Healing Abuse: An introduction
My survival and recovery process from clergy sexual abuse has been like what I understand about the process of birthing a child. There are stages where all a person can feel is sick with the changes of chemistry and mood, which can lead to confused self understanding and evaluation by others who may not know or care about the process going on in us. At the same time, there’s the understanding that there is something special going on inside us that only we can bring forward. There are times that consultation with professionals and perhaps even prescriptions help us in the process of birthing this person inside us, our own Golden Child, if you will.
My recovery process has also been like mining for gold inside and around me, in the relationships and institutions in which I have been involved and of which I am now exploring. A few years ago, my family and I drove across the country and spent one of our days with a friend at a North Carolina gem mine. I was excited at the prospect of finding a ruby or emerald that was buried in a bucket of dirty and discolored stones. Maybe I would find something that was super-valuable and that would save me a great amount of money if I found it, appraised it, and created jewelry gifts of it for my wife or others. None of the stones that I brought to a gemologist were of high enough quality to use in jewelry. After tumbling them to remove the rough sediment, we found that most had hairline fractures inside that would have made them too small to be worth cutting. So I set several polished stones in a few decorative dishes around our home and kept most of the original, unpolished gems in a bag in a closet.
Around my 48th birthday, as I prepared to go to trial to testify publicly about my abuse, I decided to follow through on a gardening project. It was a sign of letting go of a need to move ‘up and out’ of our home into something larger and with more curb appeal someday, and do something beautiful now with the home that I have loved and had neglected with my family for many years. My wife showed me a gardening magazine with photos of garden sculptures; there were variations of stone rivers that I thought were interesting and something that even I could do, not being a person who has any real experience of making art, at least not with objects.
I came up with good ideas about buying stones that were already perfectly shaped and buying a vat of rock sealing and polishing liquid that we would need. At first, I delayed working on the project because those materials would cost too much. Eventually, I committed time and energy to shovel a path next to an existing path and cover the ground that would hold this Rock River art project made up of expensive rocks that cost too much. I started to think of those abandoned precious stones that weren’t precious enough to make earrings but were much too precious to keep in a closet.
I then dug around our yard and found lots of stones that would make an interesting river. We had Flagstone from when we had bought our house that was lying in piles around our Magnolia tree. There were various sized river rocks, purples, creams, reds, and grays that I discovered once I unearthed them from different parts of the garden, cast away or buried over the years. I discovered mounds of white rocks that I found myself drawn to that I washed and coated with a sealant that gave them a shine and brought out some of the glittery speckles of color from inside. I even found myself washing smaller, white rocks, the size of grapes, two times, going over them individually the second time with a terrycloth towel, rubbing away enough of the dirt to see the interesting color inside. I coated them as well to bring out their shine.
On my 48th birthday, I took my family to a local gem mine that I had thought about going to for years, since I had seen it on a Travel Chanel program. I explained to my kids that all this washing and polishing rocks, finding buried rocks and bringing new and old gems together, were all a part of a restorative process that, in part, was a waste of time, and, in part, was something about me that I would like them to make a part of them.
This workbook is for anyone who looks outside herself for gold, or for resources or affirmation of her own value. This workbook is a guide for anyone who is willing to look inside at her own past, her own identity, and bring the experiences, even the ones that seem jagged and ugly, and examine them again in order to make something new and beautiful. This book is for artists who work with trauma and loss, damaged or neglected parts, who believe even in some small way that these experiences may contain information and resources that can inspire us and others. This book is for those who wish to be restored from living as victims of others’ knowing or unknowing actions (or our own knowing or unknowing actions), to living as change agents, understanding the choices we make, and growing in the ability to work as artists in our own healing.
This workbook is also for anyone who wishes to end child sexual abuse. As with Katrina or any other disaster, there are data that people can observe, inquire about, and use to prepare for or prevent the impact of the disaster. In other words, these are preventative actions. There are also intervention actions and there are follow up or responsive actions that hold the possibility of ongoing learning and mental transformations that we all must make in order to prevent ongoing similar or perhaps worse disasters from occurring. Child sexual abuse is a preventable disaster that also requires deep mental transformations regarding our and others’ roles of authority in organizations.
The following image adapts a familiar discussion of epistemology to represent what we know.
