Shame for what happened to you, and the way in which it happened. Part 1
What does it take to finally tell your story? It took a man writing about this subject matter in a way I had never heard before. He was talking about a teenage girl with whom he was intimate when he was just a teenager, but throughout the whole experience she just lay still and did not respond. This young man, filled with concern and confusion, reflected upon the realization that what transpired between them could easily be labeled as rape. He touched upon the oft’ discussed flight/fight responses and introduced the freeze/fawn response — a concept that many of us are familiar with.
That story became a pivotal point of introspection, shedding light on an incident from my own life, but the man was not a concerned teenager; he was a predator. It does take time to tell one’s story. In my case, it is 38 years. Sometimes you cannot tell the story because you cannot understand it, and you don’t have the words that can help you to tell it without feeling a deep shame. Shame for what happened to you, and the way in which it happened. They told you so.
An incident. I swept it under the carpet. Treating it like a flaw in a tapestry, I swiftly stitched it out of view, my mind like a delicate embroidery needle, hiding this unsightly form deep beneath layers of woven memories, pushing it to fade from the…
