We are Carriers of Freedom: Part 3

Exposing Childhood Abuse Series

Small sampling of books that spread germs of freedom

Welcome to the final instalment of We are Carriers of Freedom, an exploration of how reading and writing can strengthen body and mind against inequitable and oppressive ideologies. In Part 1, I expanded on E.B. White’s ideas about “germs of freedom” and discussed how my first major series of “inoculations” during my doctoral work in critical disability studies set me on a path toward freedom through engaging with critical theories. In Part 2, I shared how discovering my birth mother’s secret that my Dad was not my biological father, led me to learn from others whose identity and lives were similarly altered. It was this Exposing DNA Secrets Series that first implanted germs of freedom in relation to my personal history, and set me on the creative writing path. In this final instalment of We Are Carriers of Freedom, I explore the Exposing Childhood Abuse Series of inoculations. This last series has given me the germs of freedom to finally let go of my own long-held secret, one that had continued to cause me harm without me knowing. People generally don’t like to think about the unpleasant topic of childhood sexual abuse, but not thinking about it or talking about it leaves people who have experienced it to be stuck in a self-destructive cycle of secrets and shame. It’s time I do my part to break that cycle.

The Exposing Childhood Abuse Series

I had been avoiding this series of inoculations since childhood. I didn’t think I needed them. I thought I was being strong, protecting my parents and other family members from the truth about my (step)Mom’s father by keeping what he did to me a secret. This is what I thought I had to do to keep everyone happy (except myself), to make our family seem “normal.” The secret has lived inside me, like a virus that self-replicates year after year, causing symptoms like anxiety, panic attacks, low self-worth, emotional dysregulation, and over-protectiveness. I put other peoples’ happiness (or sometimes wrong assumptions of what would make people happy) ahead of my own happiness. I allowed that secret, piled onto an already-established fear of abandonment from my birth mother leaving me as a toddler, to fester within in me for far too long.

I may have continued to allow the secret of the sexual abuse I experienced at the hands of my step-grandfather to unknowingly damage my wellness and my relationships with my husband and children, were it not for the Exposing DNA Secrets Series that made me confront who I am. I found a therapist to help me process the shit-storm of unidentifiable emotions keeping me up at night. While therapy helped me work through this major identity crisis, it also helped me realize my childhood experiences had left me unable to identify and process my emotions; that I deal with difficult situations through detached logic and reason, putting myself in everyone else’s position to plan a path forward. This ability to take multiple perspectives allows me to empathize with others and come to logical conclusions, but always at the expense of my own feelings which would end up buried inside me, until now. For the first time, I became open to what therapy allowed: the exploration of my own feelings about the DNA secret that changed what I knew of my paternity, and the childhood sexual abuse and the maternal abandonment I experienced, not just what my mom or dad or anyone else felt about it. It gave me permission to feel anger, betrayal, loss, and sadness. Therapy provided the support I needed to reckon with various events of my childhood, and begin to feel and express my own emotions and needs, without filtering them through the needs of others in my life.

DNA secrets and childhood sexual abuse collided when I learned that the same newly-discovered sister I mentioned in my last post, the Exposing DNA Secrets Series has written about her own experience with childhood sexual abuse. Reading her stories, I was gobsmacked by how different we approached our abuse. She told her parents, the teenaged babysitter was charged, and a court case ensued. So while to this day I still have not told my parents (let’s talk about it, Mom and Dad, if you are reading), she was brave enough to tell her parents and go on to tell her story to a court, and to later write about it as an adult. Extreme secrecy versus telling all to everyone. I find myself wondering if I would have spoken up if I hadn’t been pre-conditioned to always keep the house peaceful and drama-free. My half-sister was raised in a loud environment by Italian family, where arguments didn’t preclude love and acceptance. I, however, was raised to keep any contrary emotions quietly hidden, despite being told the importance of family communication. Children were not to make a fuss. It was confusing to be told to always talk to Mom and Dad about my troubles, but without anyone modelling how to have difficult conversations or disagree with loved ones.

Reading her words pulled at something inside me. Discovering that someone who shares DNA with me was brave enough to disclose her abuse, somehow gave me the courage to start writing about mine, to realize I do have it in me to release the secret. I bet you have it in you to speak up as well if you want, when you are ready. And if not, that’s okay too! I’ve come to learn that each of us must act in ways that feed our own individual spirit, to do what makes us healthy and whole, to care tenderly about our own well-being. Once we’re taken care of, it becomes so much easier to care for others in an open, mutually rewarding way. This might mean writing your story, whether just for your own healing or to help others as well.

Writing Where Freedom Flourishes

The first writing group I joined here on Substack, before I really understood Substack, was run by

Midstory Magazine

. Midstory is a supportive space for midlife women writers, led by

Steph Sprenger

and

Jessica Smock

. I signed up for their first Taylor Swift, Writing Our Eras workshop in Spring 2024, not because I’m a Swiftie, but because the topics resonated with me and what I had been writing. This workshop was my first time responding to creative writing prompts, and I appreciated the opportunity to approach the stories I’d been writing in different ways.

