What to Do with Shame?

Ever since Untangling Samantha (this is my new book that is for sale on Amazon, if you are interested) came out, so many women are reaching out to me, telling me how much they appreciate the book, its subject matter and the courage it took to live through it and then write it and release it into the world.  

There is something I am learning about the sharing of traumatic events...that once you share your own, it is no longer solely your story.  It becomes the story of everyone else.  You are are no longer really talking about your own trauma and healing, it becomes this other thing.  Your trauma becomes the permission slip for others to own and discuss their trauma.  I didn’t expect that.  And it is kind of cool, how something that I lived through becomes something that is now, at least partially owned, by others.  I am still processing that, more on that later...

What is mostly being communicated to me is the amount of shame they have all walked through be it sexual assault, rape, being molested as a child.  Whatever the experience, there is this massive, all encompassing shame that I see move across their face, their body and soul.  I can fucking see it.  It has happed now so often that I find myself bracing for it.  I did not expect to be invited in, to have a ring side seat to someone else’s trauma.  It is both hard and lovely, occurring all at once.

And so this new thought begins to grow in place of my prior thoughts about my own shame related to my particular trauma.  I find myself wondering more and more why the fuck I feel shame???  Why do I feel shame about my own fucked up childhood?  Why do I now feel so vulnerable at the gym where I put out flyers for the book launch?  I have had so many moments of wanting to shut it all down and close it off, like a tomb, forever.

And so I have had to unpack all of this.  And I think this process is going to take longer, but for now, I can report that while I hold some shame about what I did to make my own trauma worse: the drinking, the carousing, the self destructive striations across my life.  I do feel some shame about all of that.  But what I feel most shameful about is being selected in the first place.  And it just strikes me so hard, like a board to my body, “that I had no choice in the matter, so why do I feel any shame at all?”  It was not my behavior that caused either of my sexual assaults.  I was just a kid in the wrong place at the wrong time with men, MEN, who knew better but just refused to do better.  So why the fuck do I feel shameful and wrong?

I can’t answer that just yet.  I just know that I do. That somehow my vulnerability at being selected, targeted, fill in your own word choice, is what makes me feel this intense, excruciating shame.  And it is this right here that makes me was to shrink back into the shadows and pull my trauma back into me and never let it go again.

And I have no idea where that comes from? 

Why do I feel shameful about abuse perpetuated upon me? 

Where did I learn this? 

Where does this come from? 

Why have I never questioned it before now????

And this is what I am seeing with the other women coming to me now.  This shame they carry, isn’t theirs, it is the indelible mark left in sexual assault’s wake.  It is the casualty of trust misplaced and then shattered.  Not in the men, no never them, I think as a society of women, we all know that any man can become a bad actor. This is NOT to say that all men will, just that they all have that potential.  And that is just a reality we live with.  If I had a nickel for all the women I have met in my life that were denigrated by a would be friend...I would have a lot of fucking nickels...

So when our normal operating in life takes us to such a dark place, that ALL men, are potential threats.  And while we do get to a place were we are able to relax with some and come to trust them, we are never completely sure that our trust is not misplaced.  Well, maybe that is just me...

So I arrive at this new place in healing where I see that I myself feel shame for what was done to me, not because I did anything wrong...but because I was merely selected.  Like if I had been stronger, or bigger, or uglier, or prettier, or thinner or fatter, or fucking something other than I was, that I would have been spared.  That I would have been not selected.  And while I know that none of the above really matters in the selection of victimization, I still feel shame about it.  And I am not sure I will ever be truly rid of it.

Such a societal clusterfuck, this idea that victims of sexual assault are somehow at fault.  And I know that I most willingly pick this up and run with it internally.  It perpetuates because I allow it to.  I allow a narrative that was never mine, never fucking mine, to operate as some sort of trauma inflicting screen saver in the back of my mind, running all the time, and acting as a quite effective barrier to further healing.

I guess what is coming into view for me is how much I have participated in the continuing societal narrative that we who are victimized had anything to do with it at all.  I was not raped because of anything I did or said.  I was raped because someone wanted to rape me, and so they did.  They had the power and control and they used it, criminally and, in my case, repeatedly.

What I see now is that I think we blame the victim for a variety of reasons.  Because we are too afraid to tackle the actual problem in our society about how women and girls are viewed, sexualized and minimized.  This seems like too hard a task...so we divert our attention away. And also, we don’t really want to look at the men in our lives that perpetuated the abuse.  We do not want to hold men accountable because it is hard, never ending and counters the societal structure that has been in place forever.

But we are going to have to change something.  And I believe that it just might start in us refusing to feel shame for behavior perpetuated upon us.  For refusing the misogynistic narrative that we who are victimized are somehow at fault, to blame, are responsible for mitigation. I think it is time for me to let that go.  I think, it just might be time, for all of us, one woman at a time to fucking let it go.

I think the only way possible for this idea that what we wear, how much intoxicating substances we ingest, who we had sex with, what kind of sex we have had in the past, whether we take off our pantyhose to walk the beach on a date (refer to Kennedy rape trial in the 1980s, I am still apparently very fucking pissed off about how that fucking narrative allowed that fucking rapist to walk away a free man).  Sorry I digress.  

I am not sure how to do this.  I am not sure where to begin but I do have this intuition that it begins with me.  Me addressing that deep and painful ache within my body, mind and soul that shakes me to my core when I am delivered back to the origins of my particular story.  I am pretty sure that I have to stop accepting any blame as it relates to the men that perpetuated it. I was 4.  I was 13.  I had no culpability in it.  And while it may feel murkier about others who are adults, it really isn’t.  No one signs up for rape or sexual assault.  I don’t care what you are into sexually, if there is consent, it isn’t rape. And if there isn’t consent or the ability to form consent, then it is rape.  That is the whole fucking story folks.

If I was 10 shots in and showed up for surgery, I would not be deemed capable of giving consent.  I WOULD NOT BE ALLOWED TO PROCEED WITH SURGERY ON MY BODY BECAUSE OF MY INABILITY TO UNDERSTAND THE CONSEQUENCES AND POTENTIAL CONSEQUENCES OF MY ACTIONS.

Jane Doe was 10 shots in when she arrived at the fraternity house.  Everything that happened after that fails the above consent test.  EVERYTHING AFTER THAT FAILS.

EVERYTHING FUCKING AFTER THAT FAILS THE CONSENT TEST!!!!!!!!!!!!!

I cannot be quiet anymore.  I cannot sit silently and allow this shameful narrative to propagate and now, perhaps for the first time, I see that I have contributed to my own suffering by accepting blame and the resulting shame for criminal actions taken by another.  And that, for me, has to stop right fucking here.

And I believe that if I am brave enough to do, to become vocal about it, that perhaps this will begin to unwind and untangle this fucking narrative that we should carry that shame.  We should not.  We cannot.  We will not.

Eradication of the transfer of shame from perp to victim begins now.  I would say we ride at dawn, but the ride has already started and is now more like a rising tide, that is quickly and not quietly pulling in gale force winds, we are gaining speed and momentum...and for fuck’s sake let’s not quit until we rain down torrents of change for all the women who are still carry that which was never theirs to carry...

Please.

No more again, still...

Let us now say...

ENOUGH.

And let’s that be a complete fucking sentence...