Judy Foreman: The Secrets We Carry Keep the Shame Trapped

I did a little bit of research on you . You're an advocate for mental health and awareness , so give us a bit of an introduction on yourself .

Then I wrote a novel , a medical thriller , called Crisperd C-R-I-S-P-R , post-A-V-D , and then this is my first and probably only memoir , so I've been all over the place .

But basically I'm a journalist and I've been a journalist for decades and I've loved being a journalist and it's been a perfect match for my personality , which is I'm an extrovert and so I love to talk to people and that's a great trait for a journalist because you could get a new story . You could get a new story at any cocktail party .

And thank God for Zoom , because I've been teaching a memoir class a writing , how to write a memoir class for a number of years , and when COVID came along , we just switched to Zoom and it worked fine , thank , goodness , thank goodness for modern technology , because I am well as an extrovert , I've got to be with people , I've got to feed off that energy .

I don't know , a typical might be unfair , but he was like a cartoon , a caricature of a corporate bill in the blank , not a nice person , very impersonal . In fact . He would not let my brother and me call him dad . He was just all corporate all the time , thank you , and was not capable of empathy or introspection or anything .

He would come to my bedroom door every night when I was a teenager , basically naked except for a short t-shirt . I was petrified . I was like a mock execution . Every night I thought I was going to get raped , so it was incredibly traumatizing for me . It was also an alcoholic and a very angry man and everybody in the whole family tiptoed around him .

Everybody was scared of him , basically including my mother , and why she didn't protect me is a big question . She claims to have not known , but where did she think he was going every night undressed ?

To her adolescent daughter's room , and , in terms of making sense of it and trying to heal from it her lack of responsibility , essentially , and her lack of understanding and her emotional unavailability . She was very superficially charming , but no insides , no death , and in some ways that has been more traumatic than my father's abusiveness .

It's interesting Both parents contributed in totally different ways . So I am a huge advocate of psychotherapy and mental health in general .

If you want I can , but I don't have to rattle off the statistics of women in particular who are abused , often by family members , often by parents and my father was also an alcoholic and something like 20% of adults in America grew up in an alcoholic family and that has its own kind of abuse that people have to try to heal from .

Those kinds of situations are very damaging to a child's brain that's just trying to understand the world , and for the child the whole world is the parents , and if they're not providing security , there's no security , and so you grow up with kind of a hole in the middle of your psyche which is hard to heal from . You're nodding .

Like you're taught that sex is abuse but it isn't Right .

Everybody's journey and their journey , right , but when it comes to children , that's a whole different thing yeah , it's very traumatizing .

According to the CDC , the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention , nearly one in five American women has experienced a completed or attempted rape during her lifetime . That's a lot . That's 20% of women . That means if you're in a cocktail party , one out of every five women is a statistic , as it were .

And one in three female rape victims is experiences rape for the first time between age 11 and 17 . And one in eight female rape victims a report that occurred before age 10 .

And here's the one that gets me More than 90% of child sexual abuse victims know their attacker and in fact the majority 77.5% of perpetrators were the parents of the victim , and that figure comes from the US Department of Justice . This is huge .

This is a huge problem and essentially in this part of the memoir I was trying to use myself as a vehicle or as an example to illustrate this larger problem . The rest of the memoir is about my own trajectory through journalism and a lot of adventures , but this part is an attempt to say how common this is and still how under recognized it is .

A lot of the opioid abuse problem is a mental health problem . People are in psychological pain and they try to medicaid themselves one way or another alcohol or drugs . That , combined with the gun epidemic , this country is in a mess and a lot of it is caused by other human beings .

They're suffering caused by violence psychological and physical violence toward other people and I wish we had mental health parity so that everyone who wanted to go to therapy could find a good therapist , certified therapist not a crazy do-it-yourself therapist , but a legitimate , certified therapist who could really help .

I know this may be backtracking a little bit , but do you think that where times were where the generation was with your mother when you were a child , with that it seemed like women have still most of this day are trained to sit down and shut up Right Years ago and still currently , people still have that mindset .

Do you think that played a factor into her turning a blonde dye and only seeing what she wanted to see ?

