Episode 33: Processing the Layers of Shame Out Loud

Episode #33 – Processing the Layers of Shame Out Loud 

Transcribed by Adam Soisson  

[Inspirational theme music plays.]  

>> Lori: Thank you for joining us. In this podcast, we are real people, talking about real things. Child abuse and neglect: a topic that is all too often left in the shadows of silence, leaving survivors alone, fearful, and oftentimes without a voice. We’re having conversations to become Louder Than Silence. It is here, where we will invite you to join us and be the change needed to end child abuse and neglect. 

>> Lori: This podcast is brought to you by our dear friends at The Conference Experience. The folks at The Conference Experience have really helped us out at EndCAN here for the last year and a half. They do incredible work, especially during COVID. They’ve really stepped up to the plate and helped us out so if you’re needing any audiovisual, production, or even support and help with running an event, please give The Conference Experience a call. Their number is 720 323-3273 or you can check them out at theconferenceexperience.com 

>> Lori: Good morning everybody and welcome to the podcast Louder Than Silence. My name is Lori Poland, I am the Executive Director for the National Foundation to End Child Abuse and Neglect. Today’s podcast is a unique one. We’ve never done anything like this. It’s a Monday morning here in beautiful Colorado. The sun is shining and we just had our team meeting after the weekend. Our staff meets every Monday just to check in, say hello and make sure we’re all on the same page. This weekend there was an interview I’d done with Lifetime movie channel several months ago. They came to my home and had this huge set up because of COVID and we did this interview and here we are many months later. The interview aired after a movie that was based on a true story of a very, very sad abduction, rape, the whole nine yards done to a woman of 17 years old. She was a 17 year old when her dad abducted her right before her 18th birthday and then held her captive in a dungeon bomb shelter for 24 years, telling his wife and her sister that she had run away. It was a really hard movie to watch and then right after this there were these tidbits of some of my interview as well as another survivor of abduction. My response to it was pretty intense and heavy, I was talking to my team about it and the impacts of me talking so openly about my experience of child abuse and how it continues to affect me in some of my close relationships. Our Communications Director, her name is Lyndsay, and she is just amazing. I just really, really love her and I feel like she sees through me. She made a suggestion on us doing a podcast to follow up with that so Lyndsay is my guest today. Hi Lyndsay. 

>> Lyndsay: Hello! 

>> Lori: You’ve all met Lyndsay on a previous podcast when we were introducing our team and I just love that you’re here and we’re going to do this. We’re just going to have a conversation and she’s going to kind of lead the way and talk me through this I suppose 

>> Lyndsay: Yeah, Lori I don’t think I thank you enough for how much you’ve made speaking out about your experience a part of your life because as a survivor myself, I don’t speak as much. I try not to. I’ve taken a position and I do what I can to work towards prevention and preventing future generations from abuse but it’s hard for me to discuss my own story so I really admire what you’ve done. I know that both of our experiences are also reflected in other survivors too so there are so many benefits of speaking out, as I’m sure we’ll get into there are lots of cons too so I want you to know how much I appreciate your willingness to be vulnerable in that space because it’s so needed. 

>> Lori: Thanks Lyndsay. 

>> Lyndsay: Yeah, so with that said I think it would be really important to let us know your emotions as you go into this experience, being willing to put your most vulnerable moment out on national television. You know a lot of people are going to be watching and you can’t control how the story will be told or received or the impact it’ll have on your life or your relationships so when you got the invitation to come on Lifetime, how did you feel? What were your thoughts when you were first considering saying yes? 

>> Lori: That’s a great question and I think what’s interesting is I try to live very humbly so I’m going to be as authentic as I can. It definitely is both. My first response is pretty ego driven and naturally, cool, maybe I am special. Somebody reached out and cares about me. So it’s that feeling that all of us just want to matter. Every time I get a request to be a speaker at a conference or event or on a national network, it definitely feeds into me feeling like I matter which is ego driven but it’s a real human experience. So that is there and the other emotion that is the underbelly of it is fear, right? Okay well maybe this time the national audience will hear it in the way I hope they will. I call it the graduation mentality. As soon as I graduate, the floodgates are going to open and I’m going to get all these job offers. I graduated on a Saturday and the next day was a Sunday and there were no job offers so I continue to have this fantasy that maybe this time I’ll have a platform and people will really hear it. I live with such an intense amount of hope. It can be a little delusional at times, it can be more of a fantasy than a reality. 

