This is Healing HERstory, the Podcast, my low tech podcast about healing from childhood trauma and sexual violence. I’m Michelle Robertson, I also write Support Notes that you can receive in your inbox every Sunday. **Content Warning: Sexual Violence, CSA** Take care of YOU! Switch off and step away if you need to. TRANSCRIPT I am an ordinary woman. Most of us are. People like to use labels like “extraordinary” about others and sometimes, even about themselves - depending on which self help guru they’re listening to. And yes, it can be useful for our confidence and our self esteem to think of ourselves as extraordinary, but really, we’re not. We’re imperfect human beings trying to do the best that we can. Just like everyone else. As an aside, I want to differentiate between the meanings of ordinary and unique. When I speak about being ordinary I take it to mean “what is commonplace or standard” And the sheer volume of the population makes us commonplace and standard. Unique on the other hand means one of a kind. And yes, we are unique as human beings, each of us, the fact that we are also ordinary is an antinomy of sorts. Why am I talking about being ordinary? Well, I was lying awake the other night, as I often do, and thinking about the women in my circle. My personal circle, not my extended business circle, and I was struck by the commonality of our experiences. In particular, our experiences with sexual violence. Of the women I have been friends with over the years, a large number of them have experienced sexual abuse in childhood. I thought about these women and the stories they had shared with me over the years. I am part of that circle. There is nothing unusual about us, we come from a variety of backgrounds, different family dynamics, different cultures. There is nothing to set us apart and label us as “at risk”. But for the fact that we have shared our stories, there is no way of “knowing”. I extended my thought process to include the women in my life who had been raped and had shared those painful memories with me. The circle widened considerably. Again, I am a part of this circle. Again, there is nothing unusual, or “different” about us. We are just women. If we then include domestic violence (which all too often includes sexual violence), it’s bigger still. What about sexual harassment and inappropriate advances. As I lay there in the darkeness… pondering…The circle now encompassed over 90% of the women I have called friends over the course of my 58 years. It was a long night, and yes, I did the calculations. The conclusion I am forced to draw, is that sexual violence is commonplace. But we knew that already, didn’t we? When the #metoo hashtag went viral on social media, we couldn’t help but know that, surely? I am so deeply disturbed by this because I know that these statistics extend to our daughters’ generation. I haven’t heard all the stories about our daughters, because, well, it’s hard enough to share our own stories, but I’ve heard enough to want to scream ENOUGH! Where does it end? How does it end? When I first began my journey of healing, my life imploded. I already had two children. I was an extremely damaged young woman who had no idea just how damaged I was. I wish I had had the opportunity to begin healing before I committed to “adulting”. It’s only in retrospect that I can see how completely unprepared I was. Sometimes I want to reach back in time and call out to that lonely, frightened woman who was so much in denial and living so fully in survival mode that she thought she had it all together, and warn her. I digress. Back to my sleepless night. I’ve had this podcast on the back burner for a while, and life and work spilled over and I kept it there. Now, I thought. This. I thought. Healing has to be about more than just the individual, and as we know, healing doesn’t happen in a vacuum. It takes community. It takes connection. That’s why over the course of so many years I’ve volunteered to work with women in some of the most dire of circumstances and helped to facilitate the telling of their stories in some small way. It’s why I started doing this more formally in an online setting three years ago. On some level I always understood that healing ourSELVES, tending to our own woundedness, and bringing our experiences into the open with our words would impact more than just those of us in the circle, it would spill out into the world and reach into the void to connect us in our healing. But what I’ve just now come to realise, is that it’s even more than that. Our ever widening circles, our ever strengthening voices, our collective stories and journeys of pain and loss and brokenness will do more than heal us. It’s really the ONLY way to begin to heal the world. I’m not one to think of pain and suffering as transformative. Yes, it can be, for some. But to prescribe that something beautiful should come out of something abhorrent, is to turn the focus back onto the victims of these crimes. And yes, there is no doubt that these are crimes, and we are victims. Before I was a survivor , I was a victim. Let’s not forget that, because in skipping out the part of our stories where we are victims of injustice, we skip over the fact that there is a perpetrator. Someone, a real, live, fellow human being, who did the unthinkable to us. Who committed an act of terror upon another. Let us remember that as survivors are also victims of these acts. There is damage. Untold damage. There are secondary victims, and changing the language of sexual violence and abuse to speak up as survivors, while ignoring the fact that we were victims, changes the focus somewhat. It’s nuanced, and that’s why words are so important. Sexual violence is commonplace. It’s a reality for ordinary women. Every day. It’s almost become a right of passage for women. I feel sick to my stomach just saying those words… but there’s an undeniable truth there. The world is in as much need of healing as we are. Our wider societies need to learn to care about what is happening to their women and children. Society needs to do more than pay lip service to the atrocities that are taking place under their noses. Society needs to heal, and the ONLY way to do so is by using our voices, sharing our stories, showing our tender wounds and letting the world know that this is not okay. That we will not be silenced. That we will speak our truth. I don’t know exactly how that will work yet, but I do know the power of shared stories. I’ll end this first broadcast with this quote by Margaret Mead: Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed citizens can change the world; indeed, it's the only thing that ever has. I find that very powerful, because we are not a small group, Those of us who have been victims of violence, those of us who have experience abuse, we are not a small group, we’re a large circle, and together, we CAN change the world. EDIT: I recorded this episode a few weeks ago, and in the interim, at the beginning of this month if fact, the United Nations declared November 18th, which is today, the World Day for the Prevention of and Healing from Child Sexual Exploitation, Abuse and Violence. The road isn’t easy, and the time frames for creating change are far too long, but this is a start and I hope that you will join me in raising your voice to make known what is happening to women and children around the world and that sexual violence and child sexual abuse is a real problem in ALL societies. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit healingherstory.substack.com
