Some people wonder why full disclosure? Why include the details in the accounts of our sexual abuse?
For one, to sanitize our stories, we enable abusers to fly under the radar of denial. When important aspects of the abuse are edited out to increase the digestibility of our stories .. we rob survivors of the power and stark truth of what they went through. We increase their shame. We help hide these crimes behind a thick wall of clouded obscurity.
Imagine if I man, who came home from war, could not talk about his ordeal at length. If he could not purge the details from his soul, let them out, be shared, be witnessed?
When we can process the traumatic details of our pasts with other person, we are able to feel less alone in the fear and terror of those recollections.
When we are allowed to utter the deepest and darkest events aloud – their power is diminished.
Abuse is not pretty. But the terms to describe it have been so stripped down of all meaning is becoming easier and easier to avoid having to really think about what childhood sexual abuse actually is – for it is only in acknowledging the true horror of it that we can honor, understand and grapple with how to help rid our world of this disgusting and soul-robbing crime.
Sexual abuse can mean so many things. Everything from touching or speaking to a child inappropriately to raping and trafficking. If we can keep the accounts of these horrible tragedies mentally at arms length then we can also avoid having to be disturbed by them. And being disturbed by something is what motivates a person to demand change. To enact action and to move to create waves in a community that is obsessed with smoothing over the waters in order to conceal the true turbulence below.
B 🤍