Silent Lucidity
Finding the Words Through the Illusion of Normalcy
by
Book Cover & Preview Text
The year, 2000…It was when my life was finally in order and all of the excuses for despair, the forgetfulness, the distractions, the work, had been used up, that I could no longer deny the aloneness that I felt inside. I managed to create this perfect external world, yet I felt like I was falling apart. My emotional state was fragile. What made all of this so hard was that I had three healthy children, a decent marriage, a good education, a nice house, and my first counseling job. On the outside, everything was great. But something was boiling inside, a stirring that I had been familiar with, but the anxiety it was creating was bigger than I had ever experienced. Because of this unraveling, and no language developed to articulate the emptiness, I started looking for answers. I discovered The Courage to Heal Guide for Survivors of Child Sexual Abuse by Ellen Bass and Laura Davis. The first thing I noted was that I was about 14 when this book was written and that it was written by two women. It was never mentioned in any of my psychology classes and neither was the topic of incest. This is where the questions started to form. It was safe, as long as no one saw me reading it. It validated that the coping skills that I developed as a child were essential because, “a child could not afford to feel the full extent of the terror, pain, rage. The agony would have been devastating. I could not have done my arithmetic with other 2nd graders had I known the depth of my sorrow; and, I could not go anywhere or run, because I relied on my parents to take care of me” (39). While reading The Courage to Heal, I could no longer deny that the word “victim” pissed me off and that kept me silent. I had minimized the experience so much that being a victim seemed weak. I was not weak, ever. I was beginning to sort through the feelings, the coping strategies, and the usefulness of this information. I had feelings, but I did not have the words to describe them. One thing I needed to admit before any changes could be made was that keeping silent was weakening my resolve. The fear of sharing my story paralyzed my defenses. Denying and minimizing the abuse was a perfect coping strategy for survival. Survival is not living. Healing required that I look at my patterns of coping. These patterns became entrenched. They took on a life of their own. There were a lot of positive things about these coping behaviors that I wasn’t sure I was ready to give up. These behaviors or patterns emerged when I was only beginning to develop personality, language, feelings. While I knew I could no longer hide in denial, I was afraid that I would lose the parts of myself that were really very viable, powerful and self-reliant. Like, somehow, this healing was an “all or nothing” surrender. Since I didn’t have the words to describe anything about any of this, I had to educate myself about expression of feelings and find a viable answer to the question, “how do you feel?” when all I had was, “I don’t know.” It was the beginning of pinpointing how incest influenced my development. I was looking for the “why” in all of this. If I could find an explanation, I could be free to break the silence which would free me from the fear that prevented me from healing. Of course, there was no reasonable “why,” at least not in the present. I was awash in an accumulation of past feelings, future dreads; all similar, all lumped together as one. I recognized that I felt empty inside. I was increasingly tired, even bored. Sleep helped me to regain energy. It helped me to shut out the outside world and experience peace. It helped me forget and cleared my mind. I was out of touch with the terribleness of my life and my nervous system was breaking down. I was, most of the time, too upset by everything to be upset by anything in particular. I was depressed about the past and anxious about the future. Everything was a colossal effort. I was falling apart. I wanted the “nothingness” to end. I learned to live with my past and move on. Now I wanted to be honest and I wanted to be free from the pain. “Acknowledgement of pain is very important, denial is deadly. Avoid the pain, it will eat at you until the feelings are fully felt, fully healed. You have to address your pain, put words to it, feel it in your heart or they will be transferred into the body some other way, anger, frustration, depression. Saying yes, means letting in the pain full force, knowing you will not only get to the other side of it, but also gain something in the end, if you look for it” (excerpt from Susan Jeffer’s book, Feel the Fear and Do it Anyway). It was time to take a “fine tooth comb” to my life –everything needed to be questioned. It was time to find the words that would help me to connect the feelings to the memories that I worked so hard to separate from. I needed to honor and understand that there is a child’s point of view inside me that still needed to be heard. I needed to discover where I emotionally cut myself off. This would require that I remember. It was frightening to see things as they really were. It was difficult to define the constant ache that I felt in my stomach and it took a lot of time and energy. The more I questioned, the more exposed I felt. I was frozen with fear.
Formats
Book Details
About the Book
In Judith Herman’s book Trauma and Recovery: The Aftermath of Violence from Domestic Abuse to Political Terror, she emphasized how “the conflict between the will to deny horrible events and the will to proclaim them aloud is the central dialectic of psychological trauma.” Finding the words to tell my story has been a long journey. My coping was entrenched, and denial was strong. Healing from the messiness of childhood incest in and of itself is so shrouded with secrecy, shame, and humiliation that putting the words together in a way that will envelop an understanding of this atrocity that refused to be buried in my mind meant allowing myself to be vulnerable to the possibility of being shunned and dismissed as crazy. It is about getting well enough to speak about without emotionally unraveling and becoming vulnerable to the stigmas that get attached to mental health. While I have learned the significance of remaining silent until emotional health is obtained, the silence kept me isolated and ashamed for far too long. My book, my words, will shed light on how complicated the journey to health and wellness is while trying to maintain normalcy. It entwines normal life experiences and looks closely at the systems (family/relationships, educational, medical, mental health) and how they either helped or hurt the process. Without looking at the progression of my life, one could not see the dynamics of recovery. Sharing this journey will provide practitioners, both medical and mental health, with a personal perspective of the road to recovery. More importantly, I have tried to communicate my journey in a way that will allow all of us to come a little closer to facing the unspeakable, to take the power out of the word incest, and to help adult survivor’s break the cycle of silence.
About the Author
Olivia Benson received her M.S. in Educational Counseling in 1994, and her B.A. in Social Science in 1991; with a focus on human development, psychology and women’s studies. She has worked in the mental health field for two decades. Her work experience includes working for social services, not-for-profit agencies, state mental health facilities, and the school system. She believes that, because of the silence that she was bound to, her educational pursuits and work experiences assisted her with developing the necessary discernment skills that aided her with finding the words that are written in this book. For sure, every experience and every life transition became an opportunity to observe, grow and discover what was typical, average and normal development. Olivia believes that the examination and analysis of one’s own unrealized spiritual or intellectual capacity is something that everyone could benefit from, but emphasizes that it is essential for victims of childhood trauma to do the work of self-exploration. She knows that healing requires a lot of personal investment of time and that recovery work is arduous. Her journey was done in silence and it was a lonely place to be. Her story does not spend a lot of time on the act of incest because it is, in her opinion, the cultural taboos that keep incest silent, which kept her locked in pain. She believes that until we can take the sting out of the word, incest, people will remain trapped in shame and humiliation.