One of my favorite researchers, Brené Brown, likes to use Harry Potter as an example for talking about shame. In her book Daring Greatly, she writes,
“Sirius told Harry to listen to him very carefully, then he said, “You are not a bad person. You’re a very good person who bad things have happened to. Besides, the world isn’t spilt into good people and Death Eaters. We’ve all got both light and dark inside us. What matters is the part we choose to act on. That’s who we really are.”
I think the most powerful outcome of the #MeToo movement is that people are sharing their stories. Acknowledging that bad things happened to them, and connecting through the common humanity of those experiences.
I was listening to an interview with Sisonke Msimang the other day, a South African woman, and author of the recently published book, Always Another Country. In the interview she said one thing that really hit me – as a child she was taught that racism is always the problem of the racist, but when she experienced sexual violence she felt it was her problem and internalized it.
When we can talk about things that have happened to us, and share our stories freely to the extent that we want, we step out of shame and into our strength. This doesn’t mean that we have to share each nitty gritty detail or relive the trauma. Sharing our stories looks differently for each of us. What it does mean is that we can acknowledge what happen to us, and that it does not define us. We learn that the bad thing that happened to us, whatever it was, is not our fault.
Bad things do happen to good people. We might not be able to change the things that have happened to us, but we can change how we let them impact the rest of our lives. Cultivating resiliency in ourselves and our relationships is one of the biggest gifts that can come out of the experience of talking about the bad things that happen to us.