Category: triggers

anger

Safe to say it’s been a grim few days, on top of already grim days, on top of a hard year.

I was raised never to be angry. Never to disrupt. Never to raise a fuss. For abuse victim survivors of any sort, anger can bring with it a variety of outcomes, all bad: more abuse perhaps, to ‘put you in your place’; more attention, which may draw eyes to the abuse, which in turn will definitely destabilise your life — and make everything worse. This repression of anger is familial, environmentally necessary. It kept my father from flying off the handle, from making everyone suffer.

But it’s also often cultural: be reasonable. Somehow this has become the reigning metric of so many of our lives. And it has its roots in the primacy of logic. We are encouraged to stand back, to be ‘objective’.

Of course this whole ‘reasonable’ approach has the effect of removing us from our emotional selves. It downplays our emotions, our views, and ultimately is a form of gaslighting: you don’t really feel this, how could you think/feel this, and finally, you’ve got it all wrong.

Case in point: the last time I spoke to my father, in 1987, it was on the phone. I was shaking with fear and anger, struggling to hold the earpiece to my ear. I said that I wanted him to accept responsibility for what he had done to me, that it was sexual abuse. His response was to laugh, and say I’d been reading too many magazines. I then said that unless he did as I asked, he would never see any future children I might have. He laughed again.

***

In fact: he never did see my children. In that moment, that last conversation with him, I somehow managed to hold onto the importance of what I felt, of right and wrong. I somehow, and possibly for the first time, managed to speak to him, however terrifyingly hard it was — and it was — with my whole self.

This won’t be the only post I do about our whole selves, and what this means to me.

For now though I’ll say that I’ve got better at anger. I’ve got better at not always having logical reasons, at not having to explain every last thing — at just feeling something. Feeling something is not in itself threatening, not in itself dangerous.

So what do we do now with these equal measures of anger and despair? When it sometimes seems that any full-throated reaction is ‘too emotional’, ‘too political’, ‘too extreme’?

Sunday January 25th, the day after Alex Pretti’s death, I felt, like a lot of people, incandescent with rage. And grief. All day. And I couldn’t see how I was going to get out of it. Would I just have to get used to this hopelessness — would we all?

At the end of the day I had a text conversation with family. All of us are distressed. We all have loved ones in the US; we all care.

I said that I was so angry, didn’t know what to do with myself. Our younger son M wrote:

…you can have a day of being furious

…but the goal is not to trick yourself into thinking

you’re fighting BY getting angry.

In other words: anger is the justified by-product. Of grief, of horror, of despair.

But it’s not, in itself, The Fight. In itself, anger does not do any useful battle.

How do we ‘fight’ then? How do we make sure we are heard? How do we make a difference?

We are heard by being whatever loud means to us — through the written or spoken word, through image, through music — in our houses, on the streets, on the phone. By breaking barriers, pushing through the societal and familial boundaries we have been hesitant to question before now.

It is very much time to ask questions and demand answers, and to keep doing it, to press and press at it all. I think we know this. It’s time to stand together. To break all the silences which form the hierarchies which control our lives — the ‘families’ if you will, which declare how we should act and what we should say.

Nope. No more. It’s time.

I’m so grateful to son M for giving me some clarity through my overwhelming feelings. And yeah: I’m extremely proud to have played a part in raising him.

are we finally at #metooCSA?

So. I spent the first nine months of 2025 feeling pretty freaked out: everything seemed worse, and likely to keep getting worse. Pillars of what most people in the world have taken to be truths and even basic human rights crumbled and continued to crumble. I for one felt that the ground I had stood on my whole life was shifting, inexorably. And I know I wasn’t the only one. I know so many felt this and continue to feel it. Unfortunately, this hasn’t changed yet in any real way.

As I mentioned in my last post, the overriding feeling for me through this became the one I dread possibly the most: we were being silenced. At every turn.

Then came the US government shutdown and the Epstein files saga. And I started to notice: wait, survivors are standing up together. With allies. At least some people are starting to build some momentum.

And then, Virginia Giuffre’s powerful memoir, Nobody’s Girl. It was being read — albeit with a kind of horror still — but it was being read. Not everyone was turning away. It was not ‘niche’ reading. It was not in a bubble. It was mainstream.

