In the face of oppression, we resist.
Because survival is paramount, resistance can be subtle, ensuring survival while protecting something of our dignity, even when much of it has been ripped away by an abuser.
We resist.
Even when our resistance goes unnoticed. Sometimes that’s the only way to simultaneously protect ourselves and preserve something of our self-worth.
We resist.
Even by the inch we refuse to surrender when we’ve had to cede a mile.
We resist.
But it doesn’t always look like it, and strangely enough, sometimes we hate ourselves for it. People will say things like “I should have spoken up”, “I should have fought back”, “I should have yelled for help”. Perhaps that’s what we imagine resistance looks like. Fighting off an oppressor is more cinematic than silently rejecting him. Yet life is not always like the movies.
The purpose of therapy here is helping people recognize and reclaim their subtle acts of resistance. That way, they can forgive themselves for not doing something more overt and come to appreciate their covert acts of resistance as equally heroic, even essential.
This is beautifully illustrated by a story one of my old professors used to tell of a woman who could not cry. She’d seen various doctors about it, but nothing, it seemed, could remedy her mysterious condition. At last, when she was asked about her story, instead of merely her symptoms, her dry eyes came to be seen as a heroic act of resistance that had merely outlasted its relevance. She was a residential school survivor, where she had been subjected to all forms of abuse. Unable to run away or fight back, she resisted by withholding her tears. She refused to let her abusers see her cry, and in that, she stood up for herself.
Telling her story allowed her to reclaim those dry eyes as the act of resistance they’d been, instead of letting them define her as somehow defective in medical terms .
I do not know if she cried afterwards, but a part of me certainly shed a tear for her.
Sometimes what we think is wrong with us can best be understood as an old attempt to reconcile survival and resistance at a time when so much was beyond our control. Instead of trying to suppress that part of ourselves, the part that may have saved us back then, an understanding of the role it tried to play can lead to appreciation, and ultimately, reconciliation, as that part learns we’re no longer in danger, and can shift out of that protective role.
If you’ve enjoyed reading this, please share it with someone you care about.
To receive the Integration Counselling Newsletter in your inbox, please subscribe today.
In solidarity,
Henrik Vierula
That was beautiful, Henrik.