I'm 70 now. It happened to me when i was 10. It was my grandfather. I, who have an amazing memory for everything that happened in my life, have huge blanks of memory where i don't remember getting away, i don't remember finding my brothers (who to this day only vaguely remember my hysteria), how i got myself into the neighbor's bathroom and locking the door to feel safe, don't remember my parents arriving. Don't remember any sequelae. In my 20s when i pressed my parents for details, i got conflicting stories - "Oh, we didn't really believe you, you were just a kid. and Oh, we barred him from ever coming to our house when we weren't there." I don't remember anyone ever talking to me about it of making sure i was ok. Your article is the first time i've really looked at it and realized how much it's shaped who i am, lack of trust, fierce independence (no one's coming to help. you better take care of this yourself), poor interpersonal relationships, always looking for a new friend who might be more supportive. I think at age 70, it's just time for me to get on with whatever chapter of my life this is. I'll try another therapist. I'm very sad.
How awful, Helene. I relate to how things shaped you, fiercely independent, not trusting, etc. I’ve let therapists go and I’m near your age. I focus on how much I can enjoy the days, on what little and big things might bring me joy. I acknowledge myself and all that I’ve survived and I’m in awe. I’m finally my own best friend instead of my worst enemy. I applaud myself and my survival instincts! Well done! Good job! Tick tock! I hear the strength in you and the sadness, too. All valid. Keep going!! You are heard!
1. Being told to "just get on with it (or over it)." Highly Sensitive or neurodiverse people are told this all the time, when they react negatively to something that doesn't bother other (normal) people. It treats what we are actually experiencing as unimportant.
2. Anecdotally, I bet you would find a ton of support for your PTSD theory in the large number of men who fought in Vietnam who suffered from PTSD afterwards, because their experiences in that war were ignored or negated or deemed not to have happened at all.
Thank you for speaking to this aspect of the ND brain- my vivid recall and pattern recognition of things related to events make it much easier to get stuck in memories.
This post literally strikes a nerve. I recently was subjected to medical misogyny in an ER--twice, two different hospitals--and was met with hateful indifference by my father-in-law (who has always hated me for being a feminist and not tolerating his sexist garbage) when I was almost killed in a hurricane. With the medical emergencies, the nurses just stood there while both doctors--in separate situations-- insulted and ignored me. With the natural disaster, I confronted my FIL with his staggering indifference, and his response was "You are no longer a part of our family" (as though I ever was). My husband has never done anything to defend me. Men absolutely do not get this. MY FIL died last year, but I didn't attend his funeral. You have to find ways to assure YOURSELF that you matter.
Absolutely right. We women DO have to find ways to assure ourselves that we matter. Who else is going to do it? I’m finding that I’m becoming stronger every time I hear about my ‘worth’ from some idiot. It is up to me to strengthen myself!! And to trust myself FIRST and, if given the opportunity, advocate for myself at every turn.
Every time I read your thoughts im moved to be stronger than I was yesterday . I understand why I acted “ crazy” in moments when I would scream , “ why are they doing this”
“ why won’t anyone help me ?”
I weep . For these words . I’m sorry you even have to read my writing!! (9th grade education )
Just to clear this up , I remember that you wrote once that you went to some speaking event and your badge said “ Kat man” and I thought it was so funny and humbling that a world renowned expert would still have to endure having someone misspell their name
Maybe I hallucinated it or I’ve embellished the story in my head, but that’s why I say Kat man
Ha! I have no memory of this now but it's certainly possible. I did once have a cat named for me--Kate Catte--by a reader and it was the highlight of my life.
You have probably read this (and if you mentioned it here and I missed it, my apologies!), but this reminds me a lot of Laura Brown’s essay “Not Outside the Range.” She writes about how trauma and PTSD were originally defined by the event and not by the reaction, and they were defined based on experiences that tended to impact men more heavily, like war. (Also, they just didn’t look at women for the research, shocker.) And the way trauma was talked about was that it had to be something “outside the range” of human experience. But as you point out, losing a job can cause a trauma response, as can childbirth, and for decades, neither could have been classified as trauma because they were sort of normal life events. The definition of trauma has expanded in the literature and in the clinic, but I think people still tend to think of it as shell shock.
