Listen to CSA Survivors
One of the things that survivors of childhood sexual abuse express is how people don't want to hear about what they experienced. They don’t want to hear about the pain people are in.
I have found this with my survivor friends, survivor groups I’ve been a member of or created, and a group I’m currently an admin of.
I had heard and felt such a sense of being so misunderstood by friends, family and even mental health professionals.
As my final project in a Human Sexuality course, I did a research study on therapeutic outcomes of survivors of sexual abuse and the results further confirmed what I was finding with others and feeling in myself - That we just don’t feel like people are willing or able to listen to us.
It's so important to give people a chance to be heard, a heart that will empathize, because throughout the traumas, especially sexual abuse, we are taught and threatened to push it down. We are taught and threatened to keep it to ourselves. We are taught to not talk about it, which is extremely harmful.
From my observations over the last 40 years, including talking to friends, family, and other survivors, all too often it can be more harmful to suppress our talk about it than the abuse itself.
When people tell you to stop dwelling on it, to get over it, talk down to us and minimize the traumatic impact, or and this breaks my heart – they tell you they don't believe you, that you’re lying, it’s incredibly harmful and it feels like being abused all over again.
And so we really as a society, we need to be able to let people speak and speak until the cows come home. We as a society need to suck it up and just listen.
Because the more survivors are allowed and encouraged to speak about it, the more we’re going to feel validated for the pain we feel because of the horrific things that happened to us.
More importantly, we need to get this out in the open. 1 out of 4 women and 1 out of 6 men, probably more, are survivors of childhood sexual abuse.
Sexual abuse survives in the anonymity of it, and as long as we don't let people speak, as long as we don't listen to other people and understand what they went through, it's never going to change. People are still going to be sexually abusing children behind closed doors.
We need to allow survivors to speak freely, and we need to listen to them with belief. Yea, it's hard to listen to stories about what others went through. I've heard some horrendous stories. And I still, you know my innocent little inner child is like, “Oh my God,” but for the person who needed me to hear that, it was so validating for them to be heard.
So listen to the people around you even if you’re uncomfortable.
Your discomfort is nothing compared to the pain they’re experiencing.
And your compassion can go a long way towards helping them heal.
