No broken humans, no rescuing.

Jessica Dore is a licensed social worker, storyteller and writer interested in meaning-making with symbol and image, and someone I only "know" through writings on the internet and recorded offerings that land in my inbox from her substack who nonetheless has sent me golden charms through the ether at times of urgency and need, often when I least know that I need them.

The most recent came in the form of a tale of an orc from a Sardinian folk tale.

I would encourage you to read the full tale as Jessica tells it, for she is a far more gifted storyteller than I.  For my purposes here, however, this is the gist of it: the orc gives his young female captive an unlikely clue to her escape, sharing with her the secret of three magic woolen balls she has stumbled across in their shared home.  This magical yarn, he tells her, can support her in escaping any villain. Not long after, she uses it to leave him for an imagined happy future with a young man she has seen from the window of the house where she has been held captive. This is not, however, to be where Maria finds her happy ending. The orc gives chase, and though he deftly dispenses with her initial volleys, she manages to imprison him in a sea of thorns with the throwing of the third and final ball. 

A prisoner now,  he begs her to look once more at him - before turning her face into that of a cat, leading to her ostracism from human society. Once again, Maria finds she is the one held captive, all her dreams shattered.

When I listened to Jessica speak this tale, these words in particular struck a chord:

There’s more to the story—which is maybe as close to a true and enduring statement as I’ve ever been—but I’m going to leave the rest out, for now. I love von Franz’ ideas about letting go of precious things in bad situations as a way to ensure that “nothing more can go wrong.” Maria certainly could have held on to the magic balls, for another day maybe, to ensure some imagined future success.

And while it was not necessary for her to discard them in order to achieve greater lightness, agility, or speed, in letting go of something which she understood as fundamental to her survival, she put herself some place simple, essential, and vulnerable. Recalling von Franz’ words regarding this motif of discarding objects while being chased, “When one is confronted by a hopelessly wrong situation, one must make a drastic leap to the bottom of open-minded simplicity, and from there one can live through it.”

 

I'd forgotten it was International Women's Day until this morning. 

Two years ago today I threw one of my own magic balls, letting the cat out of the bag that I'd spent several years at that point trying to resolve a hopelessly conflicted situation in UCD with respect to handling of a traumatic disclosure during my Mindfulness Training there that in myriad ways had left me feeling absolutely trapped with respect to moving forward with my career, or my life. 

I'll never forget that frosty morning because, before I even let my toes touch my cold bedroom floor,  I had seen whizzing by me in cyberspace a reference to an impending report on responding to women's stories of sexual violence more effectively, fairly, transparently and compassionately in our third level institutions, and I knew almost in an instant I couldn't keep my own story buried underground a moment longer.  

“When one is confronted by a hopelessly wrong situation, one must make a drastic leap to the bottom of open-minded simplicity, and from there one can live through it.”

I could imagine someone outside of me could have described the decision to tweet about the situation, in that moment, as impulsive - but the experience of it was more like the moments after the cresting of a wave, when something called to me, in Eliot's words "half-heard, in the stillness between two waves of the sea".  

I suspect we all have these moments in life. 

Moments that you just know, to hell with it, whether or not that magical yarn might be used at some other time in wiser ways, now is the moment: now is the time to say, today I will stand for this, if I stand for nothing else. Today is the day I will do this. Today is the day I will choose silence only when silence suits me, not when you demand it of me. I suspect many, many women experience such moments on the threshold of midlife.

I ran a fierce campaign to procure a meeting with the University on Twitter in the weeks that followed, and held all sorts of contradictions and crashing waves within and around me within an unfolding physiological firestorm internally. 

Though I had some support here and there from friends and colleagues, I was out on my own now, and I bloody well knew it. All the while, nagging at the edges of my mind was the creeping, sickening wondering if maybe I had made a mistake I would never recover from, and was about to find out that freedom was really only another word for nothing left to lose. I barely ate, I couldn't sleep, I could feel my heartbeat pounding relentlessly and the heat of my skin, the sweat in my brow, the ice in my veins. I felt like I was on the edge of absolute breakdown.

Winnicott once spoke of the fear of breakdown as a fear of a past event that has not yet been experienced. I came to know more fully in those weeks what I already knew, really, but had not been willing to accept to that point - that the moment I'd first opened my mouth about my past sexual trauma that I had already irretrievably, irreversibly lost all credibility within the eyes of those to whom I had chosen to tell that story, whatever gloss they might have put on what unfolded after that. 

I had even lost it with people who had never met me, who had never even sat in a room with me - with women who had dedicated their working lives to supporting some of the most vulnerable people in our society who, even still, could  somehow, without ever speaking to me, never having met me, tell me that they were satisfied it was beyond the capacity of their hard-working, committed staff to support me by... simply listening and responding to this story I had shared of my past.

After all, not every student has the personal, emotional or intellectual capacity to complete a Mindfulness training course (even when they're carrying a Distinction in it, apparently). And the feedback I offered in the "multiple emails" that I had sent - that I had agonised over wording politely, carefully, comprehensively, professionally, cordially that were totally ignored even as the Department liked and shared my tweets amplifying their work on Twitter? Well, you know, it wasn't even helpful.

In those weeks I came to know deeper things too, that to be silenced in the way one is during abuse is to learn a thing or two about the need for resourcefulness in the face of potential annihilation, and the near sacramental importance of learning to honour one's emotional, personal and intellectual sovereignty in the face of ongoing dehumanisation and objectification.

