I have some things to say about domestic abuse. And I’ll start with these quotes:
“I think about how easy it is for humans to make judgments when we’re standing on the outside of a situation. It’s easy when we’re on the outside to believe that we would walk away without second thought if a person mistreated us. It’s easy to say we couldn’t continue to love someone who mistreats us when we aren’t the ones feeling the love of that person. Colleen Hoover, It Ends with Us
“Most people have no clue hidden abuse is taking place right under their noses. It is being perpetrated by individuals who would never be suspected of being abusers. The concealed nature of this harm is what leaves its targets devastated….Normal people have a hard time comprehending that abusers go to such lengths, but they do.” Shannon Thomas, Healing From Hidden Abuse: A Journey Through the Stages of Recovery from Psychological Abuse
Photo by author
“Statistically we know now that once the hands are on the neck, the very next step is homicide.” Rachel Louise Snyder, No Visible Bruises: What We Don’t Know About Domestic Violence Can Kill Us (67)
I lost count of how many times his hands were on my neck. God only knows how many more times they were on my mother’s neck….
“…survival…is not synonymous with wholeness. We don’t survive whole.” Daria Burke, Of My Own Making
The Superfund site
“Something in me…screams…This is not all I am. I had something more in mind to do….We are reclaiming what another human being…decided to ruin, to take for themselves…Many of us don’t die. But our trajectories are forever altered.” Jen Cross, Writing Ourselves Whole
And Cross goes on to so eloquently point out that they didn’t just TAKE from us; they left us with a MESS to clean up, comparing us to an “oil spill,” a Superfund site in need of cleanup that will never be quite the same. :
“We spend the bulb and blossom of our lives cleaning up a toxic waste site. Meanwhile, we watch our friends come into full flower: making connections, reaching out, writing books, making marriages and families, developing their crafts, their skills, themselves. We watch them build careers, and wonder what is wrong with us that we can’t do what they’re doing. But we are still salvaging the superfund site inside of us. We painstakingly wipe off every blade of grass and feather of every bird that is a necessary part of our inside selves. The oil is never completely eradicated. Some of the areas impacted never recover…never become what they ought to have been…And then we simply have to mourn their loss, grieve what might have been….Meanwhile, those who polluted us are allowed to continue…”
I agree with every word…and deeply feel the effects of both what was taken…and what was left…and what goes forward…
“The past is not the past…We all bring every second of our lives to who we are today.” Andre Dubus III, with Melanie Brooks, in Writing Hard Stories – Celebrated Memoirists Who Shaped Art From Trauma
About costs
Let me first be clear… I have managed to reclaim a lot in life. And Cross notes the same in her book when she indicated that we can become a hybrid of what we were meant to be; that we can go on, go forward, and still thrive.
But too often society “glosses over” that whole in-between section, the blatant, cold, hard reality that exists in between “the abuse and the thriving.” So for once, I want to be very specific about just what this life of mine has cost me…about the fact that no matter how good we make it – there were…and ARE…costs we incurred.
And by “we” I mean not just myself, or other abuse survivors, but society in general.
But first, let me talk about my personal costs in this.
I have written in past posts about my struggles with friendships, especially with women. I was clingy, insecure, deferred to others’ opinions versus having confidence in my own, and needed constant reassurance that people cared. And I didn’t always select the healthiest of relationships. Over time, I came to realize I’d been looking for my mother my whole life. Not the best foundation for a healthy adult relationship.
I don’t deny any of that. And I fully acknowledge that, try as I might to do better, the pattern repeated even as I didn’t want it to. I was mystified by my neediness and ashamed because my adult self viewed me as acting like a child. While I managed my professional life like the forty or fifty-year-old adult I was, why was I acting like an insecure teenager in my friendships?
As I worked with various therapists to overcome these insecurities, I kept failing. No matter how much we talked it through, I just could NOT get past it. Until one day, during some recent work with my current therapist, we struck on the problem.
We were doing a yoga exercise that involved my being on my back in a vulnerable position. Even as I relaxed into the pose, I found myself getting more and more anxious, afraid, and downright terrified. She called a halt to that work, and instead we discussed what had happened. She was quiet for a moment, then mentioned something about “somatic memories” and “object constancy.”