Thank you for this - there's so much that hit home for me. I am a transgender woman, but as a young "boy" I was sexually abused by my parents. I don't know if anyone knew, but no one did anything. The interesting twist is that I became a super docile, compliant, obedient kid SO THAT NO ONE WOULD FIND OUT (teachers, friends' parents, etc.). I became so good at keeping secrets that I hid it from myself for decades as well. When I figured out the truth at age 52, my now ex-wife was very supportive, but only one of my four children accepted what I told them, and no one in my birth family believed me. It took two exceptional therapists and 15 years of therapy to get to where I am today - I'm still an abuse survivor, and residual effects of my abuse are (and always will be) apparent in my life, but my abuse is not the central fact of my life anymore. I think that's the best outcome one could hope for.
You write the truth, as I know from both sides: I had the great privilege to intervene for a young person who had been abused and help her be heard, seen, believed and supported. She has grown up to be an amazing young woman and I am very aware how that moment in her life could have been definitive had she been met with cold indifference or disbelief. I am so grateful I was there instead. Thank you for this column, and for all you do for the unheard.
It helped so much to be able to say publicly what really happened and disrupt the pretense, though in many ways I’m still reeling, still trying to answer my own question: “who am I if I’m not a philosophy professor?”
And Kate—thank you in particular for the example and the space to *practice* this species of care. I hope—believe, really—that being believed, seen, and championed is protective and healing. I’ve felt the effects, myself.
Kate this cuts so deeply because of its accuracy. I would also argue, (as I do in my book) that trauma, albeit much less acute, doesn’t have to be an event. It can be the invisible residue of growing up in a world that believes you’re weak, inferior, irrational, overly emotional, incapable of leadership and of making important decisions, etc. coupled with the crazy-making that comes from people saying it isn’t happening. Thanks for this incredible piece.
I've been on the receiving end of traumatizing misogynistic behavior more times than I can list here. But one long-term experience stands out to me: for 35 years, a male stalker has reappeared in my life from time to time. I stopped telling people about it when too many of them acknowledged it by saying to me, "Oh, I totally get that - I could see why someone would stalk you."
It became more traumatizing for me when I realized, after changing phone numbers many times, that a female mutual acquaintance was acquiring my new information and giving it to him.
To be clear, my husband and immediate family have always been extremely loving and caring about this (my dad, who was a pacifist, told me he would physically hurt the guy if he ever came near me).
Thank you for your writing. Thank you for being a voice for so many of us who are gaslit over and over and over.
I loved Fleishman is in Trouble, those scenes were so well acted and I am encouraged to read the production team was supportive during filming. I would never say I had PTSD, but I certainly had intrusive thoughts following the birth of both my babies. With my first child in 2017 , they told me he couldn’t find his heart beat when they put the monitors back on after I got the epidural- it turned out he was already too far down in the birth canal but my camp friend and husband’s cousin had stillborn babies in 2014 and 2015 so I very much panicked in the 2 minutes the medical staff were panicking. I think they determined I was fully dilated after I said I felt I needed to push and he was a 3 push baby.
When my youngest kid was born in 2019, I had a bad month of anxiety about both of my kids and would check on them 10-15 times after they went to sleep after a law school classmate’s 2 year old dying of Sudden Death Syndrome at 8 pm on a Monday. I didn’t start therapy until last year, I just kept thinking I could tell myself I was fine with all the trauma I had experienced, but after pandemic and the death of my grandma and uncle from cancer in an 18 month period, I was in a very intense mental health crisis. Throw in the ED history and I was all kinds of fucked up when I finally made an appointment.
Ten years ago, at 13, my daughter was diagnosed with a chronic illness, with additional serious diagnoses following in the next couple of years. We both have PTSD after the countless, almost universal dismissal of her symptoms as "anxiety" because she's female. We both now wait until we're on death's door before interacting with medical personnel thanks to the various humiliations we were subjected to. Ten years later, she is about to undergo surgery for a condition that we've been asking about (only to be ignored and/or ridiculed) for years. It's great that we finally found someone (a woman, of course) who listens, but boy is it infuriating that she had to suffer for so long.
I always thought the indifference came from understanding the situation all too clearly - the enormity of it - and not stepping in for any particular instance because they would also have to confront the men closest to them for the same or similar behavior.
Thank you, Kate, for another incredible essay. Once again I marvel at how you know, and can communicate, so much about so many subjects. This was really great.