And darker truths:  the endless requirement placed upon survivors to be far more cautious and political than authentic: the imperative thinking of institutions and organisations ever ready to discard what is non-essential, forcing everyone involved to move swiftly and deftly between self-protective and co-operative repertoires in ways that both internally and externally feel contradictory or incoherent. 

And the harshest reality, that to speak aloud at all is to be misunderstood, and that any woman who does will have to accept this will have people they respected and looked up to calling them a crazy bitch, manipulative, attention-seeking, a "player", "goofy as shit and a pain in the ass", a problem who must surely exhaust people closer to them.

So when Professor Colin Scott agreed to meet me to discuss a way forward, I will admit now that I knew right away that the best way to secure a "good outcome", to end the thing conclusively in my favour,  I should bring someone with me - someone to protect the narrative, to seal the deal, to speak on my behalf if I lost my train of thought or, heaven forbid, "became emotional" - but truthfully,  I didn't want to. 

I was worn out, exhausted by the whole thing, lacking clarity about why I'd ever spoken to begin with. I didn't even want a particular outcome anymore. I just wanted a meeting. I just wanted to speak, and to be heard, and to be responded to as a human being.

Towards the end of that meeting, held on Zoom, I cried. 

Up until that point, I had given a pretty good, rational, logical, steady account of the various legalities and regulatory issues and professional matters that concerned me, and how I felt they should be addressed. The conversation was reasonably cordial, collegiate. competent.. professional.

And then... I stopped arguing.

I cried. I told my story. I spoke my truth.  I'm sorry. I never meant this to be like this. I never wanted any of this. I needed help and support, to be met with dignity and compassion. I don't know why you had to take a sledgehammer to a nut here, on this of all things. I really liked those people. I cared about them. I felt.. safe there. I don't think they're bad people. I don't think they want this. Tell them I'm sorry for all of this, please. This kind of behaviour is not reflected in their work. I know they care about human suffering.  I think no one knew how to handle this. I think they worried it would take up more time than they had to give. I think.. it got out of hand. How has this ended like this? How did we ever get here?  Why is this.. even okay? 

The discarding: a return to the simple, to  the essential, to the vulnerable.

I can still see Professor Colin Scott's slight surprise at the defences crumbling, and this moment, perhaps only half a minute, where I regarded him working out how to respond to the pain that had suddenly broken through.

And for all the simple stories: I won't forget the kindness in his voice when he responded that he could see and hear that I was deeply hurt, and there was nothing he could do for me in that regard. 

I do not believe he was lying.

I do not believe he was acting.

I do believe that it is a sad but arbitrary truth that there is nothing most organizations or institutions are prepared to do voluntarily to recognise the damage that can occur when it has been decided, before they are even spoken, that women's stories will not be heard. 

Irish institutions will run International Women's Day campaigns on Twitter to beat the band, but when things go wrong, when communication breaks down, there is no sense of institutional responsibility to repair rupture, even where all that is asked is for transparent acknowledgement of events both parties already know and have agreed occurred. 

The fear of breakdown (or loss of reputation and status) is real, and to be defended against at all costs, and all the emptiness from which something new could emerge is filled up, when everyone already knows and agrees that allowing space for dialogue is the basis of all learning in developing a more equal, inclusive, progressive society.  

At the end of the orc's story, Maria takes courage and asks the orc who has held her captive, who has turned her into a monstrosity, to cleanse her of a curse he has placed upon her in her flight. He grants the wish, and in that moment, she can finally see her true face. In that moment, she is finally free - she marries her prince, and they have the orc to stay with them at the castle. 

My story is no fairytale,  though I have learned fairytales contain their own truths to inform reality. Ignoring or turning away from what's uncomfortable or ugly or difficult to see in the human experience doesn't make it go away -  not really -  and integration and dialogue between opposing sides and contradictory truths are more often than not, the surest key to freedom in conflict (internally and externally). 

When it comes to healing the wounds of Ireland's particularly dark institutional history with respect to sexual trauma, this is precisely why we need skilled, trained psychological professionals who are well regulated and subject to proper governance, who can not only be held to account when they duck out of legal, ethical, moral or professional obligations but also supported and held through the times they have made human mistakes and when their personal and professional growth would be best served by moving towards repairing what has been ruptured.

To achieve this, because human beings are human beings, we need independent oversight of professionals operating in small groups or in a small country, because of course it is hard to be objective and to judge actions clearly when we hear complaints against close friends and associates we know to be good people who usually act well, and almost always with good intentions. 

This means we need to create restorative processes that prioritise accountability over blame: processes that don't automatically demonise either client or provider when issues of misunderstanding or maladministration arise, or needlessly provoke feelings of threats to belongingness that make moving forward in a way that preserves the dignity of all parties into something seemingly impossible. 

We can create new contexts, more understanding and forgiving contexts, so that when anyone speaks about trauma in any Irish institution, neither speaker not listener are forced to end the interaction in shared "awareness" of the "truth" that nothing can be done about this.  

We can do something about this. The story is still being written of how we understand and respond when people share histories of violence, trauma or abuse. We don't need to be like butterflies pinned to a cork board, trapped in a story or role that can be allowed to contain no contradictions, and which neither party would have chosen, if the way forward had been properly and collaboratively founded. 

Every voice matters - and maybe, when we find a way to listen to and respond to eachother as human beings, whether we are complainant or respondent, service provider or patient, teacher or student, we'll have a better shot at living, if not happily ever after, with greater integrity and wholeness, and compassion for self and other in the face of human complexity.