Having and expressing human emotions is not weakness | Survivor Saturday

Posted on Saturday, February 14, 2015 by Rebecca

We aren’t being “emotionally fragile” when we feel human emotions in response to trauma.

Survivors are often labeled, by ourselves or others, as being “weak” or “fragile”. I previously wrote about that here. Since then, I’ve been giving some more thought to the whole idea of emotions…feeling them…accepting them…expressing them….

Some of us are, by nature, more “feeling” type people, and may be more expressive and communicative as well. Some may see this as a weakness, but why not argue that it is a strength? We need to affirm qualities like, She is so connected to her emotions, or She is so expressive and full of life, or even, Wow, she’s so emotionally gifted! Aren’t emotions part of our very human nature? Where did we get the idea that it’s wrong to feel some of them, or that they need to be suppressed and ignored?

Some families, more than others, stifle this part of their humanity. They might have unwritten “family rules” about emotions, such as:

Only men and boys are allowed to get angry.
Only girls are allowed to cry.
Women and girls need to act “happy” and “nice”.
Certain emotions are unacceptable.
Only positive emotions are allowed.
You are not supposed to talk about feelings.
It’s important to act stoic all the time.
Emotions should not be expressed — not even happy ones — except in a subdued, quiet manner.
Emotions are dangerous. Don’t listen to them.
Emotions are scary. Try not to feel them.
Emotional people are inferior. Don’t be like them.
Emotions are divided into good ones or bad ones, and the bad ones are sinful. Don’t feel them.
Getting in touch with your emotions is for California hippy types or wimps. Don’t be like them.
It’s OK to blame others for your emotions.
It’s the role of women and girls to make sure men and boys are happy.
Mothers are responsible for all the emotions in the home.
You should be happy — or it will make everyone around you unhappy.

Any of those sound familiar?

Some of us were told, growing up, that we were wrong to feel a certain way — or even that we were wrong about how we were feeling: “No, you can’t possibly be angry at your father! You are really happy for him.” We may have been told we were overly sensitive, or that we needed to tone ourselves down. We may have learned to suppress our own emotions, lest we anger or upset our parents. It’s a wonder more children don’t grow up wondering if they are the only ones in their families with any emotions at all!

People raised in emotionally inhibited (that’s nicer than saying “emotionally stunted”) families tend to take this discomfort with emotions out into the world with them. After all, if our parents were kind, decent, loving people, it’s rare that we scrutinize our upbringing for flaws, or spend time and energy analyzing the nuances of our family culture. Unless we have a good reason to change our minds, we tend to think the way emotions were handled in our home is pretty much the right way, even if it was fairly stifling.

Let’s imagine that two such people marry, and that the wife is a trauma survivor. If she has been raised to believe she must “keep your chin up no matter what”, she will find the vast chaotic swirl of trauma-induced emotions to be a sign that there is something wrong with her — rather than that her emotions are a natural response to the fact that something wrong was done to her. Painful emotions are painful no matter what, but the less emotionally savvy we are, the more tempted we are to numb or escape them. Like us, our hypothetical wife will most likely tend to follow her family’s lead in numbing, escaping, and/or suppressing.

Her husband will be quite content with an emotionally numb wife, if that is familiar to him because of what he grew up with. In fact, if she isn’t “good enough” at suppressing all her “negative” emotions, he will no doubt encourage her to keep her emotional range within his comfort level. If she fails, he will see this as her being weak, overly emotional, hysterical, etc.

The irony is that when his wife begins a deeper process of healing, when her emotions become unbound, when she becomes more fully alive, when she faces the truth of what was done to her and allows herself to feel all her emotions in response to such evil — when she is finally strong enough to do that — that is when her husband, instead of applauding her courage, is most apt to tell her that she is weak and fragile.

It is all too easy to accept that assessment. We think, yet again, that there is something seriously wrong with us. I remember crying in my therapist’s office, “Why does this hurt so much more now than it did back then?”

“Because,” he said gently, “back then, just in order to survive, you had to try to pretend it away. There was no safe place for you to feel, to grieve, to get angry at the cruel injustice of it all. You had to hold it all together. It was too scary to face the truth.”

It’s still too scary! I wanted to scream. In fact, I probably did…or, more likely, whispered it in a frightened gasp. Therapy session after therapy session, I bemoaned “ever opening up this can of worms”. Why not just keep on holding it together? Even if it wasn’t better for me, wouldn’t it be better for everyone else if I just went on pretending I was mostly fine? My therapist, God bless him, kept giving me assuring, encouraging, hopeful words — even when I accused him of lying or just mouthing therapeutic bullshit. But he was right. My sister-survivors and brother-survivors — my tribe — kept telling me the journey of healing was worth it, that I was not being selfish, that it was the right thing to do…and I grew to believe them more and more as I watched them walk it out.

