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When the #MeToo movement first began as a trickle of hashtags, I wasn’t particularly interested in it. The stories, as I glimpsed them in the Harris Teeter checkout aisle, or saw them referenced on social media platforms, tugged at the edges of my awareness. I did my best to ignore them.
What did #Metoo have to do with me? Rich men, famous men, politicians, and celebrities: I once lived on the outskirts of that universe, long ago–but that was ancient history. I dismissed #Metoo as being largely irrelevant to my own modest, suburban life. Whatever I’d gone through in my teens and twenties was over. Besides, I’d done a lot of therapy. Things were fine.
Denial and numbing are a natural response to emotional and physical pain. As a therapist, I’m fully aware of this, but my awareness doesn’t inure me to falling back on these defenses. What I now love about the #Metoo movement is the way it’s brought me face-to-face with my own denial.
What’s gone AWOL from your own psyche?
Sexual abuse and toxic gender dynamics have become part of our cultural narrative. It’s in the news. All my friends are talking about it. My family discusses it regularly at dinner. My clients come into my office shaken to their cores as they rethink their past sexual encounters from an entirely new perspective. On the one hand, it’s healing and validating to call assaults and violations out for what they were (and are). On the other hand, it forces you to face and feel what may have gone AWOL in your own psyche during violations, because it was too overwhelming to feel it, then: anger, grief, helplessness, worthlessness, and shame.
I love the #Metoo movement (and media platforms like this one that encourage us to “have the conversations no one else is having”) because change begins with open, respectful conversation. To have a conversation you have to know what you’re discussing. #Metoo has re-acquainted me with hidden pockets of shame, disgust, self-blame, and aversion related to my own gender and sexual-identity history. Before #Metoo, I hadn’t considered the possibility that these emotions were still there. Alas! Hurray! It’s both.
You have to feel it to heal it.
There are many far more pleasant things I’d rather sit around thinking about than the times when I found myself caught in a sexual catch-22, feeling scared, worthless, helpless, ashamed, or confused. But the truisms about trauma seem to be pretty true, for the most part. What you resist, persists. The only way out is through. You have to feel it to heal it.
#Me too has shown me an archeological gravesite in my own back yard. As I dig, it’s not that pretty. Every few feet down, there are new layers of impacted sediment filled with fossils I’d forgotten about from different time periods, through womanhood, adolescence, and all the way back into girlhood. There are dead things buried there I mostly forgot were ever alive, small, delicate corpses I never mourned. Now, I can give them a proper burial.
This process, spurred by #Metoo, is important. Pointing fingers, blaming, and even polarizing might be helpful and necessary as a way of feeling through emotions on the way to something more hopeful. Subjugating our inner feminine or finding power in the toxic inner feminine, grafting oneself rigidly to the masculine at the expense of the feminine, or succumbing completely to the dubious protection of a toxic inner masculine–these options hurt everyone.
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