Yale Psychiatry Grand Rounds, October 25, 2019: Eve Ensler

October 29, 2019

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Eve Ensler: "Women: From Surviving to Thriving"

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00:01Good morning, I am John Crystal I'm the chair of the Department of psychiatry at Yale and the chief of psychiatry at Yale, New Haven Hospital and I'm thrilled to be able to have the opportunity to welcome you today.
00:18Uh for those of you who are who heard the first two presentations earlier this morning. You know that this is going to be a powerful moving an educational day and it's the best kind of activity from my view, a kind of a grassroots day, which was organized by a committee of more than 20 people from various parts of the Yale community.
00:48Who planned this worked hard for over a year to pull this stay together? I particularly want to acknowledge the two Co chairs of the committee. Sofia Nourian, Stephanie, Gilson, both psychiatry. Residents 3rd year. Residents in the Department of Psychiatry, who basically took this idea, and ran with it. An brought people together. I think they were amazed by the recepcion in the energean the vision.
01:20Of so many people who worked with them to pull this day together. Uhm I think that that that tells you that this is not just today. Uh we're going to hear lectures, but this is really the expression of something much larger an so I was as I was listening to the two presentations this morning I was reminded by.
01:51The statement from there was a rabbi Indiana Babble on over 2000 years ago, who said if I am not for myself who will be for me if I am not for others? What am I and if not now when that to me kind of captures the opportunity and the energy of the day and.
02:18Uh I want to credit this group for not only having the vision, but really mobilizing the community, raising the money for many parts of the campus to make this day possible.
02:36Um.
02:37So why are we here we're here because women face distinct mental health challenges I'm just going to read from their own materials. They're so good.
02:49Women face distinct mental health challenges and we continue did need to better understand this need and to do a better job of supporting these women.
03:01We have to do a better job of understanding. The challenges that women face the mental health challenges and we have to do a better job of supporting them.
03:10I.
03:11That is true that is what we need to do and I hope that's part of an NRG Anna movement that comes out of this conference. Today, that continues beyond and hopefully to future to future conferences. I couldn't be more thrilled to join you in anticipating are wonderful guest speaker. But to do that. Let me invite the organizers of this conference. The head of the committee organizes Stephanie and Sophia up to.
03:42To introduce the speaker.
03:58Thank you doctor crystal.
04:02Good morning, and welcome to the first inaugural women's mental health conference here at Yale.
04:19We are so excited for you all to be joining us today.
04:25If at any moment throughout this morning.
04:28You feel like you are being overanalyzed.
04:31Don't worry, it's because we're also hosting the Department of psychiatry grand rounds.
04:41I'm Stephanie Gilson.
04:43And I'm Sophia Nori.
04:46The Genesis of this conference started from a simple Internet search.
04:53Over a year ago, Sophia and I were actually looking to attend a women's mental health conference.
05:01We were looking for a group of people who are passionate about improving the care.
05:10Of women with mental health illnesses.
05:14And who have struggles.
05:18From this.
05:20We met with many of you.
05:24We really appreciate that you are all here today, supporting us.
05:29You helped us take what was once just a small idea and make it into something much larger.
05:39We are now a coalition that spans across department's disciplines communities and even some of you are here from across the country.
05:53We are a group of trainees and students from all different backgrounds.
06:01Who share a similar drive to improve the Wellness?
06:06For women and gender minorities.
06:10We empower one another.
06:12And learn from each other.
06:15We are your future psychiatrists.
06:19Obstetricians.
06:22Lawyers.
06:24Therapists social workers.
06:28Community organizers.
06:32Public health professionals.
06:37And we are the nearly 300 people who signed up to be at this conference.
06:43And the over 400 of you in this audience today.
06:51And this is just the beginning.
06:54So stay tuned we thank each and everyone of you for being here.
07:00And helping us with this larger movement.
07:11And now it gives me immense pleasure to introduce our keynote speaker Miss Eve Ensler.
