We often hear the question: “Why don’t survivors speak?”
It’s not just for the reasons you think.
Let’s take a journey inside the brain and nervous system of a survivor of gendered and/or racialized intimate partner violence.
First, let’s visit Broca’s Area
Broca’s Area is a furl of neural matter in the left half of your brain, curled behind your left temple, above your left ear. There it is – the smaller of two orange patches. On the left, there:
For the neuroscience geeks in the room, Broca’s area was the first area of the brain to be associated with a specific function, when in 1861 Paul Broca examined the brain of a man who, in life, had been unable to speak, and discovered a significant lesion in the left frontal lobe. (That big hole in the brain in this picture below.)
Here’s a picture of the brain of a man who went by the name ‘Tan’ because that was the only word he could say. After ‘Tan’s’ death, Broca autopsied his brain and found this one area was largely missing.
Broca’s area is involved in the production of speech, of words and sentences, both those inside your mind and those spoken out loud. Research shows that electrical stimulation to this area blocks the ability to speak.
This may help to account for the “speechless terror” experienced by survivors.
Replicable studies that examine brain scans of people with PTSD indicate that Broca’s area gets deactivated during recall of traumatic stress. The British Journal of Psychiatry notes: “A replicated finding has been the deactivation of Broca’s area, the area of the brain thought to be responsible for applying semantic representations to personal experience to allow its communication or description. This would appear to be consistent with subjects with PTSD having difficulty in cognitively restructuring their traumatic experience.”
In other words, a core speech area of a survivor’s brain shuts down during traumatic events, and shuts down again any time she attempts to name, describe, think, or talk about that traumatic experience.
What does this feel like? It feels like your body is telling you something, and part of you knows it – and you just. can’t. say it. A disconnect occurs between what you know and what you are capable of articulating.
Depending on the nature of the abuse, you may be able to clearly remember and perceive the harm in your mind – you may wish you could just play the movie for others because it is so clear in your head. If you could only plug others directly into your experience they would get it instantly. But you cannot speak it. You may be able to speak around it. But attempt to speak directly of it and you find you cannot access words.
If the harm is happening in the context of intimate partner violence, this terrifying experience can happen when you try to get across what is happening and ask for it to stop, which usually happens at first in private to the person who is harming you, the person who says he loves you, as you attempt to ask him desperately to stop harming you, at first believing that he will. This can go on for months. Even when you have the knowledge of what you are trying to say, even when there are specific harmful actions and experiences you badly need to convey (the perfectly clear visuals of his repeated gaslighting words or abusive actions, for example) you can’t even coherently think it in any way connected to words.
If the person harming you deflects, minimizes, or gaslights you when you attempt to raise concerns, you may try to reach out to another listener who is trying to help you, to express exactly what the harm is and ask for help to make it stop, but no words come. Your friends who observe your partner’s behaviour might also notice that he is treating you in a strange or abusive way, but when they ask you about it, you can’t respond. You can’t speak about it even enough to speak about this experience of not being able to speak. Any time you try, the words just can’t form. Any time you think about it, this shutting down of language recurs.
While you’re keeping Broca’s area in mind, let’s slide inwards a little, into the much-discussed limbic brain, to a structure called the hippocampus, which at this point is also going haywire.
The hippocampus, so called because it is shaped a little like a seahorse, is in the middle of your brain, in your limbic brain, below your ‘thinking’ neocortex and above your ‘lizard brain,’ or brainstem.
The hippocampus is involved in such functions as ordering of emotions, memories and events, as well as spatial and sequential memory. Since episodic memory is stored in dispersed networks in the brain, the hippocampus is responsible for keeping track of and integrating the many different neural networks involved in connecting the sensory and emotional experiences that come to form memories of the events of our life. For instance, say you have a dinner party. Your brain will store information in different places for the taste of the wine, who was there, how you felt, the way the flowers smelled or the heat of the candles. The hippocampus keeps track of and connects these different networks into coherent episodic memory.
The hippocampus is deeply woven into the autonomic nervous system and all of the lower survival functions, and is connected with the Hypothalamus-Pituitary-Adrenal (HPA) axis. As part of the attachment-oriented limbic brain, it is in the most relational part of our brains, the part that developed when mammals evolved to form inside a parent’s body rather than growing externally in an egg. This is thus a highly relational part of the brain, exquisitely attuned to interdependence and the rhythms of human interconnection.