When you later get out of the situation , you look back this was not right , but that was normal . And she had no job , no career . She depended on him for money . Being the marriage was all she really cared about , and that means you don't protect your kids , or , in this case and many other cases , it means you don't protect your kids .

So , yes , I think we're in way better shape now in terms of women being able to speak up , but it's still hard if you don't have the education or the means to get a job and be able to support yourself and your children . That takes a lot of money .

We were heading back after lunch towards Zermatt , major city in Switzerland , and I just aligned from a poem and I'm not even a big poetry fan , but this line from a poem jumped into my head and the complete line was if equal affection cannot be , let the more loving one be me . And it's a line from WH Rodden .

And I stopped on the trail and I said this to Ken , my husband , and I said that's amazing . And he said , yeah , it's like a marriage vow , and I said okay , let the more loving one be me . And then he gave me a huge hug and he said no , let the more loving one be me , which was very sweet .

And so I decided that's what I was going to call my book , because one thing I have learned , I think , over my life and this fits in the therapy idea is that as I have gotten healthier , the men I have chosen to marry have gotten more and more capable of intimacy . This is my third marriage . My first marriage ended in divorce .

My second , my husband , died of prostate cancer . So this is my third . But each partner , each husband , was actually the right choice for where I was emotionally at that time , which is interesting . It makes you wonder how people can be married for 70 years to the same person . More power to them .

In putting together the memoirs of this book , I realized that there was a theme , and the overarching theme was really a search for the truth , not just a search for the truth about what happened in my family , but also I've become a huge advocate of freedom of speech and the free press and searching for truth in the wider world .

And in that sense , not just because I'm an extrovert and journalism demands extroversion , but this sort of compulsion or drive to find the truth , or multiple truths , which is usually the case that kind of propelled me for both things . So it turned out there was actually a guiding principle which I wasn't aware of when I sat down to write the book .

So I took a memoir class and you had to write a memoir every week for the class . Then I took the course several more times and pretty soon I had a huge stack of memoirs . I thought this could be a book , and piecing it together was a hard part how do I arrange it ?

So it made sense as a flowing thing , but eventually I did hit on the way to do it . It was very rewarding .

The interesting thing is , when I have given talks about this book , people come up to me afterwards with their own stories of trauma in childhood or even , as in your case , midlife or early midlife not to do with anything to do with sexual abuse , but other kinds of abuse .

For instance , a man who's actually living in my building came up to me and he said on his deathbed my father said to me you will never amount to anything . That was hugely traumatic , and other people have had suicides in their family or deaths of a parent at an early age that have left a huge mark on their personalities In the wider sense .

It's not just abuse that can lead to the need for figuring things out and therapy later on , but other forms of trauma can really affect people and can be helped by therapy .

But also for a long time I went to a group called Children of Adult , children of Alcoholics , and there's programs like that for people with obesity problems and overeating , and you know there are groups and sometimes they're free , like the alcohol world , and I don't know if you have to pay for your group , but those can be helpful too as a way to get started

. And then if you want to do individual stuff , that to me that's the best , but groups are very powerful .

And with women and sexual abuse , women tend to blame themselves . I don't know if men do too , but and there was something recently that I read I think was in the New York Times about rape victims If it's in a court , they often are not believed , unless they scream or try to run away .

But in fact , what really happens to people in a situation of terror is they freeze , and freezing is not convincing to a jury or a judge , only what Hollywood would have you do , and that's unfair too , because you would react according to your own physiology . Freezing is like what animals do if they're being attacked they play dead . So there's even or not even .

But in the justice system in particular , it has not believed women . Look at Joe Biden , whom I like , but he if you need a Hill hearings nobody believed her when she was satisfying against Clarence Thomas . It's taken a whole generation to get past that . So I'm glad we're making progress , but we have a long way to go .

But basically we need each other . We're mammals , we need each other .

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As we embark on this journey together , let's remember that there is life . After trauma . We can rise above it and create a future filled with hope and joy . Join us next week as we dive into the healing process and share more incredible stories of triumph and resilience .

Until then , take care of yourself and remember you deserve love , you deserve happiness and , above all , you deserve an abundance of healing .