07:23I first came to know of Eve's work when I struggled for healing after an assault that I have suffered in college.
07:32At the time.
07:33I was shattered, I felt very broken.
07:39I remember watching a video of Eve, where she talks about what helped her survive her own drama.
07:46And she said.
07:49When we give in the world what we want the most.
07:53We heal the broken part inside each of us.
07:58That message.
08:00That I could help myself heal myself by helping other people.
08:06Prompted me to become a Rape Crisis counselor and now a psychiatrist.
08:11Because I wanted to help heal other people's minds.
08:18Eve.
08:21Thank you.
08:27Eve has personally impacted my life and that of countless others.
08:33We may know her as the author of the vagina monologues. Anna Tony Award winning playwright.
08:39A survivor of violence herself. Eve has dedicated her whole life to illuminating violence against women and girls worldwide.
08:48In 1988, she founded V Day, a worldwide activist movement to stop violence against women.
08:56She also founded 1 billion rising the largest global mass action to end gender based violence in over 200 countries.
09:06Alongside Doctor Denis Mukwege, the recipient of the 2018 Nobel Peace Prize Eve, founded the city of joy are evolutionary center to help women survivors of violence in the Democratic Republic of the Congo.
09:25In May, Eve published a very remarkable book that's called the apology.
09:31It's a searing account of her childhood trauma written as an apology from the perpetrator who was her dad.
09:40One of my favorite parts of the book is the beginning. It's actually the first paragraph Eve says.
09:49I'm done waiting.
09:52My father is long dead.
09:54He will never say the words to me.
09:57He will not make the apology.
10:00So.
10:02It must be imagined.
10:04For it is in our imagination that we can dream across boundaries deep in the Narative.
10:11And design alternative outcomes.
10:15So let's try to do that together. Let's imagine let's dream and create a different culture.
10:23A different system that makes the well being of women from all walks of life a priority in our society.
10:31Let's design alternative outcomes for the women that we care for.
10:36Today, with Eve.
10:39Let's imagine what this kind of caring.
10:43This kind of community.
10:45This kind of world could look like.
10:48And now
10:51Please let's give a round of applause for Miss Eve Ensler.
11:13Morning everyone.
11:16Thank you for that beautiful beautiful introduction and I just want to take 2 minutes to really honor. Sophia Anne Stephanie. I know how hard they have worked over this year like really, really hard and all the volunteers because what you've done is amazing. You've changed the culture. You've changed the culture, so BBB.
11:40I just want to say a couple little notes When I use the word women, all throughout my speech. I mean to include all women straight gay. BI Trans Nonbinary. Queer genderqueer agender and gender fluid and I want to say that everything I'm saying this morning. Isn't offering not a prescription. It's come from my own experience. If it doesn't work for you release it. But I'm very, very moved and very, very honored to be here this morning.
12:11To talk about the mental health of women? What do they suffering from? What is particular to women and how do we take better care of them? This is a critical moment to be having this conversation as we are enveloped in a political cultural emotional reality that has never been more toxic racist misogynist transphobic homophobic, immigrant, hating or Earth, destroying I'm hearing from so many women as I've been touring with my book.
12:42About depression rage illness accidents, anxiety and thoughts of suicide in these terrible times.
12:50I began with the world I begin here because I believe a huge mistake in treating the mental health of women is treating each women as an individual separate from the community or the culture or the political reality that she lives in.
13:08Social services in therapy have often been siloed from social justice and without the integration of the two in my opinion. There can be no real healing. I'll begin with a little story around the time of Ronald Reagan, who by the way I hold personally responsible for the beginning of the damn full of this country.
13:28Yes.
13:31He was talking a great deal of that point about a winnable nuclear war. Of course, this was a totally absurd and terrifying idea but again to work its way into my unconscious. I began to have serious anxiety attacks. Terrable dreams about nuclear annihilation. I beyond the subway and I would find myself suddenly evaporating. I thought I was having a nervous breakdown. This point me to a new therapist for weeks, he analyzed my terror of nuclear war. As a consequence of growing up in a very violent family, where my life was constantly in jeopardy.
