Latest / The Trauma Therapist / Episode 731: Healing Radically and Honestly with Alisa Zipursky

Transcript

Episode 731: Healing Radically and Honestly with Alisa Zipursky · The Trauma Therapist

0:10
Or welcome back to the Trauma Therapist Podcast. My name is Gaming Person.
0:14
My mission is to help trauma therapist be their incredible cells, to be human,
0:19
to be real, not just a clinician. I'm a big believer in
0:23
who we are is more important than what we know, and this requires cultivating
0:27
authenticity, genuineness, and vulnerability, and that requires intention. Can learn more
0:33
about my courses and workshops by going to the Trauma Therapist project dot com.
0:37
That's the Trauma Therapist Project dot com. Let's get started. So five four
0:44
three two one, our folks, welcome back to the podcast. We're very
0:49
excited to have back as my guest, Alisa Saperski. Alisa, welcome back.
0:55
Thank you so much for having me. I am thrilled to be back
0:58
with you. You are welcome. So. Alisa is a storyteller, a
1:02
writer of a sist, facilitator, and childhood sexual abuse survivor. Her work
1:07
focuses on offering emotional support to other young survivors healing from sexual trauma. Elisa
1:12
started Healing Honestly in twenty sixteen as a way to share her experiences as a
1:18
millennial woman trying to live her career. Building Tequila drinking, sex, having
1:23
Netflix, and shealing life while contending with her experiences as a survivor of childhood
1:29
sexual abuse. Healing Honestly dot Com now has a readership of two hundred and
1:34
seventy three thousand people who stick around for her transparency, her humor. Healing
1:41
from child sexual abuse is funnier than you think, she says, an ability
1:44
to talk about really having hard topics around sexual trauma, mental health, and
1:48
healing in the way that feels accessible. Her new book, Healing Honestly,
1:53
The Messy and Magnificent Path to Overcome Self Blame and Self Shame, will be
1:59
out tomorrow. We Lisa, thanks so much for being here. Thank you
2:04
so much. So before were going as people, maybe some didn't hear the
2:12
first episode when you were on previously, share with our listeners where you're from
2:15
originally and where you are currently. I am born and raised in Washington,
2:20
DC, and I am here in Washington, DC. Okay, all right,
2:24
So I want to get to talking about the book, obviously, but
2:29
let's share what our listeners give us a little rundown about how all this started
2:34
for you. So I started doing this work in two thousand, fifteen twenty
2:40
sixteen, I was coming out. I was in my late twenties and coming
2:45
out of a period in my life that involved my dormant childhood sexual abuse trauma
2:53
coming to the surface and sort of breaking havoc on every aspect of my life
2:58
and impacting my ability to have job, my relationships of my family, my
3:01
relationships to myself, and through that healing experience, I just wanted a place
3:09
on the Internet that felt like a place where we could both sort of hold
3:15
too true this one that our trauma impacts every aspect of our lives, and
3:21
also that we are capable and worthy of full and vibrant lives. And I
3:27
just felt like at the time there were sort of kept I kept stumbling upon
3:31
two options for resources. One were clinical based resources written by doctors and medical
3:40
experts that felt deeply pathologizing for me and made me sort of feel like a
3:45
lab rat being studied. Or there was a lot of memoir that is a
3:50
beautiful and important art form, but for me felt really retraumatizing and reading about
3:54
people's very specific experiences of abuse wasn't what I needed for my healing at the
4:00
time. I needed a place where we didn't focus on what happened but we
4:02
focused on the what now. And so I just started putting my work out
4:08
on the internet through my website, Healing Honestly dot com, and it really
4:12
blew up. I'm proud to say now we have half a million readers,
4:15
which is really incredible. Wow. So I gave you, I gave you
4:19
old numbers. I read it the numbers recently and I was like, Holy
4:24
spokes, which is really amazing and has really grown. And I spent a
4:29
lot of time doing public speaking in workshops and talking on college campuses and at
4:33
conferences all about the realities of healing from childhood sexual abuse. And then a
4:42
couple of years ago, I was approached by a woman named Charlotte Ashlock from
4:46
Barrett Koehler Publishers, who I didn't know then but would become my most beloved
4:51
editor. And she approached me about writing a book. She had found my
4:56
work because she was personally looking for support, um, because she herself is
5:00
a survivor of abuse and UM. She reached out to me and and things
5:09
really grew from there, and she really helped me cultivate what would a book
5:13
for me look like? UM, what's out there and what would it mean
5:17
for a book to be truly a survivor to survivor resource for healing m no.
