We Need To Talk

“We Need to Talk” affirmed my own childhood experience of being shamed: my third-grade teacher told me I was not to be held accountable for acting silly in class because I was “not right in the head” due to a concussion the year before.

I do not lie awake thinking about that, but the fact that, after seventy years, I remember her name, what she looked like, and the plant on her desk must mean that her ridicule was deeply felt.

It’s taken me forty years to be able to talk about my childhood trauma and realize, as Anne Hallward says, I “had no choice.” We are lucky to have people like her to show us the way toward compassion — and away from shame.

I was sexually abused by a Catholic priest when I was eight years old. At my first confession, I had to say, “Bless me, Father, for I have sinned,” to the same priest who had groomed and raped me. It was painful beyond measure.

In high school I went to weekly therapy sessions and spent two years with a kind psychiatrist and two more years in group therapy with others who’d had painful childhoods. By my junior year in college I was comfortable enough to start dating.

Silence is deadly, and Anne Hallward’s research is life-affirming. To listen to others talk about their pain is one of the greatest gifts you can give — to them and to yourself. As a psychotherapist of more than thirty years, I have listened to courageous women and men who speak the unspeakable in order to free themselves from burdens carried alone for too long. Hallward stands for all of us who ache to be liberated from what we did not deserve or cause and do not need to be ashamed of.

As an abuse survivor and a trauma-recovery psychotherapist, I appreciated Anne Hallward’s perspective on shame, trauma, and addiction [“We Need to Talk,” interview by Amy Amoroso, January 2019]. My years of experience, both personal and professional, have led me to believe that shame is ubiquitous, yet it is either ignored or denied by most mental-health practitioners.