Genesis The Podcast
Genesis the Podcast is a new way to connect with Genesis Women’s Shelter and Support and expand your thinking about domestic violence and related issues that affect women. GTP is also a trusted source of information if you are in an abusive relationship and need safety, shelter or support. Listen every week for fresh content related to domestic violence, to connect with world-renown professionals, participate in exclusive events and training opportunities, and take action against domestic violence.
Genesis The Podcast is hosted by Maria MacMullin, Chief Impact Officer of Genesis Women's Shelter & Support and the Host of the Podcast on Crimes Against Women.
About Genesis Women's Shelter & Support - Located in Dallas, Texas, Genesis provides safety, shelter and support for women who have experienced domestic violence, and raises awareness regarding its cause, prevalence and impact. Learn more at GenesisShelter.org
Genesis The Podcast
From Trauma to Truth: The Pathway to Justice for Survivors of Gender-Based Violence with Dr. Judith Herman
Venturing deeper into the labyrinth of trauma, we sift through the profound consequences of childhood abuse on mental and physical health, with a special emphasis on Dr. Herman's breakthrough work, "Trauma and Recovery". The discussion evolves as she introduces the four stages of recovery from trauma and her latest book, "Truth and Repair: How Trauma Survivors Envision Justice", offering valuable insights into safety, remembrance and mourning, and the power of envisioning an equitable future for trauma survivors.
Closing the conversation, we step beyond the legal system and explore the need for community validation for survivors of gender-based violence. We navigate the 'tripod approach' by Professor Diane Rosenfeld, Northwestern's peer educator program, and the societal pressure encapsulated in the 'Man Box'. This episode wraps up with a powerful discussion on forgiveness, rehabilitation, and the critical role of supporting survivors.
In 1992, dr Judith Herman published her groundbreaking work Trauma and Recovery. A long-awaited follow-up publication, truth and Repair how Trauma Survivors Envision Justice, was released in March 2023. Today, the author and psychiatrist, dr Judith Herman, joins the show to discuss her newest release and her lifelong dedication to understanding trauma and supporting survivors. I'm Maria McMullen and this is Genesis, the podcast. Judith Lewis Herman is a professor of psychiatry part-time at Harvard Medical School. For 30 years. Until she retired, she was director of training at the Victims of Violence program at the Cambridge Hospital in Cambridge, massachusetts. Dr Herman is the author of award-winning books Father, daughter, incest, and Trauma and Recovery. She is the recipient of numerous awards, including a Guggenheim Fellowship in 1984 and the 1996 Lifetime Achievement Award from the International Society for Traumatic Stress Studies. In 2007, she was named a Distinguished Life Fellow of the American Psychiatric Association. Her new book, truth and Repair how Trauma Survivors Envision Justice, was published in March 2023.
Speaker 1:Dr Herman, welcome to the show. Thank you for having me. It's a pleasure to speak with you today. I'm so excited and I, like so many others I'm sure were thrilled when I heard of your newest publication, truth and Repair, and I want to talk with you about that book and so many other things. But before we do, I want to take a look back at the past several decades, because the work you're doing now and have done over the years is really based upon some very early experiences you had in the 1970s with survivors just beginning to find their voices. Can you tell us about how your work began with the women who opened up to you and your colleagues then and since that time?
Speaker 2:Okay, well, I began my psychiatric residency in 1970. And a few months earlier I had joined a consciousness-raising group which really changed my life, and the group I was part of Red and Rose's Collective Number 9, was mostly a bunch of white upper middle-class college-educated women like me. But even in that group people talked a lot about violence, sexual violence and violence in the home.
Speaker 2:That they had experienced that. They had experienced, yes, the premise of consciousness-raising and the term. I always liked to credit my classmate and friend, kathy Emanuek, who changed her name to Kathy Sarah Child when she became a radical feminist, but she had cut her organizing teeth in the deep south in Mississippi, Freedom Summer, as an organizer for voting rights and the student on violent coordinating committee that she was part of had brought people together to talk amongst themselves about their own experiences in these, often in church basements and places they call freedom schools, and she had seen the power of people talking about their own experience as a way to organize. And she named consciousness-raising not only as a method of political organizing for women but also as a matter of scientific method. She said women don't dare to tell the truth about their lives, so we don't really know the truth about women's condition. And so if you bring women together in the group where they have safety and support and are not ashamed, they will dare to tell the truth. And that's what happened in these groups.
