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Trial by Trust: A Memoir of how trust broke me, and awareness rebuilt me
Trial by Trust is a raw and unapologetic memoir that tears open the stitched-up silence around coercive control, cultural oppression, and the twisted expectations placed on women in tightly wound religious communities. From a childhood marked by violence and guilt-tripping disguised as tradition, I was groomed to serve others before ever understanding myself. I was told what to wear, who to love, how to act, and most dangerously, who I was allowed to be.
But I broke away.
This story traces my journey through stolen girlhood, forbidden love, family betrayals, religious condemnation, and domestic violence that threatened to erase me. At fifteen, I ran away with a man almost twenty years older, my sister’s husband, chasing a love that felt more real than anything I’d ever known. What followed was years of punishment, judgment, loss, and endurance. The family courts. The community whispers. The cold grip of survival.
And yet, Trial by Trust isn’t just about breaking down. It’s about the slow, fiery resurrection that comes after. It’s about what happens when a woman has nothing left to lose and decides to rise anyway. I became a mother, fought for my sanity, fought for my children, and started rebuilding my life on my own terms. This isn’t a sob story. It’s a story of reclaiming breath, voice, body, and self; piece by aching piece.
Every chapter in this memoir burns with the need for change, for freedom from systems that blame the victim, that shame female desire, that excuse male violence. I wrote this because I know I’m not alone. I wrote this for the women still in the fire, still silenced, still told to stay small.
Trial by Trust is my reckoning. It’s my roar in a world that told me to whisper.
But I broke away.
This story traces my journey through stolen girlhood, forbidden love, family betrayals, religious condemnation, and domestic violence that threatened to erase me. At fifteen, I ran away with a man almost twenty years older, my sister’s husband, chasing a love that felt more real than anything I’d ever known. What followed was years of punishment, judgment, loss, and endurance. The family courts. The community whispers. The cold grip of survival.
And yet, Trial by Trust isn’t just about breaking down. It’s about the slow, fiery resurrection that comes after. It’s about what happens when a woman has nothing left to lose and decides to rise anyway. I became a mother, fought for my sanity, fought for my children, and started rebuilding my life on my own terms. This isn’t a sob story. It’s a story of reclaiming breath, voice, body, and self; piece by aching piece.
Every chapter in this memoir burns with the need for change, for freedom from systems that blame the victim, that shame female desire, that excuse male violence. I wrote this because I know I’m not alone. I wrote this for the women still in the fire, still silenced, still told to stay small.
Trial by Trust is my reckoning. It’s my roar in a world that told me to whisper.
376 pages, Kindle Edition
Published May 20, 2025
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Displaying 1 - 3 of 3 reviews
February 19, 2026
Trial by Trust: A Memoir of how trust broke me, and awareness rebuilt me by Sofia Derin is a fierce, unfiltered account of coercive control, cultural confinement, and the slow, defiant rebuilding of selfhood. From the opening pages, Derin makes it clear that this is not a softened retelling of trauma it is a confrontation. The memoir examines how violence, guilt, and rigid religious expectations were woven into her upbringing, shaping a girl taught to serve before she ever learned to exist for herself.
What distinguishes this memoir is its emotional intensity paired with self-awareness. The narrative traces stolen adolescence, forbidden love, family fracture, and domestic abuse with striking candor. The decision to run away at fifteen with a man nearly twenty years older her sister’s husband becomes a catalyst for years of judgment, court battles, and survival under relentless scrutiny. Yet the book refuses to remain in devastation. Instead, it documents the painstaking evolution from dependency to consciousness, from silence to voice.
Trial by Trust ultimately becomes a story of reclamation. Derin reframes trust not as naïveté, but as something that must be rebuilt through awareness, boundaries, and self-recognition. Her writing burns with urgency not just to tell her story, but to challenge systems that excuse male violence and shame female autonomy. This is not simply a memoir of endurance; it is a manifesto of awakening. It will resonate deeply with readers navigating coercive environments, religious trauma, or the long path toward reclaiming agency.
What distinguishes this memoir is its emotional intensity paired with self-awareness. The narrative traces stolen adolescence, forbidden love, family fracture, and domestic abuse with striking candor. The decision to run away at fifteen with a man nearly twenty years older her sister’s husband becomes a catalyst for years of judgment, court battles, and survival under relentless scrutiny. Yet the book refuses to remain in devastation. Instead, it documents the painstaking evolution from dependency to consciousness, from silence to voice.
Trial by Trust ultimately becomes a story of reclamation. Derin reframes trust not as naïveté, but as something that must be rebuilt through awareness, boundaries, and self-recognition. Her writing burns with urgency not just to tell her story, but to challenge systems that excuse male violence and shame female autonomy. This is not simply a memoir of endurance; it is a manifesto of awakening. It will resonate deeply with readers navigating coercive environments, religious trauma, or the long path toward reclaiming agency.
