The role of shame in childhood rape and sexual assault
Plus six ways to release it.
This winter I made the excruciatingly tough decision to write publicly about my history as a survivor of childhood rape and sexual assault. Though resolved to disclose, I went about it a bit surreptitiously, by “burying the lede,” as we say in journalism. I did not put it in the headline or even first paragraph like I have in this post.
Why? Because I’ve really struggled to slough off the shame associated with being a victim of those crimes. I made the announcement only within the context of returning to this newsletter after a lapse and reiterating a stance on what constitutes a healthy diet, which as I argued, is not an unrelated topic…
I felt—and still feel—that writing about the deeply personal experience of childhood victimization carries risk, especially since writing is my livelihood. I’ve had to think about whether or not clients will trip across this material and hesitate to hire me—and if that’s a chance I’m willing to take.
So that was my professional concern, and then there are my personal ones. To be honest, I unsubscribed some family and friends from this Substack beforehand, as having them as subscribers felt at the least inhibiting to me and at the most, even dangerous. I reasoned it this way: I don’t show up to their workplaces and assert my presence there; conversely, I’m not writing for them here and never have been. If you’re part of my real life, I rather interact with you in person. And some of those people have already attempted to shame me for merely speaking the truth and seeking justice.
You can see how shame operates when it comes to crimes against children, especially when those crimes were left unaddressed and maybe even covered up and denied, as was the case for me.
Imagine if I’d had jewelry stolen. There’d be little shame in being the victim of that crime. Maybe some douchebag would ask in the comments if I had forgiven the thieves for stealing my jewelry even though they still walked free, and my jewelry had never been returned, and they certainly hadn’t apologized and asked for my forgiveness. But most people would express only sympathy for my jewelry loss and share in my desire to see the thieves brought to justice.
Potential clients wouldn’t even bat an eye; the jewelry theft would in fact be irrelevant to my ability to turn their game project into a bestselling, high-grossing title in the app stores, as I have done on many other projects.
A healthy family would lament the loss of the jewelry, especially any heirloom pieces, for their sentimental value alone, perhaps, something fellow family members would understand.
They wouldn’t reject the victim of the crime for speaking the truth of it.
See how we treat sex crimes—even against children—differently, and that’s the real shame here.
For all the doubling down some commenters resorted to in the below piece on forgiveness, it’s still my most popular post so far this year, and I think this double standard is why. Many victims of sex crimes have been brutalized by it.
Shame undergirds the feelings of wanting to die that plague trauma victims, too. In my second-most popular post this year, I talked about the shame of admitting a battle with suicide. It’s such a taboo subject, and here I went right to it in a year apparently devoted to taboo subjects!
It’s stunning to witness the way people react to these deeply uncomfortable aspects of human life: One commenter on that piece focused on how to cure the insomnia, as if suicidal feelings at 3 am are simply a matter of wakefulness, something that could be solved, by the way, by signing up for the qigong program she’d been on for just six weeks—not a reasonable test of long-term effectiveness. She even provided an affiliate link (which I deleted).
What she did was just another kind of avoidance—and a pretty tone-deaf one at that.
As I’ve said before:
No one wants to hear about heinous crimes committed against innocents. It’s “too triggering.” We look away, avoid, disengage, maybe even dissociate.
And that’s the last thing victims need.
The looking away, the avoidance—it’s what casts us all in shame.
As if the victim is the embodiment of the crime itself.
Almost as if she’s to blame for it.
Shame is such a powerful feeling that it can stay with us our whole lives.
It can remain buried, literally deep inside our bodies, where it tries to get our attention by manifesting as illness—autoimmune symptoms, to use my own example.
Even after we’ve cut ties with our perpetrator, setting a boundary they’re forbidden to cross.
Even after we’ve “moved on” and built good lives for ourselves despite a lack of justice or at least acknowledgment for what was done to us.
❤️🩹 How do we release shame?
I’ve found these methods to be most effective for extricating myself from its bounds1.
👺 I recognize that it’s inherent in these types of crimes, which adults commit against children for precisely this reason: Shame is one of their manipulation tools. My father and my mother both tried to reposition the guilt for the crime right onto me. I was just a little girl at the time, at the mercy of my parents, so it was easy for them to do:
My father blamed me directly and lied to try to make me feel complicit in his crimes, to shift his own self-loathing over to me.
My mother denied my reports of the crimes, accusing me of making them up, even after she witnessed them with her own eyes, even after she cleaned up my father’s mess.
👶 I’ve also found it useful to talk directly to the part of me who still feels ashamed. Known as “parts” work, this comes from the Integrated Family Systems therapeutic method. You locate within yourself this “part” of you, as not all of who you are feels ashamed, just that one part. You separate from her so that you might even “see” her in your imagination. You invite her to tell you how she feels, why she feels that way, and ask her what she needs to feel better. You listen and gently help her.
🚓 For me, reporting the crimes to police and working with them to try to obtain justice helped immensely in lessening the shame. The police took my report seriously and did their best to investigate. Even though the hefty burden of proof means in my case the perpetrator still remains free, I feel I’ve done everything within my power to get a dangerous man off the streets and away from any future child victims. Through the process, I also confronted my perpetrator, naming his crimes, which had value in removing the sting of shame.
