A healing measure
“Your daughter’s extremely anxious” said the physician, as he examined me in Melbourne’s Royal Children’s Hospital.
“She’ll be right” said Dad, blithely dismissing the specialist’s observations and my mother’s concerns with that famous Aussie mantra. Mum didn’t stop there. She sought advice from the local doctor and other medical professionals, all of whom assured her I would be fine.
But I wasn’t. My tiny body was telling the world I was in pain and it felt like no-one was listening.
And I’m not alone, I’m just one of millions of Australian children who flew under the radar - our suffering denied by carers or those who should know better. And why are we suffering? Because, as reported by the Australian Bureau of Statistics, one in five Australian children experience sexual abuse. It’s the dirty secret our country keeps so well; we’d rather put our head in the sand, than examine the trauma of our children.
The responsible adults of my nation didn’t want to hear my story as a child, and it still doesn’t. Bravehearts, Australia’s leading child protection organization, confirms that Australians rate petrol, public transport and infrastructure as more important than child abuse. And the Australian Institute of Family Studies can only estimate the frequency of child abuse because we’re one of the few developed countries in the world without a comprehensive national study of the prevalence of child abuse! Extraordinary, isn’t it? Are we too selfish or too scared to take appropriate action?
Australia is a proverbial land of milk and honey. We’ve been spoiled with blue skies, beauty and abundance. Child abuse is the antithesis of this, so horrific that maybe it’s our collective Australian nature to want to avoid it?
My own experience as a child suggests this could be the case, as even those who loved me the most didn’t recognise that I was a victim of child abuse. Could they not see the subtle indicators? Or did they not think to consider it? I was an extremely anxious child with acute stress symptoms. It was obvious I was under terrible duress; so how did my pain go unobserved and unexplored? And even if I’d told my parents, would they have listened? I’d like to think so but again, Bravehearts confirms that one in three Australian children who report abuse are not believed. One in three!
Sadly, I’m not surprised. But back to the most important question - why should we, as a nation, seek to actively acknowledge and explore an issue that makes us so uncomfortable? I’ll tell you why. Because too many of us have endured terrible trauma as children and it is now manifesting as poor mental health – poor mental health which still carries a shameful stigma so many of us don’t seek the help we so desperately need.
Men and women like my sister, Rachael, who took her own life in 2005 - and in doing so, set off a crippling, ripple effect. You see, Rachael had always been my emotional safety net. With her beside me, I felt able to navigate the challenges of my poor mental health. When she was gone, my courage deserted me. We’d been so tightly enmeshed and without her, I didn’t know who I was or where I belonged.
So, when the ambulance team called Rach’s time of death, the ground disappeared from under me and I fell into an abyss of terror. One of the medics saw my panic and lost for words, he offered me the sweet salve of our nation. “You’ll be right” he said, touching me gently on the shoulder as he left the house, exhausted from his attempts to revive the lifeless body of my beloved sister. But again, I wasn’t.
There is only so far our spirit can stretch until something snaps. It was only a matter of time.
Yet my breakdown, my lowest and most shameful of moments, was also a starting point - though I didn’t recognise it at the time. It marked the beginning of my long and torturous journey back to myself; and to see my life – and that of many other Australians - for what it truly was.
I had thought Rach’s death was the sole cause of my pain. In hindsight, it was the devastating crack that split the iceberg – I had been drawing ever closer to destruction since I was a child, it’s just that no-one had noticed. I had been so good at keeping my chin up, you see. And Rach had kept me tethered to safety for decades, holding me tight so I wouldn’t break apart and drown in my own fear. Now I had to learn how to survive and thrive without her.
With help, I came to see that I had been so firmly bound by layers of anxiety, shame and self-loathing since childhood, they had become my second skin. They were uncomfortable, but without them I felt exposed and distressed. As I peeled these layers back, ever so slowly and painfully, I began to understand the patterns, behaviours and coping mechanisms that formed my personality and informed my relationship to the world at large.