This extremely vital and sensitive part of the brain gets damaged by chronic elevated cortisol levels, which means when someone is experiencing gendered violence, they will have a harder time thinking of things together that are typically brought together in consciousness, even when they know what has happened to them. Parts of the experience, sensory information, and emotional knowledge may be disconnected in the brain, causing fragmentation and dissociation – the inability to bring together elements of consciousness that are typically connected together. There is a relationship between chronic elevated cortisol levels and hippocampal atrophy, and some evidence to suggest that chronic elevated cortisol levels can cause lesions in the hippocampus.
In other words, when a person causing harm creates chronic stress in their lover or partner, such as by gaslighting them chronically over months and months, they are physically harming that person’s brain in ways that take years to repair.
Physiological elevation of chronic stress hormones can also lead to other physical changes in the body: weight gain around the middle with skinny arms and legs, a hump on the back between the shoulder blades, extra hair growth, and swelling of the lower half of the face are all symptoms of chronically elevated cortisol.
Moving even further inwards, we come to the amygdala. The amygdala is involved in connecting and observing the outside world to scan the environment for signs relevant to our survival, including the potential for sex and attachment, food, rivals, children in distress, risk and threat.
In situations of chronic elevated stress, such as that experienced by soldiers in combat zones or survivors experiencing chronic gaslighting and other forms of intimate partner abuse, the amygdala over time develops a greater and greater sensitivity to traumatic stress.
To see how the amygdala and the hippocampus connect to everything else, we travel now from the brain down out through an opening in the bottom of your skull, moving along your vagus nerve, the largest nerve in your body. The vagus nerve connects your brain to virtually every other organ and system, and it is an important part of the body’s ‘gearing up’ and ‘gearing down’ systems. Here is our friend the vagus nerve, running up and down the body, in yellow:
When the amygdala determines that it is in danger, it initiates a hormone cascade that in turn shoots down to the adrenal glands, situated just above your kidneys:
…which pump out rushes of stress hormones including adrenaline and cortisol, that flood up the vagus nerve and overwhelm the sensitive hippocampus, creating long-term changes to this structure in the exquisitely sensitive limbic brain.
So the subverbal knowledge of our bodies is alerting us ‘something is wrong!’ and the alarms are going off, yet if the person we love, and/or the person harming us, is lying about it and gaslighting us, our capacity to hold it all together and make sense of the body’s signals is impaired simultaneously by the abuser’s lack of emotional accountability and also by our own physiology in response to the harm. And then even if we can form a coherent comprehension of what he is gaslighting us about, our language centre is impaired, rendering it incredibly difficult for us to speak what we know.
So when we talk about bravery, about the strength, dignity, and amazingness of female-of-centre people who speak up, we are talking about a lot more than just the guts involved socially in ‘deciding to tell.’ What is often overlooked and underestimated is just how much literal physiological silencing women struggle through to get able to speak at all.
The shut down in language centres and cognitive response can help explain why it can take months or even years for survivors to finally regain the capacity to speak, and the immense difficulty when they do. Please be aware of this when you are supporting them. If you ask a question and their mouth opens and no words come out, or the wrong words appear to come tumbling out of control, or they can only speak in incoherent ways, or if a normally kind and emotionally mature person appears to have only two settings, silence or screaming, or if a normally good writer begins to produce choppy broken phrasing when they try to name the harm, this effect you are seeing is caused by the abuse, and is a key element that needs your support, understanding, compassion, and protection. It feels exactly like those nightmares where your loved ones are all around you as a terrifying demon is about to eat you, and you beg the people around you for help but no words, or the wrong words, or only a tiny wordless squeak comes out. It is a waking nightmare. In NVC terms, this experience needs your full ‘giraffe ears‘ and your deep, deep nurturing support.
Many survivors describe this as a feeling like drowning, like you are underwater and cannot even speak to get the help you need, to get those around you to toss you a stick or recognize your paralysis and pull you back to dry land. Unfortunately, when describing terrifying physiological experiences, metaphor does not always help people understand. Interestingly enough, it may be more than a metaphor.
True drowning doesn’t look like drowning
Unlike on TV when people shout and wave their arms around, in real life drowning scenarios the Instinctive Drowning Response overrides the neocortex completely and the drowning person becomes physiologically unable to direct their own limbs or call out for help. This survival response blocks voluntary control of the body and creates a life-threatening stillness and inability to get attention or call for help.