Speaker 2:And so I mean I remember one classmate who had been a great and still was a great beauty, and it turned out being a great beauty was not all that much fun because she was constantly harassed. We didn't even have the term sexual harassment then, but people would call her up at all hours and hit on her constantly, throw pebbles against her dorm window, so it wasn't you know. She lived in a certain amount of fear and of course she married the first man who didn't care about her looks. So when I began my residency, my very first two patients on the inpatient service where I started were women who had made serious suicide attempts, and both of them gave histories of father, daughter who incest. And I thought wait a minute, doesn't the textbook of psychiatry say that incest is extremely rare, like one case in a million? So what are you supposed to? Chances are that complete rookie would get two cases in a month.
Speaker 1:Slim none, so maybe yeah, and yet here we are right. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So tell me a little bit more about this.
Speaker 2:So I listened with the awareness that I'd gained in my consciousness raising group. And, what do you know? When they were believed and they were respected and they were not blamed and shamed, I told you know, you must be crazy, you must be making this up. They got better. So then I was kind of on the lookout for more cases and when I finished my residency I began working in a women's free storefront clinic and we saw lots more cases there Of incest, of childhood sexual abuse you know adult survivors of childhood abuse, including incest and so we decided we would collect.
Speaker 2:We just started asking around among other therapists we knew and we collected 20 cases in no time. So we decided Lisa Hirschman, who had just finished her doctorate in psychology, was a friend and colleague. We decided we would publish our findings and we didn't publish them in a psychiatric journal, because I don't think any journal would have accepted that at the time. But we published in a brand new women's studies journal and there was no such thing as going viral in those days this was free internet. But the paper got copied and handed from one person to another and we started getting letters from all over the country saying I thought I was the only one. I thought it was my fault, you know. I thought nobody would believe me. And so then we wrote a book, and the book Father Door of Harvard University Press published it, and that was the book.
Speaker 1:Father Daughter Incest in 1981. Yes, 1981.
Speaker 2:And you know, that kind of set the course of my career.
Speaker 1:It's interesting how inspired you were, based on just those experiences of survivors telling you their story. Having someone believe you in a safe space I mean you've said all the words right is the way that you get a person to open up and begin to heal, and I found it really remarkable. What you said is that these suicide attempts were sent to a psych ward in the 70s. Was that what happened to women who tried to commit suicide? Yeah, yeah, yeah they had been.
Speaker 2:They had been admitted to the psychiatric ward because they made serious suicide attempts.
Speaker 1:And had you not been there to listen and believe them, we don't know what could have happened.
Speaker 2:Well, I hate to think what could have happened.
Speaker 1:That's so interesting because I mean, the work that you and others have done has been groundbreaking. Now we've come a really long way, but we have a really long way to go to ending violence, especially sexual violence and domestic violence. Your work in the field of psychiatry with incest survivors was pivotal, and incest is one of those topics that makes people the most uncomfortable, I think. And, what's worse, incest survivors are silenced by many, even those closest to them. So I'm curious how you decided to work with this population and what it taught you about trauma. So I know a little bit about the consciousness raising and the storefront, but what did all of that teach you about trauma and cause you to continue to work with these survivors, specifically women?
Speaker 2:Well, I think what was most inspiring was that when you listened and gave validation and support, the patients got better and people who had been chronically suicidal, self-destructive, haven't been living kind of on the edge, blossomed. They got better, and so that's what you like to see as a clinician, and so that gave me, I think, a lot of encouragement to keep going with this. And then when I began I think really on the strength of that first book I began working at Cambridge Hospital, which was a Harvard Medical School teaching hospital and also a public sector hospital that took care of the poor, the undocumented, the people that nobody else wanted to take care of. And we did a my colleague Mary Harvie and I she was a community psychologist we did a survey of the clinicians there to see how many people had seen patients with histories of childhood abuse and what do you know? It was over half, and those are the ones that reported.
Speaker 2:Right, and that's without any systematic questioning. I mean because nobody knew then to ask that as part of your routine.
Speaker 1:So we could kind of guess that the number was probably higher.
