Trusting Intuition

I am an incest survivor and I feel safe. I am here to tell other survivors that it’s possible to feel safe. My hope is, if you’re half my age or less, it will not take nearly as long. If you’re mid-fifties, like me, or older, please know that it will feel no less powerful. Your own body will no longer be frozen between fight or flight.

This paralysis happens because childhood sexual violations are like putting a hot branding iron to brain chemistry. The experience is traumatic, and the human body is programmed to register danger in order to avoid it in the future. Even people empowered enough as children to evade violators distinctly remember feeling uncomfortable during the encounter. The creepy uncle who made children sit in his lap. A groping grandma. A family friend who wouldn’t stop staring. Children intuitively recognize danger. Their bodies recognize danger.

As children, we learn how to respond to our intuition by watching adults. If an adult intervenes on our behalf, they empower us to trust our intuition. If they tease or ridicule us, we learn quickly that we are, at the very least, alone in dealing with danger. The most common response is denial, and it’s the most destructive.

Denial negates not only the intuition of the child but denies the child’s right to an identity. Sexual abuse continues within families throughout generations because of denial. We use denial to gaslight our children and ourselves into over-riding the single most important survival mechanism we have—our intuition. In “The Gift of Fear,” security specialist Gavin de Becker, who survived a horrible childhood, repeatedly stresses the importance of intuition in avoiding violence as an adult.

Our intuition has always been to tell someone when we’ve been violated, and to believe they will help us. Too often, however, we encounter denial. What we are finally seeing in our culture is the united voices of survivors shouting over the rote banalities of denial—and being heard! We are finally being heard, by one another, and by others who want to believe in the better angels of our nature and can no longer ignore the shouting.

It took more than 150 women to bring down Larry Nassar. It took just one voice to start the chorus. Every person who speaks out makes it less difficult for the next, and so on. Now, more men are starting to feel safe enough to talk about their own childhood sexual abuse. Many men are denied their truth by a culture that labels them “lucky” enough to be introduced to their “manhood” early.

“Transparent” character Josh Pfefferman is a good example. Josh was statutorily raped by an adult female babysitter when he was a young teen. His entire family remained in denial even when the grown child of their illicit union joined them for dinner. The character is said to have “troubled relationships with women,” as if the two are somehow unrelated.

Nothing that I know is more healing than naming the truth. I say this after decades of meditation, mindfulness practice, yoga, fitness of every sort, journaling hundreds of pages and leaning into work as if my life depended on it, which it did. There are frenetic decades of “doing” to remove oneself from the original experience. The body will carry its own violation for decades before presenting a bill.

Some will die with the secret. Others will live with the truth, and it will set them free. New neural pathways will slowly override those created by trauma, so that even an incest survivor can feel safe.