A little girl plucks up the courage to tell her mother that she is being molested by the man her mother has been dating for six months.
She is sent to her room and told to stop spreading such horrible lies — that stories like this could ruin him.
A young teen comes home from camp and tells his mother that a camp counselor, a long-time trusted friend touched his private parts.
He is put on restriction for a month because the counselor has already called to let them know how terribly behaved he was and when he was told to straighten up he screamed, according to the counselor, “If you tell my parents, I’ll just tell them you were molesting me!”
A girl goes out with friends from her sorority and is sexually assaulted. She won’t tell her family because they’re very strict, and she had been drinking.
She tells no one.
I describe a couple of scenarios in my free e-book, If It’s Happened to You, that could possibly happen if and when you do come out and tell someone your most horrifying and humiliating secrets:
The best case scenario is that your family believes you. Immediately. They rally behind you, report the crime against you, and promise to support you 100% until you are healed and whole for however long that takes. This does happen. I wish it happened more often.
What is more likely is that their complete and utter shock and horror at what you are saying may prevent them from being able to wrap their heads around it. Some family members will, quite frankly, measure their own discomfort against yours and, sadly, you will never be able to convince them that what you’re saying is true because the whole thing is just too distressing for them — I wish there were a more diplomatic way of saying that, but that is often the case. Some family members or friends simply have a closer relationship with your perpetrator, so you are left to navigate through the nightmare yourself.
The worst case scenario is that the very people who you relied on to protect you insufferably and summarily reject the very notion that you were harmed. And since you are up against your perpetrator’s primal sense of self-preservation, the blame for whatever “incident” you claimed occurred, lies squarely on your shoulders. Or maybe even worse than the worst-case scenario, your family acknowledges what happened and even that what happened to you was wrong — but their anger and indignation are not toward your abuser. Somehow, inexplicably, you are in the cross hairs for telling.
Shame on you.
You need a plan, a strategy, for sharing the pain of your past — there’s no getting around it.
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Here is a portion of the interview I did with Cody Stauffer for his podcast, All That’s Holy: Blue Collar Podcast that addresses this very conundrum…
CODY: When you were coming to… not necessarily grips… you knew what your story was and you knew exactly what happened to you, but when other people started telling you, “No, that’s not true… that didn’t happen…”
DAISY: Oh, that the abuse didn’t happen?
CODY: Yeah, right… was there ever a point where you doubted…
DAISY: Oh, no!
CODY: …what the story was.
DAISY: No, not at all.
CODY: Okay
DAISY: And, in fact, when I was a freshman in college at Vanguard University – and it used to be called Southern California College when I was there – I took a psychology class and learned about a really boss strategy called repression! [Sarcastic]
CODY: [Chuckles] Right. Exactly.
DAISY: And I thought, Oh my gosh! That’s what I want! I even prayed, “Lord, please! Let me forget! And I didn’t, you know? That was just one more prayer that I felt like He ignored.
CODY: So you were asking for repression.
DAISY: I was asking for repression!
CODY: Wow.
DAISY: I thought, “Wow! That’s awesome! I wanna do that!” Just wake up in the morning and it’s like it never happened, but you know, obviously that’s not the way healing goes.
CODY: Right, right, right…
DAISY: So…
CODY: What would you say to someone who is, kind of, struggling with ‘what’s the point of telling my story now? It’s in the past… I’m past that…’
DAISY: MmmHmm…
CODY: ‘I don’t… I’m never going to go back there again. Why tell the story? Why do it?’
DAISY: I’ve heard that, actually. I’ve heard that in going out and talking to people and, really, I have to tell people this: I’m not clergy. I’m not fluent in fifteen dead languages… I don’t exegete scripture…
CODY: [Laughs]
DAISY: I don’t do that. I’m not a therapist, and I’m… I’m not any part of the legal system. This is just two people talking.
CODY: Yep.
DAISY: So I would never want to tell someone what to do, and I always make that very clear. I’m just a girl…
CODY: Yeah.
DAISY: …who has a similar story. I can tell you through my own experience that my freedom has come from finding my voice. And that is what I wish for everyone… is freedom. But I also want to say that when you do tell your story, because there’s probably pain embedded very deeply in your soul that you need to come out with your story with a therapist who is trained in trauma – because you can be re-traumatized if you’re not in a safe place with a safe person. In fact, a lot of re-trauma comes when you tell your family.
CODY: MmmHmm, right.
DAISY: Because… they are so torn. Statistically, someone has abused you who is in your own family.
CODY: Right.
DAISY: Statistically.
CODY: Right.
DAISY: Um, it’s not the ‘stranger-danger’ that we all tell our children about. Or it may be a coach or a pastor or someone who has put him- or herself in close proximity to those who are vulnerable. Because that’s the M-O. So when a person… I don’t know… I wanna say… comes out? Of the closet? For lack of a better term, um, when a person does finally reveal what has gone on, the first instinct for a family is… I mean, they can’t even wrap their heads around it. And this is what I talk about in my free e-book, If It’s Happened to You that, first of all, you are up against this individual’s primal sense of self-preservation. And it is primal. So, they are slick! They have lived a level of deceit that is unfathomable to regular-thinking people. And so the strategies to minimize and deny and deflect…
CODY: Gas-lighting, I think they call it.
DAISY: Yeah, it’s… it’s… overwhelming. And without any sort of backup or support for the victim? They often stand alone. They are often the ones who are blamed.
CODY: Right.
DAISY: Just straight blamed for it!
CODY: Yeah.
DAISY: And that can be so damaging. Yes, I do think people need to tell. I tell them that. But I also think there needs to be a whole strategy for that… in coming out with this information.
Please call 1-800-4-A-CHILD to report abuse for yourself or on behalf of someone else. #YouMatter
Daisy Rain Martin is an author, speaker, advocate, and educator as well as a founding member of The Flying M-Inklings Writing Group. She lives with her husband, Sean-Martin, in the beautiful state of Idaho and teaches English and Literature during the school year to the best 7th graders the world over. Daisy spends her summers writing, speaking, researching, creating, gardening, and canning.
Hope Givers: Hope is Here, is the sequel, of sorts, to her comedic, spiritual memoir, Juxtaposed: Finding Sanctuary on the Outside, which was Christopher Matthews #1 top selling book in 2012. She has also written a free e-book for anyone who has or is currently being sexually abused called, If It’s Happened to You.
Please follow her weekly blog, SATURDAISIES, which addresses a plethora of current issues including child advocacy, all things hilarious, and matters of the heart. She would love for you to join the Rainy Dais Community by friending her on Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram.