Should You Write Publicly About Your Trauma?
In all chaos, there is a cosmos, in all disorder, a secret order. -Carl Jung
There is no coming to consciousness without pain. -Carl Jung
Should you share your story publicly? What are the risks, aside from whether or not you’ll be believed? Because if it’s true, you’ll be believed. Just know that. What you really might be wondering is what the legal ramifications might be. Could you face them? Could your abuser sue you, that is, if you never reported and your abuser was never convicted, much less investigated? How does it work for private citizens, you, and them?
I’m no attorney. I can’t offer you legal advice, and only you know whether your family has a legal fight in them. But if this helps at all, know that, in this country, they’d have to prove that you don’t believe yourself, that you’re publicly accusing them to harm them, their reputation, and their businesses. If you believe yourself and there are others in your life who believe you, therapists, doctors, friends, spouses, then that becomes much harder to prove, possibly impossible.
I don’t think you ever have to wonder what lies a narcissist tells about you to make others fear or even hate you. Narcissists will make you out to be what they are.
It’s true; you might open yourself to legal trouble if you start accusing people who, by all outward appearances, look like law-abiding, upstanding members of society. But you and I know differently, don’t we? We know what they’re like behind closed doors when no one else is looking. No one but those of us who thought we could live with what they did to us forever without saying anything to anyone about it. After all, we survived it, didn’t we? We got out and got away, and that means we’re free, right? Why would we want to jeopardize what little bit of solitude and solace we’ve built outside their reach? Why would we want to tell the world what happened to us? We know it’s too much to handle. We understand just what it means to tell. It’s dangerous. Whether our abuser explicitly threatened us or those we loved or just implied it, we knew that what they did should never be named.
We kept that secret to protect ourselves as much as them. What happened to us is gross. No one would want to love us if they knew. No one would want to be around us.
But I do. I want to be around you. Your pain is not too much for me.
I knew no one would believe me. I just knew it from an early age. I’d tried to tell my father when I was four, and he laughed at me. He thought I had misunderstood or was trying to get her in trouble because I was mad she took away my crayons.
I didn’t feel like a person that day. I felt like a cat you ignore because you just don’t find it useful.
My mother saw to that. She lied about me to all her friends and our family. She told them all kinds of things to discredit me and make me out to be a liar, a villain, a monster, something only she could love. That’s how they treated me. They all held her water for her. They all knew she was the saint, the martyr. They looked at me with contempt, disdain, dislike, as if they could barely stand being in the same room with me and were only there to support her. God cursed her with such monstrous children, such hideously outsized creatures of great shame and sin. That’s what they believe.
I wondered again today what she told them to make them look at me with such open contempt. But then, I don’t have to wonder. I don’t think you ever have to wonder what lies a narcissist tells about you to make others fear or even hate you. Narcissists will make you out to be what they are. I don’t know if my mother told her Christian friends that I sexually abused children, but I wouldn’t have put it past her. She needed me to carry her shame into the wilderness and never return so that she could feel free.
Telling on her means that I place it squarely back at her feet. It matters little that her friends and our family won’t believe me. No, it matters, but the more comfortable I get with telling, the less it matters.
Still, I can’t stop it from crossing my mind, the look on her friend Char’s face at the birthday party my dad threw that time I returned from L.A. It was a large gathering, something my mother never would have engineered and, I’m sure, tried to dissuade my dad from pulling off. Char has been a friend of theirs from early on, stretching back decades. She wouldn’t speak to me but wore a mask of rage and disgust and could barely manage a polite greeting when we spoke. It left me deeply unsettled.
Then, there was the meal with her prayer group that was stiff and staged. It felt strange, awkward, and the conversation was stilted and painful. No one asked about my life, though I’d flown 2,000 miles across the continent and hadn’t seen any of them in years. I didn’t feel like a person that day. I felt like a cat you ignore because you just don’t find it useful. Whenever I asked a question about their lives or families, I’d get single-sentence answers. I often wonder what she’d said in advance of that horrific afternoon.
Years later, I noticed she no longer mentioned any of them. When I asked about them, she’d answer rather vaguely about losing touch because of going to different churches, which didn’t make sense. They hadn’t gone to the same church since I was a child. Now I believe, they’d served their purpose.
Last night, before bed, I searched for my mother’s name on Facebook. We used to be “friends,” and since it’s been years since I posted there, I needed to unfriend her before I started any activity again.
It’s been many years since I participated regularly on any social media site. I can’t explain it. It happened during my marriage. I just stopped moving, stopped living, stopped doing anything that I’d meant to do, and little by little, I stopped updating. It was also that I felt uncomfortable allowing people to see into my life. I’ve always been uneasy with posting moments from my day or events with friends. Sometimes, most times, I don’t don’t want to be looked at.
Nevertheless, social media is a good way to connect to new people and make friends, a thing I’d like now that I’m a year divorced and finally free of toxic workplaces. I was part of a novel-writing group and wanted to connect with them on Facebook, of all places. I don’t know. It felt like a low-risk way to test out the waters in the social media pool.
Then, the fear that my mother would see it seized me. I long believed she, or someone faithful to her, would actively sabotage new friendships or work opportunities. This may be paranoia, a relic of what my mother ruined throughout my life: jewelry, toys, animals. She’d make it broken, dead, or lost. I only put it together after I moved out and realized that things don’t just break on their own when sitting in a box. Animals don’t just die prematurely because they’re “fragile creatures.”
I’m not small and weak and scared anymore. I’m not cowering in the corner of my life. I followed my instincts and began posting about my trauma, and she deleted her social media accounts.
Last night, before bed, I searched for my mother’s name on Facebook. We used to be “friends,” and since it’s been years since I posted there, I needed to unfriend her before I started any activity again.
Her name was gone, vanished. The same was true of LinkedIn. That’s when I realized that she must’ve gotten off of social media when I started posting about her on Medium. She wrote me an email after this post. I never responded to it, but it was enough for me to know that she’d read it and all she could manage was a weak, four-line email telling me that she was a good mother because she had read Doctor Spock’s book on child-rearing and made our food from scratch.
It was a powerful realization and one that carried symbolic and real-world weight. I’m not small and weak and scared anymore. I’m not cowering in the corner of my life. I followed my instincts and began posting about my trauma, and she deleted her social media accounts. I sent the cockroach scuttling back into the cracks of her horrific deeds. Whatever my family believes about me, they already believe.
Now, I join a legion of adult survivors who are telling their own stories, and together, we form a chorus of accusers who believe each other. And that’s powerful.
I used to worry about whether my family would sue me for defamation. I don’t anymore because I recognize that a court case would air out all the dirty laundry for the world to see, and no one wants to be on the wrong side of a “she said/ she said” case. Not her. She prefers to bury her head and pretend the world is as she created it, and everyone does what she determines they must.
She emailed me after she found out about my divorce. She told me all the things I used to want to hear from her. She pulled out all the stops. “I love you.” “I miss you.” “I want to see you.” “I want you with me.” I let every one of those emails go unanswered. She’s scuttled back into her corner now and I believe she’ll stay there.
So, the question I’m asking myself now is, what do you want now if the only thing you ever wanted was for her to leave you alone?