Speaker 2:Oh yeah, oh yeah, oh. Now it's pretty clear. I think pretty much the majority of psychiatric patients have these histories, certain people who see the majority of certainly the great majority of people on an inpatient service, but even outpatients. And we now have very good research that documents the profound impact of childhood abuse, the childhood adversities on health, mental health, educational achievement, social complications just in terms of depression, substance abuse, chronic suicidality and health complications and things like early pregnancy, re-victimization. People who've been abused as kids are at much higher risk for sexual assault and domestic violence and sexual trafficking as teenagers and adults. I mean the consequences are profound. So I think a very good research stated now that documents that. So if you're going to be a mental health practitioner, you really do have to know trauma.
Speaker 1:You do and I mean you did an incredible job of laying out these facts in your 1992 publication, which was really a groundbreaking work Trauma and Recovery the Aftermath of Violence, from Domestic Abuse to Political Terror. In that book you introduced three stages of recovery from trauma. And then in your new book, which I'm really excited about Truth and Repair how Trauma Survivors Envision Justice you introduce what you call the fourth and final stage of recovery. So what I'd love to do is first I want everyone to go back and read trauma and recovery and then, after they do that, they should go out and get truth and repair so they can read both books, because I think that they complement each other really well. But for now, perhaps you can review those three stages of recovery you introduced in your earlier work, and how did those shape your thinking over the years to arrive at this fourth or final stage, recovery of trauma?
Speaker 2:Okay, well, when I published Trauma and Recovery in 1992, by that time we had built, mary Hardy and I had developed a trauma outpatient treatment program at Cambridge Hospital called the Victims of Violence program, and we had seen mostly survivors of sexual and domestic violence, but also we saw refugees seeking political asylum who had faced political persecution. And I was also part of a study group that had been organized by my colleague, bessel Vanderkalk, that brought together people who were working with all kinds of different trauma combat veterans, burn victims and abused kids and people from the rape crisis center in the battered women's shelter and we all met once a month in people's houses. And we also had a lot of visiting speakers who, if they were in town for to give a talk, for some of the reason Bessel would invite them to come and talk with us. And what became clear from that study group is that trauma is trauma, whether you're talking about combat veterans or political prisoners or whether you're talking about abused kids and battered women. And so the methods, of course, of control are the same and the harm that it does, the pathology it creates it is the same.
Speaker 2:So we had a body of experience from all these different populations and the first thing that everybody agreed on really was that in order for survivors to recover, they've got to be out of the situation. As long as they're still facing constant danger, they're not going to get better. They don't really have post-traumatic stress disorder. They have traumatic stress disorder that's ongoing because they're in constant danger. So the first stage of recovery really required safety, and that's a complicated social project. If you're talking about combat veterans, safety means getting them away from the front lines. If you're talking about a domestic violence victim, it means probably possibly either getting the perpetrator out of the house or getting her out of the house and the kids. So it is a complicated social and legal project.
Speaker 1:It's probably more complicated to bring a domestic violence victim to safety than it is to get a person off the front lines in combat.
Speaker 2:Probably for sure, because if you're a wounded soldier there's a system set up to evacuate Exactly. But the system didn't exist. It was basically that was a creation of the women's movement in the 70s. When I started working in Sunbelt at the free clinic, there was no battered women shopped there and there was an underground system where community women would leave their light porch lights on as a signal that if someone had to flee her home she could come there. Oh wow, there was really an underground railroad and grassroots organizers created the first great price of centers and battered women shelters, and then there was no such thing as a restraining order. So all the legal reforms and so on came out of the initiative of women's movement.
Speaker 2:So safety's stage one, and at least a sort of a defensive perimeter, so within which the person can begin to heal and begin to imagine what happened in the past is past, but it's not happening anymore. That was then, this is now, and once that's established, then the person can start to really look back at the trauma and start to process it and make meaning of it and read the losses that were involved. And so that's really what I call stage two remembrance and mourning, looking back at the past and so and getting to the point where they can say you know, it was a terrible thing that happened to me and it changed my life and I'll never be the person I might have been if this hadn't happened to me. But it also doesn't completely define who I am. I'm more than my trauma and when people sort of reach that stage, then they can kind of come back to the present and envision the future in a way that you can't even think about the future when you're under constant attack. All you're trying to think of is avoiding the next survival. But yeah, yeah, yeah, I'm placating the perpetrator and escaping, if you can. So people can become more expansive, more ambitious, more imaginative, more hopeful and they can also join with other people.