14:04Annihilation was often imminent it was an interesting theory, but it did not stop my obsession. Then one day in the session. When I felt my fear of nuclear war was being completely pathologized. By the therapist. I got angry. I just stopped and said the possibility of nuclear war is real. It is not imagined. It is not a neurosis what I need to do is go work to stop it and I left and went out and joined a group and dedicated myself for the next 8 years to ending the arms race.
14:34And Guess Wat my anxiety went away.
14:40What it taught me is that we struggle? What we struggle with internally is profoundly connected with? What is happening externally and Alesso's connections get made is very hard to function in he'll we cannot be healed in a vacuum because their problems are not created in one right now. Women are facing some of the most challenging and debilitating issues misogyny racism inequality endless violence in the form of rape, incest domestic battery harassment sexual trafficking.
15:11Immigrant bashing what makes women sick or unwell is untended trauma from violence being blamed as a victim early childhood abuse cruelty. Bullying racial undermining not being believed not being seen, not being taken seriously body shaming that era of extinction transphobia homophobia living in a country where the leader is a known sexual predator with now close to 40 women, accusing him of sexual abuse unknown white supremacist.
15:41In a Micron hater we're a Supreme Court Justice, who was in theory, fulfilling the highest law of the land was revealed as a clear sexual predator and got sworn in just the same. These injustices signal signal to women that their lives do not matter that safety for them does not matter that their experiences do not matter. This is not only undermining an traumatizing but it constantly. Retriggers earlier traumas. I want to begin by talking about the impact of violence against women on women's mental health.
16:12As one out of 3 women on the planet will experience rape or beatings in many ways. It is the mother issue, which underlies everything and it is still often invisible in both the understanding and the treatment of women. I am a survivor of both sexual and physical abuse at the hands of my father. He began sexually violating me when I was 5 and stopped at 10 when he began to beat me, and physically batter me almost killing me a few times until I fled home at 18.
16:44What was the impact of that violence my body became the landscape of Terra and betrayal and pain I left it early. An lived floating above myself in my head as it was no one at home in my body. There was no one to protect it. My memory was fragmented early on as in my attempt to forget what happened to me, I had to begin to forget everything I was made to feel like a hore from the beginning, so I began to behave as one, I had no sense of.
17:15Agency over my body because it had been robbed from me. When I was so little. I was filled with rage depression. Constant anxiety and self hatred. I became an alcoholic at a young age drug addictive and developed eating disorders. I was unable to sustain intimacy because it made me feel caught and claustrophobic and I knew betrayal was always around the corner. I hated my body distrusted. Love and had a very warped notion of sexuality. I was a mess and at that time, there were very few trained professionals making the connection.
17:49Between the tearable sexual and physical abuse that have been done to me as a child and all the symptoms. I was manifesting. I want to say that I worked for 8 years in a maximum security prison. Bedford Correctional Facility, where I ran a group with women uncovering taking responsibility for their violent crimes and I have to say. In all the years that I was there, I would venture to say that 90% of women who end up in prison have suffered terrable untreated trauma, resulting from childhood.
18:19Or adult sexual and physical abuse and it seems it's still not seen or dealt with as the core of what caused them to act out and find their way to prison. I went from therapist a therapist and most had no notion of how to help me one of them tried to convince me that everything I believed had happened to me was simply a fantasy a Freudian notion as you know you will. I just reread Jeffrey moose. All Masons assault on truth and it's really shocking to understand how Freud?
18:50Actually knew that sexual abuse was the cause of so called hysteria. But how we eventually repressed that theory. Not too upset the German male elite.
19:01Then this therapist that I was seeing who believed it was a fantasy one day at the end of a session crossed a boundary and kissed me putting his tongue in my mouth.