I’ll get into those in the next post. But for now, she basically explained that the reaction I’d had, as well as the insecurities and some other reactions we’d worked on, were all from a very early “pre-verbal” stage of life.
Trying to understand exactly what that meant, I asked my therapist if that was related to the sexual assault my father inflicted on me during a car ride when I was three. It was an assault I still remember clearly, but given my age, would that have been “pre-verbal?”
She shook her head and quietly said, “No. It would have been much earlier than that.”
I took that in for a moment. “How much earlier than being three?”
When I first started working with this trauma therapist almost twenty years ago, all I could feel was anxiety and terror. I wasn’t even aware of the rage, just terror. Beyond that, my emotions, as well as any emotional power, were a flat line. I was not a fully open, fully expressive human being
It took ten years of regular work for me to even reach the place where anger might be a possible emotion in me. It took a literal lifetime for me to mine deep enough into my psyche to finally hit that vein of rage.
No question, once opened, there was no turning back. But then…maybe that was the point? Could it be that maybe my very life force…the one I’d been denied since infancy, was also there? The life force that is the “light side” of rage, and that could finally allow me to accept and embrace all of me, all of my life and being, fully…with love?
I only knew that once I started through that swamp of emotions, I had to keep going…because the rage had something to teach me.
THIS TIME, I’ll win…
I talked about proxy battles — re-enacting past moments of abuse or conflict by “fighting back” in some current-day situation — my way to win some kind of perceived battle in the present day. They could be some small angry interaction with someone in the grocery store, or whatever. But if I perceived insult or disrespect, especially by a man, I would “stand up for me!”
Even as I know I don’t want to get hooked by whatever it is, and on some level I know it’s ridiculous, there are times I just feel compelled to do it anyway. And even more weirdly, I experience a tremendous sense of relief if I “win.” And it’s not just relief that I “won”, but…that I FOUGHT BACK.
Then I came across these passages in the book Trauma and Recovery, by Judith Herman, MD:
There are things left within that remain still totally alive today, buried alive, even though you don’t know it. They lurk…in your psyche. Your nervous system. Your memories. Waiting.
Something happens in the moment – a loud noise, a smell, a touch- and you are suddenly spiraling backwards in time, to a place of total emotional chaos and terror. It doesn’t matter how old you are now, or how long ago that memory was buried.
They are happening again…right now.
Triggers and Flashbacks
There are so many instances that I will be having a pleasant day, absorbed in something fun, and then, when I least expect it, it overwhelms me.
A knob on the kitchen cabinet catches my shirt, and I react with fear and rage at “being pulled.” Someone starts up a loud motorcycle unexpectedly, and I jump out of my skin because the loud noise was like the noise of Dad coming into my room ready to grab me. Body and sensory memories.
Then there are the emotional ones. I have hated weekends most of my life. Except for when I worked in the hospital lab. At least on those weekends, I wasn’t home and was doing something useful. When I was at home, he was at me. Either sexually, or physically if I refused. It took me years to realize that my weekend “dread” was a powerful emotional flashback to “those weekends.”
These days the weekends still haunt me. I will be cleaning the house, then I sit down to rest for a moment and look over my to-do list. Immediately, from out of nowhere, I am filled with intense anxiety and the sense I am “bad.” I feel afraid. I feel like I’d better not be “caught” sitting down. I am in danger…or I am a “bad person” because he has made that clear to me.
Then, there is the “3:00 p.m. sense of dread” every day because “Dad will be home soon,” even though he is long-dead and I am in my seventies.
Or every year in July, on the anniversary of the first moon landing. I hate that day, feel anxious, and full of dread. I just want to sleep. That’s because it was one of the worst days of my life then. I had “avoided him,” and so he was at me all day verbally and emotionally. He didn’t hit me that day – he might have had to explain why to my mother. But he would shoot me “The Look” – that intense glare of pure hatred and rage that kept reminding me I was unloved and in deep trouble. When he wasn’t doing that, he was totally ignoring me. If I talked to him, he looked right past me.
So there is no question but that those memories are totally alive yet within me. I experience them all the time.
“The Look”
We all know those family photo albums full of pictures, especially those candid ones that can range from fun to outright silly because the camera caught the person off-guard in a hilarious position.
And then there are those posed family shots too, the ones everyone gathered for and smiled in unison.
My father’s posed photos sometimes captured a smile. But, especially back then, they usually looked more like his work badge. Sour. Unsmiling. “Tough guy.” Even when we were celebrating.
This was the photo from the celebration of my First Holy Communion when I was seven. In the Catholic Church, it’s a joyous time. Grandparents, cousins, aunts, everyone’s together laughing, smiling, eating. And photos. Lots of photos.
The smiling “posed ones” would always be taken outside by the flowering bush in the backyard. Here is Dad’s posed, “celebratory” face. Could he have been any happier that day??
So, after all these posts on the “Tools” I use to heal, tools which drove my decision to write, the final question to answer was: “What “form” of writing to use?
For me, it was a simple choice – STORY.
It is a method as old as humans themselves, the method used around the campfires of ancient hunters and warriors, the tool heard from caves, to feudal halls, to family hearths. Story.
Story, in all its ugliness, joy, failure, and success. Story, not as “happily ever after,” Story, not as journalistic objective news reporting because that is never possible. Story, not as seen by others, but Story, as what happened to me.
And when you write your own story you need to put it ALL out there on the table, see all the bits and scraps, pain and mess, mistakes and breakthroughs, spread out before you. Only then can you start the long hard work of examining each piece, and then putting the pieces all back together. Only then can you see the whole picture, and what it can teach you.
What is “story?”
Because my academic background is science, not literature, I went looking to people steeped in both writing and psychology for the answer to this question. These were my favorite and most helpful answers:
“You too are driven by the desire to understand, know…beneath your desire for knowledge writhes the hunger to understand and love yourself.” Gloria E. Anzaldúa’s essay: “now let us shift…the path of conocimiento…inner work, public acts,” in This Bridge We Call Home
Time Passages…
It all started with Al Stewart’s song, “Time Passages,” on the radio. It’s a mellow song that I have heard thousands of times and always enjoy.
On this particular day, the melody and lyrics drifted through the background of my consciousness as I drove along. As usual, I hummed along with some of the familiar words about memories and escapes into the past. But this time, one particular line smacked me with a recognition I’d never had before – the line about things left behind.
Like a lone dancer on a dark stage suddenly framed in a brilliant white-hot spotlight, those words flashed in my brain. Things left behind. THAT’S what this has been about.
Why show abuse and trauma in art? Why show it to another? Why SEE it?
The very direct version? For the world…and for me and anyone else who was abused.
Let me start with “for the world.”
For the world – the moments NOT in the family photo album
There is a raw reality that exists behind words like abused or molested. Those words are relatively “clean.” Cerebral. They tell another that “this” happened, but they do not convey the real horror of what “this” was.
They do not describe what I had to live through in each of those moments, for thousands of moments. They do not show the true images of what happened behind closed doors. Images that weren’t memorialized in the family photo albums. Those words don’t tell the “other side” of the story.
So, seeing those moments of horror in living color on a canvas gives that story a level of reality that words just can’t match.
My husband, who has watched me paint for every one of these pieces and saw the episodes of abuse emerge in paint, said as much. “I always knew about these things from what you told me, and I believed you. But seeing those moments makes them real in a whole different way. If he were standing here before me right now, I don’t know that I could actually restrain myself from going at him.”
The paintings show things that maybe society has never thought about in relation to “abuse,” things it doesn’t understand, or things it doesn’t want to look at.
And I want society to understand, because that is the only way this can change, and those harmed can be fully loved.
I want society to see what “childhood sexual abuse” really means. For me. For that young child that I was. For anyone out there who has been through it and isn’t understood by anyone around them. And to answer all of those who demand to know, “When are you going to get over this and leave it behind? Why can’t you just forget it already and move on?”
Intention
People may question the motives of artists and writers who are candid and open in sharing these experiences.
I will state totally emphatically that the intention for the art in this book is NOT to shock, traumatize, or titillate.
It is actually a heartfelt attempt to reach for that deepest human need – connection – by communicating what that reality was.