Speaker 2:And some of the best recoveries we see are in people who can make meaning out of their experience by joining with others, by saying no, I never realized this happens to so many people and it was a terrible thing. But maybe if I can do something to prevent this from happening to one other person, it won't have been entirely in vain. Maybe I could speak at us, get involved in public education or changing the laws, or maybe I can volunteer at the rape crisis center. And that's what my colleague, robert J Lifton, whose original work was with survivors of the Hiroshima atomic bomb he called this a survivor mission and he said that you know a lot of the Hiroshima survivors who saw their entire city obliterate said there's I can't.
Speaker 2:The only reason I can find for still being alive is to tell the world, you know, this could never happen again. So that's stage three, and I don't think of these. As you know, you don't frog march from one stage to the next and there's no fixed timetable. And you know it's not like you never talk about the trauma in stage one or that you never talk about the past in stage three. I mean, you know, but it's the main focus of each stage and, and I think those guidelines for therapy have held up pretty well over the last 30 years- yeah.
Speaker 1:So then we get to the fourth stage in your new book.
Speaker 2:Yeah. So I guess and that really came out of some of the work again that we did at the Victims of Violence Program with patients who did try to seek justice for the crimes that had been committed against them it was very much a minority of patients, that most patients don't tell anyone or haven't told anyone before they told us, let alone law enforcement. But there were people who had tried to hold their perpetrators accountable, sometimes for that very reasonably. We were just talking about saying, well, I couldn't live with myself If I was too chicken to speak up and then he did it to somebody else.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I think seeking justice for survivors. It takes on many forms. There's different motivations. It's not the same, just like each experience is different of trauma or abuse Seeking justice. It might seem straightforward, but it'll be a different experience and people have different expectations from justice Wishes you know.
Speaker 2:But besides, when we talk to people about whether they would consider it, many of the obstacles just had to do with fear and shame fear that they A realistic fear that they wouldn't be believed, that they would be put on trial. Basically, they would be the ones put on trial.
Speaker 1:Which still happens. It's still very much the case.
Speaker 2:Yeah, it's an adversarial system. I used to say that if you wanted to design a setting that was guaranteed to exacerbate the symptoms of post-traumatic stress disorder, the court of law would be perfect. It's an adversarial system. It's a hostile environment where you're going to be subjected to pepper with hostile questions. In the criminal justice system, there's a presumption of innocence for the perpetrator, which means basically. In practice, it means a presumption that's a victim's line, and you have no control over the situation. You can't even tell your story in your own way. You're just subject to yes or no questions and rapid fire, one after the other. Isn't it true that you had three drinks before you went?
Speaker 1:Yeah, I was thinking about asking you does achieving justice according to a survivor's expectations help heal trauma, or does this whole process inflict more trauma?
Speaker 2:Well, a lot of rape survivors who've been to court describing this as a second rape. So partly it's just the fear of that kind of confrontation, not to mention having to face the perpetrator, and a lot of people just never even want to. They never want to see his face again, or his friends, I mean. Some people are also, you know. I mean witness intimidation is a real thing, as we are, as a country, noticing right now. Of course, besides all those reasons to avoid the justice system, the other reason and this is what I found when I interviewed people from my new book was that what the justice system provides isn't what most survivors really want.
Speaker 2:When I interviewed 30 survivors of various forms of gender violence for the book 26 women, four men who've been abused as kids, sexually assaulted, sexually harassed, sexually trafficked or in an abusive, violent relationship, partner relationship and when I the question, it was an open-ended question. Basically, if you could write the script and say what a just resolution would be, if you could determine what's going to make things right for you or as right as possible, what would it be? And it turned out that what people wanted was truth and repair. They were not big on punishment. They didn't see that I mean what the criminal justice system offers is punishment. They didn't, unless they felt that this person was so dangerous that he needed to be isolated from the community entirely and locked up. They didn't see what good punishment was going to do for them or anybody else?
Speaker 1:So when you say truth, do you mean they want people to know the truth about what happened to them?
