To all survivors today: your time is precious, your energy is precious, you are precious. Your love is precious, your relationships are precious. And I don’t mean precious like cute. I mean precious like invaluable, like massive, like power, like transcendent.
—HANNAH HARRIS-SUTRO
Healing is dangerous work. Healing is about going into the struggle. When trauma happens, we go away from that space in our body where it happened—and when we go into it, it hurts so much as it wakes back up. I’m interested in creating the place where the body can remember itself, even though it hurts to do it. Where feeling better is part of it, but it’s not the goal. Struggling better is the goal.
—SUSAN RAFFO
Recently, I was auditioning a new therapist, who asked me in all sincerity during the intake if I thought the therapy I’d gotten in my twenties had “resolved my childhood sexual abuse.”
I had high hopes for this therapist. She was a woman of color with a Cesar Chavez quote on her website. She worked at the local healing justice center staffed entirely by people of color healers. She said she was “trauma-informed” on her website and listed working with survivors as one of her areas of expertise. Plus, she was cheaper than the therapist I’d been seeing for seven years, who was one of the smartest, weirdest healers I’d ever met, but still lived in Oakland, where I’d been priced out. Maybe seeing a therapist in person, not via Skype, would be a good thing?
But there I was, in the office with my mouth slightly open and the rug pulled out from under me. As it turned out, we had some really different understandings of trauma, healing, and survivorhood. She really thought that childhood sexual abuse was something to manage, something you could get over and “move on” from, a cut that could be stitched up with butterfly bandages. Not: My abuse isn’t something to resolve, a number on a pain scale, a simple wound that can go away with Neosporin. My trauma is an opera, a gorgeous and tough dress made out of my best scars, a seed library, a Gutenberg Bible, a thunderstorm to climb and buck in a small plane, a mountain range, a supernova to map.
It’s trauma. It’s also a resource. A resource that isn’t just an individual one, but one that connects me to other survivors and their collective knowledge. Knowledge that we have used to survive, and that we could potentially use to change the world, end rape culture, and create new forms of healing, family, communication, and justice.
When I composed myself, I managed to say, “I don’t really think of it like that. I think that I’m on a lifelong journey of learning from and healing my trauma. You know what I mean?” You know what I mean, right?
She smirked at me with that poor-dear-sure-let-her-think-that look. And I didn’t go back.
The idea that survivorhood is a thing to fix, cure, or get over, and that a cure is not only possible and easy but is the only desirable option, is a foundational belief in mainstream ways of understanding survivorhood and survivors. And the idea of survivorhood as solely an unfortunate condition to cure is an idea with deep roots in ableism.
Ableism believes that when there’s something “wrong” with a body/mind, the only desirable outcome to that wrongness is cure. It also believes that you can either be fixed or broken—there’s nothing in between. It certainly believes that there is nothing valuable in inhabiting a body/mind that’s disabled.
The idea of “getting over it” is also deeply seductive to survivors. We want the pain and trauma of surviving sexual abuse or assault to be over. Who wouldn’t? What’s the problem with that?
As I write this essay, the #MeToo movement has toppled senators, movie moguls, and many other famous white men (and some Black and brown ones), but more importantly, it’s created an explosion of survivors telling our stories. A movement created in 2007 by Black survivor activist Tarana Burke, #MeToo encouraged survivors to break silence about the rape and abuse we’d survived and was then Columbus-ed by several white North American cis lady media figures in late 2017. But #MeToo also took on a life of its own, claimed by many everyday survivors as a strategy to make space for us to speak, argue, and organize around survivorhood in all its complex iterations.
The thing I like most about #MeToo is how it, for a moment at least, transformed the experience of being a survivor from one that—despite me being embedded in survivor culture—still so often feels freakish and lonely, to one where the truth is out there: rape and childhood sexual abuse are the norm and most people are survivors. #MeToo created space where the weaponization of sex wasn’t seen as a rarity or an accidental tragedy befalling a sad handful of people, but as a system of oppression that’s everywhere, in the water and the air just like any industrial pollutant.
This is dangerous information. As survivors, we often feel powerless because rape and abuse are an attempt to destroy our power, and we often lack systemic power (when the legal system is racist, whorephobic, inaccessible, and not our vision of justice anyway, when people don’t believe our experiences, when we can’t afford therapy). But we survivors are also supremely powerful. Our stories of rape and survivorhood are a thundercloud, a nebula. They are huge and awesome and, if spoken, can and do bring rape culture to its knees.
