In February I was honored to tie for the win at Lancaster Story Slam, a monthly event where 10 storytellers each have five minutes to tell a true story about themselves based, however loosely, on that month’s prompt. The prompt for February was “Are You Sure?”
I’m not the only person who hears that question and instantly thinks of the doubt thrown in countless abuse survivors’ faces, particularly survivors of sexual abuse. I knew what story I had to tell. I cannot express my gratitude for how well it was received.
Because of the time limit, I had to pare down what I had originally written up quite a bit (the only technique I’ve developed for public speaking so far is to write everything down, revise, and memorize; it remains to be seen if I’ll ever hit the master level of off-the-cuff coherency at one of these things). This seemed like a good place to share the text of the full version as well as the recorded video footage of my storytelling.
TW: Tonight I’ll be sharing a story with references to Child Sexual Abuse. It won’t be graphic, but if anyone here is uncomfortable with the subject matter, I won’t be offended if you need to duck out for this one. I do have permission from the victim to tell the story.
It was the summer of 2016. I had spent the spring watching the MeToo movement flood across my social feed, hearing for the first time about my childhood best friend’s abuse at the hands of one of her parents’ boarders, and reading a case file from over a half dozen victims of a decades-long, denomination-wide child sex abuse cover-up allegedly perpetrated by a network of churches named Sovereign Grace Ministries.
To this day, that case file remains one of the worst things I’ve ever read. Please do not subject yourself to it if you are not prepared to completely and utterly fall apart.
I had previously spent several months grappling with the realization that I had been badly abused as a child in my own home. I knew for sure the abuse had been physical, emotional, psychological, mental, and religious; yet, each time I wracked my brain to consider whether I had ever been sexually abused, I came up with nothing. Instead, I watched friend after friend come forward with her #metoo story and was grateful that pain, at least, was nothing I had ever suffered.
Around this time I had also just given birth to my second son. I spent quite some time after my child’s birth battling postpartum depression, without realizing it, as the weight of everything I was learning about all the infinitely possible ways one can hurt a child bore down on me.
Then, one evening, I was brushing my teeth, and I gazed at myself in the mirror. I still don’t know why, but something in me thought way, way back. Way back—to when I was one year old. Way back to the times my father would play with me in the bathtub. Way back, to the game we used to play.
That small child, the very small child that I used to be, finally told the adult—the parent side of me—what had happened. The facts I had never, ever actually forgotten, but had always thought of with the mind of a toddler: “This was a game. This was a silly, strange game we used to play.” A game that a one-year-old baby cannot understand.
A game that no adult can innocently play.
Something that happens in many cases of abuse is a phenomenon called dissociation, which can lead to a fractured awareness in an individual of what has happened to them over the course of their life. It’s not that they don’t have memories, but they don’t always have access to those memories, and they don’t always understand what the memories signify.
But now my adult self had finally seen this childhood memory for what it was. Not just a game—a game that had made my one-year-old self uncomfortable, a game that had disgusted me—but one I had been told I must do in order not to be rejected.
I looked in the mirror, and that child looked back at me. And we knew we were sure of what had happened.
I went downstairs after that and explained to my husband, very clinically, what I had just realized. He was very quiet; the one thing I remember him saying was that it was a good thing that my dad now lived on the other side of the country.
I didn’t tell anyone else what I had realized for another 3 years.
The next person I disclosed to was my mother. I spoke very briefly, generally stated the facts in a sentence or two. She had divorced my father a year prior after suffering 29 years in an abusive marriage.
And my mother asked me,
“Are you sure? Maybe he just didn’t think, or didn’t know what he was doing. Maybe it was an accident. Maybe it was a game.”
I retorted with the graphic description of what had happened that I had hoped to spare her. Only then did she acknowledge that my father is a pedophile. Her word, not mine.
And then she told me that she, too, remembered the abuse. Because she had walked in on it the last time it had happened.
She had told my dad that if she ever saw him do something like that again, she would tell the pastors at our church. That’s actually what put an end to that particular form of my abuse.
But it is ironic that my mother threatened to tell the church, because those same church leaders she invoked later enabled and excused the horrific child sexual abuse of my best friend. They would not have helped my mother or me, even if she had gone to them.
When I sat my in-laws down to disclose to them what had happened to me, they interrupted and derailed my story over and over, made light of it with jokes and distractions, until I finally got to the pivotal moment of the narrative, by which point my father-in-law had fallen asleep in his chair.
One sister-in-law never offered me a single word in response.
The one brother I ventured to tell pressed me with the same question my mother had.
“Maybe he was just playing. You were really little. Are you sure?”
And because I did not have it in me to describe the graphic details yet again, he continued to doubt me and excuse my father.
My mother also remembered telling my aunt about the incident when it happened, and my aunt later told me she remembered that conversation with my mother. This is a measure of validation most abuse victims never, ever receive, and it gives me an incredible defense against anyone who would levy the charge,
“But you were so young. Are you sure you remember? How can you really know?”
But even without that, here’s the thing.
I know because I’ve always known. The surprisingly accurate memory that people have remarked upon since I was very young did not conveniently stop working at that particular fatal moment. Had the incident been traumatizing, it probably would have scrambled my brain and the resulting memory; we know now that this is how trauma works. But because I was so young, and so innocent, and had no idea what evil it was I endured—because I sustained no physical or psychological wound, I retained the memory normally. Disregulation of the autonomic nervous system never interfered. My wits survived intact, as an artifact awaits archeological discovery.
It was my comprehension that was incomplete until I was 31 years old, thanks to the dissociation I incurred over a lifetime of abuse.
But when I could comprehend what had happened to me with the mind of an adult, I was sure.
I couldn’t not be sure.
People who ask abuse victims “Are you sure?” are asking the wrong question.
The real question is,
“Do I want to know? Do I really want to know the truth?”
Unless people really, truly want to know the truth about what happened to their daughter—their sister—their parent—their friend—
Unless you really want to know what happened, you will always look for ways for the victim to be wrong. You will never get around to considering the possibility that a victim is telling the truth—and what that truth means.
You will never have reason to be sure of what happened.
I will always be sure of what happened to me. The question is,
Are you sure you want to know?
“The real question is, ‘Do I want to know? Do I really want to know the truth?’” - that is the heart breaking reality. And when you’re a survivor who has mustered the courage to speak up, it’s devastating to be questioned.
I’m glad that your experience was validated by some of the people closest to you.
A wise counsellor passed on to me this gem: “Ventilation without validation leads to violation.“