>> Lyndsay: I have two thoughts. The ego piece – I don’t know if it’s egotistical to have a part of your life be seen and acknowledged. Like if we were to replace this experience with something different, like breast cancer for instance because our position that child abuse is a preventative health problem, would it be egotistical for somebody who’s experiencing that to acknowledge it and work towards solutions, I’m not sure.  

>> Lori: I’ll respond to that first. I want to let our listeners know that I did not pay Lyndsay to say that [laughs] Dick will be known to say ‘the preceding was a paid political endorsement’ and also I appreciate you saying that. I think you’re right. Considering that culturally we just don’t talk about abuse, it feels ego driven because it’s filled with shame. I have a lot of shame talking about my experience and I’ve been shamed for talking about it. I’ve had people – not a lot of people, a small few – say ‘when are you going to get over it, when are you going to stop talking about it?’ My fear is that maybe just a couple people are saying it but there are more and more people that feel it. Then I feel shameful and I feel like it is ego driven, I am looking for validation and that’s not necessarily true. I know that if I could undo it, I would. I wouldn’t wish this on anybody and I feel like I did not get this hand dealt to me for naught. If I do nothing with it and go on my merry way, which I’ve done. I did that for a minute and it felt really nice but it felt like my bigger purpose wasn’t being served. I wish I could not but I know that I have a goal and my goal is to help other people who’ve experienced this know that they’re okay and they’re not alone. 

>> Lyndsay: When you say you hope maybe this will be the time your story is received well, in a perfect world what would that look like? What would the reaction be from somebody sitting on their couch several states away, what would their reaction be when they see your story? 

>> Lori: I think that one of the things I noticed this weekend – and I don’t in any way want to take away from the message that Lifetime was putting out because they have a job to do and a story to do, but while it was a very challenging movie to watch, they did what they needed to do. I feel like our media and culture leans into the extreme stories and extreme cases way more, for whatever reason whether for ratings or viewers or shock, that’s what ignites people. I don’t know necessarily where that is all driven from and I find that it minimizes the story of everybody else and allows us to differentiate ourselves from one another. There are horrific stories out there like mine and Elizabeth Smart and Katie Beers and I apologize, I can’t think of the name of the woman in the movie Girl in the Basement, I think it was Sarah. But there are a lot of those horrific abduction and that is not the most common form of child abuse in any way, shape or form. Neither, in my opinion, based on this life I’ve lived and the number of people who have shared their experience with me. More people than not tell me they had no involvement with police, child welfare or social services, no involvement with therapists or anything like that. There abuse took place in their home with an uncle, cousin, grandfather, with the person in their family or life that they trusted whether it was a coach or teacher or some adult that used their power to harm that child sexually, psychologically, neglect-wise, it doesn’t matter. I’ve had more people tell me that than that they had an open child welfare case or their parents were being worked through the family courts for child abuse. So that leads me to believe there are tens of millions of us. People are so afraid to say what they went through was child abuse. As an example of that there was a really hard article written recently in the Washington Post by Emma Brown and it was exceptionally well-done. She did a really good job. It’s not all that often that I have to pause for a long time after I read something and I paused because the article was about abuse to boys and how peer-to-peer sexual violence, assault, abuse or taunting is so common and prevalent specifically in young men. The article was about these younger boys – the freshman group- their role was to be the receivers from the older group, and there was this whole bystander group that’d already been abused and just had to sit there and watch it. They did not call any of that abuse. Even the communities rallied around the coaches, athletic department saying that it’s just hazing and that’s what happens. It’s been going on for so long and it just sickens me as a culture we’re still there. Going back to your question of what the ideal response would be, the ideal would be that we stop saying ‘that wasn’t that bad.’ Just because your mom wasn’t available to supervise you from age 2 – 15 because she was working 12 hours a day, it wasn’t that bad. Just because you grew up being physically abused or disciplined by your parents for all these years, it wasn’t that bad. I’ve been told that I was so young I can’t remember my abduction in great detail so therefore it didn’t even really happen to me and it wasn’t that bad, or just because I was abused by my abductor for the period of time I was, it wasn’t a lifetime. Talk about victim shaming. Talk about robbing people of their experiences. I don’t want to blame the people that are saying these things. That’s not the message either. The message is that more of us than not are impacted by this. As soon as we stop judging one another and telling each other to be quiet or trying to get our stories to be the stories of the people we love who were harmed, I feel like we’re going to create a space that feels safe for people to feel heard, that’s all I really want. Every time I get an opportunity to speak on a national platform that’s what I hope for, maybe they’ll hear me and it hasn’t happened yet. 