Rape culture and its proponents know this, and it scares the shit out of them. The power our stories have scares the shit out of them. So rape culture creates many things to manage survivor knowledge and tamp it down. Sometimes, I call it the Survivor Industrial Complex: the web of institutions, practices, and beliefs that works to manage, contain, and offer resolution to survivors of sexual violence. Similar to how the nonprofit industrial complex1 contains and manages dissent. Its reach is huge, stretching from the nurses who administer rape kits, to YWCA therapists who run twelve-week group therapy sessions. From the six-week “solution-focused” therapy that is the only kind available at the sliding scale clinic, to the cops and district attorneys who decide who counts as a “perfect victim,” and who is too slutty, poor, Black, brown, crazy, or trans to deserve victim compensation funds.
One of the biggest ways the Survivor Industrial Complex manages all those messy, powerful survivor emotions and truths is by deploying the idea of the good or fixed survivor. The Good Survivor is the survivor you see on a talk show or a soap opera, the one who received three months of therapy and is all better now. The abuse is a vague memory; there are no visible scars—physical or emotional—and they don’t talk about the invisible ones. They’ve moved on. They don’t talk about abuse in an ongoing way, ask for accommodations, get triggered during sex, have a new memory, or figure out something else about their trauma years later. They don’t ask that survivorhood or trauma be talked about or held in our movements, communities, or queer scenes, or insist that understanding those things could strengthen those movements. They don’t bother you with “their drama” or “their stuff,” and they know that talking about it for sure would be a bother.
The Good Survivor is someone I’ve never met in person, because they don’t exist. But their archetype haunts me and many other survivors I know. We beat ourselves up for not being them. And often, unfortunately, our partners, friends, co-workers, and comrades want us to be that good, quiet, all-better survivor too.
In contrast, the bad survivor is the one who’s still “broken,” still freaking out, still triggered, still grieving, still remembering. Still making you remember. They have a panic attack during the action, they think they can perform a certain sexual act but disassociate or throw up anyway, they tell you terrible stories that haunt your dreams, they’re pissed off at the local rape crisis center for being racist or transmisogynist or just fucking inadequate. They haven’t forgotten shit. Bad survivors see the secret insides of rape culture every day, and talk about it. They’re the femme with baggage you scroll past on Tinder because they look like too much drama. They’re the survivor who kills themself and who is described later in sorrowful tones as “broken, but now at peace.” They’re the bitch, the hysteric, the dyke. And often, as survivors, we don’t want to be them, because being them means being not healed. It means that we’ve failed at surviving.
These archetypes are binaries. The world reinforces these stereotypes in a million ways, but we also repeat them to ourselves. We torture ourselves with them, and also—let’s be real—they’re seductive. They make things feel simple. If we believe that some survivors are just too annoying or bitchy, too out of control, we can feel better about ourselves by promising we’re not like that and then distancing ourselves from those high-maintenance bitches. And if the promise of ease is a possibility, maybe someday we can achieve it.
The promise of a cure for survivorhood is what lies inside the Good Survivor, and it’s tempting: most people experiencing pain want it to stop. As a young survivor, I was in torment every single second of every day, and I wanted to get some goddamned peace. I wanted to fuck. I wanted to stop being so gone from my body that the whole world looked like a TV screen. I wanted to not feel like broken glass. I wanted to be able to think or talk about something other than my incest memories twenty-four/seven. I wanted those things because it hurt, and because of the rolled eyes, imagined and real, of the people around me who were impatient about me discussing all that depressing stuff all the time.
And there was more. I wanted to interrupt the cycles of abuse and intergenerational violence in my family. I wanted to grow up to have relationships that weren’t violent. To know pleasure, not martyrdom. Most of all, I wanted to be happy, and I wanted to know freedom, joy, and liberation. Even though and especially because I had no idea what those things actually felt like.
These are powerful, fierce survivor freedom dreams. Dreams like these are where I see many survivors in our fiercest power as revolutionaries. There is revolution in survivors remembering the omnipresence of rape, insisting that we remember shit right, and using our deepest dreams to create new worlds that we have never seen.