I’ve been reading a book by Jim Collins called What to Make of a Life. Over ten years, he and his team researched hundreds of people to see how they managed the challenges and moments of truth in life by harnessing what he calls “their encodings.” Those are people’s special innate talents held within and waiting for us to discover them. When used in the right moments and circumstances, those encodings propel us to fulfill our destinies and lead rich, satisfying lives.
He writes the book using the stories of matched pairs of individuals from all walks of life. For each particular life path, he showed how each member of the pair got started, found their way professionally and personally, then confronted a “cliff” — a moment of big change. Using their unique encodings, he showed how even very similar people can navigate transitions in very different ways.
It’s a great book and one I find very uplifting. It is heartening to read how even the likes of John Glenn, Carlos Santana, Admiral Grace Hopper, or Led Zeppelin’s Robert Plant can struggle, be enmeshed in a fog of “what next,” even choose poorly, then dig deep within to find their way.
I just finished reading the chapter about writers Toni Morrison and Barbara Tuchman. Morrison, winner of a Pulitzer Prize for fiction and the Nobel Prize in literature, wrote stories about the young black girls that did not seem to exist in any books she had read. So she wrote for herself, to create the stories she wanted to read. Barbara Tuchman was passionate about history and making non-fiction as rich a read as any good novel. Very different women, very different writing. But they were similar in one way.
Both were absolutely passionate about writing. They could not “NOT write. “As Morrison put it, “If all the publishers had disappeared in one night, I would have written anyway.”
And both used the word “compulsion” to describe what drove them to write. It wasn’t self-discipline enforced from outside themselves, but an inner compulsion to keep going for the sheer love and desire to see how their next sentence, paragraph, and story would turn out.
I resonated with these two women because that is exactly the word I would use to describe my attitude toward writing this book — compulsion. I MUST write it. I WANT to write it. I NEED to write it, to follow the story’s lead, to learn what wisdom it will reveal along the way. And I NEED to share it with whoever is supposed to find my story.
So I get up, write, research, and plan every day. And every day I channel a driven energy from somewhere within me. And that energy is always there.
This is a big topic, a KEY topic for me in my healing journey, bigger, even, than “why write.” In fact, without art, I would never have made the progress I have, and these posts would not exist.
So I am going to spend a couple of posts on art in healing, because there are several important parts to this.
In the fall of 2025, NPR’s Tonya Mosley interviewed Jane Fonda on her Fresh Air segment. In the course of their conversation about healing, the power of the arts came up:
“Jane, there’s a part of that speech, that SAG speech about the arts. And you say specifically that the arts have the power to create empathy, to understand a human so profoundly that you can touch another person’s soul.”
Tonya Mosley, NPR’s Fresh Air, September 2, 2025 – “‘We have to speak, we have to shout’: Jane Fonda is still an activist at 87.”
Touch another person’s soul…Oh my God, yes. I can honestly say that it is through the creations of various artists and actors — Madonna, Barbra Streisand, Meryl Streep, Viola Davis, and others — that I found comfort and wisdom, and received examples of powerful mothering and the “divine feminine” that I never received at home.
Of course, they don’t know this. But it was their masterful performances in their respective arts, delivered with all their hearts to the best of their abilities, that fed my soul when I needed it, and healed wounds like water on a drying, dying plant.
Madonna spoke in an interview of not being “the owner of her talent” but its master. It was given to her to allow it to move through and beyond her to those who need it. And she referred to her creative work in life as “medicine.”
Even scientists mirror these sentiments about the power of art to connect us all, and thus heal our lives:
“Here, around the fire, creative human expressions developed as an important layer of meaning-making and belonging… the activities we now call “the arts” began to take shape as an evolutionary priority to keep us alive. Art-making laid the basic foundation for culture and community among our earliest ancestors…these early gatherings helped to seed the social value of community. Researchers now know that participating in and fostering social connections in this way is akin to exercise for the brain: It improves cognitive function, lowers stress, and diminishes depression. …it allowed our species to build empathy and understanding with others.” Susan Magsamen and Ivy Ross, Your Brain on Art: How the Arts Transform Us (203)
I could go on with examples, but frankly, I will speak to it myself.
Soul Mosaic 