19:12I left therapy and be and it was almost like the repetition of everything that had happened in my family and I became progressively despaired at anxious. I finally after years met a new therapist who understood what was happening to me. She was the first person who was not afraid of my story. She was not afraid to look at my history of sexual and physical abuse, she gently took me through a profound process of recovery where I finally began to get well. What are the some of the things that improve my mental health?
19:451st and foremost my therapist believed me and I want to say something, I was just in Italy at a woman shelter and I was asking them? What is the biggest issue they struggle with in Italy and they said no one believes women. I really believe it is the underlying thing that we have to uproot on the basis of that belief my therapist work with me to go deeper an open up more channels of memory and buried trauma. She stayed with me through the agony and the terror and dread.
20:16She listened carefully she was not afraid to enter my darkness with me and she didn't put limits on how far I could go into the wound because she wasn't afraid she nurtured and she mothered me as this was going on. I was traveling the world with the day, the global movement to end violence. Against all women and girls that had merged out of my experience with the vagina monologues as I performed the play around the country and the world. Women would literally line up after the shows to tell me that their stories.
20:47At first I thought Oh great. I'm going to hear wonderful stories of sexual satisfaction. An Orgasm's and desires, but truthfully 90% of them were stories about being raped or incest or beaten or abused. The play had uncapped and catalyzed and made women able to tell their stories and many of them were sharing things they had never told anyone before I knew there was violence against women. Of course, but the play revealed the epidemic numbers of women.
21:17Who had been violated I knew we needed to do something so we began V day the global movement to end violence and as I travel to over 70 countries to homeless shelters prisons warzones refugee camps shelters. I listen to the stories of hundreds. Maybe thousands of women. I realized that most women do not want to be rescued or saved or frankly, even analyzed what they want is to be heard what they want is to be believed what they want is to tell their stories to someone who is.
21:49Empathetic, who cares who will feel their pain and reinforce their right to share their experience. What most women want is a safe place where they can rage and mourn and scream and wail and release? What most women want is to understand that they are part of a community and that what happened to them is not an isolated incident because they were wrong or terrable or bad. But in fact, violence is a systemic reality that a billion women suffer from at as it.
22:19Is the methodology that sustains patriarchy they want to come out from invisibility an insignificance? They want to feel that they are not permanently destroyed or broken or ruined. They want to be able to Reinhabit. Their bodies and feel their bodies and shake loose the trauma and pain. So here are a few rules and tools. I've learned when you sit down with any woman assume that either. She has been violated and if not herself.
22:50That she has been witnessed or experienced secondary violence be on the lookout for it prepare for it. So you are experienced in practice and seeing the signs and knowing how to help a woman break or silence work on your own denial about your own story. So you don't resist or deny another womans. I see many therapists and and this is just something who haven't worked on their own trauma. And when it comes up in patients they don't want to go forward with it or.
23:20Male therapists who I've had two experiences with who are actually verging on being perpetrators, who will not go there with women because they haven't dealt with their own aggression work on your own fear or judgment that patients can unconsciously feel believe in the power of true listening rather than feeling compelled to give advice do not press. The victim to forgive the predator that is actually another form of abuse it is not the job or role or duty.
23:50Of the victim to forgive and I will address this more when I speak of apologies later. I think individual therapy can be incredibly powerful. But I will say that recovering from violence against myself as a woman was most effective in Group and collective therapy because when my own recovery became embedded an woven into the recovery of other women. I seem to move faster. I think it's really critical that anyone working with patients.
24:21Work at the intersections every woman has a different story based on our particular family. Socioeconomic group traditions race, gender story as an immigrant. There is no monolithic template for treatment. It is critical for mental health workers to be educated about various issues the impact of racism and the impact of racism on white people white people need to educate themselves about their own racism their own legacy of racism.