Speaker 2:Exactly. They want the truth to be out there and they want the truth to be recognized. And they cared much more about the communities, the recognition and validation from the community than necessarily a confession from the perpetrator. Whether he confessed or not was not nearly as important to them as whether their families or their communities or the people that mattered to them and recognized that, yes, this happened and it was wrong and it was harmful. So it wasn't just the facts of the case, but it was the fact that it was harmful and it was wrong. They wanted the community to take sides, the bystanders basically to take sides and say this never should have happened to you, You're not to blame, this was wrong and we will do what we need, what needs to be done, to help you recover. That's true. That's meant by truth and repair.
Speaker 1:Truth and repair, okay, and the justice system should inflict consequences to a person who commits a crime, of course, but we should also place significant value on what survivors want out of this process in order to move on. In chapter nine of the book Truth and Repair, you address prevention, that being the prevention of violence that leads to trauma, and you present the quote unquote tripod approach that was developed by Professor Diane Rosenfeld, a legal scholar who directs the Gender Violence Program at Harvard Law School. Walk us through that concept of the tripod and how it applies to the culture shift needed to truly prevent violence against women.
Speaker 2:Well, my friend and colleague, Diane, has been sort of running their title nine course at Harvard Law School for years and she's become kind of an expert on how that is implemented on college campuses. And it seems both of us agreed that college campuses are a good laboratory for trying out innovative approaches, because you need in depth cultural change when you're talking about a system of dominance and subordination that is so deeply embedded in culture. It's not just a matter of punishing a few notorious offenders, it's a matter of changing general cultural attitudes on a very wide level. So the three legs of the tripod, if you will, which she considers a good title nine program are education for everybody, support services for survivors and consequences and accountability for perpetrators. And she, the metaphor, is, just as a tripod needs three legs to stand on. You need all three to really have a good, effective prevention program. So the first as you can imagine, colleges have made the most progress with the first leg of the tripod, education. And now most colleges public, private now have some form of student education on sexual violence when people and issues like consent when students first arrive on campus. But the most successful programs of course are not just the ones where you sort of check a box, you know, and you have a couple of hours of a lecture or something when people are going to come for their freshman orientation. It has to be much more in depth than that and I have some nice examples in my book of very innovative student education programs, including quite a wonderful one that was pioneered at Northwestern which uses peer educators.
Speaker 2:The students volunteer to become peer educators and then they go out to student groups, including fraternities and athletic groups, which tend to be very tend to foster this kind of behavior, and, you know, lead in-depth discussion groups over a period of weeks with small groups of students where people can really open up. I mean they're really out of consciousness raising groups and they're done in such a way also that, you know, young men talk to young men. And again at Northwestern, the peer educators. They have an exercise called the man box where they're supposed to put up on the blackboard all the words that describe a real man, and you know it's the psychologist who runs it. Says the words are always the same, you know aggressive, stoical, drink spear, eats red meat, has sex with lots of women. Says the word loving is never mentioned.
Speaker 1:Right, I'm laughing because I remember this from the book, reading it in your book. Now that you mentioned, it.
Speaker 2:And then he puts a chalk line around these words, calls it the man box. And then he says and what happens if you stray outside the man box? What kind of words are used for you? And he says those words were always the same bag it pussy bitch, you know. And so he says we're boxed in here and starting to interest young men and the idea that maybe they have something to gain too from you know a diminution of macho stereotyping, and that their lives could be improved.
Speaker 1:In other words, they could be a part of the solution. Yes, and so they're the culture shift that not only makes it a more equitable place for women, but for them as well. Yes, and it's a more friendly place for them. Yeah, we can all just relax and stop.
Speaker 2:No, they could all I mean a lot of them confess how afraid they are of being bullied by alpha male, other men being shamed and, you know, not living up to that stereotype.
Speaker 1:Yeah, it's a really interesting concept and I'm glad you chose to include that as ideas for prevention models. The book also has three sections power, visions of justice and healing. Just walk us through that contact quickly and tell us what readers can expect in those sections and how it furthers the understanding of trauma caused by violence.
Speaker 2:Well, the power section really talks about the two different kinds of relationship that are very basic in human life on every level, from family to the nation state, to the international realms of business, religion and crack.
Speaker 2:One is a relationship of dominance and control, which I call tyranny, and the other is a relationship of neutrality or equality.
Speaker 2:And the methods, of course, of control are the same for tyrannical relationships, and my argument is that they are incompatible with justice, that when one person has the power to coerce obedience from another person, if you think of justice as fundamentally about fairness, you can have courts.