5:26
And that's a perfect segue into talking about your book before we get there.
5:31
And I'm asking you this because you have a very, uh what open
5:39
way of talking about this, maybe even a unique way, a very empowering
5:46
way of approaching this whole topic of healing. When things first started happening for
5:54
you, when you started saying, Holy crap, something's going on here,
6:00
how did you deal with that? I found it extraordinarily overwhelming, And I
6:08
think that, like a lot of survivors, my my sort of come to
6:13
Jesus moments about what had happened to me was both very slow and all at
6:17
once. And I've been in therapy all my life, but wasn't really and
6:26
I would I would visit parts of my abuse at different times in my life,
6:30
and that sort of experience was very nonlinear. And I say that because
6:35
you know, I have now supported so many survivors in their healing journey,
6:40
and sometimes it's something that we've always been aware of that happened to us.
6:44
And sometimes I talk with survivors or in their sixties or seventies who might have
6:47
experienced a different trauma or something else has happened in their life that has triggered
6:51
them, and they've been like, holy shit, this was actually well,
6:55
you know, I've been holding this my whole life sort of unknowingly or uncon
7:00
justly, And so for me, I had a therapist who and I've had
7:05
a bunch of therapists in my life who have been really really supportive and wonderful
7:10
and allowed me to sort of come to my own terms and realization of my
7:15
abuse in in my own time, and allowed for me to really direct myself
7:19
when I when my brain was sort of ready to process what had happened to
7:24
me and the other part of it, which is absolutely critical and was totally
7:27
the inspiration for me starting this work, was my very dear best friend,
7:31
Kate Vandertyge. She and I met our first day of college and I saw
7:36
her and I was like, this is the coolest girl I've ever seen in
7:40
my entire life. Her ring tone was Calissa's bossy, and I was like,
7:43
I need to be this woman's friend. And she says she felt the
7:46
same way about me anyway. She even in high school, had been volunteering
7:50
at her local rape crisis center all through college was advocating for survivors on campus,
7:57
doing trainings about sexual shelf prevention, and after college she has spent her
8:01
entire career in the anti violence space. So when I was coming to terms
8:07
with my own abuse, my best friend was actually primed to be like a
8:09
professional best friend to me. And all these years later, she'll say,
8:15
like, it's not the same thing like being as you know, as a
8:16
therapist, like being trained to support somebody in a professional context, versus when
8:22
it's like one of the people you love the most are not are not one
8:26
to one things. But she was my lifeline, and she taught me things
8:33
like that it was okay that I didn't remember my abuse clearly, that it
8:37
was actually totally normal to feel blame for what happened to me and to feel
8:43
guilt over things that weren't my fault. She normalized all of these things that
8:50
otherwise would have kept me in silence and kept me away from receiving like resources
8:56
and going after like healing support for myself. And she was really she stood
9:01
beside me in the darkest moments of my life and made sure I never felt
9:07
alone. And I recognize that a lot of people don't have access to somebody
9:11
who's quite that trauma informed, especially like in their early twenties, right,
9:16
right, So was she a survivor. She was not. She's just been
9:20
a forever advocate and an extraordinary advocate, and really starting Healing Honestly was like,
9:28
how do I replicate which she has given me to other people who might
9:33
not have a bestie who can tell you, you know, it's okay,
9:37
Like these things are normal. You're not fucking crazy, you know. And
9:41
she's remained sort of like a guiding light for me about like why I do
9:45
what I do? Wow. One of the things so we're talking about the
9:52
book here called Healing Honestly, the MESSI and Magnificent Path to Overcoming Self Blame
9:58
and Self Shame. That'll be out tomorrow again, um, and we'll have
10:01
links for this on the show ups page here at the Traumatis podcast dot com.
10:05
One of the things that struck me and strike me about you is you
10:13
throughout the book there and within you there's this there's this whole tone of acceptance
10:20
and allowance. Um, that that feels very empowering for me, and that
10:28
feels very important. Uh, talk talk a little bit about that for me.
