Monthly Archives: September 2018

On Truth Telling

Christine-Blasey-Ford

Ten years post retirement from my therapy practice, I shredded drawers of client notes— at least fifty per cent of which involved stories of both sexes who suffered childhood and adolescent molestation by a parent, uncle, cousin, boyfriend or girlfriend, priest, acquaintance or malevolent stranger.

To a person, each one struggled with the emotional burden of “double living”—that is, in the retelling, each individual faced the specific events and relived the emotions of the experience. It’s one thing to tell a therapist, a trusted preofessional trained to help contextualize and manage sudden and unexpected violence to one’s body. It is quite another to sit before an all male Senate Judiciary Committee in Circa 2018, the age of Trumpism, and reveal what up to a week and a half ago was privileged and private information.

I am grateful to Dr. Christine Blasey Ford who has bravely come forth to tell her story to the American people. Months ago, she decided to write a letter to her Congress woman in order to “do the right thing” when she realized that Brett Kavanaugh was the very person who had attempted to rape her and muffle her scream.

Dr. Ford speaks for all my sexual survivor clients, especially those who were muted and intimidated into silence and were not able to confront their abuser.

I am grateful to Dr. Ford’s therapist both for her careful note taking (which is no small task) and for her willingness to hand over her notes to Dr. Ford to ascertain credibility to her story.

This has been a cliffhanger week for me. I have been on edge since re-watching Anita Hill’s dignified struggle to answer Joe Biden’s tortured and specific questions about Clarence Thomas’s licentious “come on” in 1991. In the presence of her mother and father and loving relatives, this Baptist raised, private woman spoke truth to power and was thanked with humiliation.

I recall a family session with a client who shared her abuse as a child by a male caretaker only to be rebuffed by her mother. As hurtful as her mother’s judgment and lack of empathy were  in that moment of truth telling, my client shed her muted self and lit the growing flame of self-respect.

Judge Kavanaugh is fighting for approval so as to be appointed to the highest court of our land. Dr. Ford is fighting to maintain her self respect in sounding the alarm about allowing a man who has a history of drunken violence against a woman to vote upon protocol, procedure, and laws that will effect women for decades to come.

According to a Facebook post, here’s what Dr. Christine Blasey Ford is facing.

The Violence Against Reauthorization Act of 2013 passed the Senate 78-22. The following 6 Representatives voted against it— Senator Grassley, Senator Hatch, Senator Graham,Senator Cornym, Senator Lee, and Senator Cruz.

These Senators are NOW ranking members of the Senate Judiciary Committee and will be  questioning Christine Blasey Ford.

May Dr. Ford stay strong and speak her truth. In gratitude.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

On Real-Life Storytelling in Film

Grace Lee, Film Director                Ann Hornaday, Film Critic

We’ve just returned from a week of learning about voice and ownership in film, Marv’s and my fifth season at The Chautauqua Institute with Road Scholar. As a writer, I am drawn to topics that edify and explicate literary aspects of the creative process. What better way to understand process than to listen to an astute interviewer dig into the background, motivation and story of the birth of a film.

Day five, Ann Hornaday, film critic for the Washington Post interviewed Grace Lee on what prompted her to begin her film career with “The Grace Lee Project,” in which she interviewed women named “Grace Lee” from all over the country. As an Asian American who grew up in Missouri, she was the only person she knew with her first name, but upon moving to New York and California, she realized there were many women with her full name. Likening the name “Grace Lee” to the “Jane Smith of Asian-American names,” the germ of her project was born and she set out to interview Grace Lees all over the country.

When I started asking other people about the Grace Lees they once knew, they were always stereotypically perfect, over-achieving Asian Americans. They went to Harvard at age 15, were excellent violin players…devout Christians, and I was none of those things. (Chautauqua Daily)

During the making of this 2005 film, she met Grace Lee Boggs, an Octogenerian Chinese-American woman who lived and worked as an activist-writer in a predominantly African American community in Detroit. A decade later, Lee returned to Boggs at age ninety to make a film titled “American Revolutionary: The Evolution of Grace Lee Boggs.”

As a writer of memoir, as a clinician who savors story, the film clips and discussion of how Grace Lee and her camera crew followed Boggs about on her daily encounters mesmerized me. Earlier in the week, listening to Ken Burns and his two writer colleagues, I learned the value and importance of weaving “stills” and back footage into the story line.

I attended Wayne University in Detroit in 1953, just at the time whites were fleeing to the suburbs as African Americans were moving into  neighborhoods. As a sociology major, I went from door to door, interviewing whites and African Americans about their neighborhood concerns. Wariness of the “other” was everywhere. I was on the fringe, unaware of Bogg’s world, encased in an academic bubble.

Lee, who had taken on the Grace Lee film as a way to research the stereotypical Asian-American as “passive,” commented how she had studied social history and the civil rights movement in college but also had never heard of Boggs. She zoomed into Boggs life, thereby transporting me to a time before the women’s movement, before Betty Friedan’s book, to Boggs’ 70 years of living in and advocating for the African American community.

After a week of film clips and discussions from film directors and writers, I am appreciative and grateful for the special visual and auditory qualities of documentary film story telling. I wish I had known about Grace Lee Boggs when I was a student at Wayne; she was such an inspirational woman. Thanks, to Grace Lee.