Nestled into a corner of the lounge on the ground floor of my TCU dormitory, I settled in to fill out an application for an international summer project with Campus Crusade for Christ. My first serious boyfriend had dumped me a few months before and I was still putting myself back together. I had cast aside what I considered a calling to teach as a missionary to fit into the vision of an advertising major who wanted to conquer corporate America, and now I was doing penitence. I wasn’t raised Catholic, but I might as well have been considering how much guilt I was carrying.
There were several short answer questions on the application, but the truly daunting part was the checklist of life experiences and moral standards. By the end of the one pager, I had checked yes in several sections: sexual abuse, divorced parents, presence of half/step siblings, parents’ remarriage, cult activity and adoption. Technically, I hadn’t been in a cult, but at the time the evangelical church considered the Masonic Lodge “on the fringe” and I had been initiated when I turned 18 as a rite of passage in my family. I also didn’t experience what is traditionally considered an adoption, but since my mom had been divorced and remarried twice and I had been legally adopted by each of her new husbands, I figured it counted. I wasn’t taking any chances. I was putting everything down.
All of this should have been concerning but the real kicker was that I had been sexually active with my boyfriend and had to explain (confess) all of that too. Not surprisingly, I wasn’t allowed to go to the Middle East that summer, which for reasons I can’t remember was my first choice, but instead my campus director pulled a favor card with his best friend, the director at LSU, and I was accept onto the team going to Hungary. Three months later I was on my first international flight, despite all the labels on my application.
Fast forward a year and I’m standing in front of a girlfriend hearing her say, “That makes so much sense with your dating patterns.” I can’t for the life of me remember her name, but I can still vividly see her tall, lean frame, white-blonde, shoulder length hair and the wheels turning in her head like she had just solved a complicated riddle. I was asking to borrow her car to drive the 50 minutes to my mandatory counseling appointment that Crusade required if I wanted to go back overseas with their one-year program after graduation. She had probably asked me about the book my counselor had assigned me—The Wounded Heart—and I disclosed that I had been molested by my stepfather from the time I was four years old until I was eight. She had seen me serial date for over a year, breaking the hearts of good guys and tolerating crumbs of attention from immature boys. She finally had the missing piece of data and now I made sense to her. I’m sure she didn’t say the word “broken” out loud but that’s how I felt. I was judged by one of the labels of what I had experienced as a young girl and finally exposed as the damaged and lost young woman I felt like day in and day out.
Now, I don’t look back and call either of these memories necessarily healthy or helpful in my healing journey, but they do speak to the usefulness of labels to signal significant harm. Now as a therapist, I call them “headline words”—the kind of events referred to in newspapers, the nightly news, and the stuff of research studies and Gallup polls that end up in required textbooks for courses like Social Work 101. These headline words in my story initially felt like curses in my 20s but now in my 50s, I’ve become incredibly grateful for them.
Let me be clear, I am NOT grateful for the things that I endured in my story as a child. It has taken years to separate the abuse in my story from the way it shaped me and the gifts I possess from how I survived. Now, because of decades of emotional work, I have come to see how useful it’s been to have clear words to describe dark chapters of my life. I have words that are clearly understood as affecting my development, my relationships, and my emotional health. I have words for events that everyone knows leave a mark and take a long time to heal. I have never, ever, had anyone ask me, “Why are you in counseling?” or for that matter, “Why are you still in counseling?” I would have never thought to be grateful for the headline words in my life story that the world at large agrees are egregious wrongs if it weren’t for watching my peers who grew up in “perfect” homes struggle to make sense of their own damage.
If there’s one thing I don’t envy of anyone it’s growing up in a “good Christian family.” My home was a million miles from healthy, but it was a clearly toxic concoction that should have been a legitimate CPS report, not a whitewashed tomb.
Anyone who has ever heard about my childhood has said a kind and empathetic version of “I’m so sorry that all happened to you.” You hear that enough and it helps you stay sane on days when your disorganized attachment style brings you to tears. But what about those who were wounded, even abused or neglected, by people in their family but never had a bruise to show for it? What about those who suffered through a sugar-coated toxicity that never sounded as bad out loud as it felt for their nervous systems as young children? And what about when there’s no physical action that crosses a clear, legal line or a phrase someone says that raises eyebrows or makes a police report?
Some of the most powerful therapeutic moments I’ve stumbled into are ones when a person, who seems to come from the antithesis of my upbringing, hears me say something to the effect of…
“The presence of clear, recognizable harm in my story has made it easier to pursue healing. I have so much respect for those who must excavate harm with tiny instruments like the ones archeologists use. One wrong move and it feels like you destroy all the evidence of the past.”
Whether your story is primarily “headline harm” or “candy-coated harm,” I hope the content we’ll explore in the coming months will validate what you’ve lived through, help you feel more seen by yourself and others, and leave you feeling saner and companioned on your healing journey.
Next week we’ll dive into what are the different ways harm can show up in our lives, but until then I encourage you ponder the experiences in your story you have labels for and the ones you don’t.
Reflective Exercise:
Start a list of both the headline harm and the candy-coated harm that comes to mind when you look back at your home growing up. Write down as much as you can think of, whether it feels big enough to make a list or not. Take time to wrestle with what isn’t easily named. Feel free to add phrases from books or movies, imagery or analogies, and body sensations on your candy-coated list. You might need to draw, cut out magazine pictures, get poetic or use a lot of hyphens when trying to put down on paper what feels impossible to catch on camera.
