Unshame: Healing trauma-based shame through psychotherapy by Carolyn Spring

Author:Carolyn Spring [Spring, Carolyn]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Carolyn Spring Publishing
Published: 2019-05-24T00:00:00+00:00

11

The powerlessness of grooming

‘It’s just a terrible sense of guilt,’ I explain, ‘but I don’t even know where it comes from. I just know that it was my fault. That it was always my fault. So how can I sit here in therapy and complain that I was abused if I caused it?’

The therapist looks steadily at me like she’s trying to balance a spoon on the end of her nose, and if she twitches a single muscle in expressing a response, it will fall off. I feel slightly disturbed that she is so still. Either she’s going to throw me out—because she’s realised how wrong it is for me to be here—or she’s going to demolish my belief in a single retort. But I don’t yet know which.

She doesn’t speak. She just keeps looking at me. It goes on for about three hours. Or maybe three seconds—I’m not sure. Time has gone scrunchy.

Eventually she takes a deep breath and shifts in her seat, moving slightly closer. Here it comes.

‘Would you say to your foster children that it’s their fault that they were abused?’

Ouch.

But she doesn’t stop there.

‘Would you also, by extension, say that they don’t deserve to be looked after, because they’ve caused the situation they’re in?’

I look away and a strange feeling rushes through my belly, like the moments before vomiting. Up it reaches into my chest and then sits, spiking in my chest.

‘No.’

I sit, full of petulance, at the unfairness of her tactics.

‘But surely that’s different, isn’t it?’ I retort at last. ‘Because they didn’t cause it. Whereas I...’

’Whereas you... what? How did you cause it?’

‘I don’t know.’

And I don’t know. Right at this moment, sat here, in this Thursday morning gloom, the rain spattering lazily against the window, my calves aching from the tension of wanting to run, a boiler in the background murmuring a low growl: right at this moment I have no idea how the abuse could possibly be my fault or why I’ve come to believe it. I have a lot of beliefs like this: beliefs that just feel right. Beliefs that declare themselves to be true. Beliefs that sit like too much treacle in my guts and refuse to budge or be digested. This is how I live. I don’t know how I know what I know. I just know it. And my guilt and responsibility for the abuse is a foundational piece of knowledge, of how I am in the world, and how it all came to be. So her question is moot. Stupid. Irrelevant.

But she presses the point. ‘How did you cause the abuse? What did you do that led to you being abused?’

She’s looking at me with an intensity that says, ‘This is what we’re talking about. This is what we’re working on today. We’re going to sort this.’ And when she’s in that kind of a mood, I know by now that there’s no arguing with it. It’s not coercive, but it is strict. We’ve talked in other

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