Late January, U.S. Representative Ayanna Pressley stirred national media by sharing her sexual abuse survivor story, contributing to an essay collection on believing survivors. Unexpected tears of pride filled my eyes when I read her words, “we [survivors] belong everywhere.” For a Congresswoman who confronts abuses of power in every room she enters, this claiming of space is a radical act. Instead of labeling her trauma a liability, she frames it as a guide.
Pressley’s stance is a subversion of the narrative on survivorship, and I believe that this perception of trauma holds a lesson for everyone, not just survivors.
Like Pressley, I use the trauma of my childhood sexual abuse as a guide. The incest I endured at home left no lasting outward marks. I was lucky to escape at seven years old, when a judge cut off joint custody rights in a harrowing divorce process. I did not escape unmarred. I’ve spent all my life recovering.
After years of poring over the neuroscience research on its aftereffects, I think that survivors commonly become allergic to perversity. We are aware, to a sickening degree, of the lengths to which an adult will abuse someone else, so our bodies use disgust to warn us whenever we are in danger. Perversity becomes a sense we can’t shed. And due to the social taboos surrounding this violence, our bodies have few ways to express this repulsion, often turning it inward.
Scientists are acknowledging a growing connection between childhood abuse and autoimmune disorders in adulthood, including alopecia, a condition that Pressley revealed in January that she’s recently acquired. While I don’t know Pressley’s medical history, her alopecia could be one way her body is responding to the injustices she is fighting daily.
For those of us survivors whose bodies revolt, it’s not just that we are experiencing random medicalized dysfunctions. We are reacting to the toxicity surrounding us.
I choose these words with care to reflect neuroscience’s solidifying understanding of how emotions impact our bodily functions, including the role that disgust plays in immunity. In neuroanatomy, exteroception and interoception are two key emerging concepts that map these dynamics. Our exteroception coordinates our five major senses to help us experience our environment. Our interoception manages the connections between all the body’s internal organs and the brain. Through interoception, we know when our stomach is empty or our bladder is full.
In short, our interoception marshals our internal responses based on what our exteroception is picking up. If we ate a poisonous mushroom, it would induce us to vomit. If we see a possible predator, it propels us into fighting, fleeing, or freezing. Science is also exploring how interoception forms the foundation of intuition.
Survivors move in a waking nightmare where our interoception is telling us a confounding truth: abuse shows up everywhere. Yet, this knowledge is so painful to bear that the trauma of containing it results in our bodies finding ways to destroy or disconnect from their own alarm systems.
The medical establishment calls some of these well-known methods by names like PTSD, depression, OCD. I view them as coping mechanisms in a culture intent on keeping survivors immured. Our silence costs us.
After years of waking up screaming from nightmares, I myself was finally diagnosed with complex PTSD. I had been doing talk therapy on and off since high school, but it only half-worked. It took bouncing around several psych wards, and a few carousel rounds on different psychotropic cocktails, before I found a seasoned somatics therapist who accurately ascribed my condition to survival tactics in a society that willfully covers up wrongdoing.
Pressley impresses me because she models how to consistently shatter this silence, even though she faces enmity along the way. Every day, as a survivor, she walks among people so inebriated with entitlement over other’s bodies that the evidence of their intentional abuse is plain even as they flood our newsfeeds with lies. As a Congresswoman, she is privy to acts of abuse cordoned off from the public, thanks to national security clearances or because they occur in rooms where cameras cannot record. She also walks the halls of this country’s most historically anti-Black institution, a body that codified slavery and legislated its progeny, Jim Crow and Mass Incarceration, into existence.
It’s a wonder she maintains such composure.
Pressley is right that survivors belong everywhere; we already are everywhere. Therein lies our power, if we step into it. Our bodies can detect perversion no matter the level of duplicity hiding it. This matters for more than just us survivors, but for anyone exposed to any kind of exploitation or manipulation.
Your instincts will tell you the truth, no matter who is lying or denying. Your body is wired to be your alarm bell of protection.
Your intuition isn’t just some figment of your imagination, it is a part of your physiological design.
If you listen to it, it is your most powerful guide. It will disabuse you of anyone’s untoward behaviors, and that is a form of freedom no one can suppress.
Suggested Readings (with caveats):
Resmaa Menakem, My Grandmother’s Hands, 2017
Resmaa is a Black therapist who has studied with the leading Western trauma researchers and has written a book on healing from racialized trauma. His book is most powerful in introducing his concept of “white body supremacy” into the literature and describing how it regulates everyone’s nervous systems. While he does an incredible job of weaving the history of colonization with intergenerational trauma, he also spends large portions of his book discussing how to improve relations between cops and communities of color. When I suggest others read his book, I recommend it for his insights on the psychology of trauma, rather than his ideas for police reform.
Generative Somatics, “Trauma, Healing & Collective Power“, 2019
Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha, Care Work: Dreaming Disability Justice, 2018
Muscle Medicine, “What is the Polyvagal Theory?,” 2019
This podcast is purely about the science of the nervous system with an in-depth interview with Porges that gives a great overview of his research (note: rape is discussed; there are a few cringeworthy comparisons he makes about academia)
