tears were flowing, and I could not stop."

Knowing other girls who had experienced the same thing helped break down Wright's sense of isolation. "It's so empowering to know I am not alone in this," said Wright, who is now 20 and lives in Seattle. She has found, too, that telling her story helps spread the word about the importance of healing the scars of abuse by going through therapy.

Youth Eastside Services (YES) provides individual therapy on a sliding scale to sexual-abuse survivors. It's also one of a handful of family-service counseling agencies that offer group counseling to the survivors of child sexual abuse.

While it is difficult to persuade teens to come to a class and talk to strangers about the most traumatic episode of their lives, most come away feeling stronger and more able to cope with their abuse, said Debbi Halela, the director of general counseling services for the agency.

"It is an amazingly positive experience," Halela said. The girls often bond so closely with one another that "surprisingly, it's a lot of fun. It turns into quite a celebration of individual strengths."

In the first three quarters of this year, YES helped 19,288 youth and their families, including 3,095 clients who received mental-health treatment and counseling.

The number of young people who come to YES specifically for sexual-abuse counseling is relatively small, about 30 girls a year, said YES spokesman Mel Baer. But many of YES' clients are dealing with a whole host of traumatic childhood events — from physical abuse to substance abuse — and sexual abuse is often part of that fabric.

In South King County, Kent Youth and Family Services plays a similar role, offering mental-health and substance-abuse counseling. Both agencies are part of The Seattle Times Fund For The Needy, which has provided $12 million to local charities since 1979.

Between 60 and 75 percent of the young people helped by counseling have been sexually abused at some point in their childhood or teen years, said Mike Heinisch, the executive director of the Kent agency, which generally serves about 8,000 to 10,000 people a year.

Both YES and Kent Youth and Family Services have seen requests for their help grow along with the downturn in the economy. There's also been an increase in the number of teenagers who have fled their homes and are living on the street — in many cases because parents dealing with economic stress have lashed out at their children, driving them away, Heinisch said.

Both agencies offer services to everyone, regardless of ability to pay.

YES' sliding-scale fees were an important consideration for Wright, who did not have the money for $100-a-session counseling through private therapists.

She was in her late teens when she began having vivid flashbacks of sexual abuse. She would struggle to breathe, and pick compulsively at her skin.

A high-school counselor directed her to YES, which took her case with a minimum of paperwork. They charged her just $5 for one-on-one therapy sessions.

"We definitely don't turn anybody away," Halela said. "We try to stick to our mission of helping people regardless of their ability to pay."

Wright has gone through more than two years of therapy, including two series of group-therapy sessions. The one-on-one work and group therapy have together helped her control her panic attacks, and her self-confidence has grown significantly.

"I cannot say how great therapy is and how much it has helped me," she said. "The more I talk about it, the more comfortable I am. I'm not scared to tell people what happened. It has made me a stronger person than I was."

Earlier this year, she spoke before 700 people at YES' Invest in Youth breakfast. It was a nerve-wracking number of people, and Wright had never talked to such a large group before. But she felt so strongly about the help she had received that she stepped up to the microphone and told her story.

After the event, a woman approached Wright with tears in her eyes. She said her own daughter had gone through abuse as a child and was now getting help for it. Wright's sense of self-confidence and her description of the importance of therapy gave the woman hope that her daughter could also be healed.

And that's why Wright has stepped forward to talk about her abuse.

"That is the reason I do this, to help other people," she said.

Katherine Long: 206-464-2219 or klong@seattletimes.com