Breaking the silence on abuse

This column was originally published in the News & Record on August 9, 2006

We’ve all had brushes with taboo; from the foods we eat (such as America’s rejection of dog meat) to the relationships we condone (or condemn, such as incest), taboo developed to store society’s important information over the course of time and space.

Unfortunately, taboo has evolved beyond its usefulness as a tool by spreading its power to ideas. As a society, we have silently agreed to the falsehood that keeping certain taboo topics mum is for the good of the whole.

Take, for example, domestic abuse. As a taboo topic, domestic abuse is disallowed from common conversation, leaving the victims feeling ashamed to be in a situation that seems to be outside the norm. Add taboo to the many complex emotions and manipulations involved in abuse and it’s not a stretch to believing that abuse shouldn’t be reported because it shouldn’t be spoken of. Moreover, this silence hinders one of the most powerful tools of healing: the simple act of talking.

In many ways, I feel as though I have lived a charmed life, not least of which is because I have an instinctive need to find normalcy through communication, which has allowed me to heal from my own experience with domestic abuse.

Despite the best efforts of my family, I spent my senior year of high school involved with a long-time-friend turned boyfriend who repeated the cycle of dehumanization from his life by introducing it into our relationship. Strikes at my self-esteem turned into physical aggression; I was lucky that I was able to maintain enough of a boundary to make the first black eye the last one.

My rejection on top of a lifetime of rejection was the final straw. On a sunny August morning in 1996, my ex broke into my house armed with a knife. Ten years and lots of loving support and therapy later, I have whittled that morning down to three almost-healed scars on my back and the 911 tape in the attic.

Over these ten years, I have told my story to a waitress with a black eye, to business associates, new friends, friendly strangers and just about anyone else who gives me the opportunity. The statistics match my experience: just as one-third of American women will report being physically or sexually abused by an intimate partner sometime in their lives, roughly one-third of the women to whom I tell my story counter with a story of their own.

What the statistics won’t tell you is that almost every one of those women tell their story in a way which downplays their trauma, as though their story is not worthy of attention. That is the last stronghold in the mind of a woman who has been abused; it is also the power of taboo that obeying it can lead to such a lack of self-regard.

Though I haven’t seen my therapist in many years, I continue to tell my story because of those women who may gain an extra sliver of normalcy from hearing their story come out of my mouth, and because telling it still has a powerful effect on how I feel about myself and my past, and, perhaps most of all, because I believe the only way to take power away from taboo is to defy them by talking.

Poet Audre Lorde is most famous for her truism, “Your silence will not protect you.” Less known but as true, she also said, “I feel have a duty to speak the truth as I see it and to share not just my triumphs, not just the things that felt good, but the pain, the intense, often unmitigating pain.”

It’s all a part of being human.