24:51A black women for example, who has been raped faces multiple issues in breaking her silence. We sadly live in a culture that criminalizes black people from birth black women are deeply sensitive to this and certainly don't want to betray men who have already been bit betrayed by a white supremacist culture treating a woman who has been raped is completely interwoven with this reality as it is woven into why black people don't for example, report things to the police. We only have to look at the number of Diabolical police shootings that are now happening.
25:21Actually, in peoples homes to understand why black people are the police or the last people. Black people call in distress knowing the specific struggles history distrust of the community. You work with is critical to gaining trust and helping people heal.
25:39I want to talk a little bit about creating sanctuary and creating safety an I want to turn to talking about city of joy. I've really had such an amazing life that I've gotten to travel. The planet and made so many amazing women doing the powerful work of healing, and transforming but city of joy is just my favorite place on the planet and I say this because there's a life force their joy there a spirituality there that I've never experienced.
26:10Anywhere we opened an envision city of joy, 9 years ago with my sister, Christine Schueller Disk Reaver, who lives in Congo and my brother. Doctor didn't jimagua gay as most of you know the Congo has been a place where there's been an economic war going on for decades. Millions we think estimated 8,000,000 people have died. Hundreds of thousands of women have been brutally raped and terrorized in what I can only call sexual terrorism.
26:41It's award that's been formed from minerals coltan, particularly which goes into our iPhones and computers militias that are hired by multinational corporations go into the villages. They they send these malicious into families where the husbands are forced to rape their daughters sons raped their mother is every soldiers rape. Everybody the families flee, and once they flee the malicious take over the minds when I was invited to go there almost 10 years ago by doctor McCoy gay.
27:15Uhm I have to say that I was beyond blown up. I was shattered by the stories. I was healing and it seemed to be this perfect kind of cauldron where sexism colonialism racism misogyny had just kind of and capitalism just kind of exploded into this horrible violence. And when we spend our days. Christine Ann Dr Mcquitty and I traveling and asking women what they wanted the most.
27:46With survivors wanted they most they said, We want to place we want a sanctuary a place we can heal a place we can be together a place will be safe, so through wonderful people and support. We were able to open city of joy, 9 years ago, an it's right in the center of Bukavu, which is in eastern Congo, where the war is still going on, but somehow are precious beautiful place has been protected and every six months, 90 women come.
28:16It's totally free their food is taking care of their housing. They come and live in community with sisters from other tribes and what what's really beautiful as many women tribes haven't met other tribes so they live together and learn each other's customs and dances. Women are there to do therapy all day long in groups? They have theater? They have dance they learn permaculture they learn their rights, they learn self defense, they have a completely safe.
28:46Protected loving community for 6 months, where they have nothing else to do, but take care of themselves and I have to say the program moves from victim to survivor to leader our idea is that we are building communities out of women who in my opinion, we call women Warriors women who have been through the worst sexual violence who have been through in order. It suffering, but have learned how to turn their pain into power.
29:18How to turn their poison into Medison Ann who always become the most effective important leaders in communities an in the world and we've seen this in city of joy and I've seen this throughout the world. So the idea is that when people graduate from city of joy, they go back into their communities. They become leaders. They reach out to all the women in their communities who are survivors and they begin to form groups political groups spiritual groups mental health groups in those communities.
29:48And they refer people back to city of joy ever widening and building a network all therapy is done in a group because in Congo. People don't believe in individual therapy because nobody heels outside of a community women are invested in the evolution and Wellness of their sisters as they are in themselves and I've learned this very early and Sophia said it earlier, sometimes when you're unable to fight for yourself, you can fight for a woman who's hurting just a little bit more than you this fills you with a sense of usefulness and worthiness.
30:21And it's critical to survivor when I was at the height for example, of my own anxiety in my early days of recovery from alcoholism. I went to volunteer at a homeless shelter. An I ended up staying and volunteering for 9 years. When my first marriage fell apart. I went to the Berlin Wall and got a hammer an I chipped at it for days when my second long-term relationship fell apart. I went to Sri Lanka. After the tsunami, and I bought food and water an loved to the survivors and all those things got me through when I couldn't tolerate that error, an anxiety that was emerging.