Speaker 2:You know, I mean they have courts in Iran and they have courts in Russia, but that doesn't mean they have justice there. And so if equality is the foundation of justice and democracy is the foundation of justice, then in order to have, if it's a precondition, then even in established democracies where you have long, deeply embedded relationships of dominance and subordination, whether those are based on gender, class, race, religion, sexual orientation, you're not going to have justice. And so you need to make the kinds of social changes that produce a more democratic, more egalitarian relationship between those groups in order to have justice. So that's really the argument, part one, and I use patriarchy as my main example because A it's the most widespread and long lasting form of tyranny and, in terms of you know, the most common form of human rights violations of the world that we now know are gender violence, not also, because that's the population of work will in these years.
Speaker 2:So that's part one about power. And then part two is really based on the testimony of the survivors I interviewed and putting forth their visions of what justice would look like if we really did have, if anybody actually asked survivors what they wanted, which nobody ever bothers to do if we really did have any egalitarian society, what would it look like? And then part three is about healing, is really about sort of examples of institutional changes and innovations that can promote a healing environment, a permanent environment of repair. And there the kind of take home message is really that you need kind of collaborations between systems that generally operate in isolation, because I mean, there are found some very interesting initiatives coming out of the courts, legal practice, out of police departments and, of course, out of survivor organizations and mental health, but they all end up requiring the collaboration of all those systems, because it's this kind of trauma is a social justice problem and a law enforcement problem and no legal problem and a mental health problem For sure.
Speaker 1:Yeah, and so when none of us has the solution by ourselves, we need to put it together yeah, and I think that is kind of a what we call a coordinated community response, right when we're trying to support survivors on all ends. You also talk about forgiveness and ideas of forgiveness and what that means to different people, and whether or not some survivors choose to seek apologies from their perpetrator and different motivations about that. Why was this important to include in the book?
Speaker 2:Well, for two reasons. One is and they're seemingly contradictory. One is that the stereotypic expectation is that survivors are going to be vengeful. That's, in fact, why survivors don't have the initiative in the criminal justice system. It's presumed that the state will be more fair-minded and more balanced and impartial than victims. If you allowed them to take initiative in criminal court, they would, you know, all they would want is revenge and they would want excessive punishment. And that turned out simply not to be true.
Speaker 2:And then, on the other hand, I think, if you're looking at alternatives to the conventional justice system, the most well-developed is the system of restorative justice, and there, in theory, it could be a much more accessible and compatible system for survivors, because the basic idea is to repair the harm done by the crime rather than punish the breach of the law.
Speaker 2:That's their definition of justice, as repairing the harm, and they don't talk about victims and perpetrators, they talk about harm doers and people who have been harmed, and the theory is that there's no system of fact-finding. It depends on the harm doer acknowledging and apologizing and agreeing to make amends for the harm done, and then the victim in the community or the harmed person in the consensus, rather than an adversarial meeting coming up with a plan of repair. But because a lot of work in restorative justice has come out of a kind of radical Christian notion that emphasizes forgiveness, it's all too easy to start sort of pressuring the survivor to accept this kind of plan, whether or not that's really what it kind of lets the community do off the hook. If you can just kind of persuade the victim to say, okay, that's a gift.
Speaker 1:And from what I read in your book and what I understand from other survivors, forgiveness is not always what they're trying to achieve, at least not in the court of law or through the court process. I mean to your point. The court process achieves specific objectives, which is to punish and sentence, but the reconciliation or reparation or rehabilitation of the person who has committed the crime is a whole different matter and not always something that happens. It doesn't always happen.
Speaker 2:It rarely happens, in fact, partly because we have invested so little in understanding and researching who the perpetrators are, there's no real institution to handle that part of it.
Speaker 1:If the court is managing the breaches of the law and the consequences thereof, there is no other institution where we can work on this reparation part.
Speaker 2:Right. Well, imagine if we really invested seriously in rehabilitation and community service. It's never been done. We haven't even really invested in understanding who the perpetrators are, because for sexual assault, for example, 95% of them are never to see the inside of the courtroom. So those are pretty good odds. And of course, the people who don't beat the odds look quite. First of all, they're much more likely to be people of color and poor and have serious mental health pathology. But that's not who the majority of offenders are. That's nothing doesn't tell us anything about the majority of offenders.
