women’s silence – Feminism and Religion

Um, You Were So Happy by Vibha Shetiya

“We were so happy,” he said, emphasizing the so.

Her thoughts flashed back to that car ride. Hearing that an acquaintance was taking the GRE, she had half-jokingly quipped – “Maybe I should too.” He responded: “You should. You don’t know anything about life. Your life consists of your parents and brother and a handful of friends. It’s time you learned what it really was about,” this time stressing the really. The next few months were spent prepping for entrance exams and sending out grad school applications. Within six months, she was in the US of A.

She couldn’t believe it. She had been trapped for nearly two decades. As a child, she had had no choice. As an adult, it was too late; the indoctrination of being in a family cult had left her completely alienated; she was a stranger to herself. Marriage took on another dimension. Any chance of deprogramming was replaced by degrading, the methods remaining the same though; browbeating and gaslighting as a time-tested and guaranteed method of emotional torment never disappointed.

The Legacy of Carol P. Christ: “We Say the Silence Has Been Broken”

We treat the physical assault and the silencing after as two separate things, but they are the same, both bent on annihilation. Rebecca Solnit

When I was in my twenties and in therapy I had a recurrent dream in which a strange man was chasing me and caught up with me and started to strangle me and I could not scream. I was asked to act this dream out by my therapist, who told me that this time I would scream. I could not. She got up and came over and put her hands around my neck and started to squeeze. I still could not scream.

Two decades later I had a dream in which I was a baby and suffocating in my crib. I asked my current therapist if she thought someone had tried to suffocate me when I was an infant. Her answer was simple: “There is no need to think about this happening when you were an infant. You have been silenced all your life.”

When I was a child, my father used to punish us by taking off his belt, sitting down, asking us to pull down our pants and lie across his lap, and then lashing our bare bottoms with his belt. This was typical child-rearing practice in the 1950s and 1960s. Rita Nakashima Brock was the first to name it for me as child abuse. Nonetheless, when we got older, my brother and I preferred to be spanked, rather than to have our 25 cents a week allowance taken away from us. At least, we thought, being spanked was over in a minute, while losing your allowance was something you would suffer for a long time.