Setting boundaries can be difficult in families that enable sex crimes; going to the police is the most powerful boundary you can set. It’s the ultimate push back.
🫶 Somatic work has been a godsend for me. This is body-centered meditation and brain-retraining: Rather than trying to transcend our bodies, we ground ourselves in awareness, feeling for our bodily sensations, needs, and even truths, as it can seem as if traumatic memories are physically trapped in the body. Other work I’ve done includes craniosacral therapy, somatic dance, yoga—even something as simple as singing in a church or school choir has been effective for me.
I would also put nature bathing in this category, as connecting with the non-built environment through hikes or gardening can restore what’s been lost via sexual violation.
💬 I’ve done years of talk therapy, and that can be a powerful counter to shame. You speak the seemingly unspeakable and realize that the world has not in fact ended, that these things happened to you, not because of you. That’s priceless, and it can’t often come from anyone in your family or friend group. Sometimes, you need a professional who’s outside that sphere. I’ve also found it very helpful to talk with other sexual assault survivors in a group setting.
Caveat: I’ve found that therapy alone isn’t sufficient, especially for crimes against children that were suppressed and remained unacknowledged till adulthood. Therapy can also seriously backfire, for its built-in “expert” vs. “patient” power dynamic and the limitations of the therapist—sometimes serious failings.
👀 EMDR, or eye movement desensitization and reprocessing, is another tool I use to release shame, and it’s one I’ve been taught to conduct fully on my own, without needing a therapist present. Shame is often connected to deeply traumatic memories that need different kinds of processing, and that doesn’t have to mean verbally reliving them out loud with a “doctor” present. Men in particular may find this one to be more helpful than talk therapy.
Shame is insidious, and it can be lethal. But it can also be countered, lessened; it can be gently encouraged to dissipate, like a wisp of smoke.
You might like my book of poetry, a meditation on the role of anger in the healing process.
I am not a trained or degreed mental-health professional. Please see the Notices & Policies page.
Thank you for sharing this with your followers, @Margaret Fleck. 🙏
The thoughts you write here are compelling. I have not previously been friendly to the idea of “unforgiveness.”
“Forgive us our debts, as we forgive our debtors” the Lord’s Prayer says. But you quoted a dictionary definition, that at least in English, forgiveness includes an absence of a desire for the person to be punished. Many times there is not good correspondence between modern/Western concepts and ancient/Eastern ones. Yahweh said, “Judgment is mine, I will repay” (Deuteronomy 32:25), quoted for an example for Hebrews 10:26-27: “If we deliberately go on sinning after we have received the knowledge of the truth, no further sacrifice for sins remains, but only a fearful expectation of judgment and of raging fire that will consume all adversaries.”
Yahweh put the thirst for justice in our hearts: “I will put my laws on their hearts, and write them on their minds,” Hebrews 10:16 quoting Jeremiah 31:34. What else would guide our morality? God’s justice has nothing to do with allowing the innocent to be hurt and the vicious to continue unhindered in their destruction. God made the Law in part to deal with evildoers and protect the innocent. The Law was not for withholding punishment and accountability, but for stopping revenge spirals going on for generations and hurting more innocents.
The fact of someone hiding and denying their crimes is incontrovertible evidence they know they did wrong. They ‘go on sinning’ when they don’t make any attempt to apologize to you and do what they can to help you. They sin when they subvert attempts to hold them accountable. I would interpret your sister to say, “I’ve swept this under the carpet, and you should join me in enabling predators.” Your sister is completely wrong. Your father has a “raging fire” waiting for him because he chose to become a demon instead of a human. He left a wake of generational destruction and pain. God will take care of it in the eternal sense. But in the meantime, we have an earthly system of (very imperfect) justice patterned after what God instituted, here on the physical plane. Running defense for a predator as your sister and mother did/do is WRONG. It is a satanic inversion of God’s law.
Perhaps forgiveness as Jesus taught is more about our own inner freedom. We need our anger to seek justice and hate sin. It’s part of our makeup. But anger can also become a sin in its own right if it takes over our being. I have a lot to forgive my mother and aunt for trying to make me a prostitute as a teenager to “pay for college, clothes, and dinner,” as well as growing up in abject neglect. I confessed to my priest several years ago that I still struggle to forgive my mother. He asked me to consider praying for her by name, whenever she came to mind. So I did that. She has dementia now, I ended up taking care of her for two years. I didn’t care for her well, but I did what I could. Now she is in a memory care facility and honestly I have to force myself to go see her. I’m not saying this to say, “look at me, you should do the same.” No, not at all. I’m still struggling with doing what I can. I’m still struggling to forgive. I’m still struggling to heal. And so are you. You are doing what you can. You’re a hero for going to the police. Survivors know how righteous and brave that act was. You stood up for yourself, you stood up for us. God bless you for that. Anyone out there telling you you’re not doing enough to forgive, they have no business judging you.
Your piece has given me a lot to think about, how many of the ideas of forgiveness we hold as a society and even as Christians are inverted and satanic, and feed the trauma cycle. Forgiveness is not numbness, dissociation and denial. Thank you for writing about this so clearly and bravely.