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Are We Making Headlines or Headway? [www.msmagazine.com]

 

I was thrilled when Ms. Magazine published my article about #MeToo. Here’s an excerpt:

Try this: Think of your deepest, darkest secret. The one you can’t imagine telling anyone. We all have at least one. Imagine that if you tell this secret, something terrible is going to happen. People you love deeply, upon hearing your secret, will leave you. That is why we survivors [of childhood sexual abuse] fear telling our stories.There’s a long list of other reasons. They’re all steeped in fear, too. My fear can fill a barn…But deep down, under my anxieties, I know truth-telling is healing—even when the people you tell the truth to don’t want to hear it.

The healing I have gravitated to, chased after, beaten doors down for, took a very long time. Decades. What that did was build a spine for my voice to stand on. It constructed a foundation for the courage to speak to my family, all the while not knowing what their reaction might be, and ultimately lose most of them. They took whatever was left of their love for me and headed for the hills, and I withstood the blast of their departure from my life.

I am not the only one. Activism and creativity have been paths to healing for many of us. Individual survivors have long sought all kinds of spiritual and psychic healing, even on a cellular level. We get doses of medicine from our relationships—friends, partners, therapists, healers. Many survivors have healed enough to begin working on changing our lives for the better. 

Now our culture needs to heal, too—so that it is no longer a place where there is so little sexual safety. How about adding that to the pledge of allegiance? With liberty, justice and sexual safety for all. Our society now has enough evidence to understand that sexual violation is an epidemic, and incest is the grand underbelly of our rape culture. Letting it go on means we retain the breeding ground for other forms of exploitation and violation. If our culture refused to tolerate childhood sexual abuse, it wouldn’t tolerate any other sexual violence or harassment.

 

[To read the whole article go to: 

https://msmagazine.com/2019/01...-b2066bb73e-63703957

 

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Donna: 

Thank you for sharing your powerful writing and voice. I’m so glad this was published in Ms. Magazine. You are a powerful writer and advocate and truth teller!!  Thank you for sharing here!! Cissy

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