Transcriber: KAIXIN LIN Reviewer: esra kurul
I'd attended college for one year and I savored the freedom it gave me.
I'd grown up in a white, upper middle class gated community with
a strict Italian Catholic mother and
an Irish Catholic father who was away 36 weeks a year competing as
a professional golfer on the PGA Tour.
My life was sheltered both at the private Catholic schools I attended
and at home. The topic of sex was rarely, if ever,
discussed and then only in the context of marriage.
I was taught that women who had sex before marriage were sluts are easy.
These restrictions and values only succeeded in motivating me to escape my
family's reach. When I got accepted to college, I was wide eyed, naive,
and itching for my adventure to begin. I was excited and full of life.
I was invincible, even drumming up the courage to secure a fake ID
and venture out to the local dive bar on my own.
But the sight of a familiar,
flirty young man emboldened me to stroll across the room.
We talked for several hours, engaging in playful banter and friendly teasing.
We left the bar together and despite a moment of uncertainty, I told myself,
We'll just make out a little and then I'll go home instead.
The next 12 hours became a living nightmare.
As we pulled up outside of his apartment.
The boy, who had just minutes before been so nice yanked me out of the cab.
I stumbled on the sidewalk.
Instead of helping me, he dragged me across the cement and pushed me through
the door, slamming it behind him.
Once inside, he towered over me, wrapped his hand around my throat,
pressing me against the wall, making it difficult to scream.
His other hand tore at the neck of my dress, shredding the fabric.
The realization of what was about to happen filled me with terror.
Somehow I managed to demand that he stop.
Then I begged. But he violated me anyway.
The torture continued after we fell asleep.
My naked body was pinned up against a brick wall next to his bed,
and he held me so tightly it was difficult to breathe At
the slightest movement. He would wake up and growl, go to sleep.
I trembled all night, awake and vigilant. I counted the bricks in the wall.
One, two, three, four.
Then I’d start again. One, two, three, four.
Decades passed before I learned from
the Arizona Trauma Institute that my behavior wasn't uncommon for
a victim of assault, disassociation,
a remarkable adaptive skill of the mind that disconnects us from our thoughts
or feelings, even from memories or our own sense of self, is a common,
unconscious, self protective response.
It helps us to live through unbearable trauma.
The next morning, I became a source of aggravation to him in his car.
I held my shredded clothes across my chest.
There were bruises on my legs, neck and wrists.
I mustered the strength not to cry in front of him when he dropped me off at
my dorm. He looked at me and smirked. You're a slut.
A month later, the nightmare happened again.
This time, two different male students I learned many years later from
the Trauma Resource Institute that re victimization is also not uncommon.
A victim often loses their awareness of danger.
I existed in a dream state of shock, fear, disbelief,
self accusation and self blame.
I kept this awful secret hidden for months because the shame I felt was
so great. This all had to be my fault.
I was sure the shame was only amplified by
the vicious rumors my attackers spread about me. I dug deeper into classwork.
I was committed to forging ahead with my studies. The cost was great.
The pain I felt was unbearable. I began to numb myself with food.
For the next several months, I was spat on and mocked by my peers in my classes.
I was stared at and whispered about.
Meanwhile, my rapist bragged about their actions, told people I enjoyed it.
Each time I was shamed, I visualized those same bricks.
I spent all night counting now building a wall between me
and everyone else behind them. I was safe.
I gained more than £100 of weight, aiding in my isolation.
I told myself I wasn't afraid when in reality I was terrified.
I desperately tried to bottle up the relentless tornado of pain
and emotion. I felt like a raw nerve and
I didn't want to feel anything anymore.
Sexual assault shattered me into a million tiny pieces.
The idea of coming forward and reporting felt impossible.
I had already experienced how the world had made up its mind about me.
I couldn't risk being misunderstood, judged or shamed again.
Plus, I'd already seen what had happened when other young women came forward
to report they were gaslit by the college administration
or their cases mysteriously disappeared.
I became paranoid and developed trust issues.
The bricks around me continued to stack up , the weight piling on the walls,
getting higher, the armour getting thicker . One, two, three, four.
And yet I had one place of refuge.
My therapist, the first of many who set me on a path of healing where
I could belong again. First to myself, then to the rest of humanity.
Two years later, while sitting in my dorm living room,
eight female classmates sat around discussing my first attacker.
Of eight of us. This man had raped six and not one of us had reported it.
The room fell silent. You couldn't hear a breath pass between us.
But in that moment I saw there walls to each set of walls began to crumble,
transforming all of our bricks into stepping stones
so that we might reach one another.
We came each other's safe space and took the first steps of bridging
the gap of separation between us.
Opening up to another human being
and exposing your battle wounds is petrifying.
But for me, it was the first step of bridging
the gap of separation between myself and others.
This experience served as an epiphany for me,
leaving me with several questions I would begin to explore moving forward.
Could trauma be the thing that brings people together
and help us step out of our hiding and shame?
If we rebuild the bridge of belonging within ourselves,
could we leverage the messy,
healing journey to reach other sexual trauma survivors?
It's time we see trauma for the potential it brings.
It's time we dismantle the walls around us and rebuild
the bridge of reconnection within ourselves and others.
Humans are intricate pieces of art,
and some of us have been shattered by trauma.
But something that is broken can become even more beautiful when it is put back
together. The ancient Japanese Art of Kintsugi
the art of precious scars repair smashed pottery using lacquer dusted
or mixed with precious metals.
