by Eve Ensler
If I had just stayed at home, hadn’t gone out, hadn’t opened my mouth. I wasn’t even invited to this party, a friend was invited and took me ’cause she couldn’t find anyone else. It wasn’t a direct invitation, a primary invitation from the source to me, and I am ruining the party, embarrassing my friend. I shouldn’t have gone out of the house. There were too many bad things happening. Maybe it was hearing the woman at the party with the big stuffed thing around her neck say, “Isn’t it fabulous—fur is back.” Fur is back. Isn’t it fabulous? Mutilation is back. Murder is back. Mink is back. Mink always makes me think about women. Not just that women wear minks, but that there is something about how women are raised to serve. Raised for slaughter. Something about being so beautiful, so soft and warm, that people have to wear you, have to wrap you around their neck or rape you from behind or shoot you in the head or mangle or beat or starve you.
Fur is back. Fur is back. Isn’t it fabulous, fur is back? So, it turns out, is rape. Rape is back. The Taliban is back. O.J. is back. Fur is back. Back back back.
But when did any of this go away? It never went away. It just gets ignored and buried and accepted by the people at parties, by the people who cannot stop partying, who think that life is one big party, which it is for them because they have everything, because they are wealthy and privileged and perfect and partying partying. Stop it. Stop it. Please please stop. Women are dying. Women have their labia ripped off in the Congo, their faces melted off in Pakistan, they are bought as children in Atlanta. Stop, please, doesn’t it matter to you? Don’t their lives matter? I am screaming. I am on the floor, on the wall-to-wall plush carpet near the buffet table with its goat cheese quesadillas and grilled shrimp and chocolate martinis. I am on the floor screaming, Stop it, stop it.
Stop. Can’t you just stop? For one moment, stop your lives, stop your quest for pleasure, stop your partying. A crowd is now looking at me, a crowd of fabulous partygoers who won’t look directly at me ’cause they are scared they might catch what I have, fabulous partygoers going on as I am being handcuffed, dragged, and removed from the party. I don’t move, I can’t move. I lie there on the street against the building and I open my eyes. I am looking up, straight up. I don’t remember seeing stars before in the city. There are so many of them and they are particularly sparkly. I don’t know if they are even real. They are so far away and they are right next to me. I am lying there and my eyes are open. I am not funny and my friend’s silk shirt is torn, but I can see what is in front of me. I can see the stars.
Afterword: Reclaiming Our Mojo
Jane Fonda
Every mother contains her daughter in herself and every daughter her mother and every mother extends backwards into her mother and forwards into her daughter
—Carl Jung and Carl Kerenyi, Essays on a Science of Mythology*
It would have been easy to miss altogether. Just a short sentence tucked within the fifty or so pages of my mother’s medical records:
“She spoke with considerable shame of being molested at age eight.”
The moment I read it, I was filled with relief. Yes, sadness for her. Of course. Sadness. I wanted to hold her and rock her and tell her I understood and forgave her. But relief was there, too, flooding me as I lay shivering in the bed.
I was two years into writing my memoirs, My Life So Far, which I dedicated to my mother as a way to force myself to discover why she was the way she was. Part of that research meant trying to obtain her records from the institute where she committed suicide in the late 1940s on her forty-second birthday. I was twelve.
The evening the records arrived, I had to climb into the bed and cover myself in blankets because I suddenly felt so cold. Here were the documents that would enable me to travel back in time into the reality that had been the last days of my mother’s life. What I had not anticipated was that there, tucked away amid the daily reports from doctors and nurses about her deteriorating state, was her own eleven-page double-spaced autobiography. Could it contain the clues to the puzzle that I needed?
Perhaps other family members had read these documents before me and missed that one sentence. Or had read it and not paid it much heed. Not understood what she meant when, in recounting her middle and high school years, she wrote, “Boys, boys, boys.” Not connected the dots upon reading that she’d had six abortions and plastic surgery before I was born in 1937, and that her psychiatric tests at the end were “replete with perceptual distortions many of them emphasizing bodily defects and deformities.”
But I had been getting ready for this moment for years and could at last understand and forgive her and, in doing so, forgive myself.
All my adult life, I had wondered about my mother’s childhood. The older I got and the more I understood about the long-term effects of early trauma, the more I intuited that something bad must have happened. Maybe that was why I had been drawn to studying childhood sexual abuse over the previous five years. Maybe that was why in 1995 I founded the Georgia Campaign for Adolescent Pregnancy Prevention and soon discovered that childhood sexual abuse was the single biggest predictor of teenage pregnancy. Sixty percent of teen mothers fifteen years old and younger have been victims of sexual abuse.
