💊 Not just inspiring, but medicinal: A reading list on surviving childhood sexual violence
Seven stories to (hopefully) help you heal
Thank you for reading Beyond Survival, a publication about life after trauma. This edition is about bibliotherapy and the survivor stories that have helped me feel less alone. Please be aware that some readers might find this piece, and the articles linked below, triggering.
When I was in the thick of my trauma, I read a lot. I wonder if I would have survived without it. I read to better understand my experience and to find new ways of structuring my thinking. I read to feel less alone. I found pieces of myself between the lines of other people’s stories. Reading was a way to stay connected to the world, to feel like I was still part of the human race even when I was struggling to survive.
Reading was an anchor inside the whirlpool of trauma.
I read academic books, like Judith Butler’s seminal ‘Trauma & Recovery’ and Bessel Van Der Kolk’s ‘The Body Keeps The Score’. Those books were useful, but it was the first-person stories written by survivors that changed my life. I devoured their work, hunting for clues, desperate for the information I needed to heal. I didn’t know it at the time, but I was practicing bibliotherapy, “the use of reading as an ameliorative adjunct to therapy”.
When I was at my worst, riddled with flashbacks and unable to breathe, reading grounded my body and calmed my nervous system. On bad days, I could pick up a book and visit someone else’s mind for the day. I found peace in the comforting rhythms of narrative. Reading helped to reset my brain, to break an anxious loop and give me a chance to try again tomorrow. It was a safe place to detach from my life, somewhere to hide when I couldn’t imagine going on.
Immersing myself in these stories helped me understand sexual violence as a systemic issue, not a personal one. It helped me to situate my suffering within a patriarchal system of violence and oppression. When reading about sexual violence became too much, I read stories of addiction, grief and eating disorders. I craved stories of unspeakable suffering, of losing control over one’s own body and trying to rebuild a life after a shattering rupture.
This wasn’t always a good strategy. I sometimes used reading to numb myself, preferring to hide from my feelings than face them. There’s a limit to how much you can recover when you approach trauma only as an intellectual question. At some point, I had to put down my research and focus on my feelings instead. Reading also requires time and concentration, things I didn’t have when my C-PTSD symptoms were at their most severe.
That said, I doubt I would have survived without it.
Here are 7 articles which helped me heal. They’re not always easy to read, but they are worth your time. Please feel free to take a break or seek support if it becomes too much. Remember: it always feels like you’re the only one, but you never are.
Love after abuse, Granta,
“In volcanic eruptions, animals sometimes become so overwhelmed by the stress of the situation that they run into the lava. A volcano erupted on an island off the coast of Indonesia, and several species were tracked heading towards the danger. Among them were sea lions, who could have escaped simply by swimming underwater and in the opposite direction. Instead, they swam into the volcano and let it burn them alive”
Video Games Saved my Life, The Globe and Mail, Scott C Jones
“Decades later, the questions still dog me. Am I not worthy of her love? I sometimes think when I brush my teeth in the mornings. When I look in the mirror, I think, What is it about me that is so unlovable? That is not worth believing? Not worth protecting? Asking these questions has become an organic part of who I am. It’s a dead-end alleyway in my psyche, an alleyway that I’ve been involuntarily wandering down, over and over again, for decades, hoping to find the exit. Every day, I reach the same dead end. Every day, I turn back, retrace my steps and I walk it again.”
The Legacy of Childhood Trauma, The New Yorker, Junot Diaz
“I was raped when I was eight years old. By a grownup that I truly trusted. After he raped me, he told me I had to return the next day or I would be “in trouble.” And because I was terrified, and confused, I went back the next day and was raped again. I never told anyone what happened, but today I’m telling you. And anyone else who cares to listen.”
Important Note: I debated including this essay, as it has been rightly criticised for failing to grapple with the harm Diaz inflicted on the women in his life, both those close to him and those he interacted with in professional spaces. I decided that, though flawed, the essay captures something of what sexual trauma does to the mind and body from a young boy. If you read it, please also engage with the arguments put forward in this piece by Lili Loofbourow, this one by Danielle Jackson and this one by Maiysha Kai.
When The Monster Saves You, Buzzfeed, (I really enjoyed her book too)
“The first person I told about the girls I wanted to kiss was my middle school counselor. I'd been seeing her without my mother's permission. I knew better than to ask my mother. But I spent most nights curled up in the bottom of my closet, thinking I'd die if I couldn't stop crying about the way I felt my body was betraying me, how it had been for a long time.”
Light Entertainment, London Review of Books,
“Whatever else it has been in the past, paedophilia was always an institutional disorder, in the sense that it has thrived in covert worlds with powerful elites. Boarding schools and hospitals, yes, churches certainly, but also in our premier entertainment labyrinths.”
‘I couldn’t deal with it, it tore me apart’: surviving child sexual abuse, The Guardian, Tom Yarwood
“In telling of the sexual assaults I endured as a child, I have always had the sensation of speaking into the void. I usually offer only the bare bones of the story, because I want my listener to fill in the emotional content, to tell me what I felt, what they might have felt in my position. I want them to explain to me how I could have suffered, when I felt pleasure, and how I was not to blame, though I didn’t resist. But their response is always underwhelming: they seem to understand so little about this kind of thing, less even than me. And it’s all so exquisitely embarrassing that I soon move on, apologise for myself, repeat the usual reassurances. It was nothing, really, it didn’t matter, I coped. Each telling is a new humiliation, a new disappointment. And yet, like an idiot, I always go on to attempt another.”
Our Stories, The Toast,
“If I must share my story, I want to do so without the attention that inevitably follows. I do not want pity or appreciation or advice. I am not brave. I am not strong. I am not special. I am one woman who has experienced something countless women have experienced. That’s what matters here, that having this kind of story is utterly common and that perhaps, by sharing these stories, we can become appropriately horrified about how much suffering is borne of violence.”
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Beyond Survival is written by me, Clare Egan, an award-winning writer and journalist. You can read more about me here, or look at some pretty pictures over here. Click reply to say hello anytime. Thank you for being here!
thank you xo