TRANSCRIPT
In 2011, I was hitchhiking from Alaska down to the lower 48 states, and I had a very interesting experience in British Columbia. It was early one morning. I’d been camping out the night before, and I was on the side of the road. I was picked up by a woman who was about my age. I was 39 at the time, and she had a daughter with her. They were both sitting in the front seat. The daughter was about 15 or 16. I was sitting in the back, and we got to talking, as is natural when hitchhiking.
I told her that I was a social worker. I’d been a therapist, and I was still a licensed social worker. Somehow, the subject came around to sexual abuse, and what she told me was this story. She was a First Nations person. I guess in America, the less politically correct way to say it was she was an Indian, and she was part of a tribe or a band. I believe they used that word that lived along the coast. What she told me was that, I think what she said was, ninety percent of the men in her band were registered sex offenders. She said sexual abuse of women and children by men in their tribe was rampant. It was out of control, and she said it was something terrible that had befallen her tribe, her band.
I asked how it was that they were dealing with this. What do you do when ninety percent of the men who are your people are registered sex offenders? What do you do? And I also, I remember I said this: I said, “Is it okay that we’re talking about this in front of your daughter?” I don’t like to have conversations like this in front of teenage kids. She goes, “No, actually it’s very important that we’re talking about this in front of my daughter because if I didn’t talk about this with my daughter, then she probably would have fallen prey to one of these people. I have been talking about this with my daughter since she was old enough to talk, and that’s how she’s learned how to protect herself.” I remember thinking, very interesting.
Now, she told me also that a big thing in her band of people was that, yes, they acknowledged that these men had done terrible things and they were registered sex offenders in Canada, but they also had to learn to live with them. Now, one thing that she said was historically, this is hundreds of years ago, before the coming of white Europeans, she said sexual abuse did happen in their tribe, in their band. She said it was rare, but what they did was when someone was caught sexually abusing a child, what they would do is they would kill them. And the way they did it is they were a coastal people. What they would do is they would wait until the tide went out. They would wait until it was the lowest tide, and then they would stake the person’s leg to the ground. They would strap their leg with, well, I guess like a cord of some sort, and stake them to the ground so they couldn’t get out way out in the coast at low tide, him. And then when the water would come up, it would just slowly come up, and it would rise right over them, and the person would drown. That is how they dealt with sexual abusers.
She said, “But we can’t do this now because look, 90% of our men are sexual abusers or have a history of sexual abuse.” And I remember thinking, oh my god. But then she added something even more interesting, and she was the one who brought it up, or maybe I did. What she said was the question of why did they do this? Where did this history of sexual abuse come from? And what she said is they’re acting out what they have learned. They’re acting out what we, as a tribe, as a band, have learned. And she said it really started, the rampant sexual abuse started after the coming of the white Europeans when it was, I believe it was Jesuits, it was the religious people, and they took all the children from this band and all these tribes all around Canada, all these different First Nations people, and they put them in residential schools far away from their homeland, far away from their name land. And they put them far away, and they sent the kids away with no parents, and they took the kids away for most of the year for years and years. They weren’t allowed to learn their native language. They weren’t allowed to speak their native language. They weren’t allowed to use any of their native traditions.
The big problem is the religious people who were running these schools, men and women, were rampant sexual abusers. They were horrible. They totally abused the children. And this woman said that her own mother was one of the last people to go to these residential schools, and she said her mother told her what happened at these schools. She goes, “It was constant sexual abuse and tons and tons and tons of sexual shaming.” So it was, on one hand, they were being sexually abused, and on the other hand, they were being sexually shamed. And what she said, she told me this one story. She said her mother, when her mother had her period, and this happened to other girls, when her mother started menstruating, the nuns who were the teachers took this girl’s bloody underwear and made her wear it on her head the whole day so that everyone could know that she was now sexually shamed for having menstruated. And I thought, oh my god.