10:35
I think that in my own experiences and in my experiences of supporting so
10:41
many other survivors in their healing journey. Um, we are conditioned by the
10:48
people around us and the world that we live in to believe that what we
10:52
have gone through and the ways that we have survived and the ways that we
10:56
have figured out how to heal and cope are things we should feel blame and
11:01
shame over. And you know, it's like, damned if we do,
11:05
damned if we own survivors are set up to both feel blame about what happens
11:09
to us and then feel shame over all the ways we've figured out how to
11:13
live despite this happening to us. And I just think that it's so important.
11:20
It's so critical to me that even though everybody's healing journey is different and
11:24
what I need in my healing might be radically different than somebody else, we
11:28
all have to live in this world steeped in rape culture that judges and shames
11:35
us for what we've been through and how we endure, and we all like
11:39
the kindest thing, I think, and the most important thing we can do
11:43
as survivors in community with each other is to call bullshit on that and to
11:50
say, like, actually, each of us, like are the experts in
11:54
our own safety, do know what we need? Can go at our own
11:58
pace whatever that means for us, And that there isn't this right way to
12:03
survive. There isn't this one right way to heal. And you don't have
12:07
to go like on a yogur retreat and start drinking green juices and like appropriating
12:13
Eastern culture in order to like heal. You know, like, this isn't
12:18
some cute thing that happens on Instagram. You know, it's your fucking life
12:20
and and you're allowed to live it however you see is right and best for
12:26
you. And so to me, my theory is not. You know,
12:30
while this book offers lots of practical guidance, like the key takeaway, you
12:33
know, one of the key takeaways I want for people is just to like
12:37
like realize that the judgment that is imposed upon us is like utter bullshit,
12:43
and that we actually have a lot of the answers ourselves. We've just been
12:48
conditioned by everyone around us to not be allowed to trust it. So when
12:56
you say, and I love that, right, it's so easy easy to
13:00
feel that there's a specific way to heal thank God forbid. You look at
13:05
Instagram and everyone's you know, off in some retreats somewhere it's everything's beautiful,
13:13
and you're like, I can't do that. But when you when you talk
13:20
to people, what are they coming up against? Because you again you there's
13:26
you have a certain confidence in going through this. Was that always there for
13:31
you? No, I don't think so. I think I think what has
13:37
guided me? You know, it's so funny. I you know, I
13:41
started this website in twenty sixteen. I didn't realize I was my own audience.
13:46
And that's really funny to me because it's like a fucking course, I
13:50
was my own audience. But you know, something that I allowed to guide
13:54
me is just to go back to my twenties and think about what I needed
14:00
to hear and offer that to people, you know, And I think what
14:05
has come with time and seeing so many people like respond really, really enthusiastically
14:13
to what I put out in the world is like, oh not everybody has
14:16
to fuck with me and fuck with the way that I think about this stuff,
14:20
Like, you don't have to be for everybody. You just have to
14:22
be for the people who who would most benefit from from what you offer to
14:28
the world, you know, And so I think like getting feedback from people
14:33
of being like, I actually really love that you put dumb gifts in your
14:35
Friday newsletter every week and that you always send like a stupid TikTok of a
14:41
dog, like I look forward to it every Friday. So the people being
14:45
like I like that you make these jokes like it makes things feel much more
14:48
approachable. I don't feel so like I'm holding my breath in anticipation of triggers,
14:54
you know I and and you know, so I think my audience,
15:00
my readership, has really affirmed for me that like both whenever I have a
15:05
hesitation of like maybe I'll say this thing and maybe it'll be isolating that then
15:09
they respond immediately being like, oh my god. Same. So that has
15:13
been encouraging. But also that like my sort of style and my approach for
15:18
the people it's right for it's it's right for them, and that has I
15:22
think given me a lot of confidence to approach healing with sort of my brand
15:31
of like compassion and humor and at times levity and and real talk. When
15:37
you say, you know, people, we have the answers. We are
15:43
the experts. Specifically, what do you mean when you say that? What
15:48
I mean is that I think that, especially for those of us who experienced
15:54
childhood sexual abuse, that as I did and as I sent or in my
16:00
work, while my work in my book is for anybody who has experienced abuse
16:03
or sexual trauma, I really do center CSA with that we often as children
16:14
have a keen understanding, either consciously or not consciously, that something isn't right,
16:19
and that we have an intuition in our minds and in our bodies that
16:25
something isn't okay, and we may have communicated that not maybe explicitly, maybe
16:30
not explicitly, and have received a lifetime of information from the people who were
16:37
most important to us, who we were conditioned to understand loved us the most
16:44
and we're there to protect us, and whose opinion was most impact important,
16:48
that our intuition that something wrong was happening was not correct, and it might
16:56
have been, you know, indicating to a parent that what happened to us
17:00
wasn't safe, or that we don't want to be near somebody, or that
17:03
we're having an emotional reaction and they're minimizing it or invalidating it, or perhaps
17:07
just gaslighting us and telling us you know, the guy is a different color
17:11
when it isn't. And with that we then say okay. So I guess
17:18
everything that my mind and body is telling me that isn't okay is actually okay.