Another automatic survival response that research indicates often arises in sexual assault, Tonic Immobility, similarly paralyzes the person experiencing the harm and leads them to be physiologically unable to fight, speak, or call out for help. If someone you know has been quiet quiet quiet and then “abruptly” begins pleading or shouting for help, ask yourself what has been happening to them beforehand – what did you miss over months and months – that has led to that shout, made this attempt to finally get heard their last desperate option. If you’re trying to get heard through physiological paralysis, your only options can be deathly silence, or shouting to get around the inner block. True drowning, whether in water or in abuse, can look very quiet.
Gaslighting survivors typically have a powerful, and understandable, need to create a coherent narrative and finally get their silenced voice heard. This need is what bystanders can centre to help the survivor heal.
The ones who helped me were the ones who already have a deep empathic capacity, or who have been through this themselves; the ones who have a value of living their social justice commitments in their daily lives; the ones who recognize the harm and its signs because they have been there, on one side or another of the dynamic. Some of those who have helped the most were men who are committed to this kind of work and recognize the patterns and the signs, some of whom had behaved in harmful ways in previous relationships, who now do their own emotional work, and so were able to recognize the slippery manipulative things my former partner was doing to deny his responsibility and gaslight me again. My closest friends and those who were the most empathic or had the most experience with this kind of abuse took the time to see how gentle and scared I was inside, how long I had been trying and trying and trying to ask quietly and lovingly for help, how long – months and months on end – the one harming me had refused to hear me, and how easy it would have been for me to drown.
This is why when I talk of gendered violence I am referring to all forms of abuse, including all of the forms of what we typically refer to as ‘physical’ and ‘psychological’ harm, which are equally damaging and need to be recognized and responded to with the same degree of severity.
Indeed, ‘psychological’ harm is a misnomer, as this kind of abuse causes physical harm to brain structures and is in fact more physically violent than harm to one’s more readily visible body parts, because the harm is to the delicate brain and inner functioning of the nervous system. Brain damage can be much more debilitating than a black eye, taking years to heal compared with a visible bruise on the skin. And because the physical harm in this case would only be visible on an MRI, if bystanders don’t take it seriously the original harm is compounded by additional damage to the brain when those who are watching create secondary abuse by gaslighting the survivor again until they take the time to recognize the depth of the harm. I cannot waltz into an MRI lab and say, ‘hey, he damaged my HPA axis, my hippocampus seems to not be working, and I think Broca’s area keeps shutting down. Can you take a scan of my brain I can show?”
This ability to recognize and understand what the physiological symptoms of trauma look like is an essential part of your allyship toolkit. Just as you would want to know how to recognize if someone you know was drowning, to walk in this world as an ally you will need to know what it looks like when a woman or nonbinary survivor you know is trying to get help.
These physical silencing phenomena are part of why ‘white knighting’ awareness is so very, very important. You are welcome to your opinions about what a survivor should do – indeed, once she is safe, your opinions are likely to be quite helpful – as long as you strategize with her, not at her, and make sure you get her back to shore first. Then you can strategize together in your pod about how to create accountability while deeply, deeply listening and believing and helping her articulate what has happened to her.
Now add to the physiological silencing the social silencing.
The layering of the social contours of oppression, that prioritize and centre the feelings of white and male-of-centre people, and especially centre white cismen who cause harm, create an inability of bystanders to listen to BIPOC, to women and nonbinary people. These social contours of oppression, combined with the physiological silencing of a survivor’s body, explains why those who can see abuse often cannot speak, and those who can speak freely and have the status to get heard socially often cannot, or feel entitled to choose not, to see. A central aspect of privilege is to have the privilege not to have to ever see how your actions affect those around you if you don’t want to.
So when this happened to me, I had to struggle to regain the capacity to speak through multiple layered barriers. My abuser gaslighted me anytime I tried to speak, and said he just didn’t care to hear or see my experience. Bystanders who had not personally seen his bizarre behaviour up close themselves had a hard time imagining it. And those who could understand it and had seen how he was abusing me were survivors themselves, who recognized what he was doing but like me, could not speak.
Depending on who the survivor is, the overlapping ways racism and patriarchy work together can silence survivors on multiple fronts at once. Given the ways racism and patriarchy work together in overlapping ways to harm Black, Indigenous and POC women and nonbinary people who face multiple forms of violence at once, I have for instance heard these experiences described by BIPOC folks as like “screaming into the wind,” or like “standing next to a black hole in space,” where the words get sucked into silence again before they even leave your mouth.
