The Sound of Silence
I’ve been sitting in the hospital since Friday, staring at this image. Long story short, last Tuesday I had some maxillary jaw bone removed, a complication from a near death experience almost 9 months ago. Every few hours a nurse will come in and ask me to rate my pain on a scale of 1-10 using this tool. It bothers me. It deeply bothers me.
1. Because you see my chart... I have an exposed bone in my mouth, why don’t you just guess how that feels
2. That pain chart is bs
3. That pain chart is bs
4. Exposed bone... remember!!?
5. That pain chart is bs
This is my sweet, adorable, precious, little, third grade picture. Using the scale above, please rate this child’s level of pain... 0-10... go ahead.
This picture could EASILY get inside of me. It kills me. How is this child smiling? Is this even me? At this point the amount of physical, emotional, sexual, verbal abuse, abandonment, and improsonment... I had endured AND witnessed.... the details of which are just too gross to get into here and now.... it’s just staggering. And here I am smiling.
Too often, our society implicitly uses this scale to judge abused children’s emotional pain. If they’re not crying, if their faces are expressionless, we assume they must not be hurting. Maybe the silence is really so loud we can’t even, without being there, without knowing, truly fathom how loud and deafening it is.
Without an expression of pain, we assume there is no injury. Makes sense. I suppose. As a mom of 3 boys and 1 girl, when my boys stub their toes, get a cat scratch, or a splinter you’d swear they were impaled or at least suffered a compound fracture! At least. When they are hurt they let it out. In big, bold, and unabridged ways.
Still the voiceless cry is often the most powerful one. This silent suffering. I later learned, that this is a typical reaction of young sexual abuse victims. Psychiatrists say the silence conveys their sense of helplessness, which also manifests in their reluctance to report the incidents and their tendency to accommodate their abusers. If children do disclose their abuse, their reports are often ambivalent, sometimes followed by a complete retraction and a return to silence. I never retracted but always fell silent. After I was adopted, I told my Mom about some of the abuse I had endured. She contacted an attorney and the attorney decided that “getting info out of me was like pulling teeth”. I’m not sure what language or terminology they expected me to use at 10 in reference to penetration, genitalia, and so on... especially with 5 male sexual abusers.
God has designed our brains with an amazing ability to heal. When you’re in the midst of trauma your brain responds normally to an abnormal situation. In a developing mind the pathways are litterally rerouted and this forms an “injury”. Healing is possible, I know it and I believe it. It involves work. Hard painful work. The work of becoming conscious of what we are doing in order to stop it. I struggle with even being aware my behaviors are symptoms of CPTSD! For so long I think I believed I was broken.
The key to healing is to take the mask off the behaviors and begin to deal with what is really going on underneath.
God did not form me in my mother’s womb to be her daughter, to be stuck in this cycle of trauma, addiction, abuse, poverty, and lack. I am my mother’s daughter. God did not form me in my mother’s womb to be born and live with a mask on. God did not form me in my mother’s womb to live in silent suffering. God did not form me in my mother’s womb to live as a victim. His glory through my testimony is freedom. Healing. Abundance. Hope. Life. It’s catchy. Catch up.