17:25
And now I can't trust what my mind and body tell me anymore.
17:30
And it goes even further. It goes from that to okay, well,
17:36
these bad feelings I feel in my mind and my body must be my fault
17:41
because all these adults are telling me like this isn't it, this isn't real,
17:47
or this doesn't matter, this doesn't count, or you're not understanding your
17:51
own reality. So then the only answer, especially as a child, is
17:56
to turn inward and say I'm the problem. So I think it's so critical
18:02
when we're when we're healing, and I think it's certainly one of the hardest
18:06
parts, and it's not literar, and that you know, there's no endpoint.
18:10
I haven't If there is, I haven't reached it of being able to
18:15
say like, oh, actually that intuition I had in my body in my
18:18
mind was actually correct, the adults around me were incorrect. And I get
18:26
to make decisions now as an adult based on those things. And that is
18:30
like really radical for a lot of us because we were completely conditioned to not
18:37
trust ourselves at all. And so to me, as I said, like,
18:41
healing is so different for everybody. But in order for us to know
18:45
what we need in our own healing journeys, we have to find ways to
18:52
reconnect with that and give ourselves, you know, the opportunity to trust ourselves.
18:56
And so that's why the book is. You know, the book is
19:00
full of information, and it's full of stories, and it's full of even
19:03
some laughs and all that, but it's also I want the reading of the
19:07
book to end of itself be a practice in that, you know, in
19:10
and as you'll say, I'll be like, you don't have to go read
19:12
the next chapter right now. Do you want to go take a break?
19:15
Do you want to go get some notch? Do you want to take an
19:18
that do you want to Margarita like, you don't have to keep going right
19:22
now. You don't get a prize for going to the finish line. What
19:25
do you want to do right now? Right right right? I appreciated that
19:29
in your book there's a a very pronounced and wonderful, kind of amazing thread
19:37
of humor and almost irreverence, and I think you do a really great task
19:48
and balancing this crazy topic heavy topic of trauma with some humor. How did
19:56
that come about for you? It's kind of like it's kind of like a
20:00
tight rob walk, right, And I have received negative feedback in the past
20:07
about it. I'll be honest with you. There is and I don't mean
20:11
to generalize that, but I can only tell you from the feedback I've received.
20:15
It's consistently people of an older demographic. I think, like sixty plus
20:21
who have written me there's not a ton but the insa that they find that
20:26
the humor that I use contributes to survivors not being taken seriously. And I
20:34
understand that where they're coming from is a place of hurt and pain living in
20:40
a world steeped in rape culture. That tells us that if that the reason
20:45
survivors don't get the validation and basic humanity that they deserve is because of the
20:55
way survivors are presenting themselves, this mythic idea that there is some perfect survivor
21:00
out there, and if we just present ourselves in a particular way with this
21:03
respectability politics, and we don't curse, and we don't have sex, and
21:08
we have sex, but not too much sex, but we don't seem too
21:11
interested in sex. And we talk about our trauma, but we don't talk
21:14
about our trauma. But we leave the past in the past, but just
21:17
enough. And we have the right amount of evidence, but we don't harp
21:19
on that evidence. But it's irrefutable evidence, and that kind of evidence doesn't
21:23
exist, you know, and this wild criteria of a completely impossible standard of
21:30
the perfect victim. Then then survivors will be taken seriously. That's all.
21:34
It's taken just you know, since the existence of humanity. It's just that
21:40
it's just that each of us have been slightly flawed, like who know,
21:45
um and um, And so I see that coming from a place of hurt,
21:51
that they have not been taken seriously. And I hear that because that
21:56
is a problem, you know, collect of lee and all across the world.
22:03
But I think it's extraordinarily misguided to direct that at me. I don't
22:10
think that it's fair for us to police the way we cope and heal.
