When it comes to healing, justice is big. Many trauma survivors struggle because their childhoods were so unjust, and then because history repeats itself, this often sets them up for relationships and jobs where the injustices play out again. And then there are the injustices of the culture around identity issues like social class, gender, race, caste, sexual orientation, and other social injustices. All this injustice can lead to feelings of powerlessness, helplessness, resentment, and deep down, unprocessed rage. It’s not fair. It really isn’t.
And that’s why telling your story is sometimes the only form of justice you’re going to get. If you’ve been mistreated, it’s only fair that you get to tell your story. It may be too late to get justice in the court system, but you do have the power of your pen, and that’s a big deal for your parts when it comes to helping rebalance justice.
I just read Careless People: A Cautionary Tale of Power, Greed, and Lost Idealism by Facebook whistleblower Sarah Wynn-Williams. In this searing memoir, the way she alleges that she was treated by Facebook leaders like Mark Zuckerberg, Sheryl Sandburg, and Joel Kaplan is so shocking in its cruelty and boundary violating inappropriateness that it’s no surprise that Facebook’s response is straight out of the narcissistic abuser’s playbook. As often happens in #MeToo situations, in 2017, she tried and failed to get justice in her accusation against Joel Kaplan of sexual harassment. But after getting fired for “poor performance,” she exercised the power of her pen to tell her story. Meta immediately got the courts involved to silence her because of a non-disparagement clause she’d signed. But her story became #1 on the New York Times bestseller list. Silenced to talk about the book, she still got her chance to get justice.
Many trauma survivors do not have as much power to push back against abusers as Wynn-Williams has. They don’t have expensive lawyers to protect them or a huge platform to spread the word.
But to our parts, standing up for the injustices of the past can be a massive deal psychologically, especially when it comes to what happened to us in childhood. It shows our parts WE, the wise Self, have their backs, and we, in Self, can handle negotiating with the parts that are afraid to tell the truth.
Telling your story- for justice, for creative expression, for healing, or for any reason- will be the focus of my upcoming weekend Zoom workshop MENTOR YOUR MEMOIR, April 26-27.
Register for MENTOR YOUR MEMOIR here.
Writing about our childhoods, in particular, can be extremely healing. We were powerless back then. But now we’re not. Tèa has written the story of her abusive childhood. She had one of those extremely unfair childhoods, and because of it, a series of unfair circumstances in her life repeated the cycles of abuse. Being the victim of child abuse is so unfair that kids personalize it, making it about them, when being abused has nothing to do with the child. It has everything to do with the parents, and we have a right to get whatever justice we can when we’ve been victims of child abuse.
People in spiritual circles have tried to convince Tèa that “Everything happens for a reason” or “Your soul chose this abuse to help you evolve spiritually” or “This abuse is your karma from misdeeds in past lives.” But Tèa knows better than to take on those damaging, victim-blaming, accountability-bypassing beliefs. But that leaves her without a framework to make sense of how unfairly terrible her childhood was- other than dark humor.
To lighten the heaviness of all that unearned injustice, Tèa jokes that there’s a parent factory where they pop out parents. Because the factory only operates Monday-Friday, she says the factory workers are at their best Monday morning, when they produce the best parents, the ones who offer their kiddos secure attachment, who love them unconditionally, who treat them fairly, with dignity, with respect for their human rights.
If you got even one Monday morning parent by the luck of a random lottery, you scored.
By Tuesday afternoon, they’re rolling out decent parents, but the factory workers are getting a little tired and sloppy. Those parents might be kind, attuned, and loving some of the time, but they might slip up more often than Monday morning parents.
Wednesday is hump day, so you’re still getting decent enough parents, but the factory workers are starting to fantasize about happy hour on Friday night. They’re a little distracted, and Wednesday parents have a few more flaws.
But by Friday afternoon, the parents they’re churning out are most definitely of inferior quality. Not only do they not behave the way Monday morning parents might; they’re flat out awful as parents. They’re mean, abusive, violent, neglectful, and terrifying.
In her book Not The Price of Admission, trauma therapist Laura Brown, PhD describes the required relationship between adults and children as the human “contract for care.” This is the unspoken need all offspring of all species have in order to reproduce offspring that survive. Humans cannot just give birth and then expect their kids to grow up as functioning members of tribal society. They must connect. They must relate. They must teach kids basic social skills and how to get along as an adult without undue dependency. They must train their kids when it’s safe to trust and when to be suspicious of someone. They must help kids tolerate difficult emotions, like anger, disappointment, terror, and shame. There are certain rules of being human that all kids need to learn from their parents.
But if you’ve got a Friday afternoon parent, they shirk this responsibility, violating the unspoken contract for care. Dr. Brown writes:
If you are a survivor, you were raised by people who were impaired in some way in their ability to engage in the most important human task. They broke the “contract for care.” They did not make you central. Perhaps they exploited your normal childhood vulnerability to believing what adults say. Maybe they took advantage of you needing comfort and connection even though the one to whom you had to go for that comfort was scaring or hurting you. Or they simply were unable to show up for the task of giving you the attachment experiences that you needed because they were themselves too affected by emotional distress, physical illness, and/or inadequate resources.
At the same time that they were breaking this basic human contract for your care, they were simultaneously teaching you that it was your job to keep your relational agreements with them, as well as others. They expected loyalty from you, even when they hadn’t any to you. They taught you that you had to pay a price to be in relationships by exacting prices from you that children can’t pay without suffering damage to their developing senses of self and capacities to be in relationships of any kind.
The rules of relating to other humans have thus been a continuing source of confusion for you. You haven’t wanted to be like the adults who raised you. You knew intuitively that they had committed violations of core human tasks and values. You wanted to be someone who could be counted on: loyal, committed, engaged, and decent. So you haven’t known that it’s okay to say “enough already” or “no.” You haven’t been able to figure out that you don’t have to be the only person holding up the bargain in a relationship. You don’t quite grasp why it’s perfectly moral to drop your end when other people drop theirs. You’ve overridden your inner warning signals too many times and trusted people who were dangerous to you. Or you’re on the other end of the spectrum, thinking that you hear a tsunami warning when it was just the siren of a distant ambulance going by, and you’ve kept people at a distance in order to feel even a little bit safe. You haven’t known when to say “enough already.” You haven’t known how to be safely connected.
If you got Friday afternoon parents, or if your bosses abused you the way Sarah Wynn-Williams’ did, you have a right to seek justice by telling your story. You also have a right to tell your story just because it’s beautiful or inspiring or illuminating or beautifully written, as only you can write it. You don’t have to be writing about trauma in order to tell a beautiful, meaningful, and healing story. But especially if you have no other way to get justice, or if you’ve had your story invalidated and gaslit more times than you can count, telling your story might be precious medicine for your parts.
If you feel ready to put your story out there, we invite you to join us for MENTOR YOUR MEMOIR, where we’ll be talking about book publishing, other ways to get your story out there, legal issues and boundaries regarding your story, as well as how to get an agent, what publishers are looking for, what it means to build a “platform” of people interested in your story, and other practicalities around book-writing and publishing.
Join us for MENTOR YOUR MEMOIR here.
Whether you join us or not, your story is medicine! Tell it when and if you feel ready to be witnessed.
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