By the time I read my mother’s reports, I knew that sexual abuse, be it a onetime trauma or a long-term violation, is not only a physical trauma but that its memories carry a powerful emotional and psychic charge and can lead to emotional and psychosomatic illnesses and difficulties with intimacy. The ability to connect deeply with others is broken, and it becomes difficult to experience trust, feel competent, have agency. I knew that sexual abuse robs a young person of a sense of autonomy. The boundaries of her personhood become porous, and she no longer feels the right to claim her psychic or bodily integrity. For this reason, it is not unusual for survivors to become promiscuous starting in adolescence. The message that abuse delivers to the fragile young one is “All that you have to offer is your sexuality, and you have no right to keep it off-limits.” Boys, boys, boys.
Then there’s the issue of guilt. It seems counterintuitive that a child would feel guilty about being abused by an adult whom they are incapable of fending off. But children, I learned, are developmentally unable to blame adults. They must believe that adults, on whom they depend for life and nurture, are trustworthy. Instead, guilt is internalized and carried in the body, often for a lifetime, often crossing generations—a dark, free-floating anxiety and depression. Frequently, this leads to hatred of one’s body, excessive plastic surgery, and self-mutilation (more and more, I feel they are the same).
But the most profound thing I learned—years before I’d read my mother’s history of abuse—was that these feelings of guilt and shame, the sense of never being good enough, and hatred of one’s body cast a long shadow that can span generations, carried on a cellular level to daughters and even granddaughters.
Mother saw many doctors and psychiatrists for a seemingly endless list of ailments. As a child, I had begun to believe that she liked being in hospitals more than she did being home. But in those days, if the doctors had thought to connect her medical issues with early sexual abuse, which was unlikely, they certainly wouldn’t have known what to do about it.
The psychiatrists she saw would have been Freudian. She’d have lain on a couch, staring at the ceiling, with the doctor sitting silently behind her. Just what she didn’t need. As Dana Crowley Jack has said, “the more traditional therapy reproduces a hierarchical relationship of authoritative (male) therapist and deferential (female) client which is not conducive to relationship.”
Early on, Freud had discovered incest and sexual abuse as the root cause of what was then called “hysteria” among his first well-to-do female patients. When his theories about this were first published, he was ridiculed by his colleagues in the field, who said it was unthinkable, an impossibility. Doubting his conclusions and perhaps fearing they would prevent his rise within academia, he developed what became the classic Freudian theory: C
hildren want to have sex with their parents, and when incest is reported by patients, it is to be seen as sexual fantasy.
From then until the 1970s, the psychiatric profession firmly believed that incidents of sexual abuse and incest were “one in a million.” The frequency and effects of such trauma (and the ways to treat it) did not begin to surface until the arrival of a new wave of pioneering feminist psychologists such as Carol Gilligan, Jean Baker Miller, and Judith Lewis Herman. Only in the 1970s, when women began to eschew the old presuppositions (one in a million!) and listen to one another empathically, did the truth emerge: Childhood sexual abuse and incest were and are epidemic.
These women and their colleagues were also discovering that recovery required rebuilding bonds of trust and connection. Because so many survivors of childhood violence, sexual abuse, and incest have experienced trauma at the hands of a loved and trusted person, closeness to another can come to represent danger. Intimacy, for them, is too frightening, and so they cut off. We can cut off, deny, and be symptom-free, but the shadow is there, tamping down our potential juice—muting our mojo. The shadow becomes all the darker and more powerful when we deny it.
With the birth of relational psychology, the landscape of treatment for survivors of abuse has been transformed. Rather than the former neutral, impersonal form of psychotherapy, it is through the empowerment of a trusting, growth-fostering relationship that the damaged faculties allowing us to experience intimate connection can be brought back to life.
I often imagine how it might have been for my mother had she lived today and had the support of a community of women who could have heard her story, believed it, and been moved by it. The alchemy of their tears might have opened her heart to her own pain.
That’s the crucial step.
I have a friend whom I love very much. He once told me about his childhood, describing without the slightest affect a litany of psychological and physical brutality. He seemed surprised when tears began rolling down my cheeks.
“But it was for my own good!” he declared, assuring me that the perpetrator was his “best friend.” Try as I might, I was never able to help him move through the factual history and reconnect with his feelings as that young boy, so beaten and abandoned. Nor could any therapist he saw over time. Perhaps the wounds were too deep, the scar tissue too thick. Besides, to the world, he seemed to be getting along just fine—no visible symptoms. Only those who wanted a deep connection with him knew why he couldn’t show up, why the empathy gene seemed to have been plucked from his heart. He could not experience empathy for others or for himself. As I’ve discovered, healing often has to start with self-empathy.
It is too late for my mother. But not for me. I feel blessed to have been given the truth about her history because it has enabled me to understand her as well as the nature and cause of my own shadow.
Isn’t it our job in life to get out from under the shadow and reclaim our mojo, realize our full potential as human beings? Don’t we—don’t I—need to expose the shadow to the light? Isn’t this the greatest legacy we can leave our children?
I have already made big strides. I have written my memoirs, my own historical narrative that reaches back to my ancestors and forward to my children and grandchildren—the remembering part. I feel this is a gift to them. When I die, or maybe even sooner than that, they can use my narrative, as I used my mother’s, to shed light on their own.
