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.
•§•
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.
•§•
In those first months and years of this writing practice, it felt like I was running for my life with words, and if I stopped to think too hard about what I was saying, I clotted up in doubt and fear and couldn’t write at all. I needed the right kind of pen (Pilot Precise v7) and the right kind of notebook (8 ½ x 5 Artists Sketchbook, please); I needed the right noisy cafe, a corner table near the window, headphones and a cassette tape of music I knew well. I needed many cups of strong coffee adulterated with a lot of sugar. I was like that little girl, afraid of the dark, who needs a glass of water, and her blankie, and the same two stuffed animals, and the door left open just the right amount before she felt safe enough to fall asleep. Everything had to be just right for me, too; I was absolutely afraid of the darkness I was trying to write.
My stepfather had tried to occupy every fragment, every nook and cranny, every inch of my psyche—he believed, and trained me to believe, that he had a right to every thought in my head, every emotion, every instinct. He taught me to believe he (or someone in his employ) was always watching me, and through this training, taught me to surveil myself. A legacy of that surveillance took the form of brutal and byzantine inner critics who contradicted or challenged most of what I thought or wrote. So I learned to write very fast, in order to outrun these challengers—by the time the voice rose up to take apart an accusation I made on the page, I was already onto the next line.
The chatter of the other cafe patrons, the music pulsing loud and fast through the headphones: these occupied my hyper-vigilant consciousness, so that I could write from the place underneath—from the self that was terrified of exposure, from the well of knowing that had been forced into silence during the years my mother had been married to my stepfather.
At first, I used the pages to try and make sense of myself—quite literally. After finally escaping my stepfather, I first tried to write down—using the direct, clear, logical language my stepfather had demanded—all that I had been through and was feeling. But the words kept getting muddled. I stopped writing in the middle of a sentence, stuck between what I knew was true and the quarrelsome voice of an inner censor, which sounded an awful lot like my stepfather and challenged almost every assertion I tried to make about what he’d done. I stared out the window at my hale and happy-appearing classmates; why didn’t they have this trouble? I’d lived so long inside the silence, and tangled in the Doublethink and Doublespeak, required of those surviving long-term abuse that I no longer knew how to speak straight-forwardly. My stepfather had forced me to dismantle my own language and desire from the inside out, and reconstruct these in the image he preferred. I didn’t know what anything meant anymore. That’s not exactly true; I didn’t know how to convey the layers of meanings inside my words to anyone else.
After I told my stepfather that I could no longer “continue our sexual relationship” (that was the language he required us to use) and broke contact with him and the rest of my family, he promised to harm or kill me and those I cared about if I told what he’d been doing. So I did not go to the police and I did not go to therapy. The trajectory of my life upended. He and my mother terminated their financial support for my education, so I had to withdraw from school after the fall of my senior year. I took a job with the on-campus library, went more than a little crazy, drank almost anything I could get my hands on, watched too much Rikki Lake, and wrote and wrote and wrote and wrote and wrote. It took almost a year after that terrifying conversation with my stepfather before I could let myself believe that I would not be physically harmed if I told my story to a therapist, and by the time I was able to so, I’d already developed the writing practice that I would use to suture myself back together.
In working to heal the damage my stepfather did, I haven’t only written, of course. I also, as I mentioned above, went to talk therapy, as well as group therapy, feminist support groups, model mugging and self-defense classes, every modality offering tools I could use to further my healing, my sense of sanity. But my mother and stepfather were both psychotherapists: I understood how the language of talk therapy could be used to undo or contort or ensnare someone’s psyche and sense of self—and though I have worked with kind, smart, wise and generous therapists, I don’t know if I have ever fully trusted that process or relationship, though I do believe in its transformative potential. Writing, however, has been a steady and unwavering companion, able to listen and welcome without transference or countertransference.
The page has been the place where my whole self could emerge—my complicated, confused, petty, sorrowful, funny, jubilant, desiring, hopeful, despairing, pleased, depressed, hurt, enraged, spiritual, philosophical, playful, curious, certain, and uncertain self. The page introduced me to my human self—utterly imperfect and nonetheless acceptable. The page has been a place for beauty, for grief, for attempt, for starting over. And over. And over. And over. Freewriting is my yoga, my daily jog, my meditation, my spiritual practice—when I go without this writing for too many days in a row, I begin to lose touch with myself, become jagged and short-tempered; I can feel, inside, the shards of me banging against each other. I am too many pieces again, all of them demanding attention, demanding to be true. My sense of wholeness begins to disassemble when I fall out of this practice. I’m cranky, less pleasant to be around, less functional in my so-called adulthood.
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