You already know about my childhood abuse, Kate, but you brought up matters that I had remembered and been frustrated and resentful about but had not put in the context that you have described here. When I was 40 I told my uncle, who had always loved me yet whom I had never told about this, of my mother's sexual abuse of me as a young child. Without any hesitation or struggle to come up with words, he said, “ I know. I knew then, but I couldn't do anything.” He deified my father, who was his older brother, and he didn’t want to cause an upset. A few years later a great-uncle told me he was going to leave something for me in his will. We had never been close, and I told him I was thankful for what he was doing but I didn't understand it - could he please explain to me why he was doing this. He said, “I knew that things were wrong in your family, but I didn't know what to do. I’m doing this now because I know what you went through and yet you came out of it a pretty good man.” I wish that one or both of them had acknowledged at least to me what was going on when I was young. It might have helped. I was stuck and powerless like everybody else who has experienced this.
I started my Substack for precisely this reason. A man at work managed to manipulate me into a situation in which he could exploit my work and no one cared that it was happening to me except one person. After he tried to take credit for my work and obtained my emails behind my back, I tried to report him but the university responded by taking away my power and giving him everything he wanted. I felt crazy, like I was the one who had done something wrong and was being punished.
I'm 70 now. It happened to me when i was 10. It was my grandfather. I, who have an amazing memory for everything that happened in my life, have huge blanks of memory where i don't remember getting away, i don't remember finding my brothers (who to this day only vaguely remember my hysteria), how i got myself into the neighbor's bathroom and locking the door to feel safe, don't remember my parents arriving. Don't remember any sequelae. In my 20s when i pressed my parents for details, i got conflicting stories - "Oh, we didn't really believe you, you were just a kid. and Oh, we barred him from ever coming to our house when we weren't there." I don't remember anyone ever talking to me about it of making sure i was ok. Your article is the first time i've really looked at it and realized how much it's shaped who i am, lack of trust, fierce independence (no one's coming to help. you better take care of this yourself), poor interpersonal relationships, always looking for a new friend who might be more supportive. I think at age 70, it's just time for me to get on with whatever chapter of my life this is. I'll try another therapist. I'm very sad.
Oh my god. I'm so, so sorry Helene. Holding space in my heart for you.
Ty for your kind words.
How awful, Helene. I relate to how things shaped you, fiercely independent, not trusting, etc. I’ve let therapists go and I’m near your age. I focus on how much I can enjoy the days, on what little and big things might bring me joy. I acknowledge myself and all that I’ve survived and I’m in awe. I’m finally my own best friend instead of my worst enemy. I applaud myself and my survival instincts! Well done! Good job! Tick tock! I hear the strength in you and the sadness, too. All valid. Keep going!! You are heard!
Sending a supportive hug 🤗
Two things jumped out at me:
1. Being told to "just get on with it (or over it)." Highly Sensitive or neurodiverse people are told this all the time, when they react negatively to something that doesn't bother other (normal) people. It treats what we are actually experiencing as unimportant.
2. Anecdotally, I bet you would find a ton of support for your PTSD theory in the large number of men who fought in Vietnam who suffered from PTSD afterwards, because their experiences in that war were ignored or negated or deemed not to have happened at all.
Thank you for writing about this important topic.
Thank you for speaking to this aspect of the ND brain- my vivid recall and pattern recognition of things related to events make it much easier to get stuck in memories.
What great connections! Thank you so much.
This article is strongly in conversation with Kate’s essay and your comment on it: https://substack.com/@thespirallab/note/p-147450987?r=n59wz&utm_medium=ios&utm_source=notes-share-action
This post literally strikes a nerve. I recently was subjected to medical misogyny in an ER--twice, two different hospitals--and was met with hateful indifference by my father-in-law (who has always hated me for being a feminist and not tolerating his sexist garbage) when I was almost killed in a hurricane. With the medical emergencies, the nurses just stood there while both doctors--in separate situations-- insulted and ignored me. With the natural disaster, I confronted my FIL with his staggering indifference, and his response was "You are no longer a part of our family" (as though I ever was). My husband has never done anything to defend me. Men absolutely do not get this. MY FIL died last year, but I didn't attend his funeral. You have to find ways to assure YOURSELF that you matter.
“You have to find ways to assure *yourself*.” This resonates!
You are so right. I'm incredibly sorry for what you went through. Sending all my solidarity. ❤️
Absolutely right. We women DO have to find ways to assure ourselves that we matter. Who else is going to do it? I’m finding that I’m becoming stronger every time I hear about my ‘worth’ from some idiot. It is up to me to strengthen myself!! And to trust myself FIRST and, if given the opportunity, advocate for myself at every turn.
