Armee, I'm with you in spirit as you struggle with these memories.
I remember the earlier years of when I started to recall what happened to me. I had a similar reaction to what you're describing. I couldn't completely convince myself that my memories were real, but I noticed that the treatment for childhood SA was working. Like you, I'd lived for decades with the classic SA symptoms. I was a perfect textbook example of an adult survivor of childhood SA, and I responded firmly with the treatment. I used that as evidence to my doubting brain that what I was remembering was true.
This, to me, feels like an example of how my caring, empathetic heart and my logical, engineering head needed to get on the same page. My heart knew what had happened. My head wanted to keep up the facade that I'd had a perfectly normal life. Both could not be right. It either did happen, which explained my symptoms, or it didn't happen, which offers NO explanation for why I had all the symptoms. That logical deduction helped my brain to stop fighting against my heart and accept that by logic, it happened as my heart remembered it.
Also, I am aware of a great deal of fear that still remains in me, of letting this "secret" out. I assume I was either threatened, or my family was threatened, or I was just simply too afraid of getting my abusers in trouble. I'm terrified of accusing an innocent person, while at the same time I'm also afraid of accusing a guilty person who might retaliate, or even worse...if my abuser was a religious leader, which he was, my accusing him of his guilty sins would enrage the Catholic community who would take his sins out on me. My own protectors would kill me for not keeping my little mouth shut. The one time I did try to get my mother's help with the horrific bullying I was enduring at Catholic school, she basically called me a liar. I knew then that it was more important to her to be a good Catholic, than it was to protect her son from them.
From age 25 to 55 I was able to remember how I felt physically and mentally during the abuse. I could smell the linen of the abusers' clothing, and I could feel the body hair and the sweat. I could see the locations (two of them) where these things had happened. But I couldn't see the face of the man. I could feel him, smell him, hear him, and I could see his body, but I couldn't see his face.
A few years ago I began to believe that I knew who it was. A weeklong deep dive in the internet brought up a small, old newspaper article placing him in my parish for only a few months during the exact year and season that I had always remembered it happening. My brain has used this little fact as all the proof it needs that I now know who dunnit.
Again, my heart is with you as you work to make sense of all that's happened. I still believe every word you say about it happening.
