Johanny OrtegaTaking Away the Monster’s Power
There was a Threads post I read last night that stayed with me long after I closed the app. It was about sexual-abuse survivors and how, for many, the deepest wound isn’t only what happened. It’s how their families respond after. One comment read something like, “Parents feel shame because they failed to do the one thing they were supposed to do: protect their child. Out of that shame, they deny it ever happened. And after denying it for so long, the silence itself becomes real.”
That line hit me hard because I know that silence. I’ve lived with it.
When something horrific happens in a family, the natural instinct should be to protect and comfort. But for many survivors, the opposite happens. The adults retreat behind fear and shame, rewriting the story so they can live with themselves. According to trauma psychologists, denial is a common defense mechanism when the truth threatens a person’s sense of identity. A 2018 study published in Frontiers in Psychology found that families dealing with abuse often enter what researchers call “protective denial”—a state where acknowledging the trauma would mean admitting they failed at love’s most basic duty: safety.
That’s what builds the silence.
In families like mine, silence doesn’t just linger. It mutates. It becomes a living thing, a presence that sits at the dinner table and watches TV with you. Everyone senses it, but no one names it. It’s easier to pretend it isn’t there than to face what it means. Over time, the silence becomes the monster in the house: invisible, but powerful enough to shape every conversation, every relationship, every unspoken rule about what can and cannot be said.
That’s the monster I write about.
In The Ordinary Bruja, Marisol lives inside that same haunted quiet—the generational kind that passes from mother to daughter like an heirloom nobody wants. Her mother Josefina tried to protect her the only way she knew how: by wrapping truth in stories, lullabies, and warnings disguised as folklore. It’s something I’ve seen in so many immigrant and Latine families—pain gets encoded in parables because direct confrontation feels dangerous or disrespectful. Storytelling becomes the only safe language for survival.
When I write, I’m not just crafting fiction. I’m translating silence. Every ghost, every haunting, every ancestral whisper in my books represents something once buried. Writing becomes a kind of exorcism; a way to let those spirits finally speak.
People sometimes ask why my stories lean into darkness. I tell them it’s because I grew up in a world that pretended darkness didn’t exist. Writing horror and magical realism lets me drag it into the light. Horror, at its best, doesn’t glamorize pain, instead it forces us to look at what we’d rather avoid. Like the psychologist Carl Jung said, “What you resist, persists.” By writing the very things I was told to keep quiet about, I stop them from persisting in me.
Silence is powerful because it isolates. It convinces survivors that they’re alone in their truth, when the reality is heartbreakingly common. According to the Rape, Abuse & Incest National Network (RAINN), about 1 in 9 girls and 1 in 20 boys experience sexual abuse before age 18. Yet fewer than 38% of these crimes are reported. And of those reported, many families respond with disbelief or hostility, which re-traumatizes survivors and pushes them deeper into isolation. That’s how silence becomes its own ecosystem of harm.
For years, I didn’t understand that silence is a form of participation. When we choose not to speak, we hand the microphone to the monster. The more everyone avoids naming it, the more it grows. It slithers between generations, showing up as anxiety, addiction, or perfectionism—disguises that look different but share the same root: unspoken pain.
In writing The Ordinary Bruja, I decided I was done letting the silence win. Through Marisol, I took away the monster’s mask. Her journey isn’t about becoming fearless. It’s about facing what her family refused to confront. When she begins to see her ancestors’ ghosts, she’s really seeing what they hid from her: the pain, the guilt, and the truths that were too heavy to hold.
I’ve learned that every survivor’s story of healing starts with naming. That first whisper of “This happened to me” is an act of rebellion against shame. Shame thrives in secrecy, and truth starves it. When survivors speak, even through fiction, they reclaim their narrative. Research from trauma expert Dr. Bessel van der Kolk, author of The Body Keeps the Score, explains that storytelling helps survivors integrate fragmented memories and rebuild a coherent sense of self. In other words, telling the story—whether aloud, on paper, or through art—is literally how we rewire our brains toward healing.
That’s why I write.
I don’t write because I enjoy the dark; I write because I refuse to let it win. I write to remind myself that even if no one else names the monster, I can. And once I do, it loses its grip.
There’s a particular kind of freedom that comes when you finally drag the unspoken into the light. It’s painful, yes—but it’s also purifying. Every time I describe the ghost, or give a voice to a silenced woman, I feel a piece of that generational weight lift. It doesn’t disappear overnight. Healing never does. But the act of storytelling, of choosing to remember and speak, is a daily declaration: I survived, and the monster doesn’t get to live rent-free anymore.
Denial doesn’t protect anyone. It only delays the inevitable reckoning. Silence is not safety. It’s surrender.
So, yes, my monsters talk. They whisper, cry, and sometimes sing. But they’re mine now. They don’t walk freely through my house anymore.
And that, to me, is what real magic looks like.
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