Thank you for writing this. It said out loud what has quietly tormented me my whole life. The indifference around me was worse than what happened.
Sending solidarity ❤️
Every time I read your thoughts im moved to be stronger than I was yesterday . I understand why I acted “ crazy” in moments when I would scream , “ why are they doing this”
“ why won’t anyone help me ?”
I weep . For these words . I’m sorry you even have to read my writing!! (9th grade education )
What a gift you are to this world Kate manne
Kat man
Oof thank you so much. And please never apologize. You express yourself beautifully and I'm sending so much solidarity ❤️
Just to clear this up , I remember that you wrote once that you went to some speaking event and your badge said “ Kat man” and I thought it was so funny and humbling that a world renowned expert would still have to endure having someone misspell their name
Maybe I hallucinated it or I’ve embellished the story in my head, but that’s why I say Kat man
And I laugh every time ❤️⭐️
Ha! I have no memory of this now but it's certainly possible. I did once have a cat named for me--Kate Catte--by a reader and it was the highlight of my life.
You have probably read this (and if you mentioned it here and I missed it, my apologies!), but this reminds me a lot of Laura Brown’s essay “Not Outside the Range.” She writes about how trauma and PTSD were originally defined by the event and not by the reaction, and they were defined based on experiences that tended to impact men more heavily, like war. (Also, they just didn’t look at women for the research, shocker.) And the way trauma was talked about was that it had to be something “outside the range” of human experience. But as you point out, losing a job can cause a trauma response, as can childbirth, and for decades, neither could have been classified as trauma because they were sort of normal life events. The definition of trauma has expanded in the literature and in the clinic, but I think people still tend to think of it as shell shock.
Thank you! Looking this up now.
Thank you for this - there's so much that hit home for me. I am a transgender woman, but as a young "boy" I was sexually abused by my parents. I don't know if anyone knew, but no one did anything. The interesting twist is that I became a super docile, compliant, obedient kid SO THAT NO ONE WOULD FIND OUT (teachers, friends' parents, etc.). I became so good at keeping secrets that I hid it from myself for decades as well. When I figured out the truth at age 52, my now ex-wife was very supportive, but only one of my four children accepted what I told them, and no one in my birth family believed me. It took two exceptional therapists and 15 years of therapy to get to where I am today - I'm still an abuse survivor, and residual effects of my abuse are (and always will be) apparent in my life, but my abuse is not the central fact of my life anymore. I think that's the best outcome one could hope for.
Oh my goodness, I am so sorry. Holding you in my heart ❤️
You write the truth, as I know from both sides: I had the great privilege to intervene for a young person who had been abused and help her be heard, seen, believed and supported. She has grown up to be an amazing young woman and I am very aware how that moment in her life could have been definitive had she been met with cold indifference or disbelief. I am so grateful I was there instead. Thank you for this column, and for all you do for the unheard.
Thank you so much, Linda--your support and kindness and advocacy truly matter xo
Thank you for this piece. I wrote about what my former community did to me, here: https://www.advancejournal.org/article/94664-telling-on-themselves-a-story-of-institutional-betrayal-in-christian-higher-education
It helped so much to be able to say publicly what really happened and disrupt the pretense, though in many ways I’m still reeling, still trying to answer my own question: “who am I if I’m not a philosophy professor?”
And Kate—thank you in particular for the example and the space to *practice* this species of care. I hope—believe, really—that being believed, seen, and championed is protective and healing. I’ve felt the effects, myself.
Thank you so much. I have been thinking about the connection with institutional betrayal and I can't wait to read this xo
Thank you for sharing this, Melissa. I am currently reading your article with much rage.
Kate this cuts so deeply because of its accuracy. I would also argue, (as I do in my book) that trauma, albeit much less acute, doesn’t have to be an event. It can be the invisible residue of growing up in a world that believes you’re weak, inferior, irrational, overly emotional, incapable of leadership and of making important decisions, etc. coupled with the crazy-making that comes from people saying it isn’t happening. Thanks for this incredible piece.
You are so right--thank you. Thinking now about CPTSD in this connection..And congratulations on your book, which is such a vital contribution xo
I've been on the receiving end of traumatizing misogynistic behavior more times than I can list here. But one long-term experience stands out to me: for 35 years, a male stalker has reappeared in my life from time to time. I stopped telling people about it when too many of them acknowledged it by saying to me, "Oh, I totally get that - I could see why someone would stalk you."