Conscious
Public: we Private: we know
know what we what we don’t know
know
Blind: we don’t know Hidden: we don’t
what we don’t know know what we know
Sub-conscious
The information in the first or upper left quadrant is what we can call K.K. (we know what we know). This includes what we share with others intentionally or what others can readily understand (that we are conscious of). The second or upper right quadrant (K. D.K.) includes what we know and keep to ourselves or areas of which we can increase our knowledge if we invest time and effort (e.g., taking a class, reading a book). Whether this learning process is positive or terrifying, easy or difficult, varies with individuals. The third or lower right quadrant (D.K. K.) includes all of our ‘reptilian brain’ functions, as well as the information that we use without thinking about it (e.g., rules of the road, performance intelligence, etc.). Finally, the fourth or lower left quadrant D.K. D.K.) includes everything else.
For the average person, who uses 5- 10% of our brain, quadrants 1-3 represent the tip of our intelligence iceberg. The image of an iceberg in this case is selected because the intellectual field of DK DK may conjure up a menacing’ nature of what we do not know, that being under the surface. On the contrary, DKDK in this discussion has a neutral or positive connotation as it relates to people being explorers or people who have dispositions that anticipate adaptation and innovation. These dynamic, cognitive skills relate with successfully navigating the complexity of our times, as opposed to a more static way of thinking and operating. The working assumption in this workbook is that we all need to bring our critical thinking skills or questioning skills to bear upon previously unquestioned or unnoticed areas in order to prevent and end child sexual abuse. A corollary assumption is that this work is profoundly difficult.
Critical thinking in action is likely to lead to deep learning, which is the learning that takes place between familiar and new understanding. In a sense, it is an expansive process of Knowing what we Know (KK), Knowing what we Don’t Know (K DK), Not Knowing what we Know (DK K) as we experience Not Knowing what we Do Not Know (DK DK). The experience and temporary consequence of deep learning is often marked by anxiety, frustration, and disequilibrium. The learner, once confident and competent in what was familiar or fairly simple, often feels deskilled, incompetent or inadequate.
There are many times when this uncomfortable sense of ‘not knowing’ may take place, albeit as a result of markedly distinctive levels of understanding. I do not think that the experience is much different in moving from unconsciously incompetent to consciously incompetent; from consciously incompetent to consciously competent; from consciously competent to unconsciously competent. Similarly, transitions between ‘blind understanding’ to ‘hidden understanding;’ from hidden understanding to private understanding; from private understanding to public understanding bring our new experiences with our prior understandings and move us forward into a deeper level of complexity and capacity to understand any problem and any solution in more and more ways. However, the interpretation and competency that accompanies each stage is very different.
I believe that, in dealing with something as profoundly destructive and corruptive as sexual abuse by religious authorities, it is critical that anyone who takes up a role as advocate recognize that this is a property of being an advocate. Critical thinking is not something to get over or, at some point, to stop practicing in light of whatever faith traditions in which we identify. This work requires us to be contemplatives in action and to reflect upon our experiences and what we know about both faith and reason.
To stop applying critical thinking and questioning to institutions or organizations in which children and vulnerable adults are hurt is to practice contemplative inaction. As Dr. Martin Luther King described being creatively malcontent, I believe that being creatively malcontent is a property of being an advocate to prevent child sexual abuse. I suggest that this is a property of being a person of faith in action, not faith inaction.
Part 1 of this workbook is written with and primarily for victims or survivors of religious authority sexual abuse. The chapters are organized to facilitate the readers’ thinking process by examining: the experiences related to the recovery process (what), the action logic that supports the respective experiences (how), the implications of working through this stage of the process (so what) and finally, next steps related to this stage (now what). This format is one of many that is theoretically grounded in my background as a teacher educator and action researcher.
Part 2 of this workbook is written with and primarily for survivor supporters, whether or not they have experienced sexual abuse by a religious authority. Chapter 5 is informed by sociological discussions about racism and the ways that people knowingly and unknowingly participate in it. While the terms (systems theory) and categories (cheerleader, bystander, and ally) are borrowed from another field, they are no less useful in understanding the complexity of this taboo topic.
Chapter 6 is intended to offer support and tools to those who attempt or intend to take up an active role in promoting institutional and cultural transformation that leads to the ending of child abuse. It differs significantly from the content in the chapters in that it is primarily about the applying and adapting systems theory or being a reflective activist, akin to a researcher in action (i.e., action researcher, which is a way to understand and improve an environment in which we live or work).
The workbook in its entirety, however, develops the theme of becoming the change we wish to see in the world with respect to ending child abuse. From whatever perspective, victim, ally, or change agent, all chapters are intended to help the reader work with others in ways to shift our larger, collective understanding of child sexual abuse from denial to a working set of individual, interpersonal, and systemic dynamics that intend to end child sexual abuse.