Suffering in Silence: A Listener named “Dreama” Can’t Talk About Her Trauma
I chose this survey response because I know there must be so many other abuse victims like her, that suffer in silence, afraid to talk about the abuse they suffered as children because it would mean a confrontation with family members and experiencing the trauma again. But what I think Dreama and others like her forget is that they are reliving the trauma everyday because they have kept it secret, where it does the most damage and has the most power. Though I don’t know the rest of her story, my hunch is that people like Dreama usually wind up expressing their pain through living a life based in fear, and anticipating pain at every turn, and that anxiety is usually passed on to children and kills any chance of intimacy with a partner.
But how to you get someone who has been violated to trust again? I don’t know the answer to that, but in my case, my bad coping mechanisms had to start to unravel, and suicide had to start looking good forme to wake up and realize I was hurting inside.
This is a Listener E-Mail of the Day, posted on October 13th, 2012 by Paul Gilmartin
