Dear Nichole:

“I am trying to grow as a person but still salvage any bonds I can with family since in the end that is all we got”- our need to be connected, to have social bonds is so strong that we are willing to void so much of ourselves so to maintain bonds. If it takes taking abuse, then be it. If it takes pretending there has never been abuse, we will pretend.

I imagine you going to AZ, sitting in your brother’s living room with his wife and your other brother and his girlfriend, some snacks on the table, light talk, feels nice. I imagine that I enter that setting and say to your AZ brother: so I heard you sexually abused Nichole on and off for years, many years.

I imagine that I will be an unwelcomed guest there and then.

If you said that, you will be an unwelcomed guest, gone all that nice bonding feeling, a bonding based on pretending nothing happened, the guilty is not accountable, the victim keeps her silence.

“It was never anything I told anyone or spoke about. It’s as if it never happened”, but it did happen and the pretending that it didn’t, keep your pain going and going.

anita