It was during this workshop that I began to write about my experience with childhood sexual abuse, at first in a somewhat obscure way. When the workshop ended, I decided it was time to write out the whole story. Writing about it was the first step to let the secret out, to put it on the page and not just in my head. The day after my final edits on the story – July 7, 2024 – I read Andrea B. Skinner’s story in The Toronto Star about being sexually abused by her step-father, and how her parents (her mother being the famed Canadian author, Alice Munro) kept it hush-hush. Some of her writing mirrored my own and her story pushed me over the metaphorical cliff. Here was someone whose mother was a beloved Canadian figure who had responded to her daughter’s disclosure of the abuse just like most other parents: she ignored it and stayed with the abuser. (Not only did she ignore it in real life, she based some of her stories around it, showing more concern for her characters than for her own daughter. If you’d like to read more, Giles Harvey addresses it comprehensively in this New York Times article.) Skinner’s public disclosure gave me the boost I needed to recognize that the abuse I experienced wasn’t “nothing,” and that my own story was worthy of being told. It also helped me recognize that things would not have necessarily been any better for me had I told, allowing me to let go of some of the guilt around not telling.

Until reading Skinner’s story, I didn’t know there was a place in Toronto supporting survivors of childhood sexual abuse, because I had never looked for it – I never thought I needed such support. Not only did Skinner validate the worthiness of my own written story, her writing also prompted me to finally address the pain I’ve held in my body and mind for 45 years. I’ve since completed the first phase of peer support from The Gatehouse, and developed friendships with other women who are healing and working through their own stories.

At the end of the Writing Our Eras workshop, I started poking around Substack, looking for opportunities to improve my creative nonfiction writing and found

Writing in the Dark with Jeannine Ouellette

(WITD), a true gem of a find.

Jeannine Ouellette

is a soulful and skillful writer and writing teacher who offers weekly writing exercises (and more!) through WITD. She and

Billie Oh

facilitate a supportive community of writers bonding through close reading each other’s work, learning with and from one another – the best way to learn, in my opinion.

There are other Substackers who provide excellent writing prompts and a supportive writing community, but it was Jeannine’s story, as much as her approach, that drew me to her. She is another courageous woman who has written a memoir about her experiences of childhood sexual abuse. Using an elliptical structure and beautiful prose, in The Part That Burns she eloquently shows how past experiences stay with us, become part of us, and are unwittingly passed on to our children, whether they remain hidden or are brought to surface. Her book provides an example of how to write painful experiences with striking prose from a narrator of shifting ages. It is an example of how writing can be a portal to self-discovery and healing.

The Part That Burns by Jeannine Ouellette

WITD is also a portal to self-discovery and healing. It is a productive, generative space that has taught me to slow down, in reading, writing, and life. I’ve learned how to close read – me, who usually reads books as fast as possible, skimming ‘boring bits’ to get to the good stuff. I’ve learned how to engage with the boring bits, and I’ve discovered some of what I used to think of as boring is actually beautiful – writers in-tune with their world. Close reading has helped me slow down and appreciate the beauty of language and life, and to identify when perhaps it is too much interiority that makes something boring, or masterful sentences I didn’t have the patience to sit and think about before. I also realize I’ve been too hard on myself, because I already do close read when I grade student assignments and review articles for academic journals!

Through Midstory and WITD, I’ve met many other writers all bravely writing out of hiding in their own way, spreading their germs of freedom. Some have been at it for many years and are seasoned writers continuing to hone their craft, others are newer creative writers like myself. I am grateful to them all and look forward to celebrating and sharing their work! (I don’t want to do it here at the end of a long post, so will find other ways to honour these women.)

In addition to these women writers showing me how to spread germs of freedom, I must mention collaborations with women in my work life (others are also named in Part 1) which helped set me on that path. One of my work projects has been researching team-based critical reflection and dialogue in the context of healthcare. Critical reflection through dialogue is a process that involves challenging power hierarchies and questioning norms and assumptions of practice by engaging in the sharing of diverse perspectives. The goal of this radical collaboration, where team members create a supportive environment to dwell with difference and discomfort, is to create innovative solutions toward equitable care; to move the theory of critical reflection to practice. The transformative potential of critical dialogue in teaching and healthcare practice settings made me realize the importance of sharing my own perspective and contributing my own thoughts, precisely because they differed from others. I began to realize this during my PhD work, but my continued collaborations with Stella Ng, Marie-Ève Caty, Farah Freisen, and other members of Stella and Sarah Wright’s Praxis Lab, which occurred during the time of my uncovering DNA secrets and learning more about myself through therapy and meeting my DNA family, is what finally made me realize that I had things to say that people might want to hear.

As it turns out, I am a person of a multitude of words – they can’t get out fast enough now. The words have always been there, hidden beneath the restraint of normalcy. I had tried so hard to fit into a fictitious normal that I had shrunk myself down to nothing. Nobody could see me, and I couldn’t see myself, but I can now. The germs of freedom have been growing inside me, and I’m ready to start spreading them through the power of writing, like so many of you! Let’s make it harder for people to wield power over others, and easier for those who have been abused to get the support they need.

Has there been a particular resource or person who spread their germs of freedom to you and set you on a writing path or any other journey of self-discovery and freedom? What germs of freedom do you hope to spread through your writing?