>> Lyndsay: It sounds like if consumers on a cultural level, when you’re consuming a story about someone who experienced child abuse and wants to speak out about it, if we could all agree this is not the time for us all to be the jury and decide the degree to which the person has a right to feel like they were the victim of a crime because that’s not really the question. It’s not ‘how bad was it? Did it even happen? Does it matter, should we even think about it?’ Let’s toss all of those aside and as Dick always says, if you don’t understand someone’s behavior you don’t have enough history so maybe we need to be more critical consumers of this story and start asking questions. Let’s learn more about this perpetrator, let’s learn more about the societal systems that enabled this abuse to take place. 

>> Lori: As a culture we perpetuate abuse by asking people to stop talking about it and telling people to get over it. Essentially that’s what our abusers want. They count on our society silencing one another and simply by that silence it creates a level of unworthiness within the person that their story isn’t worthy of sharing or owning or identifying with. There’s so much shame around it. Did I cause it? Is it my fault? Did I deserve it? Why didn’t I stop it? Why did I let it go on for so long? Did anybody else know about it? Why didn’t they stop it? Is this what families really do? All of it. We also oftentimes do what we learn and it all can feed into itself. If we can let one another know that doesn’t have to be the answer, that doesn’t have to be the way we raise our children or how we support or protect our friends’ kids. I think we’ve gotten so, so much better from the 60s and 70s. At least we’re talking about it now but the average age for a woman to share her sexual abuse story is 52 and that is a problem. That is a long life of living with a secret that is not theirs to be a burden.  

>> Lyndsay: I wanted to know more about how it felt for you when you were watching your interview this weekend. Where were you, set the scene in my mind. What were you doing, what were you wearing, did you eat snacks [laughs? 

>> Lori: [laughs] Awesome. So we’d had dinner and my partner and I – this is the first time I’ve ever been in a relationship where my partner is able to be there with me. Not because it’s not hard on him because I know that hearing my story is really hard for him and it’s been hard for previous relationships I’ve been in. So at first, I’d asked my kids. They love watching my interviews and they’re very proud of the work I do. So sometimes I invite them in. I painted the scene about the story, this is what this girl went through and about four minutes in my daughters said nope and they just couldn’t. We were all on the same page but it was just my partner and he had a really tough time watching the movie. He asked how long is this a few times. He’s this big, macho, muscular guy so none of that takes away that he’s also an emotional soul and these kinds of things are hard for him to see and hear. That was the stage and it was taxing on him and me to watch the movie first but when he saw me on the screen he grabbed my hand and scooted closer to me right at the beginning and I got super anxious. My stomach went into knots because you just never know what they’re going to say, how they’re going to twist it. There was another interview I did recently that I think was a really good show and great interview but I was not at all expecting what I saw. So that was just two weeks ago so this one I had that same anxiousness. What were they going to say, how were they going to edit the hours and hours of filming we did into however long the segment would be. I thought the segment would be an hour but it was like ten minutes. It was myself and Katie Beers who is also an abduction survivor. Anyhow so that’s the stage, we’d just eaten dinner. I don’t remember what I ate but my partner cooks and is a really good chef so that was nice. I had a glass of ice water and that was it. Then when I saw myself on the screen I was unrecognizable. I looked at myself and saw a really ugly person. Physically ugly but my facial expressions shocked me because the facial expressions that came with the edited words I said felt ego driven and all knowing and not as soft and nurturing as I really, really try and pride myself on being because I know what it feels like to not be loved for being who I am and I never want anybody to feel that way so when I saw myself on that screen and heard the things I was saying I felt like I was that all-knowing person telling people what to do instead of setting the stage of inviting people into the space of doing something with me. I felt really unattractive both emotionally and physically then I was speechless. Anybody who’s listened to this podcast, I am not a speechless person [laughs] and my partner looked at me and said ‘that was beautiful, you did a great job, how do you feel?’ and I just started sobbing. Not because Lifetime did a bad job but because it doesn’t change. No matter how much I want it to be different, it’s not working. I thought I’m three years into this, everybody in the world should be signing up and showing up to our Walk in the fall and everybody’s going to be on board, right? And they’re not going to be on board with that kind of messaging. 