The final piece of the puzzle dropped in five years ago when repressed memories of sexual abuse started bubbling up to the surface of my consciousness. At first, I didn’t understand what was happening. I thought I was delusional. I’d always considered my childhood a happy one and never in my wildest dreams would I have ever imagined that I was a victim of child abuse. And if I were, surely I would remember it - who could forget being sexually abused? According to Freudian psychology, there are a significant number of us.
The realisation I had been abused finally explained the sense of foreboding that had haunted me since I was a child: the feeling that even on my happier days, something ‘bad’ would happen and I would be powerless to stop it. I finally understood the anxiety and phobias that have plagued me since I was three years old and the origin of the post-natal depression that crippled me, robbing me of the joy of my first and only child’s first year. It also explained my chronic dependence on Rachael, my desperate need for her reassuring presence. From a young age we were devoted to one another, but we were also tied together by the tough yet invisible tape of my hideous secret which she silently accepted without judgement or comment.
Shocked into action by these old memories and new knowledge, I began the laborious research process: reading one medical journal after another; reading one more shocking statistic after another. I kept examining the nature and effects of child sexual abuse, inexorably pulled forward by my innate need for understanding, while simultaneously being sickened by the knowledge. Not just the knowledge of what I had kept buried for most of my life, but that it may also have happened to my beloved sister as well.
As a child, Rach was always windswept and wild; the archetypal Aussie kid who survived on Weetbix, vegemite sambos, meat and three veg while pedalling madly up and down suburban streets or playing in parks and cubby houses. Unable to keep still, her muscular little body was always consumed with a turbulent, fiery emotion I didn’t understand – I now think it may have been a deep-seated rebellion, fuelled by impotent rage.
Rach had always been so brave, bold and blatantly defiant - she feared nothing and no-one, ever. I both admired and envied her courage as my automatic response to fear was to freeze, rather than fight. So as a child and fourteen months my junior, Rach quietly assumed the role of my protector - and the mantle of this responsibility had sat heavily on her slim shoulders for a lifetime.
Maybe this was why she was always drawn to the classic Aussie underdog. I remember the night of her first shift at The Marine Hotel in Brighton and her fury as she drew herself to her full height of five foot five, and publicly chastised the Australian Cricket Team, who were enjoying a post-game drink, for mocking a disabled man. She lost her job on the spot, but not before silencing the room and shaming those cocky Australian heroes into an apology.
But the tables turned when I wasn’t watching. I don’t know if she just got tired of fighting, or whether the fight seemed futile and she gave up. As an adult, Rachael was a gifted psychologist, treating clinically depressed women at The Austin Hospital in Heidelberg. Her gutsy attitude to life had softened over the years and with her patients, she was tenderness itself – often sitting quietly with these women and holding their hands for hours as they haltingly offered their stories in the darkness of the long nights, well after her work day had ended. As she whispered soothing words of comfort to these broken women, she simultaneously despaired at their plight, at their sense of hopelessness and their shame. It mirrored her own.
But what could she do with it? The pattern of powerlessness had chased her since her days as a traumatised child and into anxious adulthood. Her resilience had diminished with each passing year while her sensitivity increased. The pain of her patients touched her very core and her inability to effect major change and generate funding for mental health, within our hospital system, was a source of great frustration to her.
And yes, we have Australian mental health and trauma initiatives which are raising awareness and funds but they’re not changing behaviour yet. Why? Because too many of us are still too frightened to examine our personal response to child abuse and mental health disorders. Pre pandemic, education was Australia’s fourth biggest export and yet we don’t have the will, the skill or the courage to effectively educate our own people on matters that really matter!
At a fundraising event for One in Five, a charity that funds medical research for mental illness, the keynote speaker spoke of her thirteen-year-old daughter who is suffering with clinical depression and self-harming. Her daughter attends a sizeable Catholic girl’s school in Melbourne’s inner suburbs, a school which prides itself on its pastoral care and is well aware of this young girl’s mental health issues. Yet there wasn’t one teacher, aide or staff member prepared to sit with this young girl, during school hours, when she was in need of emotional support recently, so she was sent home by herself. Alone. Not one of her daughter’s friends stepped up to the plate. Nor did the parents. Not one phone call. Not one meal. Not one hug or word of encouragement. Yes, I know they’re scared too but it’s still a disgrace.