January 21, 2026
For adolescents, the idea of who you are and what you believe is an extremely important question to figure out the answer to, and it’s no different for Sofia Derin. Born into a religious family, Derin is raised to uphold her family’s Islamic beliefs, but even at a relatively young age she notices that these ideals seem to contradict what she naturally feels in her heart. Still, the familial and societal expectations are strong, so for Derin, it’s quite the battle to work through those walls of judgment in order to finally be free from the demands of others.
From an early age, the author’s parents placed a tremendous amount of pressure on her; Sofia Derin was expected to be the highly educated, perfect Islamic woman. She grew up with the constant stress of having to please her family without being able to express how she truly felt, and she experiences the same thing later with the future men in her life. The ideals of her family’s religion did not coincide with those of her own, and she is thrown through several scenarios where she must face the consequences of this. One early example that the author uses to describe this concept is that of her sister’s pregnancy. Although she knew that her parents opposed a child out of a wedlock, Derin was highly confused when they pressured her sister to either marry the father of the baby or get an abortion. But, isn’t it also sinful to enter a loveless marriage without the ability to uphold vows? Isn’t it also supposed to be a cardinal sin for a woman to get an abortion? Her sister and the father of her child were pressured into a marriage, even though they didn’t really love each other, and as a sibling, Derin had no choice but to support it. The author describes many more examples of how contradictory her family’s values were, but she was not able to voice her opinions or express her own feelings at all (and couldn’t even comfortably write in her diary about it!). Throughout her book, she describes her survival through several forms of verbal, emotional, mental, and physical abuse, all from people who are supposed to love her. To quote from Derin herself, “I felt that the air I breathed was a sin, everything I said, did, thought, was wrong.” At times, this book can be difficult to continue reading due to the events that constantly seem to spiral around the author, however it’s necessary in order to truly understand what Sophia Derin has overcome in her life. To quote her again, “I realised I’d been shaped by things beyond my control, indoctrinated before I turned 14, coerced after that, pulled between religion, culture, logic, heart. No wonder I was lost.”
Trial by Trust is a story that exposes what can happen to a person when they are forced into a religion, what happens when they try to escape it, and how it can be detrimental to one’s sense of self as they grow into an adult. For blacklisted people who come from religious families, this book could be triggering. This memoir is honest and horrifying, but it still provides hope in the freedom of self-discovery and expression.
From an early age, the author’s parents placed a tremendous amount of pressure on her; Sofia Derin was expected to be the highly educated, perfect Islamic woman. She grew up with the constant stress of having to please her family without being able to express how she truly felt, and she experiences the same thing later with the future men in her life. The ideals of her family’s religion did not coincide with those of her own, and she is thrown through several scenarios where she must face the consequences of this. One early example that the author uses to describe this concept is that of her sister’s pregnancy. Although she knew that her parents opposed a child out of a wedlock, Derin was highly confused when they pressured her sister to either marry the father of the baby or get an abortion. But, isn’t it also sinful to enter a loveless marriage without the ability to uphold vows? Isn’t it also supposed to be a cardinal sin for a woman to get an abortion? Her sister and the father of her child were pressured into a marriage, even though they didn’t really love each other, and as a sibling, Derin had no choice but to support it. The author describes many more examples of how contradictory her family’s values were, but she was not able to voice her opinions or express her own feelings at all (and couldn’t even comfortably write in her diary about it!). Throughout her book, she describes her survival through several forms of verbal, emotional, mental, and physical abuse, all from people who are supposed to love her. To quote from Derin herself, “I felt that the air I breathed was a sin, everything I said, did, thought, was wrong.” At times, this book can be difficult to continue reading due to the events that constantly seem to spiral around the author, however it’s necessary in order to truly understand what Sophia Derin has overcome in her life. To quote her again, “I realised I’d been shaped by things beyond my control, indoctrinated before I turned 14, coerced after that, pulled between religion, culture, logic, heart. No wonder I was lost.”
Trial by Trust is a story that exposes what can happen to a person when they are forced into a religion, what happens when they try to escape it, and how it can be detrimental to one’s sense of self as they grow into an adult. For blacklisted people who come from religious families, this book could be triggering. This memoir is honest and horrifying, but it still provides hope in the freedom of self-discovery and expression.
June 8, 2025
Some parts of this book made me feel so connected to her, I couldn’t stop reading because I needed to know what happened next. I kept thinking, how can one person go through so much? I can’t even imagine the pain she was feeling. The fact that she kept going, kept surviving… it honestly made me just want to hug her. I just wish I could find out what happened afterwards.
Displaying 1 - 3 of 3 reviews