>> Lyndsay: The first thing that strikes me, I think a lot of people, men and women but women especially, there’s a lot of pressure put on us that we have to look beautiful all the time. And I know how it feels to catch yourself in that Zoom frame or walk by a mirror and think who is that? [laughs] So, I just don’t know how it feels to have that moment where it’s not the mirror you’re looking into where you have that moment but it’s the TV that’s being broadcast nationwide in permanence because things never die on the internet. I can’t really put myself in your shoes there but I can imagine, I don’t want to use this phrase lightly but it’s kind of traumatizing I would imagine, to experience that, judging yourself for that. It’s just a really intense feeling to have especially when you’re being really vulnerable. 

>> Lori: This is probably the first time naming this out loud, but I’ve had body image issues for the better part of 20 years now starting when I was 20. I used to be really slender and what we see in magazines and the news and models and actresses. I had a really beautiful figure and it was commented on almost on a daily basis. At 20 something changed when I met a significant other and they commented about my weight in a really different way. I started putting on weight pretty instantly and my weight has been my barrier between me and the world, keeping people away from me. Almost like if I’m not physically attractive maybe they won’t hurt me. I’ve struggled with that for a really long time and even with being single after my divorce, and in dating I’ve had two people I’ve dated comment about my weight and there’s a lot of shame in that. So seeing myself on the screen with my body, it took my self-image to a whole other level of an issue this weekend and I have to reach out to my support system and ground myself again because beating myself up in that regard isn’t good for me either. The layers just don’t stop. As I’m saying this out loud, it’s almost like how people question our celebrities. ‘If you don’t like the attention than maybe you shouldn’t have become a celebrity.’ The thing that went through my mind just a moment ago is ‘why are you even talking on a public level? You’ll be lucky if anyone even listens to this podcast and ever invites you again.’ 

>> Lyndsay: I think you’re just adding on another layer of shame as we’re breaking down all the levels [laughs] 

>> Lori: [laughs] I need Rene Brown in my room right now, I need her in this office because it’s intense. We all are our worst critic and I just take it and take it. sometimes it’s like I might as well be my critic because I know that other people will too. Then I’m like no, everybody is their own worst critic and my voice is pretty close to what a few close people have said to me and I think if they can say it than it must be true. 

>> Lyndsay: well I don’t think that there’s legitimacy behind this idea that if you’re going to be put in the spotlight you have to enjoy every second of it. That’s kind of abusive to say you have to enjoy everything and you don’t get to have an authentic concern about your own experience. That’s what we demand of celebrities, especially now, that they be undyingly authentic, open, vulnerable, unless it’s something that would require us to change how we do things. I think that it’s important to have this conversation because if we want people to keep talking about child abuse, which is something we need to bring it to the forefront of the national conversation so people can start thinking about what we need to end it and protect future children, we need to figure out how to do it better. What we’re doing right now isn’t working because if you’re a representative of the demographic who chooses to speak out and goes through these experiences of shame upon sham, what we’re going to do is that people who speak out or are willing to speak out are extinct. That’s not the thing we want to end, it’s the opposite. 

>> Lori: Well I think on other levels, we invite one another – those who are willing to speak out, or are in the public eye – we invite that and then we get mad at them for getting it wrong. That’s also a really big fear of mine. I’m not always going to say the right thing and there is this whole fear, especially right now. We are accosting one another, demanding people’s jobs who have gotten it wrong and then who apologize but then the apology isn’t accepted. It’s too late, you’re not smart. It’s not even that you’re not smart, it’s like we don’t accept your apology or imperfection. The pressure for us all to not show our imperfections when our abuse stories are honestly a huge part of our imperfections. It’s not my imperfections but it’s an imperfection that happened to me. When we don’t allow somebody to screw up and they said the wrong thing, especially as we’re trying really hard culturally to create new language about what we can say and interact and how to embrace our differences, we’re going to have people that are going to make mistakes so why on earth would we allow for each other to hear our abuse stories and our worst secrets. These are our most shameful experiences and that is scary, you know. I’m afraid I’m going to make a mistake and not be forgiven. If there isn’t a platform for that, how can I even expect there’s a platform for me to share my dark side. 