If culture cannot see a thing, it determines that thing does not exist. Your words describing a very real phenomenon are received as though they just do not mean anything. This phenomenon, this cognitive dissonance between our physical lived reality and our culture’s oppressive and erasing mythologies, creates a deadly gap.
So the ones who saw clearly what he was doing to me when I was quiet and drowning could not protect me because they had the same physiological silencing that I did. And when we finally spoke, those who had the power and prestige to get heard had no idea what we were talking about.
Here is where it become the case that ‘survivors don’t speak because they are not believed, they get shamed, they get attacked.” That is true, but it happens on top of the already brutal physiological silencing caused by the abuse. We have to keep both of these layers in mind when we try to understand why survivors have such a heard time speaking.
The combination creates a double, or triple, or quadrupal whammy. It is frankly commendable, given the strength required to survive this layering of erasure, that survivors continue putting one foot in front of the other, going on to live their lives, day after day. Because if those who harm have privilege, they can go on completely unwilling to hear how they have affected someone. That is the essence of privilege.
This is why “I believe women” matters so very, very much.
Many cognitive distortions shape our perceptions. Racism, individualist atomized capitalism, and white cishetpatriarchy shape how we perceive – and do not perceive – reality. To see violence, to end violence, we must work through our cognitive distortions, one by one by one.
It is frightening to describe traumatic experiences in a culture of erasure, because when something happening to you is so strange it is hard to even believe as it is happening to you, and when the person doing it is lying to you about it continuously, when their privilege gives them a feeling of entitlement to refuse to listen, care, or see how their actions cause harm, and our culture does not even have a word for what is happening to you, and the language centres of your brain deactivate when you try to talk about it? Facing all of that all at once? How can you speak?
Trying to tell people about harm that is hidden by structures of violence is frightening because even if you could speak, how can they believe you if the behavior is so strange you can hardly believe it even as it is happening? Racism, sexism, transphobia are massive cultural forms of gaslighting and that render ‘unseeable’ the violence that happens right in front of us every day. So much so that these words likely don’t even mean anything to you unless you have lived this yourself.
Add to this that the trauma occurring within the relationship is often not the only trauma; we need our partners and lovers and intimate friends and, yes, even our consensual fuckbuddies to be safe havens where we can heal from the layered violences we already face. A feminist lover or partner works through their own shit so they can offer a safe, reliable, accountable soft landing place, a reliable place for healing from structural violence, not an additional source of violence on top of the many systemic harms survivors already face.In this world in which so many of us have faced layered violence that break us apart, what we are often doing when we hold one another is putting one another back together.
What Can You Do?
How can you help? Well, if a woman or nonbinary person you know gets that wordless look on their face when they try to talk about something that has happened or is happening to them, or if they ask you for help, take unhurried time to look and feel deeply into what is happening for them. Try asking them gentle questions. If what they are describing is abuse, and they or you have already tried talking directly to their abuser about it to no avail, you can form an accountability and support committee, and begin the process of healing.
Because a survivor who comes to you for help may be physiologically drowning inside their own body, if you gaslight her again (by falling sway to the abuser’s narrative, or saying she is imagining it), you actively damage the very brain structures she needs to be able to connect with others who care about her and find the ones who are able to help.
It helps to ask gentle questions and empathically calibrate how you understand the answers. “Are you having trouble speaking?” would have been a great one for me, because I could have vigorously nodded my head. “Are you feeling afraid?” likewise. I could not explain, but I could have nodded yes. The relief when friends began to get what I was feeling was immense.
Understand this may take some time. You can ask “Was it like this? Did he do that?” and believe, believe, believe, this person who is trapped in themselves, trying to communicate events that have happened to them that they can feel and see, but may not be able to connect coherently, and likely cannot utter even to their closest friends.
If you project that they look ‘angry’ notice that you may be disconnecting from them emotionally, and empathically connect with them instead. If they try to tell you ‘it’s not anger,’ believe them. Terror at drowning can look an awful lot like anger. The ones who saved me had a profound empathic capacity and could get past appearances to connect with what I was actually feeling.