There’s nothing wrong with wanting less pain, or a different experience of it. There’s nothing wrong with wanting to transform generations of passed-down trauma. But what gets more complicated is when those desires bleed into the ableist model of cure.2 That model and its harsh binary of fixed and successful versus broken and fucked is part of what contributes to suicide and struggle in long-term survivors. I’ve seen survivors, including myself, struggle with feelings of failure and self-hatred when we’re thirty, forty, fifty, sixty, or older and we’re still triggered, grieving, and remembering, when we haven’t reached that mythic cured place. What keeps me alive and thriving is my work as a disabled survivor. Undoing and picking apart that binary and naming its poison as ableist. Bringing together crip and survivor struggles and knowledge. Mapping a new model of survival that charts where my scars and my still being crazy in adulthood are not signs that I’ve failed.
Cure, Crips, and Survivors
My friend Blyth Barnow is a white, working-class femme survivor priest. A couple of months ago, an Instagram photograph she posted blew me away. It was an image of big flip chart paper in a workshop, with writing that said, “How do survivors’ skills translate to ministry?” Underneath, there was a list of words like boundaries, finding healing moment in texts, nuance, destigmatizing mental health, process of finding healthy self-worth, and self-grace.
Skills. Survivors’ skills. Survivors as people who are good at things. Survivors as leaders, because of and not despite our survivorhood. Blyth’s post was the first time in my life, after more than twenty years of being deeply integrated in survivor communities, that I’d seen survivors described as being good at things. As having specific skills that emerged from our survivorhood.
There is a deep parallel between the way being a survivor is seen only as a fault, never as a skill, and the way ableism views disabled people as individual, tragic health defects (if you doubt me, think about how disabled fetuses are never referred to as disabled fetuses, but as birth defects). When I lead disability justice workshops, one of my toughest teaching moments is always to get people to step out of the deficiency model of disability. When I talk about disabled wisdom and skills, or about disabled people as having histories, cultures, and movements, the blank looks in the room kill me. It’s damn near impossible for many abled people to think of disability as anything other than an individual tragedy and a state no one would choose to inhabit.
But I, along with many other disabled people and people who believe in disability justice, insist that disabled people have competencies and skills that abled people lack, like deep knowledge of how to create collective access,3 compassion, flexibility, ingenuity, and community in which crips, kids, elders, poor people, and families are not just (begrudgingly) included but hold power and set the agenda, leading the march as slowly as we need to. When wildfires spread across most of western North America in the summer and fall of 2017, sick and disabled people already knew how to protect ourselves from smoke. We shared with able-bodied people who were facing air stress for the first time our knowledge of N95 and P95 masks and respirators, air purifiers, and herbs to detox, soothe lungs, and ease anxiety, as well as our crip sense of time where we can only do what we can do.
We’ve already survived the end of the world, and our knowledge will be what helps us survive any coming apocalypse of fascism and climate change.
But in the deficiency model of disability, there’s nothing good about disability—no skills or brilliance—we are just a fault to be cured. The only good crip is a cured crip, one who has ceased to exist. That lack of existence happens through cure. Cure is healing is elimination.
And cure infects survivor dialogues. Survivors longing for healing hit the medical-industrial complex in search of therapy, only to confront the idea of cure as the only way to heal from abuse. This belief breeds shame and promotes the binary of fixed or broken. This binary stops us from being able to imagine survivor futures where we are thriving but not cured.
When I was a young survivor, I would ask my counselors when “it” would get better, when “it” would be gone. By “it” I meant something between “having flashbacks every day and feeling constantly in trauma hell” and “having any trauma memories or experiences at all.” Something like survivorhood. I was horrified when one gifted and lovely therapist gently told me that “it” would never fully go away, but my life would and could transform so much I wouldn’t even recognize it, and my experience of pain, trauma, and abuse memories would also transform.
My counselor was trying, as best she could, to convey what I would later learn through years of listening to and shape-shifting chronic pain: our experiences of pain and trauma can completely transform when we have access to community, tools, support, and different stories and narratives.
But as a young survivor, the vision I was given from most sources—including some therapists and feminist abuse books—was this: if I performed healing correctly, by the time I was thirty or forty, I would be a survivor who had no visible signs of survivorhood. One who wasn’t crazy anymore, who never panicked, never jumped when she was touched the wrong way, never flashed back to beliefs she’d been taught about how truly stupid it was to trust anybody, who was never brought to her knees by anger or grief or sadness or fear or freezing. The abuse would be gone, and I would be good as new—or as good as someone who had never been abused. It was a vision of survivorhood that mimicked the Good Survivor archetype, albeit often with a feminist, anti-oppressive coating.
