feminism is a trauma response
Activism is a trauma response.
The first definition of “activate” is to make reactive or more reactive. Activism is a reaction. It is a reaction that comes from a person that has had a painful experience with an issue; we can call this trauma. Our trauma informs the way we react to things, the way we respond—until we know better. I responded by becoming an activist. I am a doer. I am always activated. The most well-known and researched responses to trauma are: fight, flight, freeze and now fawn. While most of us resort to all of these in some form, we tend toward one response more than others. I am a workaholic. I am achievement driven. I am my own greatest critic, constantly telling myself to do more and do better, be more and be better. I am never enough. There is always another place to go and be, an achievement to be made. An activist has a cause, a purpose, a reason to keep going. An activist is always in flight. Our mission is to save the world. The truth is we are really trying to save ourselves—save ourselves from the trauma.
My attraction to feminism was inevitable. Feminism at its core is a response to trauma—a toxic patriarchal society. Women who identify as feminist are standing up and saying no to being left out, ignored, minimized, objectified, patronized, vilified, fetishized, sexualized, purified, and de-humanized. Our lives, as women, under siege by patriarchy, are traumatizing. We learn to live with it; we learn to cope. Most of us succumb to the power of the patriarchy and respond by fawning—people pleasing. Then there are those of us who respond by reacting. We act up and act out. We are in perpetual fight or flight mode. For many of us activists, the public trauma imposed on us by the system of patriarchy is hard, but it’s the trauma in our private lives that causes us to react. I am not afraid to act. I have been doing my whole life—mostly because I have had to. I have never felt secure in the hands of another.
That is what childhood sexual abuse does. For most of us, the ones who are closest to us who have abused us, abused our trust. We have trust issues, thus, control issues. We need to be in control. We did not have control as children, and as adults, we are looking to feel safe and secure. We fight off any perceived danger. For those of us who become activists, we fight like hell for others. We are empaths. We feel the pain of others because their stories are all too familiar. We carry your secrets and we bring them to the light. If we are honest, we recognize it is not the other who needs saving. We are saving ourselves from the trauma.
From the time I was seven years old until I was fourteen, I endured sexual trauma. Even now, I feel guilty calling it trauma. There wasn’t force, or physical pain or violence. I wasn’t threatened. It just happened, and it happened again, and again, and again for seven years. It occurs to me, as I write this, thirty-two years later, I am denying the truth. It was force; I was a child. There was pain; it lives on in my nervous system today. It was violent. My boundaries, my body, my space, my humanity was violated; that’s violence. I never gave permission. I never said yes. But I never said no, either. I was silent, and in the silence, there is shame.
Childhood sexual trauma leaves us deficient. We move through the world with blurred lines and broken boundaries. We experienced sex too soon without the pleasure and autonomy. Sex then becomes this very confusing place of both shame and desire. As adults, we often become very promiscuous or repressed and frigid. Neither of those extremes allow for a healthy adult sex life and intimate relationships. Intimacy is about trust, and it is difficult to trust when appropriate relationships were not formed in childhood. All of my adult intimate relationships were deficient or inappropriate—sometimes both.
More than any other, I have relied on the flight response. I am a workaholic. It is through work I experience wins. I am good at work. I am good at doing and creating. I am not so good at being. As a child, simply being and existing made me a target of other people’s pain. Simply being feels passive. I abhor passivity. I am an activist. Activism is either reactive or proactive. Either way, it involves action.
Being a feminist, for me, means being on constant alert. It’s the lens I use most often to see the world. My gender identity has been more of a detriment than my racial category. In some ways, I have transcended my racial category. I have learned to navigate White spaces with language. I have mastered the art of talking white. As the nice Jewish fella I met online said, “You sound Whiter than me.” My ex-husband once said to me, “You are the whitest Black girl I’ve ever met.” Transcending race, to some degree, has never been difficult for me. But my gender, my identification as a woman with a vagina, has plagued me my entire life.
My vagina has been a place of both unthinkable pain and incredible power. I learned very early that I have something that men want. But I also understood the power imbalance. I knew that if I wasn’t careful my vagina could be taken from me without my permission—again. I knew I was physically the weaker sex. To account for that, I spent my time learning. I focused on being smart. I vowed to never let a man outsmart me. I did not want to be perceived as the weaker sex. This led to the construction of a wall I built around myself. A wall of invincibility. I became the proverbial Strong Black Woman. The Strong Black Woman persona poses many problems for the sexual abuse survivor. A large part of me walks through the world with shame. I want to avert my eyes and put my head down. But the Strong Black Woman part of me silences the shame. Shame is weak. Shame is vulnerable. Shame is penetrable. The wall I have constructed is a wall of silence. I have silenced all that is weak in me. Feminist activism has allowed me to be strong, to appear strong, to feel strong. But it has diminished my humanity: the weakness, vulnerability, and penetrability.
The Strong Black Woman is a persona we create out of necessity. She is an archetype. Our experiences call for protection, and the Strong Black Woman swoops down and protects us from the abuse; it protects us from the trauma–generations of trauma inflicted on our bodies and on our spirits. She protects us when it seems no one else will. She is me. I am The Strong Black Woman. I am a feminist. I am an activist. I am a fighter. In my flawed and unreliable reality, I am alone in the world. My experiences have shaped my beliefs about others. Others are not there when I need them. As a little girl, a wife and a mother, I thought I was alone. I was not. The Strong Black Woman was there. She saved me from myself. She saved me from the trauma. I need her.
The Strong Black Woman is the quintessence of feminism, but the Strong Black Woman lives on the surface and in the moment. Like all trauma responses, she is meant to be temporary. She is the mask. Underneath, I am fragile. Like glass, I am strong, yet breakable. The assumptions made about me as a Black woman are oppressive. They keep me in a box. Strength is my constitution, but so is vulnerability. I need the world to see my vulnerability. I need you to see my vulnerability. I need you to see me as human.