I there was a quick and easy solution: there isn’t, but I do have an interim measure – and it requires action, not words. It requires a willingness by our community to hold us, to touch us, to tend to us – not run away and hide from us. Unless the wounded among us are openly acknowledged and accepted, healing can’t take place.
Power and strength are found in group energy. We just have look at the phenomena that is Hannah Gadsby’s Nanette, Time’s Up and #Me Too. As women, our justifiable rage against centuries of sexual harassment and assault reached a tipping point and these movements were born. They changed popular perception, and women are no longer silenced, shunned or ashamed of their vulnerability - these deeply offensive behaviours are just not acceptable anymore.
How can we bring this same lens to victims of child abuse and poor mental health? So many of us have been groomed since childhood to believe the abuse was our fault, that we were responsible for what was done to us, rather than the depraved inclinations of our predators who are masters in manipulation. Many of us carry a deep fear that our disgusting secret will be exposed to the world and this fear inhibits our capacity to enjoy a normal life.
And while we can’t expect the world at large to fathom our feelings, many of us wish there were a safe place to go at times like this. A place where we could grieve and be comforted by those who really understand the isolation and loneliness that comes with abuse, rather than sobbing in silent solitude.
Like poor mental health and suicide, sexual abuse carries a hideous stigma that taints those of us affected by it. It separates us from the masses. We see the looks of judgement, fear and avoidance as they flash across the faces of those who catch a glimpse of our hidden scarlet letters and this widens the gap between us and them, inch by inch, until we are so disconnected we don’t know how to reach out any more.
It has been five years since I heard the phrase that triggered my first memory of abuse. Many more memories have arisen since then, some more distressing than others. Each one takes me back into a place of terror, of acute loneliness. Each one alienates me from those I love; sometimes only for minutes, but sometimes for months. It has taken years to learn how to lean in to the ugliness, the trauma, and the fear and I still haven’t made peace with them. I resent even having look at them, let alone befriend them. And yet what else can I do? I am done with ignorance and I am done with denial. And I am done with being lonely because my story is too ugly to look at.
Again, this is not just my story. It is the story of hundreds of thousands of Australian women, men and children and it needs to be heard. Why? Because child abuse is intrinsically connected with poor mental health and healing can only take place when our stories are witnessed with compassion and sensitivity. It is in being seen that we stop being a faceless statistic, and in being touched that we begin to believe that we might be of some value. It’s time to create local healing spaces in each Australian community; physical places we can visit to honour ourselves and our stories while silently holding the hands of others who do the same.
It’s time for a figurative wailing wall or commemorative symbol we can touch while crying for the loss of our loved ones, our innocence or our peace of mind: a respectful place or plaque in our public gardens or communities where we can mourn the injustice done to us in the presence of others who can hold the space for us, rather than cutting our bodies or losing our minds. I know the power of these sacred spaces. There is an olive tree, planted by the gate of my son’s school in recognition of those abused by the Catholic church. Whenever I am overwhelmed with grief, I go and sit by this tree and I feel comforted as I weep. I feel acknowledged – and this is healing.
It’s time to follow the lead of countries like Luxembourg, Germany and Argentina that accept mental illness with open minds and open hearts. The people of these countries embrace their mentally ill citizens and encourage the seeking of help. The people of these countries work together with an attitude of acceptance that Australians would do well to adopt.
One in five - that’s the Australian statistic for poor mental health and child abuse, and suicide is still the main cause of death for our young people. We have unnecessarily laid too many of them to rest in the underbelly of this magnificent country. It’s time to stop handballing this messy, complicated problem. It’s time to educate our nation so we know how to recognise and respond to symptoms and signs of abuse and poor mental health, and to start creating public and sacred spaces of healing for us and our children. Places where hurt citizens can sit silently in nature or seek comfort from those who are prepared to look at and listen to us; to hold us without judgement, only kindness. What an Australia that would be!
If this post resonates with you, please share it with members of government, local council or policy makers, or on your social media channels. Thank you so much for listening! Jx