I have been feeling paralyzed about sharing my family experience – which neccessarily includes my family members. Perhaps I am describing the individuals or what happened too thoroughly, or perhaps I should say “I know someone whose sister …,” or perhaps it is my presentation of being outside the trauma and looking in from a removed position.
Talking about my sister who is closest in age and was institutionalized, diagnosed, and has lived a life of challenge since then is telling an injury of my soul. Is it also compromising her privacy – even though nobody knows my maiden name or her first name or how to find her? She might not like it if I told her story publicly. I did not call and ask. My faraway sister in fact told me not to write about her and my response was that I get to tell about my life and she’s in it.
I have come to understand that keeping family secrets is a culturally approved choice.
Perhaps I am causing discomfort within others that are not even in the story by disrupting the status quo.
I feel strongly that keeping everything quiet is not a positive thing for people who have been traumatized, which includes most of us. Ok – that’s your opinion a voice within me says. Is it fair that you decide this for others?
The work I do involves healing of patterns and dynamics for those who have experienced trauma. I don’t think it would surprise very many people to know that most trauma is perpetrated by those closest to us: Mother, Father, Sibling, Husband, Wife and even Child. We are so afraid of the Stranger in this world, but the real harm, the deepest harm and betrayal generally comes from those we engage with regularly.
I am not making any statements about the intention of the injuring person. My focus here is on the person who is harmed.
Intentional trauma can be betrayal or untruth or physical harm. That pretty much covers it – but the range and variation of these themes are vast. Betrayal includes sexual use of a child by any mature (or maturing) individual. Untruth includes the pretense of kindness when one manipulates another. Physical harm can be “accidental,” perpetual, occasional, and of different degrees and types – to the point of regularly executed torture or sleep deprivation. These things go on in families. Between people who “love” each other.
Keeping the dirty little secrets of family is what we are expected to do. But it causes shame within. “This happened to me and I can’t ever talk about it because it’s shameful.” It’s a very small step from that place to carrying shame about oneself. People try to bury it, but it lingers. It steals your well-being, your self-love, your self-respect, your ability to speak up. It steals your ability to stand in your true self and apply your god-given wisdom and knowledge to your own life.
Keeping secrets also makes us comfortable with deception. It’s a very short step from not telling to lying. In fact, it’s not a step at all. Not telling about something that is pivotal to your wellbeing is lying. And we quickly learn not to tell. If we are not explicitly threatened with harm or the harm of someone else we love, the response of others teaches us quickly to keep it to ourselves. Most people truly do not want to hear about what happened to you. You are avoided or directly chastised as a liar or ridiculed and treated as less. That’s how the large majority of people respond. Because they are afraid of association with someone who has had these experiences.
Keeping secrets of this sort – secrets of harm done to you as a child or as a lover – are practices in our culture that have been established over time. These practices protect the perpetrator of those who hurt others weaker than them, even though those harmed would be justified in hoping/expecting to have the protection of the person who instead, is harming them.
Am I harming the people I love by telling the stories I am sharing?
I have more thinking to do.
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8 hummingbird way 