A few years ago, when American culture was melting down over the concept of “trigger warnings”, I asked my mother about them. My mother is a children’s and family therapist, specializing in families in which a member has experienced sexual abuse. She’d gone back to school to study this, for her master’s of social work, when I was in junior high, around 1994 or 5. At that point, I had been hearing about “trigger warnings” from her for over a decade and a half–always in the context of therapy, never in the context of culture or art.
My mother is very blunt. As someone whose every day work is to confront the things no one wants to talk about, that most people deny are happening, she can be wonderfully direct about things. “Well, that’s pretty silly. That’s not what a trigger warning is for,” she said, when I described some students asking for trigger warnings before reading Beloved because they were uncomfortable with the depictions of slavery.
But my mother also likes to tell stories. In that conversation, she told me that one of her earliest assignments in grad school was to a community meeting for parents, after a local teacher was accused of abuse and a school board of a cover up. Over the course of the next few years, she held many of these meetings when abuse was uncovered–an attempt of local governments to have some sort of reconciliation, some sort of acknowledgement of harm. This was a time when institutions believed that they should do that.
Anyways, my mother told me that the more of these meetings she attended as a therapist in training, the more she understood that at every meeting, she should sit in the back of the room, preferably with a box of tissues. Often at the meetings, someone would rise from the audience suddenly and flee the room, and my mother learned to be near the escape they were seeking to offer some kind of comfort. These were parents horrified by what was uncovered, but very often they were also adults who were finally in a space where the reality of what happened to them as children could be acknowledged. By the 1990s, the Boston area, where we lived, was beginning to reckon with the Catholic church’s far-reaching child sexual abuse scandals. Some of the people in those meetings were just realizing that what they lived through had been abuse. Others had always known, but no one around them was able to say it until then. The investigations of completely unrelated instances of abuse reminded them of the harm they had lived through. The reality of their lives shifted in that moment. What had happened to them was no longer a bad joke, laughed off at the bar, or something whispered only to a best friend or spouse, or gossip about the parish priest. What had happened to them was finally acknowledged for what it was, except it was being acknowledged for their children, and in that moment, they could only come undone.
I think about this story all the time, especially now. There is no doubt in my mind that there is a cross-section of people who believe in the Trump administration’s version of the Epstein scandal, despite increasing reports of suppression and collusion, and people who were abused. Statistics alone–the fact that, on average, one in four women are survivors of sexual assault and one in seven men–bear this out. I think we are collectively experiencing what those people in the meetings my mother attended did, except right now, no one, especially not any institutions, are interested in reconciliation, or the acknowledgement of harm, or giving comfort.
A meme that I have seen reposted everywhere in my version of the algorithm says “Why do we need a client list when we have the testimony of the women who lived through it?” The truth of it is, of course, that even survivors of abuse can internalize the idea that the victim holds the shame of the act, that the perpetrator should be respected, at least, for their ability to be so violent. If you hold the shame of your own abuse, searching for lists, the belief that blame lies with a single political party, and the longing for an authoritarian savior to punish all is appealing. As appealing as running to an exit door. But certainly, our culture will tell you, more honorable.
The Epstein case is awful. A group of incredibly wealthy and politically connected people participated in the regular sexual abuse and trafficking of very young women. But sexual abuse, particularly the sexual abuse that thrives in institutions, is unbearably evil and very commonplace. Sometimes, on my most cynical days, I think it’s what keeps this country running. I recently read a throwaway line in a piece of cultural criticism, about how in the 19th century, the well-documented abuse of young boys in English prep schools was as much about creating a class of obedient adults who wouldn’t question the violence of British colonialism–that is to say, the violence of an authoritarian government–as much as it was about the individual cruelty of a teacher or a fellow student. A child subjected to abuse, and given no chance for repair or reconciliation, grows into an adult who is unsure. Sometimes this uncertainty means the child becomes even more courageous, even more loving of justice. Our culture loves stories like that–just think of Roald Dahl’s Matilda. But in my experience, if they become an adult who holds the shame within themselves, it can make it harder for them to speak up about injustice, about abuses of power. It can make them even more scared of the instability that comes with shaming your devil, even more certain to love someone who says “I alone can fix it.” For every truth teller forged from abuse, it also forges those of us who do not make it, and those of us who do, but only to cause more harm to others. Sometimes you can’t lift your head up and say “this world is wrong” if you are holding the pain of your past horror. In that instance, it can be hard to even acknowledge the present horror around you.
American culture doesn’t, indeed most cultures do not, have any rituals, any ceremonies, any scripts, of how a survivor of sexual assault or abuse is supposed to respond to and live with what happened to them, outside of the one of forgiveness. For so many communities, forgiveness means “stay silent, don’t cause trouble, and make your abuser’s life as easy as possible.” Absent any idea of what reconciliation might look like, some of us follow influencers and charlatans and fascists who tell us that it’s really quite simple. It’s not about the adult in your community who abused you. It’s all about them over there.
We all know something is deeply wrong in this country. Unfortunately,it’s the people willing to say that something is wrong who get to define the wrongness, even if those same definers are doing so in the absolute worst faith. We have a democratic party who, terrified of the label of traitors, double down on the beauty of the American dream, that institutions will somehow be good if everyone is civil enough. And we have a coalition of fascists who are at least willing to say “this world is wrong.” But they want all of us to eat our shame, keep our heads down, let the violence continue.
The other night, I went to a performance of The Gospel at Colonus, a production at the New York park Little Island. The Gospel at Colonus is a retelling of the myth of Oedipus through gospel music. Except the story starts not when Oedipus unknowingly marries his mother; not when he learns the terrible truth of incest, but after he has blinded himself in disgust and shame. The production managed to remind me of the horror of this story, which can be lost in the millenia worth of jokes, and references, and theories, that has essentially reduced Oedipus to a meme. Oedipus is a survivor. In the production, there are three actors who play Oedipus–an older woman, who speaks most of his lines, a younger man, who sings some of his solos, and an older blind man with the sweetest voice, who sings Oedipus’s saddest songs. “I see through my tears,” he sings at one point. They often walk around the set–a bowl of an amphitheater looking out onto the water at dusk–in a line: the woman holds the shoulder of the young man; who holds the shoulder of the old man; who holds a cane. Different realities, different timelines; different voices; all connected by a steady palm at the back. It was one of the realest depictions of the psychology of being a survivor I have ever seen on stage.
The play is full of big, stirring organ solos, snare drums, rousing choruses. But it ends with a child actor asking the woman who narrates Oedipus if Oedipus had a painless death. He is asking if Oedipus obtained peace for what happened to him. Because this is theater, based on Greek theater at that, we are promised catharsis and we get it. We are told, in the beautiful harmonies of gospel, a musical tradition forged through the horrendous sexual and physical abuse of American chattel slavery, that Oedipus died at peace, surrounded by his daughter-sisters, his fellow survivors, and the only people who do not judge him, reminded of love.
When I left that theater, I wished I could get every survivor to somehow sit down inside of it. Maybe then we’d all be closer to making it out to the exit, to making it home.