Countering the social isolation that survivors with CPTSD often experience can help our healing as well. If the one who caused harm just doesn’t care to hear, then what bystanders can do is make sure the survivor is included, believed, protected, and cared for. This is a big help in itself. We need to experience social belonging, to be believed and heard and accepted in the social world around us, as an important part of creating the emotional safety that can help us heal. As so many have written before in discussions of bystander dynamics, gossip and knowing that private information about your experience is circulating without your consent can lead to the survivor ending up leaving shared social spaces, while the abuser continues to take up those same spaces, because no one is comfortable enough protecting the survivor or simply naming to him what he did that caused harm.
Accepting, loving, compassionate and accountable social bonds are needed for the survivor’s healing, as social bonds affect everything from our cortisol levels to our vagal tone. “Close knit human bonds—whether it be family, friendship or a romantic partner—are vital for your physical and mental health at any age. Recent studies have shown that the Vagus nerve also responds to human connectivity and physical touch to relax your parasympathetic nervous system.” But all too often, instead of love, connection, and support, the survivor’s personal details and the patriarchal systems that lead bystanders to isolate survivors end up double-punishing survivors if they even manage to speak at all. Emotional safety for survivors can occur not just with the one who caused the harm, but in the social spaces around them. This practice is so vital if we want to help create healing and acceptance for the one who was harmed.
Once you understand what has happened, an important step is asking what they need, and sticking it out with them as they figure that out. Understand that what they need may shift and change over time as they begin to heal after being heard. Some may need their support pod to name for them the things they cannot say themselves, to simply and firmly say to the abuser and his accountability pod: “This is what you did. We don’t think you’re a bad person, but you are not telling the truth, and this is the truth. When you are ready to rejoin the community, we will need you to own your abusive actions, apologize, and do appropriate repair.”
If you are a man, or are male of centre, and have been asked to do accountability, try thinking back to whether the person who says you have harmed them asked you kindly to help or stop, way way back before this point. How many of those kind loving benefit of the doubt ‘please help me understand why you’re doing these frightening hurtful things?’ conversations did you have? How did you respond? Did you act caring and emotionally honest and accountable, or did you mentally ‘skip’ their desperate, terrified attempts to get you to stop or to help?
How long – how many months – would you retain your capacity to stay kind and loving and caring and calm if the roles were reversed? How do you feel about having damaged someone else’s hippocampus to the point they cannot create coherent emotional sense? (What kind of repair would bring you back to integrity in the world and in your heart?)
Even as I write this I have to struggle through this continual shut down, this verbal and cognitive paralysis, that has meant I have to go and come back and go and come back and each step is like struggling through quicksand. You can’t tell by reading this, because your reception of this text may appear as though it was composed in a fluent way, but it was started and stopped and started and stopped as my body had to move through the wordlessness over and over and over and over again. And yet creating a coherent narrative, speaking and being honoured and heard, is one of the best forms of healing from trauma we have yet discerned.
This has been, physiologically, the hardest piece I have ever had to write. And yet pushing through step by step has been so very needed as I have heard more and more survivors attempt to create cultural understanding of what those who have not been in our shoes directly are at times unable to see.
It was as though he drove a car on top of me and parked there, gaslighting me continuously while insisting he was being good to me. And in this disruption and wordlessness I tried to asked first him, then our friends, to help me push the car off me as it was crushing my chest. I even managed to ask nicely, for months and months, while living in this state of disruption and terror. But the c0ntours of oppression won: the ones around me who saw what was happening were also survivors, who share the verbal shutdown and so could see but could not speak.
Only once others who were not experiencing this physiological and social erasure took the time to listen and see – those who could name clearly to my abuser what he was doing to me – did safety begin to return for me. Until that point, the vulnerability of this double layering of social and physiological silencing had been beating me. I remember sitting on the kitchen floor on the phone with a friend while this was all going on, in the drowning phase, barely able to speak, whispering “I just feel crazy, I just feel crazy,” and trying and trying to get the words out, and my friend was confused by my abuser’s story and seemed to have no idea how I felt inside or how the words could not, just could not come.
Even if we manage to struggle to speak through all of this, if we manage to get past the barriers physically silencing us, on top of all that – as we are in terror and hoping someone can see us drowning in our own shut down bodies – we then have to face the brutal social contours of racism and patriarchy that literally do not want us to be heard.
