October is Sexual Assault Awareness Month Healing After Trauma with Help from HER: Part I

We Are HER is a non-profit based out of Cardwell that helps survivors of abuse or assault heal after trauma. Today I’d like to discuss healing. While I won’t get into any explicit details on trauma, I do want to issue a trigger warning to those in the audience as I will be defining different aspects of intimate partner violence.

But first, I want to start by defining what a survivor is. Before I started doing this work, I remember my college showed us a PSA of a survivor. This woman had a black eye and tears running down her face. This is typically what we think of when we think of the word survivor: a severely battered woman who often makes a mad dash for her keys and escapes with her kids.

And, yes, that can be a survivor. But being a survivor is more nuanced than that. The way we define abuse and violence is so limited. And every state legally defines it differently. Montana acknowledges sexual abuse and intimate partner violence as a partner or family member assault. However, those legal definitions don’t acknowledge the psychological, emotional, verbal, or financial abuse survivors endure.

It’s important to remember that domestic violence is not one single act. Domestic violence, by definition, is a pattern of abusive behaviors in any relationship that is used by one partner to gain or maintain power and control over another intimate partner.

A powerful quote on abuse is from Dr. James D. Gill: The act of love is to say: I want you to be who you are. The act of abuse is to say: I want you to be who I want you to be.

It’s also important to know that everyone can experience abuse. Abuse doesn’t apply to only one gender or people of a certain religion or socioeconomic status. It can happen to anyone. Montana reports that 37 percent of women and 35 percent of men have experienced physical or sexual violence. It’s reported that law enforcement officers in Montana respond to a domestic violence-related call every 1.75 hours.

We often treat domestic violence in the same way we address disaster relief. If you leave an abusive relationship, you oftentimes have access to temporary shelter, a temporary restraining order, or temporary legal assistance. Everything is very short-term focused. We treat domestic violence as if the problem happened over days or weeks when, in reality, domestic violence happens over years or generations. All we have at this moment is very concentrated surface-level support at a moment of acute crisis.

Here’s the question I want to address today: How can we help survivors months, years, or decades after they’ve left an abusive situation?

I asked this question for the first time in 2016. I am a survivor myself, and after receiving some of those short-term services in my moment of crisis, I realized there was nothing else for me.

The CDC estimates that intimate partner violence will cost a female survivor $140,000. So, at the age of 24, I found myself in debt, isolated from friends and family, diagnosed with PTSD, and no more resources for me. My adulthood had just started, but it felt like my life was over.

We, as a society, do not have a robust ecosystem of support for survivors. And at 24 years old, I knew that.

I started We Are HER in 2016 to address the problems I was facing. I wanted survivors to have community care, access to trauma recovery education, and the ability to share their stories. At first, We Are HER started as a blog where survivors could share their stories anonymously online. After a few months, we had several hundred writers from across the globe submitting their stories. And this was before the Me Too Movement gained traction in 2017. Back then, people weren’t talking about being a survivor. It was still too shameful. But what We Are HER did was provide survivors with the opportunity to talk about being a survivor in a safe, non-judgmental space. We listened with open hearts. We helped survivors feel seen.

I remember a survivor came to us who was in her late 50s. She was abused by her stepfather as a child. Her mother tried to take him to court, but this was in the 1970s, and nothing was done. For her whole life, she said she carried that burden of shame with her. We Are HER helped her understand that she deserved healing. She deserved peace.

In 2018, we became a nonprofit and greatly expanded our services. We offer story-sharing opportunities on our podcast, survivor meetups, educational workshops, mental health scholarships, and a survivor retreat. We offer these services because they are focused on shedding shame and creating a safe space, two things backed by research that contributes to lasting healing.

Over and over and over again, I hear the same thing from survivors: no one else is offering this kind of support.

And I know why. Healing is hard. The concept of healing is elusive. Time and time again, I hear survivors plead, “Just tell me how to heal,” they beg. Unfortunately, there is no manual on how to heal. There is no secret formula. Dedicating a whole nonprofit to the concept of healing means we’ll see lots of ebbs and flows and ups and downs. People will experience pain and hurt many times in their lives. But what we do is help them become more resilient, so they have the tools to work through their pain and hurt. They can rely on the community support they’ve received, the trauma recovery education, and the confidence to share their story.

Learn more about Stevie’s healing journey and We Are HER in Part II of this article next week.