My task now is to go beyond the narrative and to enter it experientially, emotionally. Memory reconnected to feeling.
I know many people who have been able, with help, to move beyond dissociation. I’m one of them, and I’ve learned it’s an ongoing journey, not easy in a patriarchal culture that tells us it’s better to stuff it. Maturity, we’re told, means staying always in control.
But what’s so great about control if your heart feels empty and the walls between you and others feel impenetrable? Step three in AA’s twelve-step program is about giving up control to a higher power. For me, right now, my higher power is my own deep consciousness, my own Divine within that needs me to surrender to it the tightness and brittleness of control.
I’m in the last act of my life. What frightens me isn’t the thought of dying but getting to the edge of life with regrets. I discovered in preparing for my last act, at age sixty, that my biggest regret would be to have never experienced real intimacy. To do this, I saw, to finally overcome my fears, I would have to be willing to go to that dark, shadowy place and experience it. To learn to acknowledge and handle the toxic parts of what I inherited from my mother but also embrace and embody the juicy, sensual, wild, and beautiful parts of her. I can’t do this if all I have is a relationship to the facts.
Knowing and healing aren’t the same. We can talk about the facts of trauma, recount the chronology, and still continue to be cut off from the experience, unable to go back to the dark place and feel. Healing takes feeling.
Healing also takes courage, because it’s painful.
But if you’ve ever exercised for physical fitness, you know the difference between the pain of hard muscular or anaerobic work and the pain of injury. The former has a positive payoff: increased strength and fitness.
So it is with the pain of the internal work required for recovery. Yes, it’s painful to purposefully try to access the emotions of trauma. But out of the pain can come a new, deeper, freer life if you are in a safe place, with loving guidance from a knowledgeable, skillful therapist or with a professionally guided group of women on the same journey.
For many, bodywork and holotropic breathwork, as developed by Dr. Stanislav Grof, and other transpersonal psychotherapies can dislodge the blockages that prevent us from reexperiencing and integrating early trauma.
It’s important to create an intentional community of love, friends who are also committed to living as fully and wholly as possible. Eve Ensler and I are part of each other’s community of love. It was with her that I first witnessed the power of what I call therapeutic listening. We were visiting a shelter for abused and abandoned girls in Jerusalem. Eve had asked permission to interview five or six of the girls, and I was worried that in the brief several hours we had with them, we would be opening Pandora’s box and then we’d be gone. That’s not at all what happened.
I saw what is meant by “active listening.” Eve pulled the girls into the act of remembering and encouraged them to go beyond the unspeakable facts of their traumas to what their feelings were. Her listening always held palpable respect and empathy. She shed tears for them, and a shift occurred. I could feel it: Each girl saw she was believed and began to hear her own story with empathy. For the first time, the girls heard one another’s stories, and this, too, seemed therapeutic. A community had been created.
Serendipitously, I recently made a film that touches on the subject of incest. At dinner one evening with one of the producers, I was talking about the frequency of sexual abuse and incest and how so many women I know—most, in fact—have experienced this trauma.
“Why is this?” he asked. “Don’t tell me it’s about power.”
Don’t tell me it’s about power.
I saw that evening how dissociation can happen not only to victims of trauma but on a mass social level. This is how we avoid seeing violence against women as an inherent part of male dominance—the drive to impose power over those society views as “less than,” or the drive to ensure submission of those whose power is feared.
A psychiatrist once said, “The general contractor for the social construction of masculinity and femininity is psychological trauma, but the architect is the system of dominance.”*
In case you think that in the United States at the beginning of the twenty-first century women aren’t viewed as less than, listen to how men put down other men by calling them “girls,” “pussies.” How men who exhibit wonderful qualities such as empathy, compassion, nurture, qualities associated with women, are often scorned. And that’s without going into issues like lower pay for c
omparable work and far lower representation in the halls of corporate, media, and political power.
For survivors of violence, sexual abuse, and incest, part of what can lead them to self-repossession is to be drawn into the work of stopping the violence—like Eve Ensler has done. This can mean supporting shelters for victims of rape and domestic violence, creating crisis hotlines and rape crisis centers where there are none. We must ensure the presence of victim advocates in the court system, and the enforcement of penalties against perpetrators.
Those are some of the immediate forms that healing activism can take. But we need to hold in our hearts a bigger vision of a world in which both men and women are able to be full human beings, in control of their bodies and their hearts, respecting others’ bodies and hearts. And the more we achieve that within ourselves, the more effective we’ll be at moving society into a post-dominant era.
*Bollingen Series 22 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1963), p. 162.
*Bessel A. Van der Kolk, “The Body Keeps the Score” (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard Medical School, 1994), p. 219.
An Invitation: How to Get Involved
The writings in A Memory, a Monologue, a Rant, and a Prayer were first presented in June 2006 as part of a theater and film festival called “Until the Violence Stops: NYC,” which invited all eight million New Yorkers to stand up and join V-Day, a movement dedicated to stopping violence against women, to make New York City the safest place on earth for women and girls.