So if you are a bystander and a survivor finally manages to come up out of this silence and ask for help, know how much time she has spent underwater patiently, lovingly, peacefully, kindly, desperately trying to beg for help before she has gotten to words. Likely months, in some cases years.
In my case, after months of being gaslighted and destabilized as I quietly, quietly, lovingly, trustingly asking my abuser over and over again to stop, as he continued gaslighting me and destabilizing me and lying about it every day, I finally months and months in ended up with only two settings: complete inability to speak, or incoherent screaming.
Those closest to me who have known me for many years knew how out of character this was and knew right away something terrible had happened to me. I am typically emotionally intelligent, compassionate, responsive, loving, and kind.
My oldest, closest friends knew to ask ‘what did he do to you that got you to this point?’ and that deep seeing me was what I needed, because no one else was in it with me to witness the second by second constant destabilizing behaviour over a year, the shaming, the gaslighting, the lying and then lying about lying, from this person who told me he “loved me deeply and wanted to be close to me forever” while his actions bore no resemblance to his words. And then just a few people in my support pod directly witnessed him sabotage the loving, gentle, kind, generous accountability process we offered him: doing it in private, telling him how much we like him, that we see his good heart, but that he had done these harmful things and needed to own them and stop gaslighting and manipulating, so that healing could begin.
We say “survivors don’t speak up because they fear they won’t be believed” and that’s true, too. But underneath that reality is another one, that layers to create complex harm. Under the social silencing is a physiological reality that undercuts survivor’s voices before they’ve even begun. This culture is not yet aware that this harm to the survivor’s agency – their access to their own body – is the first and biggest harm.
Imagine having to face social disbelief on top of your own body’s complete shutting down of your verbal capacity. Imagine you can barely speak, and instead of “hey I see how hard this is for you, wow I see you’re acting really out of character, what has happened to you, how can I help you form words? Is it like this, is this what is happening to you? What was it like?” or deep empathic witnessing that could help the survivor who desperately needs to get able to speak, imagine if instead what you hear is ‘prove it,’ or ‘don’t you think maybe you’re being a little hard on him?’ or ‘he told me he had the best of intentions,’ – or worse: ‘I’m going to get angry at you and try to control the conversation if you even try to talk about it.’ This is what happened to me, and what has happened to millions of other survivors.
If you care about being an ally to women this ability to recognize the depth of harm – to see the signs early and intervene – is a key tool in your emotional vocabulary. So that you can avoiike the parents standing nearby as their 9 year old daughter drowned, if you gaslight them again by telling them they are imagining it or buying in to their abuser’s story you actively damage the very brain structures they need to get help. When a survivor first opens her month, knowing how to create conditions of emotional safety is an essential skill.If you are watching someone you care about drowning, this is not the time to stand over them and deliberate strategy, to tell them you will not help them unless they do what you say. When someone is drowning, you throw them a rope, you pull them out of the water, and then once they are out on shore and covered in a warm blanket and drinking something hot do you ask them how it happened, express your love and concern for them, and let them hear your thoughts and advice while remaining open to what they say.
Abuse takes away our capacity to combine experience and words, takes away our agency and voice by shutting down an important language area in their brain and areas of the limbic system that we need to connect our experiences in a coherent way. When this is happening to a survivor, even if she could order and explain her experience, the words just do not come.
Survivors live in this double bind: those who care enough about them to listen may not have a comparable experience with which they can understand, and those who identify with or feel compelled by patriarchy to centre the one who harmed them may act defensive and not want to hear. If you tell her she is imagining it, or mistake the effects of abuse for personality traits, you are going to harm her again. And the worst thing is she won’t even be able to tell you what is happening.
After all of this, we often face abusers who control every inch of the process, tell us we have only a set number of minutes to speak, who threaten to walk away from accountability if we say a thing they don’t like, and who literally cannot hear the things they need to hear. The amount of pressure created by this kind of control is not conducive to accountability. And the truth is, if an abuser does not want to hear, no amount of clarity or accuracy will help him hear. His privilege lets him just not care. There is a better way.
If you are a feminist, then women drowning in this wordlessness deserve your careful, careful nurturance, your deep, committed listening, and your working through whatever your own issues are that block you from believing them, in an ongoing way. Because to get to the point of naming the harm at all, they have to struggle through physiologically induced, very much real, wordless terror. If you have not incorporated this awareness into your empathic care of survivors, if you tell them how they are feeling instead of deeply listening to them, or tell them that you know what is best for them without listening to help them gain access to their trapped words at the same time, or if you call them ‘angry’ while they are desperately trapped inside their bodies in this way trying to reach you for empathy – or if you have allowed this silencing to let you slide away from hearing how you personally have harmed someone, you may need to work on this if you want to consider yourself a feminist man, or just a good person who can be there for others.