22:15
And it's okay that as some people talk about their trauma in ways that I
22:19
never would, And that's okay too, you know, like there's something for
22:22
everyone, but I think for me also, it's so wild because I'm like,
22:26
I'm a Jew, like my people proudly have made it quite well known
22:34
that we used humor to cope with extraordinary suffering and trauma. And I am
22:41
incredibly proud of that tradition. And so to tell me that I have to
22:47
go against my nature, to go against my ancestry, to go against what
22:52
is in my bones about how I know how to cope with extraordinary trauma,
22:59
to go against that because I want somebody to take me seriously who has no
23:04
interest in taking me seriously feels fundamentally misguided for me, you know, and
23:10
not relevant in my life. And so, you know, my family are
23:14
the funniest people I know. Like sitting around my grandparents table at dinner table
23:18
in Omaha, Nebraska, which was sort of the heart of where a family
23:22
was, Like I remember my aunts and uncles, they would cry laughing.
23:26
There were always needed to be a box of tissues because they would laugh so
23:30
hard they would cry. Their incredible storytellers. They're so fucking funny. And
23:37
so me using humor, I you know, yes, it's a tightrope,
23:41
and it's intentional and I try very thoughtfully to balance tone and to make things
23:48
feel more approachable and accessible when otherwise they feel really stigmatizing and scary. But
23:52
also it's me giving myself permission to say, I get to show up as
23:57
my whole self when I do this work, and I don't have to play
24:02
some role of like this this you know, the victim, the survivor who
24:07
goes to the thriver and now she's like lah lah lah you know, and
24:11
and she speaks in platitudes and m is an inspiration. It's like, no,
24:18
I just get to be a human and um, and that's what sustains
24:22
me through this work. I think that also comes through in the book.
24:26
I mean just the very use of humor, I think lays out a kind
24:34
of welcome at for people to be themselves, to understand that it's okay for
24:41
them to be themselves. Uh and and that's a kind of a crucial part
24:45
in the healing process. Taking a step back, what did you? What
24:52
did you? And we kind of, I think, cover this, but
24:56
I want to give you the opportunity to articulate it even more so. What
25:00
did you want? Is the book to be a statement about well, first
25:07
and foremost I wanted the book to feel like a friend, and to feel
25:15
like the friend that I had that said, Hey, I've been down this
25:19
road, I'm here with you. You're not alone in this and like,
25:25
I'm going to also introduce you to some other amazing friends that have helped me
25:29
along my way, and you can hear from them and you can learn from
25:32
their wisdom and their experience too. I wanted this book to feel like community.
25:37
And somebody who read an early copy of my book said the most wonderful
25:41
thing. They said, this feels like the support group I always dreamed of
25:45
and never had. And I want people, whether they feel like they want
25:51
to disclose what happened to them to somebody or not in the privacy of themselves,
25:56
to feel the healing aspect of being in community with other survivors and feeling
26:03
supported in a way that is full of boundaries, in a way that is
26:06
full of consent, in a way that is full of content learnings you know,
26:10
like and get all the benefits of a support group without actually having to
26:18
physically put themselves in a situation that they may not want to put themselves in
26:22
for any good reason. So more important to me than even what it said,
26:26
was how it made people feel. I wanted people to feel that kind
26:30
of friendship, and I wanted people to feel like it's actually okay for us
26:36
to talk about our trauma in the same language and the same way we talk
26:41
about any other aspect of our lives, because so often we feel so fragmented
26:45
and compartmentalize, and it's actually okay to like be our whole selves as we're
26:52
healing and talking about this. And then, you know, really what I
26:56
want people to walk away with this is an understanding for themselves as to why
27:03
we feel so much blame and shame for things that are our fault. You
27:07
know, in each chapter we go through, you know, who are the
27:11
people in our lives who we trust it, who reinforced these untrue stories that
27:15
were to blame for what we've been through, and how we heal. What
27:19
are the institutions and the cultural norms that have led to this and contributed to
27:25
this, And what are some practical strategies for us to turn the volume down
27:30
on that shame and blame that we hear to no fault of our own,
27:36
