Throughout my posts in this blog, you will hear me reference My Brave and My Broken - thus the name of the blog itself. My Brave is the part of me that’s able to write this blog. It’s the part of me that has stood up to oppressive employers and doctors who sexually harass and who chooses to confront my survivorhood every day. My Broken is the part of me that can’t outrun the triggers and the panic attacks. The part of me that needs breaks from my daughter in vulnerable moments and whose mind is sometimes too full of the dark to have room for the light.
Recently I’ve been extremely inspired by accounts of childhood abuse survivors who, as adults, have formally accused their abusers. I guess if I’m being 100% honest, I’m inspired, but I’m also jealous or envious. I have a lot of Braves. I have the “public speaking Brave”. I have the “try a brand-new job with no experience Brave.” I have the “start a women’s organization Brave.” I even have the “tell my truth to the world Brave.” There is one Brave I don't have yet - the “call my abuser to the carpet Brave.” Today I want to, as my boss often says, “put the skunk on the table,” or just say the hard thing that I am in denial of and don’t want to say out loud:
I don’t trust my memories.
There I said it. There are a bunch of things that I tell myself are the reasons I haven’t yet named my abuser publicly, or to the police. Some of them include:
I don’t want to rock the boat any more than I already have for my family.
I don’t want to drag people into a court battle who are at peace with their lives.
I don’t want to go through the pressure and re-traumatization of a court case.
The truth: I know My Brave is strong enough to overcome all of those reasons. The real reason I haven’t accused my abuser publicly is that the memories of my abuse are still so new and sometimes blurry that I don’t truly understand them and they still shock and scare me every day. In other words, My Broken doesn't trust what my intellect, my memories, and multiple specialists trained in trauma recovery know to be the truth. The Broken comes from the grooming, the shaming and the secret keeping. The Broken is still so loud sometimes.
The truth is I’m smart enough to understand that the vague but awful feelings I had about throughout my young adulthood weren’t nothing. As I grew older, the vagueness became clearer, as the layers of childhood protection wore off slowly. One day, the truth hit me like a brick wall. I stopped functioning as the human I thought I was, the day the memories became clear. I finally knew what I had known all along but didn’t have the capacity to bring to the surface. I have done enough work with professionals to know that when I question the details of what happened to me, it’s not because I question if or how it happened. Rather, there is a part of me that doesn’t want to BELIEVE it happened. I still don’t want to hate every picture from that decade in my life. I don’t want to accept that those closest to me missed what was happening. I think most of all I’m not ready to understand why, even though I was in Kindergarten, My Brave wasn’t brave enough to stop it. Skunk. On. Table.
In closing, I’m jealous of those who face their abusers because they’ve seemingly overcome the questions and the questioning that comes with this type of survival. I deal with so many questions every day, and question I still don’t have an answer to is if I will ever be ready to take the step of naming my abuser publicly. I know one thing though - My Brave grows louder every day and I’m pretty much done letting anyone silence it.
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