Because wordless terror is how it feels. And wordless terror in response to abuse someone is living through deserves your empathy, kindness, connection, and care. When a survivor finally gets able to speak, we must stop thinking like a perpetrator, and become able to centre survivors.
Often, that first step means simply listening, listening deeply in an unhurried way, asking the survivor questions, and forming together with them an accurate picture in your mind of the things they are unable to say and that you may at first feel unable to hear. Patiently run your understanding of what happened by them, think on what they say until you can really empathize with them, and accept that it may take you a few weeks and stretching your empathic imagination to get the full picture of what actually happened. You can gently ask ‘was it like this? was it like that? am I picturing it as it was?’ and then calibrate your perception to match her – finally, relieved – response.
—
“Imagine you approached a friend, an elder, a health professional, a family member or work colleague and told them that you were in pain — extreme pain from a lot of hurt — but that you didn’t know why because society didn’t teach you that we are hurt by the way we are treated as babies, children and teenagers, at work, in the family and in society, and by the many oppressions inflicted on us like racism, abuse, sexism, homophobia, classism, bullying, political/religious doctrines, and many more that aren’t listened to. Putting all this into context and hearing the gentle words, ‘There’s absolutely nothing wrong with you and you are a good person,’ how would you feel then? How would you feel knowing you won’t be medicated, labeled or diagnosed if you were to cry, scream, shake, laugh out loud, or want someone to hold you through the pain? How would you feel in a world that could hold the hurt?”
– Renuka Bhakta (from “Searching for a Rose Garden: Challenging Psychiatry, Fostering Mad Studies,” 2016)
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Additional Resources:
BYP100 Community Accountability Process (I highly recommend this)
Incite! community accountability process
Philly Stands Up
The Revolution Starts at Home
Bay Area Transformative Justice Network
For further reading: https://briarpatchmagazine.com/articles/view/if-black-women-were-free-part-2
See the original viral post The Opposite of Rape Culture is Nurturance Culture
I love this Bay Area Transformative Justice pod mapping worksheet so much that big, dramatic, hyperbole feels called for. ie I wanna shout it from the rooftops and say it again and again: if you consider yourself a feminist man, or you allow others around you to let you walk around with this identity and you enjoy having that reputation, or if you find you get laid or get dates or partners because of this reputation, and if you have not yet mapped out your pod of people who you would want to call you on it when you act in abusive ways, then do this right now. like today. like right away. Because it is everything, it is wonderful: https://batjc.wordpress.com/pods-and-pod-mapping-worksheet/
For a world in which everyone can feel safer, including those who harm and those who cause harm.
This video from Everyday Feminism is also great, and I highly recommend you watch it and take in carefully what she is saying about her own experience of fucking up and then being fully accountable. Owning doesn’t centre you. It is not about your intentions or your emotions or your reasons for the fuckup. It centres the other person, the one you have harmed. Name fully your acts, take the time to fully get and own how they caused harm, and express in a responsive way how you intend to address them, and check if what you offer actually is effective for repair of the harm you caused. You can also have compassion for yourself of course but that’s not the owning part. That’s it. Nobody has to be perfect but you have to know how to do repair if you want to be part of social justice movements, because you’re going to fuck up and you have to know how to hear it and fix it without flipping out. http://everydayfeminism.com/2013/11/how-to-apologize/
This is an incredibly on point and insightful piece from Everyday Feminism I highly recommend you read and act on right away: Abusive ‘Feminist’ Men Exist — Here Are 6 Things Men Can Do to Stop Them
For more on working with shame and hope, here is a piece that looks at how the fear of being ‘not good enough‘ can be self-fulfilling
Here’s another resource I like that emphasizes the importance of expressing empathy when you apologize for harming someone. Without empathy your apology will feel hollow: Mindful Tools: How To Apologize
Do you love speculative fiction and social justice? I am working on a speculative fiction project that deals with the transformations our planet is undergoing, and the undoing of cultures of domination. Cipher is currently seeking collaborators, advisors, an agent, and a publisher. Learn more about Cipher here.
