By Fran
I was young enough at the time of my assault that even if I had wanted to tell my parents what had happened, I was so far from being a remotely sexual being that I’m not even sure I would have had the vocabulary to describe it. At the time, I felt a distinct mix of confusion, shame, and violation that I wasn’t prepared to share with anyone else. I was particularly disinterested in sharing with people who I saw every day and who I knew I would have to continue talking about it with if I said anything. So I packed it away in the back of my mind.
When I came to remember, so many years later, what happened in that summer camp bunk, I was 17 years old and three states away from my parents. I was living on a residential college campus where I had access to free and confidential mental health services for students. In the ensuing spiral of anxiety and depression that followed my recollection of my assault, I made an appointment with a counselor and began the process of healing. However, I mistakenly scheduled my second appointment on a day that my basketball team was traveling to an away game and didn’t have the counseling center’s phone number saved to call and let them know I needed to reschedule. (This was, of course, before anybody had a smart phone, so it wasn’t as simple as Googling it.) I became so anxious that my counselor would be angry with me for missing an appointment that I never went back. I think this anxiety about having “failed” my counselor was linked to the root cause of not telling my family. I didn’t want anyone to share in the burden I was carrying; I didn’t want others to have to feel the pain I was feeling. So much for being proactive.
This probably should have been the point where I told my parents about my assault. I was in the thick of dealing with the memory of what happened to me, and my anxiety had reached a level that there were days that peeling myself out of bed was about as much as I could do. I barely ate, I became obsessed with whether or not the people I spent time with were actually my friends or only acting as such out of pity, and frequently vomited at the thought of everyday activities, like going to coffee with an old friend. Anxious tendencies have been a part of my life since I was very young, but they were certainly at their worst immediately following my realization about my experiences at camp that summer. I’m sure that my parents noticed my increased anxiety, since they had seen me struggle with various iterations of it for years, but I wasn’t prepared to tell them why it had peaked at this particular moment in time.
I wasn’t prepared to burden them with the guilt that I knew would follow from my disclosure of the truth. I was so young. I was at a church summer camp that I’m sure they pushed me to attend. I was still their baby and something so antithetical to youth had been forced upon me. By the time I was actively coping with it, I was adult enough to be in control of my own decisions about my mental health (although clearly I didn’t do so very effectively). I didn’t see the point in worrying them with something that had happened so long ago and that I felt I had the tools to deal with on my own. In retrospect, the feeling of self-efficacy I had was sorely misguided, because I very clearly would have benefited from someone else’s help. However, as anyone who has dealt with anxiety knows, reason and logic have very little bearing on so many decisions.
For a while I felt really guilty about not telling them. I felt like I was hiding something. In retrospect, part of me wishes I had told them, because I feel certain that they would have encouraged (read: forced) me to continue seeking the help of a mental health professional, from which I undoubtedly would have benefited. Yet another part of me is perfectly content with my decision to cope with it myself, because now, at 27, I’ve come to a place of peace with it, and my parents never had to carry that burden. I don’t think that the decision not to tell one’s parents about incidences of sexual violence is right for everyone, but I do think that having someone in whom one can confide is critically important. Fortunately, I had that safe place in various others who were in my life at the time, such that my decision not to tell my parents wasn’t detrimental. For others without that haven in friends, there grows an encouragingly large number of community resources available. I still wonder sometimes, though, how my recovery would have played out differently had I told my family.