This art form is a powerful metaphor
for life where nothing is ever truly broken.
But we are humans after all.
Not porcelain vases, though. For many years afterwards, I felt fragile.
Viktor Frankl, psychiatrist,
Holocaust survivor and author of A Man's Search for Meaning,
said Between stimulus and response.
There is a space in that space is our power to choose our response in our
response lives, our growth and freedom.
I desperately wanted to find that space where I could grow and be free again.
I just didn’t realize what a heavy lift that would be.
Healing is messy business.
There were the flashbacks, the irritability, the anger, the rages,
the body aches, the headaches, the insomnia, the grief,
the binge eating and secret and nightmares.
I even regressed back to childhood behavior that included sleeping with
a teddy bear. My grandfather gave me the day I was born and sucking my thumb,
which I hadn't done as a way to self-soothe since I was four. My mom said.
It breaks my heart to see you hitting a brick wall.
Despite taking medication and four years of talk therapy.
I knew that in order to heal,
I had to feel all of my emotions instead of numbing out. I tried many different.
Psychiatric and healing modalities.
The breakthrough came when I turned to EMDR,
Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing,
which works with directly with
the central nervous system where traumatic memories can get stuck.
For me, EMDR was the final piece of the therapeutic puzzle.
Traumatic memories don't ever go away. They become more quiet.
It's an imperfect science.
I still get triggered by witnessing situations or certain sounds
and feelings. But trauma no longer has complete power over me.
I have agency now. I have control.
Social belonging is a basic human need infused into our DNA.
Research found that emotional pain lights up the same regions of the brain
as physical pain. In fact, neuroscience researchers at Harvard, Purdue,
Duke and UCLA discovered that being excluded lights up the same regions of
the brain as physical pain,
being excluded as painful because it threatens fundamental human needs such
as belonging and self esteem, says Dr. Kipling Williams of Purdue University.
This sense of belonging is fundamental to how humankind organizes itself.
We are members of families, clubs, sports teams, cities, countries,
nationalities and even alumni.
Nearly every aspect of our lives is organized around belonging to something.
But belonging goes deeper than our surface level attributes.
We must recognize the importance of
a sense of belonging in regards to our physical, emotional and mental health.
During my journey of healing,
I discovered new questions worth exploring.
What if we felt as comfortable talking about our trauma histories
as we do our hobbies? Might trauma connect us in ways that makes us feel
seen, heard and appreciated in the deepest ways?
Could trauma bridge the gap of separation between us?
All this internal work, combined with surrounding myself with people who truly
loved me as I was human, fallible,
sometimes uncertain, but also funny,
energetic and smart. Helped me put the pieces of my being back together.
It's taken many years. 27.
And I'm here to tell you, healing is possible in baby steps with
the right support. Know that there is nothing that it can replace
the learning you experience with struggle.
It shows you what you're made of, how resilient you are,
and brings you back home to yourself.
I'm finally able to experience true peace, joy, happiness and love.
The World Health Organization estimates that 1 in 3 women worldwide have been
sexually assaulted, and all those statistics
on male sexual assault are much more difficult to quantify due to low levels
of reporting. It's estimated that 1 in 6 men have been sexually assaulted.
Sexual assault is not just a female problem.
Using my experience to assist sexual assault survivors has been
an empowering step forward in my own healing.
In my work as an executive coach for the US military,
I work with others to help them regain their own sense of belonging.
I met a colonel recently. I'll call him John.
He couldn't be more different from me.
In his words, he grew up poor with a black father and a mexican mother.
I joined the military, he once said, for generational opportunities.
He's proudly served his country for more than 30 years.
As a practice, I share that I'm
a three time sexual assault survivor with all my military clients.
After sharing this with John, he looked at me and said, Me too.
He told me that as a child he was sexually assaulted by three of his
cousins. He said in the black community, Kelly, we don't talk about sexual trauma.
And the Mexican side of my family was very machismo.
Their philosophy was be a man and get over it.
I watched the imaginary bridge appear between us,
connecting me to a human with whom I thought I shared little common ground.
The walls came down and John looked visibly relaxed
as he recognized in me what he had experienced himself.
He said, Oh, so you really understand and can relate.
I nodded my head yes.
He said, Your story has given me permission to be myself.
You've shown me how to take down my walls, not hide anymore and be vulnerable.
Be me just by modeling the way.
That was the moment when I began to walk alongside John on his healing journey.
We can begin to build bridges back to ourselves and others.
We can start at any time. We can look for strength in others and in turn be
an example of that strength for others.
When you walk alongside people on their journey from being traumatized to healing,
you witness all the scars, bruises and obstacles this human has overcome.
The scars make them more beautiful. The concierge technique suggests many things.
When an object breaks, the cracks don't have to be disguised,
and it doesn't mean it's no longer useful. The cracks become valuable.
Or, as Leonard Cohen says in his song Anthem, there is a crack in everything.
That's how the light gets in.
Both Kanshi and Cohen's lyrics refer to the breaks scars as beautiful,
but one leaves them visible, the other sealed up,
reinforcing the idea that the healing journey is very personal.
Standing together as equals and bearing witness to each other's humanity is
a deep signal of recognition between assault survivors.
Each of us has a way to seek a way to cope with traumatic events in
a positive way. It's where we learn from negative experiences,
and in time we come to see that we are each unique, precious and whole.
We send each other the silent message saying, I see your light and you see mine.
We are fragile. We are vulnerable. We are equals. We are resilient.
Thank you.