Mary McBeth

Writer, Editor, True Believer

WEEK 2: Silencing and Writing Your Truth

MEMOIR MAGAZINE SURVIVOR WRITERS WORKSHOP: WEEK 2: Silencing and Writing Your Truth.

Readings:

Discussion:

“All sorrows can be borne if you put them in a story or tell a story about them.”

—Isak Dinesen

So much of todays lexicon uses the phrase Silencing. What is Silencing and how does it affect us as writers of our truths? Silencing is a phenomenon by which a person or group of people are intimidated, humiliated, or threatened into obedience or complacency if asserting their emotional truth, for the benefit of a more powerful group or person. It happens so often that we may not even be aware of it.

In the video, Naomi Wolf discusses why it’s difficult to write about our own abuse, sexual assault, or rape. She says that of the thousands of women rape victims she has interviewed over decades of activism, the overwhelming majority of victims describe reached a point (during the rape) in which they realized they “had to submit to what was happening or be much more violently injured or killed. That submission imbeds an understanding about suppressing our most basic urge to fight or escape in order to survive.”

Wolf goes on to say that this understandable and common crisis response imprints upon the survivor and facilitates PTSD and makes Silence our mode of surviving life after the rape. “The way we are taught and trained not to speak about it or something terrible will happen to us” becomes our standard way of seeing our truth in the world and we become deeply conflict adverse as a result—a form of self silencing.

Rape and the silence around it effects Survivor Writers “because there is a hole in the center of our life narrative.” PTSD has made us conflict adverse, and we have learned that expressing our original thoughts (writing or telling) can lead to conflict. But for a writer to not be able to say “this is what happened to me” stunts our growth as individuals and our ability to get our whole truth across to others.

Interestingly Wolf also points out that the classic symptoms of PTSD: compliance, other directedness, people pleasing, hesitation, placation, etc are also the standard checklist of conventional feminine standards of society.  Throughout history women have been silenced on a global scale and in our personal private lives.

Silencing has been especially effective in perpetuating abuse. Victims of sexual violence are told they are wrong or broken, that they are lying, inappropriate, or “nice girls don’t talk about such things.” Well. if you are bad for speaking up for or defending yourself then when and what is good? In a culture where silencing is prevalent, it can be especially difficult to trust your own truth or advocate for yourself.

Gaslighting (manipulative suggestion) is a particularly harmful form of silencing.  The victim is brainwashed, made to feel confusion, and doubt their own reality in favor of the perpetrator’s version of events, isolating them and rendering them incapable of controlling their situation. Victims are told they “must have been dreaming, it never happened, I don’t know what you are talking about.” Social misunderstanding (“you must have misunderstood what happened”), and accusations of lying are other common techniques used to silence us.

To get beyond Silencing, it is sometimes helpful to understand the difference between facts and truth. Facts may belong to everyone, to ponder, prod and poke and question, but truth is yours alone.

True (Facts) versus Truth (Emotional Truth)

What do I mean by this? When we say something is True, we are referring to facts of what happened; the things that most (sane) people will agree on. They may differ in their memory of when an event occurred and what someone was wearing or what exactly was said. Like the common anecdote of the crime scene where ten different witnesses provide ten different accounts that are all “true,” varied only by their perception. Truth, in the sense of fact, is merely a statistic, what is collectively accepted.

But if we were discussing say a ball, your ball may not be round, maybe it’s a football! Similarly, Emotional truth is all your own. It is what happened inside of you. It is indisputable to you.

The details (true facts) of what happened to you are important, but the emotional truth is vital in memoir writing. It is the way for readers to deeply connect with your story and understand what your experienced, or the effects of it, as well as really understand the level of loss suffered by “being there” or “walking in your shoes.”

Subjective and Objective Reality 

 There is a term in psychology called “subjective character of experience” which basically means “until someone has had an experience of something the object or concept within itself is not “real.””* Someone in Alaska is aware of the existence of snow, they have seen it, but for a person in Africa who has never seen snow before, the snow does not exist in the same way and may even be a myth.

