You don’t decide to get over that. It’s not impossible to heal from it but it’s going to require quite a bit more than just deciding to get over it. So maybe you’d do a lot more good supporting people through that process instead of demanding they get over it so you can feel more comfortable.
When Nedra talks about growing up in an alcoholic family, naturally that was something that resonated with me. Growing up my father was an alcoholic. It was normal for me to fear your father, especially when they’d been drinking. It was normal for there to be violence at home. It was normal for children to be physically attacked for as little as making too much noise.
Perhaps worst of all, it was also normal to keep it all secret, to not share what happens at home outside of the immediate family.
Which made it all the more easy for the sexual abuse I suffered later to be kept secret. And, in some odd way, for it also to seem normal.
As shocking and dark as the details of the Duggar family and their relgious beliefs may be to many of us, it shouldn’t surprise us at all that they were so many people with a vested interest in the show, the religious organization, and the family were encouraged and even forced to gloss over the reality of what happened. If you’re shocked that anyone would go to such lengths to hide child abuse and ignore victims, you simply haven’t been paying attention. It goes on everywhere, and I hope the more cases like this one that we can bring to light, the more we’ll start to understand how horrible this is.
There was no gift involved in child abuse, no silver lining, and no reason for it to happen. It was abuse inflicted on me by another person. Period. That experience is part of me, but not nearly the sum of who I am. I refuse to let anyone define me that narrowly.
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