I’m not sure when exactly it happened but somewhere along the way my culture decided the perfect pairing for motherhood is wine. Brands like Mommy Juice play up this association and “wine play dates” where moms can share a bottle while the little ones play have popped up all over. Bloggers joke about hiding wine in old Starbucks cups so they can drink when they’re at PTA meetings.
Secondary traumatic stress is the experience of being triggered by another person’s firsthand account of abuse. It is not something ugly you are doing to others, not a lack of sympathy. It’s what happens when it’s all too much to take in, particularly as a trauma survivor.
When celebrities are accused of domestic violence or sexual assault, there’s a timeline that always plays out. Sometime between today and next week, I expect many of my friends will be dealing with secondary trauma.
First, there’s the allegation, full of naked truths and ugly details. The knowledge that another man has fallen, is unworthy of his fame and adoration. That part doesn’t trigger me. It saddens me.
Then there’s the memories. Even if I’m calm, I’m introspective. I remember times I’ve been abused for my gender, beginning in early girlhood and going on until my current celibate hermitage.
Then comes the wave of other stories from friends, tales of degradation and abuse. Those are hard, and I’m torn between a desire to offer comfort and shield myself from details. I try to do both, badly.
Hard as all that is, I can cope with it. I can medicate and distract myself and spend part of my day focused on life affirming things. I can get through it.
If that’s all there was to a celebrity abuse scandal, I could deal. But it isn’t. There’s a far uglier and more damaging stage we can’t seem to escape.
The doubts start, the self-appointed agents of the court who crop up to offer what they imagine is reasonable doubt. “We weren’t there” they’ll say with faux wisdom, as if we victims didn’t realize most abuse occurs behind closed doors.
The doubts turn to excuses, reasons the victim is at fault, why truly they’re to blame for “making” an abuser mistreat them. Sympathy is absent and resentment runs high. How dare that victim tell us the truth when we didn’t want to hear it!
This is called retraumatizing the victim, and we know doubts in the presence of honesty cause it. Victim blaming does it even more.
The secondary trauma and retrauma of your disbelief does more to harm victims than you can imagine. Woody Allen didn’t abuse me, he abused another girl. But all the people who hurt her by doubting her hurt me too.
When you refuse to believe a celebrity you like is capable of abuse, I know you won’t do the right thing if one of your friends is an abuser too. You’ve marked yourself as unsafe, and there are hundreds of thousands just like you.
This is why partner violence, family abuse, and sexual assault run rampant, because when faced with the knowledge someone you admire behaved abhorrently, most of you attack the victim for bursting your bubble.
This week, Amber Heard filed for an emergency restraining order against Johnny Depp, who she is attempting to divorce. I believe her. I’ve read the account of his physical and verbal abuse and it rings true, as a DV survivor. False abuse allegations are rare; domestic violence is common.
But other people are not so ready to believe. They like Depp, maybe they’ve liked him for decades. They love his art and his looks, and don’t want Heard “ruining” that for them. So, although she is the victim and did nothing wrong, fans and gawkers are expressing anger at her for daring to say something (to a judge to get protection. She hasn’t given press interviews or anything.)
I’m here to take on the expressions of disbelief and the objections to believing Heard I have seen, one by one. Such statements are in bold italics with my responses in standard text.
My cult leader was not beautiful, not when I knew her. She was short and fat with thinning gray hair, dressed in floral print mumus and cracked black leather loafers and went by the nickname Giggy. Carol Balizet was cute in the black and white photos of herself she’d papered her bedroom walls with, photos of herself as a teen and young adult. She was charismatic, which is not the same as beautiful. It lasts longer.
When she spoke, it was as if she was illuminated by a psychic spotlight. She glowed. It didn’t matter very much that she often spoke nonsense or else had her facts twenty years out of date. She spoke with such confidence and authority, I believed her. Sometimes she would shine that light on me, approve of me or make me feel special, and it was like being chosen by the sun as its favorite.
I understand why “natural cures” are so appealing. They evoke pastoral scenes and ancient herbalists; they create nostalgia for a fictional simpler yet healthier time. They feel knowable to the average person in a way the advanced chemistry behind pharmaceutical medicine doesn’t. Dietary supplements are a legal category in the US, not subject to Food and Driug Administration oversight, so they don’t carry all the scary warnings prescription medications do.
I’ve had mixed success with “natural” remedies. Melatonin for wakefulness worked, but after years of use mint stopped soothing nausea and started to cause it. Eating tryptophan rich foods like pineapple, yogurt, and turkey has kept my Obsessive Compulsive Disorder in check for the past ten years, but it doesn’t touch my depression.
Going to the gym daily, even if it’s just to walk very slowly on the treadmill for twenty minutes, does help maintain what little core strength I have, which in turn reduces back pain. I use marijuana daily for physical and emotional pain, and it does its job.
I’m disabled. I have disabilities. It’s okay, breathe. You can cope with this knowledge. You don’t need to call me “differently abled” or pretend the “dis” is an unimportant part of the world. There are things I can’t do that are particularly valued or required in the world and culture I live in. It’s a truth, and acknowledging it won’t kill either of us.