In this worldview, if I ever had flashbacks, trauma, pain, or triggers, that meant I was failing. At survivorhood. At healing. At fixing it. At breaking the cycle. This was my life’s work, the thing that everything hung on. This was a terribly hard place to be. And, then and today, I see survivors struggling with feelings of deep shame that we are not “over it.” I see survivors in our thirties, forties, and beyond getting thrown into suicidal thoughts when we are triggered, again, because we’re beating ourselves up over still being “unfixed.” When a new memory or a new experience of trauma or grief comes to us. When we are still sad, still panicking, still crazy. We think we are failing.
I believe that bringing a disability justice4 analysis of ableism into survivor culture—where struggle and scar are not failures, where our vision of healing shifts from getting over it to still fucked up and also beautiful and okay—could do a lot to address this struggle. This might be a big leap for many survivors and supporters of survivors. We don’t often think of survivorhood within a disability framework, and many people still think of disability in a limited way, as only meaning a small number of people with certain strictly defined physical disabilities. But I define disability as a broader term. “Disabled” is a word/world that includes people with physical disabilities, people who are deaf, hard of hearing, deaf/blind or blind, people who identify as mad/mentally ill, people who are neuro-divergent, and people with chronic illness. Disability can also be defined as anyone whose body/mind do not conform to oppressive society’s notions of “normal” or “functional.”
There are many disabled, deaf, blind, chronically ill, and/or neuro-divergent survivors, and I also believe that all survivors of sexual or physical abuse who hold trauma memories and responses, have complex post-traumatic stress disorder, multiplicity/dissociative identity disorder, or other trauma-rooted psychic differences, could find a home in disability communities. The same skills we have developed as crips—asking for collectively created access as a right, not a favor, and resisting ableist ideas of our body/minds as fucked-up failures—can be a vital part of where we create our reparations and our salvation as survivors.
When we are not fixed, not over it, still triggered, still feeling, still healing in our forties, fifties, sixties, and beyond, we are not failing. We are remembering. We are learning from our survivorhood. We are moving from a model that gasps at our scars to one that wants to learn as much from them as possible. We are not an individual defect. We are a collective movement, a series of overlapping survivor communities.
And I ask the dangerous question: What if more survivors—and the therapists and healing spaces available to us—had a mad, crip idea of healing, one that was not about cure but about increasing possibility, about learning, about loving all our survivor mad genius? What if there were models and stories where we got to grieve as long as we needed to? Where we had tools to hold the grief? Where that grief was seen as sacred and valuable, a source of life-giving knowledge, not a pain in the ass? What if bad survivors were good survivors? What if all survivors were beautiful in our mess?
Old-Ass Survivors Who Cry and Laugh
As a young survivor, I read a lot of survivor writing—the feminist of color slam poetry kind, the Dorothy Allison kind. What I picked up on was that telling the raw truth could heal you. Running away could heal you. Cutting off someone’s dick could heal you (thank God Lorena Bobbitt was in the news when I was twenty). Sex could heal you, and solitude, and a closed door, and collective houses, and herbs. Time and space and silence.
What I didn’t see much of was stories of what came after, what long-term survivorhood looked like after you’d been trying to heal for a while.
It would’ve meant a lot to me, I think, if I’d seen stories and pictures of some middle-aged or even older survivor femmes who were happy and yet, not done. Who were a lot less triggered than they used to be, but still snapped at their partner, froze up when touched a certain way, had a great month and then a week of panic attacks and then just had to get the fuck out of town for a while. Who were successful on their own terms and who also had at least a few deeply shitty mental health times a year. Who had chosen queer family that was wonderful, the best, and also fell the fuck apart in completely unpredictable and disastrous ways. Who thought they knew everything about their abuse story, but who then woke up one day at forty-two and thought, Shit, maybe my mom also abused my older cousin who was like me and who she also had a “special closeness” to, or realized, What if I’m not just grateful to be free? What if I’m deeply angry and sad that I don’t have a mom? Who had a full, rich life, but one where the abuse memories were never faint.
It would have meant a lot to me if, instead of focusing on the goal of normalizing myself, my therapists had used more tools to honor dissociation, self-injury, and stimming as survival skills, not marks of how scarred I still was. If they could have talked about what changes we needed to make in our communities so that there were many examples of crazy femmes not having to hide our crazy to be loved and, more than that, respected and valued as leaders. What if I’d seen femme leaders who weren’t loved just when we were infallible but also when we were curled up on the floor having a panic attack? What if there were revolutionary and generous work structures that allowed us to call in crazy or sad, to cry at our desks and never be seen as unreliable when we did so? I wonder how it would have landed if a therapist had refrained from saying I’d “never be done” and instead shown me pictures of what that could look like.