Healing is messy. If we are human, experiencing trauma, betrayal, violence, humiliation, hatred, and dehumanizing acts will wound us deeply. We aren’t just recovering from those events, but from the years in their aftermath when we did not adequately heal. It takes courage and strength to face all that head-on…to stare down our worst memories…to allow the most extensive surgery to be performed on our most painfully wounded parts.

Emotionally healthy people actually feel and express their emotions. We may be a bit messy while learning to do so. We have been through a cataclysmic event; naturally there be some cataclysmic emotions…and, if we have held in many or most of them for years, they will seem overwhelming, like a dam bursting. It takes a lot of strength and courage not to avoid or numb that.

It takes even more strength to go against a lifetime of conditioning, to become more alive instead of less, and to pursue healing when it is so painful. But when the people who are supposed to care for us the most keep tearing us down rather than building us up, discouraging us rather than encouraging us — when they offer us words of weakness and failure rather than strength and hope — then it takes even more strength and determination on our part.

“Strengthen me by sympathizing with my strength, not my weakness.”
— Amos Bronson Alcott

So…my words of advice to any potential allies out there, anyone who wants to walk alongside a sexual trauma survivor on her healing journey: Don’t tear her down. Don’t demean her. Don’t add to her negative self-talk. If all you see is weakness and fragility, you don’t know her well enough to be her ally. If you have no words of encouragement and hope, if you cannot see her strength and worth clearly enough to remind her of it, keep your mouth shut — except to encourage her to find real allies.

And this is for those of us who are survivors, no matter what it might be that we have survived:

“Courage is more exhilarating than fear and in the long run it is easier. We do not have to become heroes overnight. Just a step at a time, meeting each thing that comes up, seeing it is not as dreadful as it appeared, discovering we have the strength to stare it down.”
— Eleanor Roosevelt in You Learn By Living

“Courage is like a muscle. We strengthen it with use.”
— Ruth Gordon

“The encouraging thing is that every time you meet a situation, though you may think at the time it is an impossibility and you go through the tortures of the damned, once you have met it and lived through it you find that forever after you are freer than you ever were before. If you can live through that you can live through anything. You gain strength, courage, and confidence by every experience in which you stop to look fear in the face.

You are able to say to yourself, `I lived through this horror. I can take the next thing that comes along.’

The danger lies in refusing to face the fear, in not daring to come to grips with it. If you fail anywhere along the line, it will take away your confidence. You must make yourself succeed every time. You must do the thing you think you cannot do.”
— Eleanor Roosevelt in You Learn by Living: Eleven Keys for a More Fulfilling Life

Note to my fellow and sister survivors: Although I am somewhat of a loner by nature, I believe very strongly in the value of finding a “tribe”. We heal best in community. If your current “community” — be it family, friends, or church — is not truly encouraging and supportive, in a healthy way, of your healing, this doesn’t mean you have to dump them. It just means you have to look elsewhere for your “healing community”. Don’t give up.

I’d love to hear from you about your healing journey. If you found a tribe, how and where did you find them? If you grew up in an emotionally open and expressive family, how did that help you in the healing process? If not, how are you overcoming that?

I weigh in about vaccines

Posted on Sunday, February 8, 2015 by Rebecca

Back in 1985, I was somewhat more educated about vaccines than the typical parent, having taken a college course on the history of virus diseases — a fascinating and hugely informative course taught by an amazing man whose many accomplishments in the field of medicine included being the head of the CDC’s virology division. So, while I was unquestioningly pro-vaccine to the point that it never dawned on me not to vaccinate, I knew there were things about virus diseases that were yet mysterious and unexplainable. For instance, the two brilliant doctors and researchers who taught my course, experts in the fields of virology and epidemiology, could not entirely explain why certain diseases had obviously been on the decline before vaccines against them were introduced, or why the polio rates in an unvaccinated populace outside the U.S. dropped at the same time and almost the same rate as the newly vaccinated U.S. population.

None of that, for a moment, caused me to question the wisdom of full vaccination against any and all diseases. In all my reading and study, nothing had made me think that vaccines were anything but entirely safe.

Then my infant son experienced syncope following his routine vaccination. I recall holding his limp, seemingly lifeless body in my arms, his breathing so shallow that I could not detect it, and screaming for the doctor, the nurse — anyone — to help. I thought my son was dead.