Guiffre’s experiences in her childhood home and beyond have the exact shape and tone — down to what is said, the manipulation, the physical responses of her abusers — of not only my own experiences as a victim survivor, but the experiences of every survivor I have spoken to about it.

But she then goes on. She places the abuses in the context of our cultures and our societies. She makes clear that she was not the exception. That child sexual abuse is endemic. And that it’s all about power. Many — across mainstream media, and certainly across socials — sat up and took notice in ways I’ve not seen before.

If you haven’t read the book — read it. It may be triggering for some of you, so take care. And some of you will find it very upsetting. What I would say to that is: welcome to our world. Survivors carry aspects of her story — as she did — every day, day in, day out. We don’t have the luxury of ‘not engaging’ with abuse. We have lived it, and it will never go away.

I’m just stating facts.

***

It’s tempting to turn away from activism — whether quiet or loud — because more often than not it meets with disbelief, horror, embarrassment, or dismissal.

And yet, somehow this latest series of events hasn’t skidded to a stop at a dead end. Somehow a ball is still rolling.

In 2017, the #metoo movement went viral. Begun by a survivor of child sexual abuse, Tarana Burke several years before, it gathered sexual violence as a whole under its umbrella. Various offshoots developed, including #metooinceste, which started in France.

However. From my and other CSA survivors’ I know points of view — we never really felt heard with #metoo. Like so many, I have been sexually assaulted as an adult, and I felt #metoo supported these disclosures. But despite the origins of the phrase, I never felt that it could hold Child Sexual Abuse, or CSA. The viral wave swept it elsewhere. Soon, any hint of #metoo in relation to CSA simply disappeared.

Something is happening now though. Does anyone else feel it? NOT just around Epstein and his cronies (including we know who). But around the whole space of CSA. In the last six weeks or so, my Threads and Bluesky and even Instagram feeds have been flooded with disclosures, with CSA survivors who have never before gone public about the abuse they suffered — now feeling safe to disclose, or that it’s necessary to disclose, or that they know it’s time to disclose, to connect some dots, to be here in solidarity. And the vast majority of these disclosures identify family and family friends as perpetrators. Unsurprisingly.

One way or another I’ve been working in this space for about six years. And almost the whole time, I have felt that my words, my experiences, my desire to connect and amplify — to make a change, somehow — have had almost no impact beyond the (beautiful!) survivor activism community. My greatest frustration — the thing which has done me in time and time again over the years — has been the sense that we are not being heard. That no one is really — really — listening.

I feel a shift now, though. A lasting shift, I hope. A solidarity across ‘types’ of sexual abuse is coming to the fore, a space for all survivor stories and testimonies. As are vocal allies, who are saying over and over, in public and on socials: ‘listen to survivors’, ‘believe the survivors’. I am sensing that there is a gathering together of activists, survivors, and allies into what we have long been working for: a survivor-led #metooCSA movement. We are gaining critical mass — for our voices, and for change.

Thank you always Tarana Burke, for your courage, and your words.

A Year Later: starting 2026

[image from Juneau Empire]

I have been writing and re-writing this post in my head for months.

What happened? I considered this for weeks.

What I did not want to admit (to myself, or anyone) was how completely shaken I was by the re-election of an abuser to the White House. His re-emergence, followed by lawless action after lawless action, rendered me almost paralysed.

What is the point of working away in my small corner of the fight against Violence Against Women and Girls, when the whole world order has turned justice on its head?

More pointedly: every survivor I know hears an abuser in his voice. An abuser, and a bully. We have all known this since at least 2015. We all recognise it. And for the last 10 years, we have not been heard. And as we all know: when we talk and no one hears, we are silenced, again.

It took me several months to realise that I was simultaneously triggered and silenced by happenings in the US. Again and again I felt that any voice I had ever had was useless. I see now that I have spent the last year being re-traumatised, over and over.

The reality is: the country where I grew up is being dismantled. The values I thought we all shared (more or less) have evaporated. Any ‘noise’ I might be able to make surely disappears into thin air.

I remain pessimistic when it comes to the US managing to take care of its people. This feels a very long way from achievable at the moment.

However. In the last few months, the plight of the Epstein survivors, and the involvement of men and women who occupy the most wealthy and powerful positions in the world in their trafficking — have crashed my worlds together.

