From the very early stages in our lives, the message girls are sent is to be sweet, nurturing, appealing and pleasant, both in our appearance and in our speech. Fast forward 30 years and even after the revolution of the #MeToo movement, we still live in a world where hearing the stories of survivors sets off questions surrounding their credibility and often of the timing of their truth-telling - many of us never reveal our abuse until adulthood. Public support of survivors seems to have a statute of limitations - we become suspect of their stories if they wait “too long” to tell them. What our world doesn't see of the process, is that quite often survivors have to first survive the thing - the actual trauma and abuse. Then we have to survive the healing. Then, if we are so inclined, we have to survive the telling. Many of us never get to this point because of how uncomfortable child sexual trauma makes people, as a society. Because the topic is so unpalatable to our culture, we ask survivors to stay hidden. We would rather them stay quiet and small - so the awfulness of the thing itself can’t take up too much space in our minds. This social silencing of our voices perpetuates the idea that we should feel shame. And if you zoom out and look at this from a bird's eye view, what we ask of our survivors - to sit alone in their dark smallness - looks a lot like what our abusers asked of us all those years ago.
The non-survivor community may not understand the dynamics at play when children endure sexual abuse without telling a trusted adult. When I revealed my abuse to my mother, one of her first reactions was to ask me why I didn’t tell her it was happening to me as a child. (As a side note, please take a moment to think about what you’d say to someone, if you were ever confided in like this - asking them why they didn’t tell sooner, or why they didn’t scream “no” the whole time, implies THEY did something wrong). My abuse happened in dark spaces, with locked doors, often without the safety of my parents at home. All of this darkness and secrecy sent signals to me to stay quiet and that I should feel shame. This is how the secrets stayed secret. How the unknown never became known. The question of why I didn’t tell my truth as a child is something I’ve explored deeply in therapy. It’s hard to grapple with keeping something secret that I knew deep down felt wrong. From a place of trauma, my Broken says “You could have stopped this.” From a place of intellect and understanding, my Brave says, “You were a child, asked to stay silent and shamed into keeping the secret.” I walk through life hearing both voices and that is where the struggle in parenting through trauma begins.
Intentionally freeing my daughter of feeling pressured to be quiet, shameful, or to not take up too much space in our world, is how I parent each day. Statistics say she is likely to be abused or assaulted at some point in her life. I live everyday with the fear of that potentiality. Based on that, and because I believe it’s the right thing to do, I refuse to let silence or shame be her go-to tools, like they were mine. Somebody once said something like, “Discomfort breeds growth.” If we all support survivors by listening, encouraging and accepting, we could create a world in which brave truth-telling is supported, rather than shame, silence and smallness. Isn’t this the world you want to live in?
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