You don’t get over that quickly.

My son was not dead. The nurse, impatient with my state of shock, and unfamiliar with information like this, told me my son was obviously “shutting down from overstimulation” — even though he was long past the newborn stage and never reacted like that to anything else. She refused to summon the doctor and insisted that I leave immediately.

Still in shock, and not knowing what else to do, I left.

To make a long story short, my infant son — who usually slept very little during the day — remained in what I can only describe as a coma-like state for over 8 hours. I could not rouse him. Repeated calls to the doctor’s office finally resulted in my being told by the nurses that I was an overwrought new mother and should enjoy the “break from my son” for as long as it lasted, and to stop calling them. It was that day that I discovered we had a family history of “bad reactions” to the pertussis vaccine, which prompted me — once my son seemed back to normal — to head off to the UCLA Biomed Library to try to find out what on earth had happened to him.

This was before The National Childhood Vaccine Injury Act, and my son’s frightening reaction was not reported to VAERS. The CDC admits this database is incomplete, even today. How incomplete is anyone’s guess.

In the next two to three years, I read everything I could lay my hands on about vaccines. I questioned medical professionals. I attended seminars. I did all the study and research that I could.

What I discovered during my research was that my son’s reaction, while sounding trivial — oh, he just slept deeply all day — was actually considered serious because it is usually accompanied by neurological damage. Two years later, another pediatrician told me emphatically, “I cannot in good conscience give any member of your family the pertussis vaccine.”

“You might not be so lucky next time,” more than one doctor told me.

I decided to take their medical advice. Unfortunately, I foolishly mentioned this to some other mothers — and that’s when I discovered just how angry, hysterical, and irrationally selfish the radical fringe of the most extremely pro-vaccine parents can get. I discovered that the ones urging me the most vociferously to “Do some research!” had never actually done any of their own, and were totally unfamiliar with what I considered the most basic knowledge about vaccines. When one distraught woman went so far as to scream in my face that she didn’t care if all my children died from vaccines just as long as hers weren’t exposed to whooping cough, I decided this topic was too emotionally loaded to discuss rationally with some people, and it was probably best to keep my mouth shut in the future.

The current hysteria reminds me of those days, only now it seems so much more widespread and virulent. I would recommend parents, and all those concerned about measles, to read this information from the CDC. If you are going to lambaste people for their medical decisions, or clamor for the government to take draconian measures against non-vaccinators, at the very least you should acquire some basic knowledge and make sure your own vaccinations are up to date.

If you think every person who decides to forego a particular vaccine is a dangerously ignorant wacko anti-vaxxer, I would like you to know:

Some of us felt very much like you until something scary happened to one of our children
Some of us are not at all “anti-vaccine”, but carefully consider the merits of each one, weighing the risks and benefits
Some of us have done a lot of research and study in order to make the difficult decisions we have made
Some of us are following medical advice
Some of us will forego a particular vaccine for reasons that have nothing to do with autism
Some of us are so concerned about people with compromised immune systems that we do our best to prevent their exposure to people who are not only possibly ill, but might have recently received a live vaccine (and, contrary to what you may have been told, the measles vaccine in the U.S. is a live vaccine)
Some of us understand that no vaccine is 100% effective, which is why we might get argumentative when you insist your fully vaccinated — but obviously sick — child could not possibly have an illness he was vaccinated against, even if his symptoms seem glaringly obvious to everyone else. When we point this out, we aren’t on an anti-vax tear; we just don’t want your kid infecting other kids, vaccinated or not. Besides, if you’re right that the cough that sounds so alarmingly whooping-like isn’t pertussis, or that what your child is covered with is some entirely different pox, then I really don’t want to be exposed to whatever it is your kid has — so please keep him/her home, OK?
Some of us understand that not all diseases have a vaccine. We also understand that what might be a “simple cold” or “I hope it’s not the flu, haha” to one person might be quite serious to someone else. That’s why some of us might seem a bit “paranoid” about germs, or overly concerned with maintaining healthy immune systems.
We have a wide variety of reasons for choosing against one vaccine, several vaccines, or all vaccines. Don’t assume you know those reasons, or that we are all misguided, ignorant zealouts out to infect your children…after all, I try not to assume all stridently vocal pro-vaccinators are misguided, ignorant zealouts who — because they can’t be bothered to make informed decisions for their children and themselves — want to take away my right to do so.

Note: Since my youngest is almost 18, I no longer have a dog in this fight. And, frankly, that’s a relief.