>> Lyndsay: Something you just said made me think any story of child abuse is only imperfection. If what we strive so hard to be – and this is the expectation especially on social media – to be perfect because you want to be perceived as best you can which is part of what keeps me from explaining the explicit details of my own story is that it makes me less perfect in the eyes of somebody else, especially someone who won’t have the understanding or capacity that maybe this is all I’ll be when they look at me. That’s really scary to think about but every abuse story, that’s all it is – imperfection. It’s imperfect relationships, treatment of children, response to that. That’s what we’re talking about, it’s only imperfection. So with a culture that’s uncomfortable discussing imperfections it makes a lot of sense that we have a hard time talking about this. 

>> Lori: Thank you for saying that. There’s such a demand – I even said it like ten minutes ago – we should be further along. We should have gotten this. Everybody should be following us now. There’s a lot of ‘should’ that should be happening but I look at it like I’m really grateful that I am a woman and I’m a leader and executive. I’m in 2021 and I’m on a screen with another woman talking about things that are pretty taboo and we’re going to post this publicly for anybody and everybody to listen to if they want to. That would not have been the case 50, 60 years ago. Granted we’ve got a lot to do. Let’s pick up the speed a little bit, right [laughs]? Hit the one on the right. That’s just my hope. While there is a lot of imperfection there’s a lot of growth that’s occurred and I’m glad for that too. 

>> Lyndsay: Me too. There are so many larger issues that this one issue is connected to, this one issue of how it feels to go super public with your story. The other issue that I’m thinking of is this idea that technology and media, we know can be really amazing tools for human connection and cultivating and understanding of how to connect and appreciate and be more compassionate towards one another but it often is not. When I was in graduate school I studied how storytelling can be used to promote empathy and how video specifically can be used to do that. Why don’t we do more of that? Is there a way for us to tell stories of survivors of abuse in such a way that people watch it and come away with it with an understanding that this is a preventable issue and we should be more compassionate towards everyone involved in that situation. What are we doing wrong that that’s not where we’re landing when we tell these stories?  

>> Lori: I don’t know that I have that answer but I love that thought and I love that way of thinking. A thought that comes to mind in response to it –  

>> Lyndsay: Like it’s related to social media, that it should be that experience that you can jump on and connect with all your friends and have a great time but it’s not that all the time so how can we restructure our approach to all these tools are our disposal in a way that makes us more human rather than less human? 

>> Lori: For sure well I think that a lot of it leads back to mattering. I’d say 92% of the population, live on the bar. There’s a percentage of the population that need us and count on us taking care of and helping and doing that then there’s everybody else that just wants to fit in and not be noticed and belong. Then there’s 1% of us, which feels like where I live and I have always been that way since I was a very little girl. I’ve always been on the outside, and not from a bad lens. I never wanted to be a part of the group in part because I never wanted to get kicked out of it, I was in a group once and I got kicked out by my best friends and 20 years later they made amends for it because they felt bad about it but I’ve never belonged and just want to matter so I think that when we put ourselves out there and share our darkest secrets and imperfections the fear is that nobody is going to catch us especially when our experiences and imperfections, when those originate from the people who are supposed to love and protect us the most. So when there’s intrafamilial abuse or by somebody we very much trust, it is even harder for those people to share those experiences because our moms, siblings, aunts, uncles, coaches, teachers are supposed to be the ones that protect and believe in us. This weekend I asked people very close to me to just believe in me because I don’t feel like they do. Whether they think they do doesn’t matter, I don’t feel like they do and it doesn’t mean they’re doing it wrong. It’s just my experience. That’s all I ask and I think that’s all we ask and I think that’s why we don’t share. We just want people to believe in us and when you share your story with someone and they look at you with wide eyes and they have nothing to say and all the sudden they have to go to the bathroom you know you’ve made them uncomfortable and now all the sudden you’re the outlier and that has certainly happened to me before. 