Of course, that would mean moving from an individual survivor support model to one where survivors and our madness and our survivorhood were truly loved and honored. Where communities had mad and trauma-surviving folks as leaders—and not just ones who were super really good at never showing their crazy. Some of our communities have that. Many don’t.
As a disabled person, my experience of my disability changed 1,000 percent when I learned from disabled friends that instead of seeing my disabled body as broken and wrong and shameful, I could see myself as part of a lineage of disabled genius friends, warriors, and lovers. Instead of being marginalized from inaccessible community, forever on the edge or unable to get in or stay at the queer club, I could have a deeply satisfying crip family and community. I could organize and communicate my art on Skype, in my living room, in the accessible spaces on the database we collectively created.
And I wonder: How would my experience of my survivorhood change if it, following a disability justice precept, moved from being seen as an individual, sad, and shameful experience to a common, normal, and collective one that I had every right to access and create movements for, with work and art in mind? If I could see others who were leaders, lovers, and cherished community members whose breakdowns and triggers were an openly loved part of who they were? Would this be survivor collective access?
There are still not enough of these long-term survivor stories, so I am going to offer mine. I’m forty-two. I live in a house with my amazing femme of color partner and friends, plus two cats, in a greenbelt strip in Southside Seattle where there are big trees and blackberry bushes and a secret creek that is also ten minutes from Wendy’s. The survivor, working class femme of color love I get from my partner has transformed my heart and my cunt and my life. Living together is amazing, and also was super hard in ways I in no way expected. Moving in hit me with all the PTSD from past abuse in the world.
I love my friends and I have panic attacks that lay me out for two days. I’m still unpacking deep shame I have around “being crazy” and around being the survivor of childhood sexual abuse that is stigmatized (mother-daughter, happened early). By unpacking I mean sometimes it hits like a gut punch in the middle of my day, in the middle of negotiating sex or teaching a workshop. Grief about not having a mom brought me to my knees, and I stayed there for a long time, and I cancelled shit and worked in pajamas and cried longer than I thought there were days. I didn’t know that grief was there. I can be defensive and stubborn as hell. I can snap and get into a fight over who gets to use a cutting board. I can be wrong. I can have a meltdown. I can be frozen. I can jerk off for hours and not be able to get out of bed. I can win awards. I can make dinner for friends.
I have somatic flashbacks of my rape. Still. I’m still scared to talk to my family, and visiting my home state or driving through my hometown is never something I do casually, never without an escape plan and much preparation. I experience months of joy and weeks that get sucked under when I trip over a wire and a trap door opens.
I am not normal, at all, and I have not forgotten anything. Nor do I want to. I do not want an individualized healing. I want to enjoy the shit out of my life, and I want to use the knowledge I have gained from surviving rape to transform the world with others who share my pain.
I do not want to be fixed if being fixed means being bleached of memory, untaught by what I have learned through this miracle of surviving. My survivorhood is not an individual problem. I want the communion of all of us who have survived, and the knowledge.
I do not want to be fixed. I want to change the world. I want to be alive, awake, grieving, and full of joy. And I am.
Notes
1.For a Black, Indigenous, and brown feminist analysis of the nonprofit industrial complex, see The Revolution Will Not Be Funded, INCITE Women of Color Against Violence (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2017).
2.For a much more detailed account of a disabled queer survivor grappling with cure and its complexities, check out Eli Clare’s Brilliant Imperfection (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2017).
3.Collective access is a term describing the ways sick and disabled people can and do create interdependent access for each other. Collective access is in opposition to many of the ways access is commonly understood and practiced, which is as charities with much gatekeeping and little autonomy, administered by able-bodied people who treat disabled people as passive recipients. Collective access emphasizes the ways disabled people can and do care for each other, and the power, knowledge, and labor we have done and still do. For more about collective access, check out creatingcollectiveaccess.wordpress.com.
4.Disability justice is an intersectional movement for liberation centering the lives and leadership of disabled queer and trans people and disabled Black and brown people (and those of us who are both). Invented in 2005 by Patty Berne, Leroy Moore, Mia Mingus, Eli Clare, and Sebastian Margaret, disability justice both builds on earlier disability rights organizing and critiques its whiteness and single issue focus on independence and gaining legal rights, and argues for interdependence, mutual aid, and dismantling capitalism and colonialism. For more, check out sinsinvalid.org or Skin, Tooth, and Bone: The Basis of Movement Is Our People: A Disability Justice Primer.