Each marriage is different

Posted on Thursday, February 5, 2015 by Rebecca

These words from Gary Thomas were part of my devotions this morning:

“Different From the Rest”

Let me put a saying by nineteenth-century churchman Horace Bushnell in the language of marriage: “No married couple is ever called to be another. God has as many plans for married couples as He has couples; and, therefore, He never requires them to measure their life by any other couple.”

You comprise one-half of a unique couple. No other couple has your gifts, your weaknesses, your history, your dynamics, your children, your calling. There is great freedom in accepting our couple identity as it is: we might be strong in this area, weak in that, vulnerable here, impenetrable there, excelling in this, often failing in that, but we are a unique couple called forth by God to fulfill our unique purpose in this world.

God has established your home and your marriage, and that’s the life He wants you to live. Never look to other couples to measure your worth; look to God to fulfill your call. Don’t compare yourself with other couples to measure your happiness; compare your obedience with God’s design on your life to measure your faithfulness.

Become comfortable with your story, your identity as a couple. Relish it. Never compare it. Just be faithful to the unique vision God has given to the unique you (and that’s a plural you). God doesn’t need another couple just like one He already made. He is so much more creative than that. Rather, He wants to release and bless the unique couple that is you.

This goes along with my last post. It is encouraging and freeing not to feel the need to hold my marriage up to a standard set by anyone else, not to hold it up for comparison to other marriages, not to hold it up to what is written in marriage books. The “rules” some people apply to marriages (tasks must be arbitrarily divided along gender lines; communication must follow this format and these guidelines; wives need x,y,z while husbands need a,b,c; a good marriage requires this or that; etc.) do not apply to me — only God’s rules and standards, clearly stated in His Word apply. I can and should look to Him, to my husband, and to myself for the practical outworkings in my life and in my marriage.

That is not to say that others have nothing to offer. There is good advice out there, and it would be foolish to disregard it all. But it’s also foolish to try to shoehorn my marriage and myself into something my husband and I were never intended to fit.

Marriage requires our best. But it should not require us to become someone we are not. It’s a wonderful thing when we can accept ourselves for who we are, our spouses for who they are, and our marriages for what they are — and encourage that all live up to their full unique identities.

I was wrong about date nights

Posted on Tuesday, February 3, 2015 by Rebecca

It’s not that I was entirely wrong. I still don’t believe that couples need to leave their kids with babysitters once a week, lest their marriages be doomed. Nor do I think we should be trying to recapture the early, pre-marriage days of our relationship, when we were not only younger but far more immature and selfish, didn’t know each other as well, and hopefully — if we followed Biblical morality — weren’t having sex. Why go backwards?

However, there are some things I was seriously wrong about, and those are things that the best of the “date night” advocates are trying to get at. I’m addressing this to the wives, because…well, because I am one.

1. Intimacy is important, and it doesn’t just happen. You need to make room for it. By this, I mean real intimacy; I’m not just using the word as a code or euphemism for sex. It takes time, and a willingness to be open and vulnerable with each other, to build and maintain the level of intimacy that should be found in a truly healthy marriage. Otherwise it’s too easy to become harried co-parents passing each other like two ships in the night, whose conversations are mostly about babies and business.

2. Husbands aren’t just being immature and selfish, or child-haters, if they miss the “fun” person we used to be, or that they hoped we’d be, when we married. Unless you married a really irresponsible jerk, he doesn’t want to quit his job, sell the kids to the gypsies, and run off with you on some crazy adventure. But he might want you to play with him — however that might like look for the both of you — and to be his recreational companion once in a while. He might want to know that he can still make you laugh, that your life is not all drudgery and duty, and that there is still a fun sparkle in your eyes especially for him to enjoy. He might just want to see you happy, and to know it’s because of him.

3. Some husbands get lonely, and rely on our friendship more than we realize. This can be confusing if your husband’s friendship style is waaaaay different than yours. I was shocked to read a study showing that the majority of happily married men considered their wives their best friends, while the wives usually considered someone else their best friends. As a stay-at-home, homeschooling mom whose husband was usually busily involved in his business and in church ministry plus meeting weekly with a prayer partner for most of our marriage, it was easy for me to think my husband’s life was filled with people and rich relationships while I was isolated and starved for adult conversation. Yes, my husband was surrounded by people all day, but that did not meet his deeper needs for relationship. We would have both done things differently if we had realized that.