so that each of us can get in touch with that inner expert and hear
27:40
that voice inside of us louder, and with that we'll be able to actually
27:47
know what we want and not necessarily what we want in the big grand scheme
27:52
of life, and what we want in terms of like, oh, this
27:56
thing is really triggering for me. Maybe I'm not going to feel shame that
28:02
I have this trigger, and I'm not going to blame myself for having this
28:04
reaction, and instead, I'm going to be compassionate with myself and say,
28:10
you know what, it's okay if I want to avoid this thing that's triggering
28:14
right now. Doesn't mean I'll always feel that way, but the fact that
28:17
I feel that way today is enough and I don't need to feel bad about
28:19
that, right right. Well, yeah, before we started recording, you
28:25
mentioned that there were some challenges in actually writing the book, many many,
28:32
So there were sort of personal challenges and then there were structural challenges. The
28:36
personal challenge is that in order to know what I needed to say, the
28:44
way I knew what I wanted this book to be was to go back to
28:47
some of the worst times in my life and think, what was the book
28:51
that really would have helped me out at this time? And you know,
28:55
as I proudly say, I'm the cover of the book the least retraumatizing read
29:00
child sex views out there. It was very true, great for me to
29:04
write, and and I kept waiting for it to get easier. I thought,
29:11
oh, well, maybe this is just a difficult chapter for me,
29:14
or maybe this is just a difficult month for me. And about halfway through
29:18
I remember going to my agent and my editor, who are both survivors,
29:22
and saying, I don't think the easier time is coming. I think this
29:26
is what it is. And so I had to learn how to take a
29:30
lot of breaks. I had to learn to step away for whole weeks at
29:34
a time. I had to radically care for myself in a way that was
29:42
sort of a new level, and everyone around me really rallied with me.
29:48
My support system was so extraordinary and carried me so much through this. Every
29:55
strategy and coping mechanism I had ever had just kept, you know, more
29:57
and more and more to get through this. And it was during a pandemic,
30:02
which you know, helps everything, It makes everything so much easier.
30:06
I know it was. You know, I've only written one book and lived
30:07
through one pandemic, but I'm pretty safe to say I wouldn't recommend doing them
30:11
at the same time. And then there was the structural challenges, which are
30:17
really pronounced, you know, as I send my agent and my editor boast
30:21
survivors, and we all come to this work with extraordinary personal investment as well
30:26
as professional investment, and we just worked as hard as we could to try
30:32
to create a new way of working that was trauma informed, whether it was
30:37
advocating for more time for me so I could take more breaks, or advocating
30:41
for me to have legal protections against abusers who might take legal action around me.
30:48
There is just so much in the publishing world, just like the rest
30:52
of society, that is really not set up to be trauma informed in the
30:56
slightest and certainly not set up to support survivors and their safety needs. And
31:03
so I'm extraordinarily proud of this book. I'm perhaps even more proud of the
31:08
way that we did it together as a team. This book just kept finding
31:12
survivors sort of at every single step who stepped in and advocated, like in
31:19
extraordinary ways for it. And that's why it's here today well, speaking with
31:26
Elsa as a purse key. The book again is called Healing Honestly the Messie
31:30
and Magnificent Path to Overcoming self blame and self shame. It's out tomorrow,
31:37
So people are going to read this book and they are going to feel that
31:45
that embrace that you present to them and give them and welcome them with.
31:52
How else do you help people? I mean, aside from aside from all
31:56
that stuff you do, I mean, do you have you've been you work
32:00
with people? In what context? Yeah? So a lot of my work
32:05
lately has been doing a lot of public speaking. I love especially visiting college
32:10
campuses and speaking with folks on campus, whether it's survivors or the people who
32:16
love them, or students just trying to learn about We spent a lot of
32:22
time sort of debunking the myths about being a sexual violence survivor. And I
32:27
love it also because I don't know if anybody has experienced a college student complimenting
32:36
their outfit, but it's the best feeling in the world, and that's my
32:39
drug of choice. So I like going on to college campuses wearing cool clothes
32:43
and then them telling me that, um, it's like my Tinkerbell momentum.
