I thought my troubled upbringing wrecked my chance of ever finding love. Decades later, I discovered I was wrong.

• This is an adapted excerpt from "I Just Haven't Met You Yet: Finding Empowerment in Dating, Love, and Life."
• Tracy Strauss is an award-winning writer who teaches at Harvard University.

The following is an adapted excerpt from Tracy Strauss' book, "I Just Haven't Met You Yet: Finding Empowerment in Dating, Love, and Life," published by Skyhorse.

"Did the surgeon remove part of your brain," my father said, "when he took off part of your breast?"

I was a teenager, standing in my bedroom doorway, listening to the silverware sparring with food on the dinner plates in the kitchen. I imagined my father cutting his meat with the jagged edge of his knife. There was silence. I imagined in the silence that my mother, who was recently hospitalized for the removal of a borderline-malignant lump in her breast, was dishing more peas onto her plate, letting them tumble in circular patterns, poking their middles with the points of her fork.

Pots and pans crashed on the linoleum kitchen floor. The sound lodged itself in my ribs. Taking a few steps to the hallway closet, beside my brother's vacant bedroom (he was away at college), I retrieved a thick towel and then tiptoed, barefoot, toward the bathroom, halfway between my bedroom and the kitchen. I counted each step, feeling my skin brushing against the bark-colored carpet, until I reached the cool tiles of the bathroom floor: safe.

I closed the bathroom door, pressing the lock securely in place, then undressed quickly, piling my clothes on the counter by the sink. I stepped into the shower and turned on the faucet to drown out the sounds of arguing.

The steady stream of hot water filled my ears, pelted my back, and flowed over my body, warming my shoulders and chest. Shutting my eyes tightly, I prayed the arguing would be over when I turned off the water. But when I did, things were worse.

I kept a secret

When I told one of my friends I was upset that my parents were having marital problems, she said, "I'm not worried about you." She said there were people she worried about, but I wasn't one of them. I was the type of person who could handle anything.

I hadn't told her my secret, the one I kept from even myself: that my father was sexually abusing me.

I could handle anything and everything. I numbed myself in order to do so.

When I was an adult, early in my PTSD recovery, my therapist explained dissociation — how a person can "go someplace else" in her mind to escape an experience that's threatening or unbearable. That was how I'd pushed away what was happening, even blocked out some of my trauma, until I was in a physically and emotionally safe enough place, as an adult, to fully grapple with the details.

Dissociation allowed me to grow up as an overachieving student in high school and college. I became an adult whom clinicians in the trauma field labeled "high functioning": I was a woman with an advanced degree, an apartment, a full-time job, and a relatively stable — though socially isolated — life. Other survivors, I learned, coped by developing severe dissociative identity disorder or addictions, or led a life of crime and prostitution, or became homeless. Early in my recovery, when I participated in a trauma-education and coping-skills group with 10 other adult childhood-sexual-abuse survivors, I was one of only two who engaged in conversation. The others sat around the table coloring with crayons for self-soothing. Sure, I had issues, but I managed. I was lucky.

I thought I was failing at love

While my friends were getting married and starting families, I was perpetually single. I spent my 30s in therapy three times a week, coming to terms with my past and working to overcome the obstacles that my abuse history had placed in the development of my love life. I thought that if I worked hard enough, I could catch up to my peers; I, too, could find my life partner.

I met men through online dating, speed dating, religious groups, hiking groups, adult education classes, and meet-up groups, but I was always disappointed by either the lack of connection I felt with the pool of potential boyfriends or the rejections I received from the bachelors I really wanted.

Though I felt unlucky in love, I was on a lifesaving journey to untangle my heart from my damaging past. My upbringing was built upon a self-destructive belief system that I needed to see, understand, and dismantle. Until I did, I couldn't fully embrace dating.

For years I believed my romance fails were all for nothing, but in truth they weren't "fails" and they were all for something. On the way to finding my life partner, I'd find myself. The men I met, the dating experiences I tried to navigate, and the relationships I attempted to have showed me the way.

I just didn't know it yet.