Thing is: we are all the same. As survivors, we are all the same. Whatever our backgrounds, whomever our abusers. Whether ‘it’ happens once, or repeatedly over years and years or perpetrator after perpetrator: we must join forces. Our homes (or lack thereof) made us vulnerable to sexual abuse; in this, we are a community.

We must not allow the isolation that inevitably accompanies our abuse to silence us. We must not consider some peoples’ experiences of abuse more harmful or ‘worse’ than others. We must understand that we are in this together, all of us.

Only then will we be able build upon the voices and experiences of survivors toward real cultural and social change: toward accountability, restitution, prevention.

I come to this post today through partially gritted teeth. I’m not sure if any of this will do any ‘good’. But I can’t not try. The last year has shown this to me in technicolour: I have to keep trying. I have to. The one thing I know is that I would do anything to save a child from going through what one in six of us goes through, worldwide. To that end, I have managed to keep going with a couple of projects, quietly, which will soon come to a kind of fruition. But I know I need to use my voice too, publicly. It’s so important that we do this if we can. And I can.

So here I am. More soon.

making a lot of quiet noise

A couple of weekends ago, I went to Cardiff for my first LOUDfence. Founder and Director of LOUDfence UK Antonia Sobocki had invited me to help launch Wales’ LOUDfence movement.

As victim-survivors, we have come to expect emotional turmoil around Child Sexual Abuse: being misunderstood, not being heard, not being ‘seen’, not being believed. We have come to expect physical turmoil too: not feeling able to go someplace (church, for instance), or revisit any childhood location without fear, or even wear certain clothes, smell certain smells, hear certain sounds — without triggers which drive us far away from our lives.

In Cardiff, I was prepared to feel a lot of this turmoil. I was prepared to feel on the outside looking in. To feel at arm’s length from the huge ‘authority’ figure called the Church. I did not expect to be moved.

I am generally not a church-goer. However, my husband’s family are Catholic, we were married in a Catholic church, etc — and I feel comfortable with a Catholic mass insofar as hymns and actions and words go. At the last minute in Cardiff I was drafted in to do the first reading, from Ezekiel. This too was absolutely fine; I am used to finding a calm place in myself from which to read, in any environment really.

Archbishop Mark O’Toole took the mass. Antonia and I were in the front pew. And as he spoke, something started to let go in me. He was soft-spoken, sad — and offered a profound apology. He took responsibility for the failings in his beloved Church. He directly addressed survivors, many of whom (it turns out) were in the congregation. He made room for their – my – suffering. For their – my – trauma. He spoke about the betrayal all of us — whether abused in association with the Church or not — had undergone, perpetrated by the very people meant to take care of us. He acknowledged his own guilt too, by proxy, in perhaps not responding as he should have, not taking note of everything he needed to, and of not making it his responsibility to understand and enact change. He showed his own pain in the face of all of this.

I began to feel he was speaking to me. Directly to me. He was saying he was sorry. He was saying that he ‘saw’ me, saw all of us survivors. And I found myself crying almost uncontrollably. It was the first time in my life — my whole 45 years of living with the debris and breakages from five years of sexual abuse when I was a child — that anyone with any authority, part of any institution AT ALL, had apologised. Sorry. Had opened their hands palms upward in a gesture of responsibility, of grief, and reparation. We are sorry.

Through his humility and gentleness, Archbishop Mark brought the part of me which feels undeserving — the broken part, the abused part — back into the centre of the Church’s responsibilities and concerns. How many times have I felt I was writing/shouting/crying into a wind which blew it all right back into my face? How many times have I felt ignored? Hundreds of times, as have all survivors. The trauma of sexual abuse haunts us, and for some of us, it haunts us most particularly in the place where witnessing faith might help: the Church. And yet: this time our words and feelings were held there. Believed. Grieved for.

It is not in my nature to be loud about my experiences of abuse. Although I consider myself an activist, I am a fairly quiet one. My activism is through my writing, through the research and arts projects I participate in, and through being open and frank about my own experiences. Over time, my transparency in every aspect of my life has encouraged numerous people to disclose their own experiences of abuse to me. Part of what I hope to do is make room for conversations in contexts which have nothing to do with abuse. What matters is that people who confide in me know that they are safe. That I won’t shout about their abuse. That they can trust me. That we are in this together.