And she, ’cause her mother came back completely screwed up. And she said what happened is all these kids, when they came back from these residential schools run by these European religious people, she goes they were all sexually screwed up. They were all acting out sexually all over the place. There was rape going on. There was child sexual abuse going on. They were replicating what they had learned. They were traumatized, and they were acting out their trauma. They were expressing their trauma through their behavior. And then what happened is it became part of the behavior of the band. She said it just became rampant. She goes parents were sexually abusing their kids. They were abusing other people’s kids. Kids were abusing each other. And basically, most people were growing up having been sexually abused. There was no healing going on, there wasn’t, or very little of it. And she goes it just spread.
And she goes, “Now,” she said, “then it was the year 2011. This is what we’re left with. We’re left with the legacy of sexual abuse where we were sexually abused, and now we have internalized it.” And in my experience as a therapist, I told her this, and I know this, and she knew it herself, you know better than I did. This is what happens to people who have been abused, that if they don’t resolve it in some way or another, they are going to act it out. And to me, now when I reflect on it, the question is what do we do about it? Does it help to label people sexual abusers for life? Put people on a sexual abuse registry? Well, maybe it’s important to know. I think it’s not a bad thing to know who’s dangerous so we can protect ourselves, so we can protect children from them. But at the same time, does it solve the problem? Clearly not.
The other thing is what I consider, not everybody has been sexually abused, at least in overt ways, but everybody’s been traumatized in some way or other. And everybody who has power over other people, from what I see, in some way or other, either in very subtle ways, in minor ways, or in more extreme ways, acts out their abuse. They act out what’s been done to them, and they can harm other people until they heal, until they grieve their wounds, until they resolve them. And what I think is what she described going on in her band, her little band of, I don’t know, 500, 800 people, a thousand people, I really don’t remember the numbers, is a microcosm of something going on in our whole world. A world of traumatized people traumatizing other people. A world of hurt people who hurt other people. A world of traumatized humans who traumatize other humans and are destroying our planet, are harming each other, harming the whole natural world. And yet we, this is…
All we’ve got, and we each other, is all we’ve got. We can’t just kill all the bad people because it doesn’t work that way anymore. And especially when we consider that everybody’s a little bit bad. Everybody’s done screwed up things. And this is not a new philosophy. It became certainly 2000 years ago. I’m not even a religious person, but Jesus said it: “You who have committed no sin, cast the first stone.” And what happened when he said that? Because they were gonna stone a woman to death for having committed adultery. Well, when he said that, nobody threw any stones.
Because deep down, when we look inside ourselves, we’ve all done bad things. We’ve all acted out. We’ve all been traumatized in some way. And so how do we heal? This is the life work of getting to know ourselves better, of being more honest with ourselves, of trying to get some distance between ourselves and the people who harmed us, so we can have the safety to look at what happened to us. Especially when what happened to us happened in the context of our primary relationships, often with our parents and other loving authority figures who behaved sometimes in ways that were not so loving, and sometimes behaved in ways that were absolutely terrible because of the things that happened to them.
Yet we do all have a responsibility to work to heal ourselves, to work to become better people, to know ourselves, to acknowledge not just what we’ve done to others, but primarily what was done to us. Because if we don’t know what was done to us, if we don’t feel all the feelings around the bad things that were done to us, reclaim our split-off, dissociated, post-traumatic feelings, we can’t heal. If we can’t grieve the losses of what we went through from trauma, extreme trauma or minor trauma, we can’t heal from it.
And so that, that is what I see is incumbent upon us as human beings, as individual human beings. Our job is to heal ourselves and also to set an example for healing so that other people can see it, and other people can be inspired and realize that being split off, being dissociated, acting out is not the only way to be human. And it’s not even a good way to be human. It’s a terrible way to be human. It’s actually a way to be inhuman. And that to really be human is to heal, to reclaim the split-off and harmed parts of ourselves.
So when I think back of that ride I had with that woman, I admired her bravery to talk with a stranger from a different culture, from a different land, from a different language, to talk about what had happened in her world. And she said that she goes, “I need to talk about it. We need to talk about what happened.” Because what happened here may be an extreme case, she says, but it applies everywhere. And she knew it.
And I say to her and to her daughter for listening and participating in the conversation, thank you. Thank you for setting an example about speaking about reality, even when it doesn’t look so good for our own individual selves.