One of the biggest problems with speaking our truth is that many people who have never experienced rape cannot fully understand the scope of harm simply by hearing a set of events.  This may even be one reason why some people refuse to believe our story or tend towards a “it’s not that bad” attitude. At the same time, this Subjective point of view can also our saving grace when telling our story. Subjective truth, based on feelings, and everyone knows what it feels like to be sad, afraid, devastated, hungry, confused, or in pain, is our real strength in writing memoir. As writers, we must strive to find common ground with readers through feelings. It evens the odds in the fight against Silencing and telling our stories.

CHECK OUT: subjective character of experience: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Subjective_character_of_experience

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Discussion Questions (Please post your answer to at least one of the following questions by Friday)

  1. What are some things that silence you in society or in your own life?
  2. In the op-ed piece by memoir writer Mary Karr about the role of truth in memoir, she writes, “IN the decades since, objective truth (a phrase it’s hard not to put quotes around) has lost power; subjective experience has gained authority. “ What does she mean by this? What duty do you feel you have to your readers and to those you are writing about? In order to be truthful do you need to tell everything? What is it okay to leave out?
  3. What are the moments in Emily Finn’s and Andrea Gallagher’s essays where you got a sense that they were battling silencing?
  4. Can you think of an example of when factual truth was different than emotional truth for you?

Writing Exercises (Please write these exercises by Friday)

  1. Have you ever had to explain to a friend or relative that you were raped, what rape is, or why it is bad? Write for 7 minutes. Create the scene, tell the story of the person who did or didn’t believe you and how that made you feel. Alternatively, write a letter to that person about how it made you feel.
  2. Write a Time line of events and next to it a timeline of what you were feeling emotionally at that time. Focus on what the reaction actually felt like in your body and why you think you had that reaction. Choose one emotion and write about it for 7 minutes.

 

 

One response to “WEEK 2: Silencing and Writing Your Truth”

  1. Magnolia Avatar
    Magnolia

    1. Things that silence you in society or your own life:

    – Is it me, the clothes I’m wearing, the things I spoke, my gender, body or the easy laughter around them? Will they blame me? And so I don’t even give them the chance. I am mousy around them in general. I do not speak much, and hence less visible, easy to look over and ill-treat.

    – My mother often taught me, “Dont tell your husband. He can do/say bad things to you.” If you give yourself to a man, he may ask you later after your marriage, “You allowed me then, why not now? How will you answer that?” I am afraid of the idea of a husband that my mother painted.

     

    2. If we look back at the people before us who have spoken their truth, made mistakes and had fingers pointed at them, how they defend themselves, there is a language and narrative that helps us decipher the complex art that memoir is. Parts are forgotten, blurred and biased due to emotion. Should we leave our readers hanging? Must we paint a picture as best as we can, to give them the much needed closure? What if the struggles are invented by our child self and the adult version of us is better able to decipher it? We could end up carrying the child-reality too long without examining it. Revisiting memory is part imagination and this soul-searching exercise of memoir writing relies on it. I think we can be truthful in the first draft that is for ourselves. But the reader can get straight to the messsage and not wander in our maze and confusion as we wander around in it.

     

    3. Emily is unable to speak of her assault experience to the [m]other. Her mother thanks her for her silence to protect the powerful person (abuser). Andrea is counting to ten because no one is watching and she cannot run. No one speaks of it because they all think it is happening only to them and that they are the cause of the shame and pain.

     

    4. Factual truth: About 6 cousins/siblings (age:8-15) sat in the semi-dark room watching TV, when the molester lay next to me in bed and ran his hands across my body. Nobody said a word. Later a 15 yr-old male cousin will tell me, “A hero rescued a skimpy dressed girl from the goons in a movie. He told her to dress well and save herself next time. If you saw that scene, you would hang your head in shame.” My 10 yr-old sister will ask, “Did you know what he was doing to you?” And later she will blank out the memory of the act or the question itself. This blurred memory, in you and in your loved ones is part of the silencing.

     

    Emotional truth: I feel more ashamed that they may have seen it than that hideous act itself. Even as a child of 12, I didn’t know what is happening, but the sense of public humiliation was developed enough to be felt. I can feel some pleasure in parts of the act because this time, there is no pain in my breasts (because I’m not PMS-ing), the bed is soft and he is hugging me. And this shame will stand in the way of my recovery for decades after the act. It will influence my memory because there are black holes that I cannot recall this time. I wish there was physical pain. That would have been easier.

Mary McBeth