32:47
Anyway, So doing that and at conferences as well, and sort of bringing
32:52
this work out into the world in that way. And then I do also
32:59
keep up with my readership. Every Friday, I put out a newsletter that
33:02
is equal parts stuff about trauma and stuff about life. Like every week I
33:09
include a TV recommendation that includes content warnings for sexual violence, because guests,
33:14
what survivors want to watch Netflix and chill too, but sometimes we need some
33:16
info or like I said, like a dumb photo of my dog. And
33:22
I've received emails from survivors being like, you know what, I don't even
33:24
read the first half of the newsletter where you talk about real stuff. I
33:28
just go to the fun stuff, And I say, you know what,
33:30
that's great, because that's the whole fucking point, like to give you some
33:35
joy today, Like that's healing too. And then I also offer some on
33:42
demand as well as in person well virtual in person coaching specifically like for childhood
33:50
sexual abuse survivors. But right now it's really about doing whatever I can to
33:55
help get this book out into the world and get it into the hands of
34:00
the people who most need it, you know, survivors and the people who
34:02
love us, and the people who treat us and the people who care about
34:07
us. You know, the last time there was a book, A survivor
34:08
to survivor book about healing from childhood sexual abuse was The Courage to Heal On
34:14
That was written in nineteen eighty eight, and I can tell you right now
34:16
that was thirty five years ago because it was the year I was born.
34:20
And so it's really important that we get the word out about this book because
34:25
there are millions of us out there, and we deserve so many resources,
34:32
and we deserve to hear from each other and have that survivor to survivor community
34:38
and love. As well. As we kind of wind down here, I
34:43
want to hear what your thoughts are on the cultural shift that's happened within the
34:52
recognition of trauma. I mean a lot, you know with Me Too movement,
34:55
lots happened. Where do you see things going? I mean, how
35:02
do you interpret this wider recognition of trauma? I interpret it carefully, I
35:12
think, is the answer. You know, on any given day, I
35:16
feel radically different about how optimistic I do and don't feel about things. I
35:23
have so much tremendous love and respect and admiration for Toronto Burke and the Me
35:29
Too movement that she has built. Also, I know survivors have been screaming
35:35
at the top of their lungs about what has happened to them and what they
35:39
need since the dawn of time. And so to me, I think that
35:45
I will be continue to be heartened to see people who aren't survivors speaking up,
35:52
who creating change, actually challenging systems of oppression, because survivors, we've
35:58
been out here, we've been doing this work. We started it before Meat
36:00
series started it before the last one hundred years. You know, we have
36:04
been here talking about this, and it's really going to take everyone else,
36:09
especially people in positions of power, to actually shift power dynamics. And you
36:15
know, something I'm extraordinarily mindful of in this exact moment in particular, is
36:22
that transphobia is a leading indicator of cause for childhood sexual abuse. We know
36:30
from the American Academy of Pediactress in a two thousand and twelve study that showed
36:36
that children who were gender nonconforming were seven times more likely to be sexually abused
36:40
than their gender conforming peers. So we know that transphobia and homophobia are leading
36:47
causes of CSA. And I'm quite concerned with the rising fascist laws that are
36:58
being passed throughout this country that are oppressing gender not conforming, trans and queer
37:05
children. It is absolutely putting them at much greater risk for sexual violence and
37:12
all sorts of kinds of violence. And so, you know, and I
37:15
really applaud organizations like Mirror Memoirs, led by Amitha Swadin and Jaden Fields who
37:21
have really been uplifting this and talking about this and saying, hey, if
37:25
you care about childhood sexual abuse, if you care about ending sexual violence,
37:29
and you care about protecting children from sexual violence, you have to care about
37:35
transphobia and homophobia, and you have to care about what these kids are going
37:39
through and and protect and revere these children, no matter who they are.
37:45
And so I think it's a call to action for all of us, especially
37:51
those of us like myself who assists and heterosexual that if we really want to
37:58
see the hides turning on the epidemic of sexual violence in this country, we
38:05
have to be bringing that into it. Yeah, I appreciate that, All
38:08
right, Alisa, I mean I could talk to you for a long time.
38:14
Here. What's the best way for people to get in contact with you?
38:19
You can reach me through my website Healing Honestly dot com. You can
38:22
also hit me up on Instagram at Elisa Healing Honestly. That's ali essay Healing
38:29
Honestly on Instagram. And most of all, you can go get your own
38:34
copy of Healing Honestly, The Messy and Magnificent Path to Overcoming self blame and
38:39
self shame. As I proudly say, the least we're traumatizing read on CSA
38:45
written by a survivor or survivors awesome again. We'll have that linked up here
38:50
at the show notes page at the Trauma dis podcast dot com. Alsa,
38:52
thank you so much. You are not just a breath of fresh air.
38:57
You are an amazing wind, your storm of amazingness. Seriously, you're you're
39:06
so freaking inspiring. Thank you, and thank you for being such an incredible
39:12
supporter of my work all these years. I appreciate that or it will be
39:15
in touch, pack care. Thank you, goodbye,