43 Rape, Incest, Shame, and Silence: A True Story Reexamined, Part 2

Nov 23, 2020

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Intro: Welcome to the podcast Coronavirus Crisis: Carpe Diem!, where by God’s grace, you and I rise up and embrace the possibilities and opportunities for spiritual and psychological growth in this time of crisis, all grounded in a Catholic worldview. We are going beyond mere resilience, to rising up to the challenges of this pandemic and becoming even healthier in the natural and the spiritual realms than we were before. I’m clinical psychologist Peter Malinoski and I am here with you, to be your host and guide. This podcast is part of Souls and Hearts, our online outreach at soulsandhearts.com, which is all about shoring up our natural foundation for the Catholic spiritual life, all about overcoming psychological obstacles to being loved and to loving.
1. This is episode 43, released on November 23, 2020
2. Thank you for being here with me.
3. and it is the seventh episode in our series on shame.
4. and it is titled: Rape, Incest, Shame, and Silence: A True Story Reexamined, Part 2
5. We are back to dealing with very heavy, very difficult material.
6. We are going back to the story of Crown Prince Amnon rape of his half-sister the princess Tamar that is recounted in 2 Samuel 13. Remember that both Prince Amnon and Princess Tamar were King David's children.
7. We opened that up in Episode 40, with Part 1 -- now that we have taken two episodes to look deeply at King David's upbringing, especially around shame and his wounds
  1. So that we can better understand his role in this present situation
8. 1. And now we are ready to return to the rape and so much of what went into it and came out of it.
10. We are going to be applying what we learned about shame in the conceptual information from Episodes 37, 38, 39.
11. We're going to focus on listening as we were learning about in Episodes 41 and especially 42.
Cautions
1. There is an incestuous rape of a teenager in this story.
  1. I am not going into unnecessary graphic aspects about the rape itself
2. 1. there isn't a need to get into the all the specific details of it
3. 1. However, I am bringing out the emotional, relational and psychological impact of the traumas here, and not just the rape, but the betrayals and the failures to protect, and the injustice of it all and all the aftermath
    1. Those aspects -- betrayal, abandonment, the implications, the meaning of those contextual factors can be and often are worse than the actual physical violations. And Tamar tells us that in the scripture.
  2. 1. Those realities can be very difficult to take, it's understandable why people want to avoid discussing them.
  3. 1. We need to be real about these things. People who are traumatized, people who are burdened with shame, who are confused, who are lost -- they need resources. These kinds of awful violations happen. A lot. We need to talk about them. In this podcast I go into them.
  4. 1. There is no neat and tidy way to talk about incest and sexual violence and its aftermath, especially the experience of shame. No whitewash, no clichés, no pious pablum.
  5. 1. And we need to be able to put these thing into a Catholic context, see them from a Catholic viewpoint.
Warnings -- let's be prudent here in listening to the story -- not an episode for little kids to necessarily be listening to.
1. As important as it is to deal with these topics
2. Be thoughtful about where you are in your life journey, where you are in your healing -- this story may strike close to home for many of you
3. You don't have to listen to the story or my analysis of it -- listen only if it is good for you -- even for people who are really psychologically well integrated, this is painful stuff.
  1. Unresolved sexual trauma -- this may be a great time, it may be a terrible time listen to it.
  2. Unresolved incest
  3. Unresolved betrayal
  4. Unresolved abandonment, especially by parents or church or civic leaders
  5. Sibling issues.
4. Window of tolerance
  1. the zone of nervous system arousal in which you are able to function most effectively. When you are within this zone, you can readily take in information, process that information, and integrate that information more readily.
5. 1. You can listen.
6. 1. People in the window of tolerance are feeling emotions at moderate levels, not overwhelmed with emotion (hyperarousal) and not numbing their feelings out (hypoarousal).
Review of levels of listening -- check out last episode
1. Listening to trauma may be easier with a written narrative than in person with the people immediately present
1. Listening to -- Level 1 listening -- Listening with your mind, taking in information
  1. Often called active listening
2. 1. Listen carefully to what is happening in the story
3. 1. Grasping the content, the facts
4. 1. Requires attention, concentration, taking in what the person is saying.
5. 1. Focus externally on the characters, not internally on what is going on with your parts. Not distracted by own self-focus
1. Listening for -- Level 2 listening -- Rarer.
  1. This is speculative, we hold it lightly
  2. Listening to fill in the gaps in each character's big picture
  3. What is beyond and behind the words?
    1. Listening for the deeper layers of meaning in order to perceive what has not been said outright.
  4. 1. understanding the experiential context for each of the characters
  6. Listening to what the character does not say or do -- omissions.
  7. What are we listening for when we are listening for?
    1. The person's experience -- to grasp the person's experience -- all the inner stuff.
    2. Emotions
    3. Intentions
    4. Thoughts
    5. Desires
    6. Attitudes toward the world
    7. Impulses
    8. Vision of the world
    9. Working models of the world, assumptions.
    10. Values
    11. Purpose in life
    12. I listen for identity
    13. and for shame.
  8. Engage the Faculty of imagination to help us fill in the gaps
  9. Taking in what the person means (in contrast to what the person says in Level 1)
  10. What we are not doing:
    1. Not evaluating the merits of that perspective, not getting caught up in judging that perspective
    2. Not looking to right wrongs, not looking for justice, not asking deep existential questions about how could that terrible thing have happened to the person, not formulating advice, not looking to impress.
    3. Setting all that aside. To be with the characters in their stories, their narrative. Understanding them first.
    4. Taking that character's perspective in. Seeing the world through the other person's eyes. No matter how inaccurate or distorted that perception of the world may seem to be to us.
1. Listening with...