As the holidays approach, I think each day about how these are supposed to be special times, filled with joy, peace and family. For some survivors, those words are unattainable goals, and this time of the year feels excruciating. For me, the holidays are just okay lately. I am in a phase of my healing that includes a lot of mourning. Mourning of the innocence I lost so early and the childhood I could have had. I also mourn the loss of a decade of holiday photos that haunt me and a childhood full of toys my daughter will never play with because they are tainted with pain and disgust. Christmas morning memories of presents piled high under the tree were most definitely a thing for me. At the time, my childhood Christmases seemed “normal” and I felt lucky. Now looking back, the memories are unbearable. Some faces in the pictures are like serrated knives in my mind’s eye. Sadly, those painful faces include my own little face staring back at me, showing the brick-like facade that survival required of me but hiding the sweet and soft little girl that I knew was in there, too scared to use her voice.
As you move through the holiday season with your people, whether they are your family of origin, the family you’ve chosen or maybe a bit of both, stop for a moment and think about the statistics. Odds say that if you’re not the one, that there is at least one member of your group that is healing from childhood sexual trauma, whether out in the open or privately. Both methods of healing can be equally challenging. Surviving in the dark was THE loneliest thing I’ve ever been through. Alternatively, healing out loud can feel like you are a body-sized bruise in a world full of sharp corners. The transition between the darkness and the openness is often just as exhausting.
Telling your truth takes grit, courage, determination and confidence. Hearing someone’s truth isn’t easy either. It can often feel helpless, guilt-ridden, sad and shocking. In case this holiday season a member of your family decides to begin healing out in the open, I’d like to share some advice for how to hear a hard truth like this. The following aren’t tips from professionals, just someone who has a lot of experience saying the hard thing and listening to peoples’ reactions:
1. Believe them. Even if you’re using it as a figure of speech, avoid saying any derivation of “I can’t believe this.” You may ACTUALLY believe everything the person is saying, but hearing those words come out of your mouth, when most likely at some point they feared not being believed, can be retraumatizing. Try something like this to convey your shock and surprise, “Wow, hearing this is really shocking, but I am grateful you felt comfortable enough to share this with me. How can I help you with what you are going through now?”
2. Again, believe them. If you happen to have been in this person’s life, during the time the abuse took place, don’t say something like, “Are you sure, because I don’t remember [abuser name here] as someone who could do something so awful,” or “Maybe you’re remembering wrong.” These are sure-fire ways to get our brave discloser to shut down. Most likely, our survivor has spent a long time going over the intricacies of their abuse and the situations that allowed for it to happen. It’s way more probable that loved ones missed signs of the abuse than the survivor is remembering incorrectly - and suggesting that they are, once again can be extremely retraumatizing. See suggestion above for how to convey shock with what you’re hearing without portraying disbelief.
3. It’s not about you. Lastly, and this one may be especially hard when a loved one is involved: please, please, don’t ask them, “Why didn’t you just say something?” I understand, especially if you are a parent or sibling that is hearing this awful truth for the first time, that your first instinct is to want to go back and help - and that you feel you need to understand why you didn’t seem like a safe person to tell. (see how many “you”s that was?) Take note here: Asking “Why didn’t you tell,” implies the survivor had the luxury of circumstances that ALLOWED for the safe disclosure of the abuse at the time it was happening. For me, I was VERY young and my abuser normalized the abusive activities by calling them play. For others, their physical safety was in question. And for still others…well there are as many reasons we keep the secrets as there are secrets themselves. ALL OF THE REASONS ARE VALID. Asking why a survivor didn’t disclose sooner, or during the abuse, most likely brings up feelings of having to defend themselves. What these questions can SOUND like to the discloser is “You could have stopped it, if only you were (brave or strong or loud) enough to tell me.” We live everyday with the fact that there is most likely at least one adult in the world that could have stopped our abuse, had we only told the truth. Survivors don’t need to be reminded of that. The reality is most likely they didn't FEEL SAFE enough to tell you for whatever reason and that is not on them.
Overall, what to remember if you are witnessing a disclosure or have recently, is that it’s never too late. Never too late to offer help. Never too late to humble yourself and accept whatever hard-to-bare role you may have played in the abuse (if applicable). Never too late to be a part of the solution for the next generation. That solution starts with open, honest conversations that don’t revolve around the feelings of the listener, but the discloser. That solution starts with the unknowns becoming known, a little bit at a time, regardless of how hard it is to hear….because I promise, it was harder to tell.
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