Speaker 2:So if there were serious investment in rehabilitation and maybe some percentage of offenders would be capable of a sincere apology and many survivors said if they thought such a thing was possible then they would be open to it. But they basically thought this guy's a manipulator, he's a good politician. Nobody wanted the politician's apology. Mistakes were made I'm sorry if anyone was offended and insincere apology just was an added insult. And so and most survivors didn't think the perpetrator was capable of a sincere apology. There were some rare instances where that really did happen and it was wonderful and in those instances forgiveness was like spontaneous. It was like one survivor who I worked with described it as just the burden just was lifted from my shoulders.
Speaker 1:No, yeah, I mean forgiveness can be very liberating.
Speaker 2:It has to be spontaneous. I mean what some people mean by forgiveness is letting go of anger Very different process. That's a kind of part of the grieving process and forgiving oneself.
Speaker 1:Yeah, absolutely it's not an I am thou kind of repair. You talk in the book about bystanders and you've mentioned it here too. If you could offer a call to action to these bystanders of the trauma that you mentioned in your book, what would that be?
Speaker 2:Find your courage and find your support. Don't try to take this on by yourself, but don't withdraw, don't be silent, don't be an accomplice. You have a moral choice here and if you join with others, you can do something.
Speaker 1:How about some words of support for survivors, because you've worked with so many of them?
Speaker 2:Well, I mean, where to start? I? I think it always Starts with the survivors themselves. You know, find someone, don't, don't try to do it. Well, find someone.
Speaker 2:It was a very good study that was done years ago by Ann Burgess, a psychiatric nurse in Lidl-Holsterman sociologists. They interviewed every, every rape victim that came into the emergency room at Boston City Hospital for a year and then they followed them up four years later to see how they were doing. And the ones who recovered well, who were first of all, the ones who took action of some sort to regain safety. It didn't matter what the action was. Some reported to police, most didn't. But just even changing the locks on their doors, getting a dog Moving in with family, you know, whatever it was.
Speaker 2:And the second thing was telling someone. And the ones who did best were the ones not necessarily the ones who found a supportive person Right away with the ones who didn't give up if they didn't get a supportive response. They kept trying until they found somebody who said I believe you, it's not your fault, that that was wrong, that never should have happened. Nothing you did just didn't deserve this. So active mastery in affiliation of others turned out to be the big predictor of Good return.
Speaker 1:Yeah, and it's hard, right, I mean to. To not be believed and go on and try to find someone else who might believe you is no, it's challenging. So the idea of believing her and bringing her in a safe place and being supportive has never been more important. It's always been the foundation for healing trauma and I'm so glad we had the time to spend together today to learn about your book and learn from you about your work in the field. Thank you so much, dr Herman, for spending time with me. Well, it's been my pleasure. Thank you. Attention Spanish speaking listeners. Listen to the end of this podcast for information on how to reach a Spanish speaking representative of Genesis.
Speaker 3:Attention hispanic speakers listen to this podcast until the end to receive information on how to communicate with the Personal.
Speaker 1:The Genesis in Spanish if you or someone you know is in an abusive relationship. You can get help or give help at Genesis shelter ORG or by calling or texting our 24 7 crisis hotline team at 2, 1, 4, 9, 4, 6. Help 2, 1, 4, 9, 4, 6, 4, 3, 5, 7. Bilingual services at Genesis include text, phone call, clinical counseling, legal services, advocacy and more. Call or text us for more information. Donations to support women and children escaping domestic violence are always needed. Learn more at Genesis shelter ORG. Slash donate. Thanks for joining us and reminding you always that ending domestic violence begins when we believe her.
Speaker 3:Genesis. El podcast anuncia servicios bilinguals disponibles in Genesis women's shelter e support. If you or someone you know is in an abusive relationship, you can receive help or give help Genesis shelter or Org or by calling or texting our 24-hour crisis hotline team at 2, 1, 4, 9, 4, 6, 4, 3, 5, 7. Bilingual services at Genesis include text messages, call counseling, legal services, accessories and more. Call us or send us a text for more information. Always need donations to support women or children escaping domestic violence. Learn more on our website on the internet at Genesis shelter or ORG. Slash donated. Thanks for joining us. Remember that ending domestic violence begins when we believe the victim.