Silence

  • The importance of unlearning our childhood stories

    ByMike McBride Reading Time: 3 minutes

    I could not heal until I unlearned that my abuse was something I somehow caused. Unlearning that opened up the possibility of learning something different, namely, that I was abused because someone decided to abuse me. Did that happen overnight? Of course not! Unlearning is a process, and the more closely we identify with a belief, the more difficult it becomes to unlearn it. So many survivors learn at a very early age to keep secrets, that bad things will happen if they tell anyone.

    People who’ve never had that belief drilled into their young minds wonder why victims wait decades to come forward and tell their stories. That’s why! That belief is hard to unlearn. Many of us grew up with silence being the thing that prevents the abuse from being worse. Why should we start discussing it? If you tried to tell someone as a child and got shut down, this only gets worse. 

  • Society Doesn’t Learn – Survivors Aren’t Believed

    ByMike McBride Reading Time: 5 minutes

    It’s disheartening to think that I’ve spent over 20 years in the online survivor community advocating that we believe survivors and act on accusations of abuse only to wind up here. This feels like we’ve gone back to the days of sexual violence being unheard of because no one would dare talk about being a victim. It’s enough to make you want to quit. I felt that way last week. As I watched my wife’s hope for women across the country leave her body while also being overwhelmingly angry at people who voted for a criminal and a rapist, I wanted to walk away and shut myself off from the world.

    Instead, I stepped away for a few days and reminded myself that there will be innumerable victims of sexual abuse who can’t talk about it and need to know that they are not alone. There are growing numbers of survivors who will be losing their families and friends and need to know that they are not alone. We will all be looking for community. 

    If anything, the importance of staying online and continuing to talk about child abuse, sexual violence, mental health, and supporting vulnerable people is higher now than it has been in the entire time I’ve been doing this. Now is not the time to walk away; it’s the time to fight for survivors.

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    The Many Ways We Invalidate Someone’s Story

    ByMike McBride Reading Time: 4 minutes

    We could also talk about abuse here too, and all the ways our stories all invalidated. How many of these have you heard from folks who find out about the abuse you dealt with as a child, or even as an adult:

    “You were young, you’ll get over it” (Or you don’t remember it that well)

    “Are you sure it was abuse?”

    “I can’t imagine (abuser) doing that”

    “Why didn’t you just leave?”

    “How could you have let that happen?”

  • Silence Does Not Help

    ByMike McBride Reading Time: 1 minute

    My wife sent me this clip of “Kristoff St. John’s ‘Y&R’ Co-Star Eric Braeden’s Emotional Reaction to His Friend’s Death” She also sent me this message and I couldn’t have said it any better myself. And this is why you do actually need to talk about things and check on people I have to admit….