And for the first time in my life, two weeks ago I was welcomed into the centre of someone else’s openness and transparency. For the first time, I felt that our experiences as survivors were at the centre of things, not around the edges fighting hard to be heard. I felt respected and believed.

At the end of the mass, Archbishop Mark invited Antonia and I to process out of the church ahead of him and the rest of the clergy. I reached for Antonia’s hand. We walked out together.

It was one service, yes. One priest. One church. There is still so much to do in challenging and changing our cultures both from inside and outside our faith institutions. But for me — Cardiff was an enormously powerful beam of hope. Maybe change right through to our oldest and most revered institutions is actually possible. Some of us move more quietly than others — but we are all, each of us, centring survivors, sharing our stories, trying to protect children, and, step by step, one foot after the other, shifting cultures. We are all loud now.

Archbishop Mark’s homily begins at about 26 minutes in.

claustrophobia

My dear friend came to visit recently. After many years of knowing each other and being close as writers — we discovered only a few years ago that we are both CSA (Child Sexual Abuse) survivors. This was a shock to us both: keeping secrets, keeping abuse ‘over there’ is hard-wired in both of us. But we have come to know that much connects us, and that in a way this is cause for celebration. Despite our pasts, we have compassion, we have empathy. We have humour, and love.

This time we ended up alighting upon something I didn’t know she had as well: a violent reaction to feeling enclosed.

I’m curious: do most or all survivors experience this? I cannot bear the sensation of feeling enclosed, or struggling to swallow, or reaching for air. This means that last year when I had tonsillitis I was in a terrible, panicked state. Max sat with me, holding my hand, distracting me by watching sitcoms. I was barely with it. Tears of desperation squeezed out of my eyes with every breath.

Every time a duvet climbs above my shoulders I am panicky and shove it away. I almost always sleep with my arms out of the covers. I also find elevators (lifts) very difficult, especially small ones. I struggle with spiral staircases, and have had more than one serious panic attack while climbing them. I am physically disoriented very easily, and launch into a full blown panic attack when this happens. Whether in IKEA, or once in an observatory when the ceiling rotated — when I don’t know or remember how to ‘escape’ from someplace, I melt down.

My friend is the same. Almost exactly the same. We figured there must be something about being overpowered. About a large person hovering and smothering. About not being able to fight.

One of the first realisations I had in my early therapy was the fact that I wanted to push my father away. My arms ached with that realisation. But I never did. I was frozen, frightened, dissociated.

These triggers — phobias, fears, whatever you call them — are all collateral damage. Ripples from abuse. All of the above responses are valid, as are many more. They are normal trauma responses. Yet both of us have at times been made to feel deficient: buck up, be brave, there’s nothing wrong!

There’s a lot wrong when you are in fear for your life. When you think the breath will be squeezed out of you. When things are forced into your mouth and you can’t breathe. When you are a child and can’t bear the weight, the intrusion. These are the facts. They never go away.

We must respect trauma responses. We need to be trauma-informed. It is often NOT possible to ‘overcome’ these responses, and it’s a myth to believe everyone can. We all have to work with what we carry around the best we can. For survivors, these tangled and deeply embedded responses are unavoidable at times.

For me this means I almost always avoid lifts. For me this means I ask the dentist to raise the head of the chair closer to sitting, and have to ‘go someplace else’ when x-ray plates are in my mouth. For me this means I am always verging on panic when in a crowd.

My family know these things and accept them. They know where these responses come from. With time and recognition of these triggers, I am less compromised by them than I used to be. For me, speaking my ‘truth’ — admitting that I’m frightened, admitting that I’m disoriented and having to control my breathing — eases my panic, and often prevents it from escalating to the point where I can’t be reached. These issues don’t go away — but they have less sway over me.

This won’t work for everyone, clearly. Sometimes we are surrounded by people who refuse to understand, or whom we don’t trust, or with whom we don’t feel safe enough to show we are feeling vulnerable. I know I am very lucky. Without even realising it consciously, I landed on my feet when it comes to close family and friends.

Regardless of how memories manifest with you or with your loved ones, acceptance goes a long way. Lack of judgment goes a long way. Saying ‘it’s alright’ to feel this way, to react, goes a long way. Because next time the panic might not be quite as overwhelming. Regardless of the trigger: being seen and believed and supported can help dismantle these suffocating walls.