Breaking the Silence: The Challenges Faced by Survivors of Violence and Abuse in Sharing Traumatic Experiences
Survivors of childhood or intimate partner violence or abuse often struggle with communicating their experiences. The trauma of such experiences, can be difficult to put into words and it can be a deeply distressing and overwhelming experience.
Trauma can impact the way that we process and remember events, making it challenging to recall specific details or articulate our feelings about what happened.
Survivors may fear that they will not be believed or that they will be stigmatised or treated differently if they speak out about their experiences. This can lead to a sense of isolation and make it even more difficult to communicate with others.
Sometimes, abuse can be so normalised, that for the longest time, a survivor may not even be aware that they can label their experiences as such too. This was certainly my experience: despite a professional career as a lawyer and significant education, I didn’t know that the psychological abuse, beatings, and neglect in my childhood could be labelled as abuse.
Learning that I could do so — that these events were not a product of my “badness” (as I’d been led to understand), was revelatory.
