Yes. #Me Too

There has been a lot of fuss around the #Me Too movement, and mostly for the right reasons. It was a long time coming. Women have been silenced by what they have had to endure for time plus time. French movie stars have signed a letter denouncing the movement; people have been complaining that things have gone too far; and so on. When things begin to be birthed, they are often messy, but they clean up as they grow up. So it is with #Me Too. It has only just begun, so perhaps its looking a bit messy but it will grow, and as it does, lessons will be learned and women will grow in confidence. And this is what women need.

I didn't begin speaking about my own abuse (other than to therapists) until a cataclysmic event in 2015, engineered by my mother, caused me to reach my end point and find a new beginning. A decades in the formation, paradigm shift clicked into place: I was never going to expose myself again and thereby collude with the forms of emotional abuse I had become used to receiving from my mother and other family members. Consequently, I also decided to speak out about the abuse  I suffered as a child: sexual abuse at the hands of an uncle; physical abuse; emotional abuse and verbal abuse. I also suffered various abuses as a Premier Agency model, not least at the hands of my agent. Unhealthy relationships followed. Key for me was that I realised that even though people were related to me by blood, I did not need to keep riding the same cruel carousel. I could get off. And I could say why. Forgiveness does not always mean restoration.

Soon afterwards the #Me Too movement took off and I heard the voices of many others - through the movement - but also just by speaking about what had happened to me. Speaking, and hearing resonance, is part of healing; letting the light of individual truth shine, banishes the darkness. For me it helped exorcise the shame and the lie that it was ‘my fault’; that I deserved it; that it didn't happen; Let us never call for silence.

PS I was delighted to learn recently that I am one of #BrandBallot's top 200 parenting blogs recently. Thank you very much indeed! - Good philosophy you have there. Glad to be part of it.