Secrets
Secrets are sometimes needed to protect the innocent. But held on for too long, they can block us from where we want to go.
I recently shared the truth of my trauma with my youngest daughter (not the details, just the fact of it). Keeping this secret was a major block in my life. It was a block to having an honest and transparent relationship with her.
I have kept my secret for a long time. I have felt the pressure to be silent from the beginning due to the stigma and weight of this topic. No one wants to hear about it. Especially when they see you as strong, as friends did, and surely as a child does. It colors their view of you, making you somehow damaged. I don’t want to be seen as damaged. No one does. Yet if I’m seen as damaged so are 1 in 6 women as that is the statistic for rape.1
To be clear, we are not damaged.
We have been harmed.
But when you have a reputation as someone who is strong, no one wants to hear how a strong woman was compromised.
I was compromised.
When I was a graduate student several years ago, I was raped. To finish my degree - to graduate - I had to keep it a secret.
When the pandemic started, degree finally in hand, I started my practice. I had to keep it a secret so I could work and get clients. I can still do my job, but sometimes people think you can’t. I couldn’t risk it because I had to house and feed my children.
So I kept silent.
I kept silent so I could keep going. I kept silent because that’s what my image as a strong therapist demands of me. I kept silent because I didn’t know the impact telling others would result in.
I kept this secret from men I dated because when I told some men, they judged me. They asked unhelpful questions based on ingrained victim-blame beliefs:
Did you say no?
Did he hurt you or just traumatize you?
I kept silent when I met colleagues because I didn’t want to be judged. Yes, even therapists judge. See my article about speaking out at a therapist conference.
Finally I kept silent to protect my daughter from information she was too young to know, even though my trauma responses could not be effectively hidden no matter how I tried. She noticed. We can try to hide PTSD responses but sometimes they overtake us, for example, needing naps at strange times, and withdrawing from social encounters. Life was exhausting. I couldn’t tell my children the truth because they were too young to know. And at the time, I was not strong enough to hold the emotional space telling them would have been required of me.
But my youngest is now sixteen. It’s time. It was hard for me to share this with her because I did not want to break her bubble, to share something she knows exists in the world, but didn’t realize how close it was to her life. To protect her privacy, I will not share how she responded. I choose to write and speak about the trauma of rape and the aftermath. She did not choose so I will not share her response.
This conversation was one hardest ones I’ve had as a parent. No one wants to tell their daughters this brutal reality of life. I want my daughters to believe in the goodness of men. But they need to know some men act in evil ways. It was a hard lesson for me to learn as a grown woman, to experience this in middle age. I had no idea the impact of this trauma that millions of women experience and is often made light of in media (though thankfully less and less as more and more survivors speak out). But to share with young women emerging into adulthood is not something I wanted to do.
But I had to.
The Costs of Secrets
This secret, the one I had to keep to protect my daughter, meant I had a block to sharing in the world, including here on Substack. The more I speak and write in the public domain, the more likely the message will get back to my daughter. So I had to share my secret directly with her before doing anything more here, or elsewhere.
This secret has been a block in my relationship with my daughter. It has created an unspoken stress, felt but not articulated. My eldest has known for over two years but she was eighteen when I told her. And since I told her, she has had to keep this secret from her sister. That’s not fair. I knew I would have to share but finding the right time has been on my mind for at least a year. When she turned sixteen, I felt the time had come. Sixteen felt like an appropriate age to share; after all, in many places, it is the age of consent. And I felt deeply I could not go further sharing my work in the public sphere until the secret was out in my family. My family needed to be congruent. Everyone needed to be on the same page. No more secrets were to be between us. However, foremost in my mind was her well being. I shared when I believed it was the right time and would not be too hard on her mental health.
My children come first. Before anything I do in the world.
Secrets are necessary sometimes but they block us if we hold on for too long.
Secrets have costs. They block connection and truth.
Secrets can destroy families. We think we are protecting our children when we keep secrets from them, but we are denying them the reality of their experience. Something is wrong. They know. My daughters knew something was off with their mother but there were no words for it. Early on I had to to keep going. I was in survival mode and had few choices and none of them were good. I knew enough about psychology to hide, to shield, to put on a mask. I had explanations for them that seemed almost plausible - mommy is tired, mommy’s heart is broken because she broke up with someone, school is hard.
But children know when the truth has been skewed into something other even if they cannot put words to it. Eventually the truth needs to come out.
I wanted the truth to come out on my terms and with respect for my daughter, her development, and her capacity to process that truth.
If it means I am slower in having a presence here and elsewhere, so be it. My children have already been hurt by the damage done to their mother by a damaged man.
All I can do is speak truth, respect boundaries, and share how I am getting through.
I am getting through.
Thanks for being here,
https://rainn.org/statistics/scope-problem