Hubchallenge, day 5: Ten years of therapy

On a different blogsite I'm working on a series of articles that I'm pretty proud of. It's a 30 article series on Childhood Sexual Abuse. I'm aiming to write it from a personal experience perspective without turning it into a sobstory or personal journal. Using my experiences to shed some light on what Childhood Sexual Abuse, and healing from it, looks like from the inside.

Hubchallenge, day 5: Ten years of therapy

Good and Evil

"All that is required for evil to prevail is for good men to do nothing"
Edmund Burke.

Evil came into my life early in the form of a child molester who abused me for 9 years. I experienced first hand the truth of the statement by Edmund Burke. In the nine years I was abused I'm sure some people must have seen something strange going on with me. I have no memory of anyone ever acting on my behalf thought. Instead, I was scolded for the way I acted out, told I was lazy and a rebellious teen.

In coming to terms with the experience of evil so early in life, I've thought a lot about good and evil. It has made me very aware that I have a choice, at any moment, to commit evil (by act or ommision) or good. I learned the truth of Alexandre Soltjzenitzyn's statement:

"The line between good and evil runs through the heart of every human being"

It's a moral choice whether you do good deeds or evil deeds.

Conformity experiment
That moral choice isn't as easy to make as it might seem: most of us are easily influenced by peer pressure. In the famous Asch experiment of conformity a full 75% of the people tested at least once gave a wrong answer when everyone around them gave the wrong answer. The question was: which of these lines on the right is of equal length to the one left, A B or C? Not hard to answer that one is it? In fact, without peer pressure only 1 person out of 35 tested ever got it wrong. When everyone around them gave the wrong answer however, 75% failed to give the right answer.

What's true for factual matters is probably double true for matters dealing with right and wrong. Given a situation where you perceive yourself to have no choices, where someone in authority is taking responsibility for your actions, and peer pressure to conform is high, you too might commit attrocities, like them poor soldiers in Abu Grahib. There but for the grace of God go I. An inconvenient truth? Yes. Can we escape it? Maybe.

In no way do I excuse people for the evil deeds they commit, I solidly believe in personal responsibility. However I also believe that there is no such thing as an evil person. Every one of us has a potential for good AND evil. Circumstances may call forth one or the other. The only thing we have to assist us in doing good is making a moral choice.


The hero's choice
A very simple example is littering. Interesting study done about that shows that when a street is very clean you don't normally litter, although about 10% of the people do anyway. If the street is very dirty, 90% of the same people just add to the mess. You have a moral choice:

• You can put your own litter in the appropriate bin.
• You can drop your litter as you go.

Then there is also the hero's choice:

• Clean your entire street of litter and engage in a community program to keep it clean.

What we need in order to escape from the risk of us becoming the very monsters we fear, is everyday heroism. We need to celebrate the everyday hero that helps an old lady with her groceries. The hero that helps you pick up your papers when you drop them. The kind of hero that doesn't stand idly by when something bad happens, but goes into action when it counts. Every day we have a chance to be the hero that we are. All we have to do is be on the lookout for it.

So ask yourself at the end of every day:

"Did I have a chance to be somebody's hero today? Did I grab the chance?"

Interesting times

The Chinese have a saying: "May you live in interesting times". It is said to be a blessing and a curse at the same time. That sure holds true in my life. Since I posted the last blog-entry about realizing my dream a lot has happened. I've started work on making my dream come true. I'm currently working on a project-plan for a foundation that will give adult survivors of Childhood Sexual Abuse a voice in the Netherlands.

Already the plan includes a photo-series on adult survivors of childhood sexual abuse by my good friend Toos Poels, who has a wonderful talent for expressing things through photography. Check out her blog if you will at Toosphotoos to get an impression of her stuff. Check every week or two for updates. She has a way of making simple, every day topics glow with a special shine. The picture on this blog entry (and many others on my blog) are from her stock.

We aim to have plaster the nation with posters and postcards, have presentations throughout the country and we're working on ideas for getting our message on local and national television and radio. The culmination of the project will be a documentary on the topic, presented in a symposium. The finale of the two year project with the documentary being a spin-off. We're looking for people to join us in this campaign, or perhaps start your own in America or the UK. Worldwide attention would be awesome, but is not within the scope of what we intend to accomplish in the Netherlands. However... this is just my dream and making it come true is just our project. Who knows we might inspire others in other nations?...

I will be going through the project step by step on a Dutch blog called "onhoorbare schreeuw" which means something like "the inaudible scream". It feels really good to be working on this, to be on track with what my life is really all about. It's the most amazing feeling in the world to be this dedicated to something. I've never felt this strongly about anything ever before and it's making me want to jump out of bed in the morning and get to work.

Realizing your dream, following mine

I was at a series of workshops last week. The first, about mindfulness I've already reported on. Today I'd like to tell you about the dream workshop I did and what it did with me.

The trouble with dreaming is that so often I have had little or no idea what I wanted to do with my life. Somehow that's bred out of us through childhood expectations and educations: you're supposed to make something out of your life. Something the adults approve of, of course. So we lose the childlike innocence that tells us intuitively what to do.

Reconnecting with the dream, finding out what really makes you tick and then going for it is the stuff that dreams are made of. The workshop was a very personal one by Margreet de Jong who is realizing her own dream this summer. She's bought a beautiful estate in Spain where she is going to be giving an extended version of the dream workshop she showed us last week.

The one exercise that stood out for me personally was a visualization. Taking us inside a trip in our own minds, she showed us a little hallway with two doors in it. The door on the left led to a room full of the stuff we'd be willing to leave behind. For me it contained my excuses, my escapism and some of my projects that really aren't what I'm about. The door to the right showed the possibilities that come with pursuing your dream.

I was surprised to see what was behind door number two. Recently I've been working on getting up my courage (core-rage, a friend of mine would say) to become the voice of abuse. I've long noticed that Child Sexual Abuse (CSA) has been in the media a lot, but always from the vantage point of the child. Media coverage is usually about current cases, makes perpetrators out to be monsters and generally provokes sentiments of anger and rage. Other communications aim at prevention, presenting lists of behavioral symptoms and sometimes educational tools to empower children to talk about it.

What is left out by all this attention is the adult survivor of CSA. This lack is a painful one for the men and women suffering from the affects and effects of CSA on the long term. These are the people, and I am one of them, that I want to give my voice to. I want recognition, acknowledgement and downright help for people like me. I was fortunate to have found a therapist that was able and willing to go through the rough stuff with me. Who didn't get scared or disgusted when I told her about my experiences, but instead listened attentively and stimulated me to really connect to my pain and sorrow. I hear stories every day from people who weren't so fortunate. Whose trip to the doctor's office resulted in some sleep medication and a puzzled look on the face of the general practitioner. Heck, I got a mail the other day from a doctor who had stumbled onto my site at Windtraveller. It said: "I get people in my office all the time who suffer similarly, I never know what to do with that. Also, I suspect that what I'm seeing is just the tip of the iceberg".

So this is what I saw when I opened that door to the future. I saw myself standing in front of a room filled with hundreds of people. Speaking about the suffering of those who have survived CSA and are now dealing, coping, struggling with the aftereffects. I saw myself on television, heard myself on the radio and yes, saw myself writing this piece on the web.

There you have it, please, if this article strikes a chord in you, comment on it, leave a message, let me know. I'm looking for supporters in this pursuit of my dream.