It became more traumatizing for me when I realized, after changing phone numbers many times, that a female mutual acquaintance was acquiring my new information and giving it to him.
To be clear, my husband and immediate family have always been extremely loving and caring about this (my dad, who was a pacifist, told me he would physically hurt the guy if he ever came near me).
Thank you for your writing. Thank you for being a voice for so many of us who are gaslit over and over and over.
Sharing new, “safe” info repeatedly with the stalker?! That makes me want to light things on fire. Whew.
I’m so glad that the people closest to you are protective and affirming.
Oh my god. I'm so sorry. So angry for you. The betrayal! I'm enraged
I loved Fleishman is in Trouble, those scenes were so well acted and I am encouraged to read the production team was supportive during filming. I would never say I had PTSD, but I certainly had intrusive thoughts following the birth of both my babies. With my first child in 2017 , they told me he couldn’t find his heart beat when they put the monitors back on after I got the epidural- it turned out he was already too far down in the birth canal but my camp friend and husband’s cousin had stillborn babies in 2014 and 2015 so I very much panicked in the 2 minutes the medical staff were panicking. I think they determined I was fully dilated after I said I felt I needed to push and he was a 3 push baby.
When my youngest kid was born in 2019, I had a bad month of anxiety about both of my kids and would check on them 10-15 times after they went to sleep after a law school classmate’s 2 year old dying of Sudden Death Syndrome at 8 pm on a Monday. I didn’t start therapy until last year, I just kept thinking I could tell myself I was fine with all the trauma I had experienced, but after pandemic and the death of my grandma and uncle from cancer in an 18 month period, I was in a very intense mental health crisis. Throw in the ED history and I was all kinds of fucked up when I finally made an appointment.
Oh my goodness, I'm so sorry. This is too much to bear. I am just hoping you have the support in processing this you deserve xo
Ten years ago, at 13, my daughter was diagnosed with a chronic illness, with additional serious diagnoses following in the next couple of years. We both have PTSD after the countless, almost universal dismissal of her symptoms as "anxiety" because she's female. We both now wait until we're on death's door before interacting with medical personnel thanks to the various humiliations we were subjected to. Ten years later, she is about to undergo surgery for a condition that we've been asking about (only to be ignored and/or ridiculed) for years. It's great that we finally found someone (a woman, of course) who listens, but boy is it infuriating that she had to suffer for so long.
Enraged for you both. I'm thinking of you both and sending my warmest xo
I always thought the indifference came from understanding the situation all too clearly - the enormity of it - and not stepping in for any particular instance because they would also have to confront the men closest to them for the same or similar behavior.
Yes, I bet this is often a large piece of it. Sigh. And thank you for putting it so well.
Thank you, Kate, for another incredible essay. Once again I marvel at how you know, and can communicate, so much about so many subjects. This was really great.
You already know about my childhood abuse, Kate, but you brought up matters that I had remembered and been frustrated and resentful about but had not put in the context that you have described here. When I was 40 I told my uncle, who had always loved me yet whom I had never told about this, of my mother's sexual abuse of me as a young child. Without any hesitation or struggle to come up with words, he said, “ I know. I knew then, but I couldn't do anything.” He deified my father, who was his older brother, and he didn’t want to cause an upset. A few years later a great-uncle told me he was going to leave something for me in his will. We had never been close, and I told him I was thankful for what he was doing but I didn't understand it - could he please explain to me why he was doing this. He said, “I knew that things were wrong in your family, but I didn't know what to do. I’m doing this now because I know what you went through and yet you came out of it a pretty good man.” I wish that one or both of them had acknowledged at least to me what was going on when I was young. It might have helped. I was stuck and powerless like everybody else who has experienced this.
Thank you so much, Rick; I'm sending you all my solidarity ❤️
Thank you, Kate, dear.
I started my Substack for precisely this reason. A man at work managed to manipulate me into a situation in which he could exploit my work and no one cared that it was happening to me except one person. After he tried to take credit for my work and obtained my emails behind my back, I tried to report him but the university responded by taking away my power and giving him everything he wanted. I felt crazy, like I was the one who had done something wrong and was being punished.
Wow. So angry for you. The audacity! Arghhhh