I was shocked when my harddrive crashed. One minute I was typing away, responding to an email; the next, there was nothing, and there wasn't anything I could do about it. I tried. My husband, a former IBMer, tried. Nothing. We fretted over how much it would cost to get it fixed or get a new one, and I was anxious about what files might have been lost. The tension built as we researched how and where to have it diagnosed and fixed, and when we finally found a place, they told us it would take a while. Looking back, it's a fitting metaphor for what happens when an adult with repressed memories of childhood sexual abuse has her first flashback. Everything comes to a halt and there's nothing she can do about it. She may turn to her husband, but though he wants to be helpful he doesn't know how to be. They research where to get help, feeling anxious about the cost, and when they find a competent therapist, she's vague about how long the healing process will take. How could she be otherwise? To quote a line from Stephen Sondheim's Into the Woods: "What is is. What isn't, isn't.  The only way through it is to go through it. And it takes as long as it takes."

The poet Kahil Gibran wrote that "labor is love made visible." Beautiful quote, and challenging, in the best sense. But to the survivor of sexual abuse, especially if the perpetrator was her father, mother, grandfather, grandmother, brother, sister, uncle or aunt -- people who were supposed to love her; who may have told her over and over that they loved her -- it can be a challenge filled with  anger, horrific memories, anxiety, fear, ambivalence, confusion and perhaps even a glimmer of hope. I'm interested in building on the hope. My next several blogs will be about various aspects of the labor of healing. Some of the topics I plan to include are why therapy is important, how to choose a therapist, stages of healing, managing your life while you're managing your pain, the place of creative expression (ie. art, music, drama), and self care throughout the lifecycle.

I thought a fitting way to end this Labor Day Lamentation would be to share with you this poem, which I wrote several years ago. The title is Anyway:

                        When people say “Go to hell!”

                        they are talking about a place where

                        little girls who have been sexually abused

                        have been. They were never supposed to

                        experience all that evil;

                        the flaming intensity of it; the inferno.

                        But their perpetrators didn’t care

                        about that and took them there

                        anyway.

                        When people say “incest recovery journey”

                        they are talking about a process

                        where grown women who are trying to heal

                        wounds of sexual abuse must go to hell

                        over and over again while they look to the outside world

                        as if they are living in the here and now.  Sometimes,

                        they want to curl up and die

                        But they must pay the bills and kiss the kids

                        anyway.

                        They listen to stories and read books hoping

                        to find a map for the territory while

                        some folks tell them: “If you can’t stand the heat,

                        stay out of the fire.”  What do they know?

                        You don’t have to stand the heat.  You can

                        scream and cry and moan and complain. Get

                        it out. Any way you can do it is the best way

                        and it beats keeping the fucking secrets

                        any day!

* My use of  feminine pronouns is not meant to imply in any way that only females are victims of sexual abuse, though statistically female victims outnumber male.

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