Resilient Women Share Their Healing Stories
Do you wonder how women heal from sexual abuse?
Resilience is key to recovering from trauma. Recovery can transform one’s personal pain into wisdom, insight and compassion. At that sage of the hero’s journey, survivors often feel called to share their hard-earned skills to help pull other survivors out of the matrix of denial and shame.
When people experience shock and trauma, some remember details, while others have blank spots in their memories. Either way, the body knows, even when the nervous system uses the freeze response to protect us when we don’t feel safe enough to remember. Often in cases of abuse in childhood, it isn’t safe for the child to remember and there may be on one she can trust. Just as in many alcoholic families, no one names what is happening, because it is taboo. It can be stigmatizing, and we are biologically adverse to being ostracized, as we lose support we rely on to survive.
Our nervous systems are designed to go into the freeze response when we don’t have the capacity or power to fight or flee the abuser. For example, in most cases, children cannot stand up to adults. As with veterans of war, survivors of sexual abuse suppress memories when they are too dangerous to remember. Surviving is the organism’s number 1 priority. Dealing with the trauma can come years later.
As children who’ve been abused grow up, it often is safer for them to “forget” the trauma by suppressing their emotions. They don’t heal emotionally, because suppressing overwhelming emotions drives them into the subconscious mind. The body remembers what the mind can’t deal with because trauma is encoded in the nervous system.
Even when survivors try to “forget” and move on, trauma will continue to plague them with flashbacks that trigger fear, shame and toxic feelings. This can happen unexpectedly, even in a situation that in present time is actually safe, when it resembles, on a sensory level, a traumatic experience from the past. The resemblance could be the setting, such as in a laundry room, on holiday with family, or the smell of a particular food that was being prepared when the trauma occurred.
Recovering memories is an arduous process. Surviving, and then healing, builds tenacity in survivors. We learn to love ourselves and let ourselves rest—instead of pushing ourselves to keep going, even when we are tired. We learn how to unwind the pain and fear we’ve internalized and regulate our nervous systems. Often, we do this without much support from friends, and in the face of ongoing denial by family members. The intensity of the trauma is hard for people to face.
For many survivors, memories will start to surface, when they are safe from their abuser(s), and their nervous systems relax enough to let the nervous system begin to repair itself. This is true of war veterans of war and survivors of abuse, whether the abuse was physical, emotional, sexual or spiritual. All abuse effects survivors emotionally, physically and spiritually, whether they recognize this or not.
Survivors heal by learning to be grounded and stay present in their bodies, even as memories surface. When our nervous systems calm down, suppressed memories may float to the surface and become conscious, at least partially.
Thirty years ago, “exposure therapy” was considered state of the art. We know now, thanks to scientific advances in neurobiology, that exposure therapy can regroove the same pathways that the brain created in order to survive the original trauma, thereby digging the trauma pathways deeper into the brain.
Instead of following the same circuits, to heal, we need to create new neural pathways and teach our nervous systems to self-regulate. We need to develop the capacity to come to a place of rest and complete a cycle of anxiety or overload of intensity.
While listening to a trauma summit online with the Shift Network a few years back, one of the speakers was a therapist who worked with Viet Nam vets to help them overcome PTSD. Each year, after working with group of veterans together for a year, he took them on a trip to Viet Nam. They knew and trusted each other because they’d bonded as they did therapy together. Once in Viet Nam, they confronted their past in a way that was designed to be healing.
They discovered what they’d learned, what they regretted, and what they didn’t and couldn’t know while they were in the war. When we are in high intensity situations, day to day survival outweighs other concerns, such as the morality of the situation, or the capacity to grieve. This is the same with children growing up in abusive families—they live in hypervigilance, without the capacity to objectively see what is going on in the family.
The veterans learned how they’d grown as human beings, and in many cases, they become activists, protesting wars that involve invading another country without their home country having been attacked. In other words, they came to terms with what they’d done. They felt their feelings, and, in many cases, their perspectives shifted.
The therapist spoke eloquently about how important it was to have a support group of peers, and to complete a rite of passage, in which they acknowledged the wisdom they’d gained, the lessons learned. In many cases, they experienced changes in perspective, and found within their hearts a desire to advocate for peace.
Much like a vision quest, the rite of passage, moved them from loss of self to a renewed sense of purpose in the world. Their suffering brought them to new understanding and opened the space for dignity, a revival of their own sense of worthiness, and a degree of wisdom.
There is power in facing our experiences and the actions of those who have traumatized us.
Ever since hearing that interview, I’ve been sitting with the seed of an idea.
Like veterans of war, sexual abuse survivors also enter a dark night of the soul. Their suffering can be great and can lead to mental illness and homelessness. The loss of their sense of safety and autonomy over their bodies can lead them to prostitution. Unlike veterans, they are not seen as heroes. The culture doesn’t offer them redemption and a place of honor.
My heart says that sexual abuse survivors will also benefit from going through a rite of passage, coming out the other side, and reentering society as valued members, whose experiences can lead to wisdom, increased intuition and compassion, all of which are of great value for our culture.
Survivors need to be heard—we need to hear them and learn their lessons of courage, resilience and recovery.
During these times of climate change and disasters abounding, we need stories that teach resilience. We need to expose what is hidden—and reduce the harm being done. We need to groove new pathways in our journey to recover from devastation and rebuild culture based on wisdom gained and lessons learned.
Inspired by their courage, tenacity and resilience, this is the first of what I envision as a series of interviews with women who’ve traveled the arc of adverse childhood experiences, who have found their way to become compassionate, insightful and, yes, wise women, who want to share their stories and support healing for all survivors.
Interview #1 in this series features Mary Knight, a survivor of childhood sexual abuse, whose healing journey inspires gratitude and admiration. You can watch the full interview on YouTube.
Watch Mary Knight’s interview on my YouTube Channel here
Stay tuned here for her next interview, which will be about her documentary movie called “Am I crazy”? Her next interview will be followed by a Watch Party on Facebook Live and Zoom. Sign up for my newsletter to receive announcements.
Stay tuned here for her next interview about her documentary film, “Am I crazy”? This will be followed by a Watch Party on Facebook Live and Zoom, and a Q&A with Mary afterward.
I’ll announce the date of the WATCH PARTY as soon as we’ve chosen one.
Learn more about Mary here , or contact her here.
