When I began to lead writing groups with sexual trauma survivors, I finally thought to ask: What happens if we question the mainstream stories that get told about us? What happens when we tell the untellable stories? What if we challenge the stories our families or perpetrators or communities told about us, the normative, normalizing stories that tell us who and how we’re supposed to be? I wanted to find out what happened when we wrote directly into the stories we were most afraid or ashamed of, when we turned our most-told stories upside down and inside out. What happens when we write the backside of the stories we have internalized about ourselves, about our communities, the stories of our healing or our desire?
In writing with groups of survivors (and other folks, as well), I found the strength and curiosity to write into and question some of my most deeply-held stories (that is, beliefs) about myself: that I was broken; that I would never feel safe in my body; that sex would always be difficult for me; that I was a failure; that I didn’t deserve to call myself a woman; that I was culpable for my stepfather’s sexual abuse because I hadn’t been able to stop him for so long; that I didn’t deserve family; that family didn’t want me; that I wasn’t worth caring about or saving. It takes heart and guts to tell the truth on the page, whether we ever share that writing with another soul. We grow, we transform, when we are willing to take that risk.
If we as a culture are immersed in story, then it follows that we come to know, to understand, ourselves through story. Therefore it’s possible to be transformed by others’ stories, by others’ ways of knowing and experiencing the world and their own possibility, though this requires a profound vulnerability and willingness to be open to change. When we are present with other people’s stories, we can learn different ways of looking at the world, looking at ourselves, understanding pain and struggle and desire and longing, than we ourselves have yet considered. I notice this happening quite often in the writing workshops, a note of, “I never heard it described quite that way before—that’s just how I feel, too!” And there’s a shift, a splitting open, a new openness of our perceptions, and thus ourselves.
There is a quality of magic that manifests when we gather with others in community and share our creative selves. The word magic comes from old Greek and Persian words that have to do with art and agency or power. I want that magic—that powerful art—for all sexual trauma survivors, because I believe this work can heal us, break open our isolation, reincorporate us into the human family, while transforming humanity into something more kind, expansive, and real.
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One magic quality of story that I most value is the way stories show up for me when I am most alone and nearly lost. Dr. Rachel Naomi Remen, the author of Kitchen Table Wisdom, was one of the facilitators I worked with when I attended the Writing as a Healing Art conference in 2010. While she was with us she discussed the power of story, describing the ways in which stories are able to accompany people into their darkest places. The story that any of us tells about how we survive our own struggles will accompany those who’ve heard us when they, later, have to walk into their own difficult places. The listener receives these stories as a kind of opening, a faint and terraced map: Look how they resisted, made it through, forgave themselves, told the truth—maybe I could do that, too. I carry workshop writers’ stories with me: they live along the skin of my forearms, they live in the cilia just inside my ears.
When I hear others’ stories of resilience and resistance, I get the chance to revisit my own narrative, reconsider the parts I’ve labeled cowardice, betrayal, isolation, lack of integrity, lack of strength, and cover those old labels with sticky notes on which I’ve scribbled: strategy, resilience, patience, courage, generosity. I try on new naming. I remember, in the early 90s, sitting at an isolated desk in the dusty stacks of my college library. The timer that controlled the light above the study area ticked away while I flipped through an old collection of women’s stories of abuse—maybe it was I Never Told Anyone—horrified that this was happening to so many of us, and, underneath that, so thankful to have discovered I wasn’t alone. I don’t think I ever checked that book out; I was too afraid of the librarian cocking an eyebrow my way, which would lead inevitably, I was sure, to my stepfather raging at me on the phone because I “told.” But there in those stacks, when the timer ran out and the light clicked off, I held the book in my hands for a moment, breathing in the knowledge that there were women who made it out—that there were women who got free, that there were women who told.
We need one another’s’ stories as we learn to navigate the world post-trauma. For anyone struggling with the isolation of trauma aftermath, writing authentically—alone and with peers—can be transformative. Author and essayist Barry Lopez says, “The stories people tell have a way of taking care of them. If the stories come to you, care for them. And learn to give them away where they are needed. Sometimes a person needs a story more than food to stay alive.” While we can never change what was done to us, we can transform how that history lives in us, take control over how it shapes and constrains us. We can come to understand that creativity, or creative genius, or possibility can be our name: broken and raped don’t have to be our names. Victim doesn’t have to be our name (nor does stupid or shithead or selfish or crybaby or coward or whatever other words they used against us to keep us tethered, afraid, and ashamed).
We can allow these experiences to take up a right-sized space in our souls without them having to be the whole of our being. We can story ourselves anew.
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We who are survivors of horror—of sexual violation, of physical abuse, of mental torture, of emotional manipulation or disregard, of captivity; those of us who’ve had ties with our own blood severed, or who have wished to scrape out of our veins the blood that flowed there—who are we, without the roots of a shared (hi)story? We’re not the first generation of survivors, we’re not the first generation whose parents/caregivers/spouses thought we were worthy of abuse: part of our lineage is that truth, borne forward in the mouths of the ones who came before us, in the whispers and models of resilience, in the slow ways we learn to keep little pieces of ourselves safe. No one told us outright how to survive: that knowing is bone-deep ancestral memory, something in these cells that knows about staying alive when everything else says die.
We are of our own blood, true, and we are also of that other, larger family, the family that will never gather for a reunion, that averts its eyes from strangers or looks boldly into your curious face, the family of truth-veined human beings who made it through something horrible, only to have to live the rest of their lives carrying those memories in body and breath.
In this book, I mean to constellate some of what I’ve learned in twenty-some years of ongoing personal writing practice and over thirteen years facilitating sexuality and other writing groups with folks who, like me, survived sexual violence in one form or another. Throughout, I describe why I believe writing alone, and in a community of peers, is so revolutionary for sexual violence survivors.
The process I describe herein, that I’ve been working with for the past many years, has three parts, each of which can crack us open to transformation: story, voice, and witness:
• When we find words for our untold stories, we build new relationships with the fragments of experience, memory, and reaction that have bounced around inside our psyches with no tethering, no root; we allow the stories out of our bodies and into the world.
• When we read aloud our new writing, we give voice to both our story and our creative abilities, and we deepen our embodiment as writers and speakers.
• When we choose to share our work with others, we are witnessed: we hear how our writing, our craft, our story has affected others; our story isn’t ours to carry alone anymore. We get to experience being truly heard and we get to return that kindness by listening to/witnessing others’ stories as well. We come to understand that our attention is important, that our listening and observation matter.
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In