By L.A. Winnen
March 11th, 2025
I know a woman, who suffered the kind of abuse you only hear about on the news or in the movies. Her past is riddled with horrific sexual, emotional, and physical abuse at the hands of her parents. Her siblings too suffered the same fate, but at different degrees. I have heard intimate stories about their abuse for much of my adult life. I have also seen the impact it has had, on their lives, how they interact with each other, and the people around them. It has caused much suffering for them and built barriers in how they engage in the world. This abuse has been swept away for the most part and not discussed. Unfortunately, these kinds of trauma invade most people's most private lives. Horrors that are not openly talked about and then shut up in a room made of scar tissue in one's mind.
I will speak only of the women I know, how they engaged with said choices, and how the impact has reached into their life. She is the one I know the most intimately, so I will speak only of her. On the surface, this person holds a normal job and has been a wife and mother. She had gone to college and bought a house. She engages in her community, and she has gone to church. Most do not see how she still suffers from the abuse she left behind so long ago. But, if you look closely, you can still see traces of this abuse that have come out to impact her choice of partners (she had been married a few times), and how she handles stressful events. It still haunts her dreams and affects how she shows herself to the world. A reality most don't see because she has kept these particulars hidden.
Her personality has fractured itself into three different personas. One is a small child that comes out when she is scared, another is a disassociated, take-charge persona that comes out to handle stressful events, and the other is her warm natural persona. Sometimes, it's hard to know the difference between dissociated persona and her natural one. If you pay attention, you can see the shift between the different personas. In the course of a short conversation, her expressions will change, and her voice will sound somewhat different. When the small child persona comes out, you can see a significant change in her. She speaks as if she is very small and fragile. She may hug a doll or stuff toy and rock back and forth. This persona is rarer to see, she only comes out when this woman is terrified. This woman's choices may seem logical for the most part, but because she is constantly running from her past, she changes how she lives frequently. It could be making a move, changing her partner or job, getting rid of everything she owns, and starting over. She has started over a lot. She is running from a past she can't escape, but she also can't heal from it, because it exists behind scarred walls that don't want to come down.
This woman is like many women in our world. They may exhibit their trauma and abuse in different ways, but it is there and it lurks under the surface. Many women are scared to talk about their trauma aloud, due to how our society treats these women. Many people react with outrage at hearing a stranger's experience, but then when it comes to the intimate knowledge we have of friends, family members, or partners, we stay quiet. We may condone the abuse and talk about how horribly it was, but women are not allowed to grieve about it openly. They are not allowed to say it out loud in a public sphere in case someone might overhear.
Our traumas are left to fester like an open wound inside scarred walls. We are just told to be brave and muster the courage to move on with our lives without giving the abuse much thought. They are cast into shadow and the abuser goes free. Others may play about another's abuse and turn it for their own gain, like men who look for women with "daddy issues". Women may go from man to man seeking a loving partner, the kind of love that she never has experienced in her life, but end up with a wolf pretending to be her "true love". These women are laughed at and scorned. They are given no worth because they don't meet up with society's quota. Men (and some women) down seem to understand they are the issue. Many don't want to come face to face with a woman's past. They don't want to see themselves in the situation, so it is swept under the bed like an old forgotten pair of shoes.
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