Disabilities exist. One in four US adults have a disability. People in every nation have disabilities. Our prehuman ancestors had disabilities. Animals can have disabilities, inborn or acquired or foisted on them by humans like my poor declawed cat. Disability exists and it’s okay to admit that head on.
You’ve probably encountered this type of mealy mouthed watered down “activism” before: We’re all human! Oppressors and oppressed, victims and abusers, prisoners and wardens, we’re all human! *cue sitcom Christmas episode level cheesy music* It’s a message that betrays a naive wish to skip all the hard work of justice, right to the peace and comfort of unity. It may be consciously well intended, but it is detrimental to real healing and real equity.
“We’re all human” is erasure, in several ways. It erases the ways we’re not all treated human. Like a white person defiantly “correcting” a Black Lives Matter” activist by shouting “ALL lives matter!”, this statement pretends away the life and death consequences of bigotry. It sweeps under the proverbial rug varied life expectancies and lifetime risks of violence, homelessness, and incarceration. It ignores our struggles. “We’re all human” obfuscates the problem that a cultural archetype of a default “human” already exists, and we don’t all look like it.
Content warning for brief mention of child sex abuse, description of vehicular homicide, child death, home birth
Usually it’s easy for me to be glad I removed someone damaging to my life. I never miss the pedophile who abused me, or my ex-husband, or my former live in boyfriend. They hurt me and they wronged me and I prefer to pretend they’re all dead. No part of me wants relationship with them. But I miss my old cult leader, my grandma, and it hurts to not see her.
I have to remind myself that she has Alzheimer’s and hasn’t seen me in seven years. She wouldn’t recognize me, or might confuse me for one of my aunts twenty years ago. And the last time we spoke, I yelled at her for not seeking medical care for a cult member’s toddler who fell in a yellow jackets nest behind her offices and died several hours later from the poison. She screamed back, “Well what do you want me to say, I’m sorry?!” There are reasons we haven’t spoken since.
My Giggy raised me and broke me, sang hymns while rocking me in her lap, and once snapped a metal ladle in two while spanking me with it. She played with us in the backyard swimming pool, and told us demonic forces were all around. She drove so fast and so carelessly, she plowed into a deaf and blind woman on a residential street, killing her on impact on the windshield, inches from my face. She called me Nuke as a nickname, and told me I was “good as gold”.
She’s my only abuser I ever truly loved and some days I just want to climb into her lap and sink into her plump grandmotherly embrace. She poisoned my relationship with my mother so that I’m unable to emotionally believe that she loves me, and the worst thing my mother did was have her mother around us. I remember that my own son is reason enough to stay away. My Giggy, my grandma, my first teacher, and the woman who felt more like a mother to me than her daughter who birthed me, would chew him up and spit him out.
I have to remind myself that she killed people, and even seemed to want my mom to die in home childbirth. In her written account of my older brother’s birth, Giggy said that she told God he could take my mother, and compared herself to Abraham offering Isaac to God. My mother the person is not mentioned again in the story, save a brief remark about her perineum not tearing. Mom’s survival wasn’t the point of that story; Gig’s spiritual warfare was.
I have to remind myself. For all that I know, for all that I witnessed, isn’t enough to make my heart stop loving her. I don’t have contact with her. I don’t plan to see her until her funeral. But I know her death one day will shake me, will destroy me for a while. Because I still love her. I can’t not. I’ve tried. Some days I wish against my own self interest that she was well and I still believed in her. I haven’t been able to believe since I lost my faith in her.
I miss the killer who raised me.
You cannot have true revolution, real change without bringing everyone with you. If your social justice cause leaves anyone behind, then everyone is at risk of the same. You can get incremental change this way, but you can’t take on the system.
If your activism leaves mentally ill people behind, then all the powers that be need to do to discount you is suggest you are crazy. If you throw trans women under the proverbial bus to get a feminism that puts you first, then all the world has to do is say you look trans to treat you badly too.
My college history professor (who accidentally saved me from a cult by teaching me the history of others) gave me the framework I still use for thinking of a just society. He assigned us all to design a fictional country and determine its hierarchy. After we were finished, he told us to imagine we had to live at the lowest station we had created. If we’d included a servant class while imagining ourselves as royalty, we now found ourselves as peasants. If we’d gone for more balance, we were more content with our role.
Growing up, we ate unseasoned food at home. Grandma cooked all vegetables the same way, boiled until they turned gray. Lima beans and mashed potatoes tasted the same: bland. I didn’t encounter spice. The only seasoning I craved was salt, and I would sometimes eat salt on its own as a snack. Taco Bell without sauce was probably the spiciest food I was ever served, once or twice over several years. I didn’t realize at the time how well this accommodated me.
I can’t eat spicy food. I don’t simply mean I prefer not to, or that my IBS makes me regret doing so. I mean I can’t swallow spicy food because it hurts so bad. I tried Thai food once, ten years ago. I can’t remember how the heat tasted but I remember slamming back coffee creamers while tears streamed down my face . I had chemical burns on my tongue. The relatives I was eating with were absolutely fine. The problem wasn’t Thai food, it was me.
Misandry Angie 