4. Marriage should be our priority human relationship. After all, we took vows with this dude. That doesn’t mean we sacrifice our children on the altar of marriage. We don’t have to do silly, rude things like couch time to let everyone know they are second, third, or fourth fiddle to us. It doesn’t mean we should spend more time with our husbands than our children, or that we can’t have a girls’ night out, or that we must not ever do anything without our husbands. Marriage should never be an idol. Neither should any husband. But it’s an extremely important relationship, not just because of the vows, but because it’s supposed to be a living analogy of Christ and the Church. So we better treat our marriage with respect (and the same goes for the children produced by it).

5. Marriage books are full of nonsense. But I already knew that. Of course, they are not all 100% rubbish, but we would do well to remember a few important things: a) most, if not all, of them were written by people who have never met you or your husband; b) most, if not all, of them are written by people you would never, ever want to be married to; c) authors of marriage books have their own issues and baggage just like everyone else; d) the more authoritative and dogmatic the author, the quicker you should toss his/her book on the scrap heap; e) too many marriage books are written by middle or upper class Americans who assume we all have enough discretionary income to spend on babysitters, romantic dinners, fancy lingerie, hotel weekends, and vacations without the kids; f) just as God created us all different and doesn’t want us all to look and act exactly alike, He doesn’t want all marriages to look and act exactly alike; g) marriage is first and foremost about becoming one — not erasing anyone, but becoming a whole that is greater than the individual parts — so don’t take anyone seriously who starts telling you marriage is like the military, or like a business, or like a sports team, or like any other wacky thing God never intended it to be.

6. You are neither a sinner nor a failure if you need time to relax and rejuvenate. Even Jesus withdrew for times with His Father. We need intimacy with our Heavenly Father. We need intimacy with our husbands, however that may look in each of our marriages. And we need a certain amount of intimacy with good friends. Those things are important and valuable…and we don’t need to pretend we are supermoms who are above human needs and desires. We need each other…and our husbands need us.

7. Marriages have seasons, and what works in one may not work in another. We need to cut ourselves some slack. Alone time with our husbands will not be our major priority when we have a newborn, nor should it. Going broke hiring babysitters, or stressing out over what mayhem the kids are engaging in without us, is not a marriage-building exercise, no matter what anyone tries to tell you.

8. We need to do what works for us. Even though I rejected the notion that my marriage would shrivel up and die if I didn’t jump through all the stressful, exhausting hoops a weekly date night would have required when the kids were little, I still thought we needed a weekly something. So I tried date nights at home and a bunch of other ideas I found in books or online, and they all went over like a lead balloon. In my misguided zeal, I forgot to do the most important thing. It never dawned on me to say to my husband, “Honey, I want us to have the best marriage possible, and to become closer to each other. What kind of things do you think would nurture and strengthen our marriage? And what kind of things would you enjoy doing together?”

A valuable article about childhood sexual abuse

Posted on Friday, January 23, 2015 by Rebecca

How do sexual abusers gain the trust of their young victims and why do parents “let” them? How do they get by with it? Why don’t the child victims say anything? How can a mother insist she had no idea what was going on? These are questions that trouble people whenever the subject of childhood sexual abuse comes up.

I found an article online that offers a concise explanation of the “grooming” process. It is all valuable information, but I wanted to highlight this:

Mother blaming tactics

The myths around child sexual abuse often describe the reasons the offender sexually abused the child as being the mother’s fault. Some of these reasons could be that the mother was sick, worked long hours, or was frightened of the perpetrator. As a mother, you are not to blame for the sexual abuse. The sexual abuse of children is just one part of a system of trickery and abuse created to maintain secrecy, isolation and the offender’s absolute power over the child and all others in the child’s life. The offender sets up a web-like structure of traps, lies and distortions to isolate the victim and recreate the child as problematic in the eyes of siblings, the mother, friends, family and neighbours. In particular, offenders admit that their prime target is to destroy the child’s relationship of trust with the mother (Morris, 2003).

The relationship problems between mother and child that are commonly seen after the abuse is disclosed are more likely to be the result of a campaign of disinformation orchestrated by the offender. The offender’s actions create a context in which the mother and child are blind to his role in creating the difficulties in their relationship (Laing and Kamsler, 1990). In fact, one of the most common tactics by the offender is creating a division between the mother and child. The mother blaming shifts the focus from the offender to the mother, in search for someone to blame.

Research shows that the vast majority of mothers do not know that sexual abuse was occurring, and this is part of the offender’s campaign to keep the abuse secret. Offenders work hard to be seen as the idea father, uncle, grandfather, brother or a trusted family friend who is wonderful with children.

Read more here: Sex offender tactics and grooming