>> Lyndsay: Well what I think is you are brave and that is beautiful. No matter what deception the lighting of the situation is doing or the camera lens, what you are willing to say and do with your voice is really incredible and inspiring to me so I hope that we can find a way, someday, that your story can continue to be told in a way that is not just for consumption for people to be horrified by for a second and then move on.  

>> Lori: And not as sacrificial, that would be nice. I hope so too, Lyndsay, I really do. 

>> Lyndsay: So how are you feeling now? This aired on Saturday, you’ve had all of 36 hours to think about it 

>> Lori: I should be better right? And honestly I do feel better today. I feel like yesterday I came to a much better space moving forward working with more of that national media platform and even just media in general. The intention I know is good and the outcome never seems to meet what I dream and plan it to and it causes a lot of harm in my world and that’s hard. The bigger story is that the impacts of those stories are so much bigger. Today though I feel good, I feel decided upon in some of that in what my plan is going forward. The bigger message is not about the extreme stories, it’s about everybody’s story. There is no difference between us and them and everybody has a story, and there’s more of us than them. More of us than not have experienced being maltreated. That’s a much safer way of calling abuse and neglect, abuse and neglect. I think it impacts a lot more of us than we let on. So I feel better today, stronger today. A cousin of mine posted on my Facebook page this weekend that Sarah Borrealis, I want to see you be brave. I’m so bad with names but it’s the Brave song, and when you said you think I’m brave, it kind of feels like my theme song right song. ‘Say what you wanna say’ is one of the lines in it and it just feels like it’s right so today I’m good. It’s Monday, starting a new week, it’s sunny and life is good. 

>> Lyndsay: If it were one of your own daughters going through this experience, and you witnessed that whole emotional journey of going from the beginning to where you are now, what would you say to one of them? 

>> Lori: W3ell first of all, I’d do what I did yesterday. I have a daughter – both my girls are incredible human beings as well as my son – she is a gymnast and she didn’t do as good as she wanted to do because she got third place instead of first in overall gymnastics and she just cried and cried. I had to open the garage door to let her inside because she didn’t want anybody in the house to see her. She went straight to her room and I asked her permission if I could come and I just held her and didn’t say anything for about fifteen minutes, I just let her cry in my arms. I just held her the way I would when she was a baby and I talked about how I held her when she was a baby and fit perfectly in my arms and then I started talking about how we can’t be the best at everything and that’s what helps us grow. It’s such an honor when we give everything we have and somebody else beats us. We can walk out of that game or walk out of that experience and say great job. I gave it everything I had and you took me, great job. That feels very different than blaming those judges and that ref. It’s such a different message so I said all that to her and just laid there for an hour talking and going back and forth and then she was better and helped me organize my laundry room for four hours and so I would do that again if I knew my daughter was hurting the way I was hurting this weekend, I would do exactly what I did. That’s what I try to do in the world and that’s what my partner did for me, he just held me. I did not hug him back, he just held me because I wanted to push him away because I was hurting. Thanks for that question. 

>> Lyndsay: I heard that somewhere and it’s always stuck with me because to me that’s such an actionable way to combat my inner critic / myself because there’s things that I say and think about myself that I would never, ever even think to say to someone else I love so I just sometimes have to step back and think about how I can be a more compassionate version of myself to myself. 

>> Lori: Agreed 

>> Lyndsay: Well do you have any other thoughts on this Lifetime experience that will probably stick with you for a lifetime? 

>> Lori: [laughs] Yeah I think that’s a wrap. I appreciate you asking me these questions and kind of processing out loud what the experience is like. I just want to thank all of our listeners for listening today and listening to my vulnerability and Lyndsay’s authenticity. We’re just two people trying to do right by the world here and we’d love for anybody who’s interested to join us so thank you all so much for joining us today. This is the Louder Than Silence podcast, we’ve got Lyndsay Lack, our Communications Director here at EndCAN, and until next time take care everybody. Bye bye. 

>> Lori: I want to thank each of you again for joining us today and listening in. If you or someone you know is being abused, please call 1-800-4-A-CHILD. To learn more about EndCAN, visit www.endcan.org or find us on all social media platforms. Join us in being Louder than Silence and being a part of the change. Please leave a comment, like our podcast, or share with your friends. The more the word spreads, the more of a collective impact we can have. If you have a question or you know someone who would want to be a guest on our podcast, please contact bethechange@endcan.org. Thanks again, and have a great day. 

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