30:54As I dress my sexual abuse, I began to interview other women and see that I was not alone. Then I began to understand that my suffering was part of a larger story, Anne paradigm of patriarchy and violence. I honestly believe that the deepest suffering, particularly in this country comes from isolation loneliness. Disconnection women feeling wrong. Responsible bad and failures. It's a combination of this morbid capitalism.
31:25And Competitiveness Ananna system that creates dispose ability women feel they carry an unbearable burden of shame when you're connected to a group of women or you have a posse you begin to understand that you have not been singled out but there is a larger order a larger diabolical system at work. An resistance makes you feel better and city of joy women voiced their stories. They undergo exercises that uncovered the trauma. They learned their rights and one of the things I've really learned.
31:57Being part of, but mainly just getting to witness what happens in city of joy because it's completely run and determined by the Congolese is that body movement body connection is key to recovery dance is a huge part. I I would say women dance probably 6 hours a day they danced between classes. They dance on the way to things they sing an that dancing is a huge part of the healing. I think one of the there's 10 principles that guide city of joy, one is tell the truth.
32:32Know your rights give what you want the most and treat your sisters life as if it was your own uhm. I think when I've also seen that profound holistic healing can happen simultaneously. While you're creating leaders and revolutionaries and I think this is really the new modality. We have to start moving into which moves certainly moves women out of victimhood and into leadership.
32:59I believe that the two things that have healed me the most profoundly are writing and activism. Starting B day in one billion rising. I think when I was hearing and overwhelmed by the stories of so many women around the world and we began a movement where people could put on the play an use the money and the proceeds of that play in local communities to go to hotlines an shelters and safe houses. I began to feel what had happened to me.
33:30The horrors that had happened to me were being turned into something that was productive and useful and um.
33:38I think that theory of giving what you want the most has been the guiding principle of my life. I think the power of art and the role of imagination is critical in healing? How do you's mental health workers help those suffering develop and trust the power of their imagination because I believe our imagination is our superpower and we're only being encouraged to use it a tiny little drop Anne Anne Anne. I'm going to give you this little story of my therapist, Sue 10 years ago, I was diagnosed with Stage 3 for uterine cancer.
34:11And it was about looking good and I had a 9 hour surgery where they moved 7 organs and 70 nodes. Ann I woke up and I was in Terra and then I had to go to chemotherapy and it was really, really, really scared of chemotherapy and I didn't want to do it. I didn't want to put poison in my body. It's just like the like. Such a metaphor for everything that happened to me, so my therapist who came over to my house because somebody had told her I wasn't going to do the chemo and she kind of pretended. She was just showing up out of the blue and it was kind of clear why she was there.
34:43An I went into my whole pitch about why would not be doing the chemo and she said. You know he.
34:49The chemo isn't for you, the key most for your cancer So what I want you to imagine is every time the chemo's going into you. You are going to burn off some aspect of your childhood you're going to burn away the rapes. You're going to burn away the beatings. I want you to picture incidents in every time the chemo is going through you're going to burn it away and burn it away. You're going to burn the stories of women you're holding in your body you're going to be and she said, and when this is done.
35:19Chemo you will be clean.
35:22I can't tell you I couldn't wait to get to chemotherapy. I couldn't wait.
35:28And it was the most profound experience of my life, I would sit there every day. I would have little visions, OK today. We're burning this away. I'm bringing this away and honestly and truly I will tell you that 80% of my childhood was burned away after chemotherapy so.
35:49I really encourage people to be inventive about how they treat people, 2:00 AM at get people to imagine it and use the imagination 'cause. It's so central in how we survive. I think one of the reasons the vagina monologues has been successful is because I interviewed 200 women to begin with, then they went off and created a fictional play based on their stories and now it's being performed by survivors for other women, it's dramatic it's intense.
36:19It's funny, it, said it's real but what started to happen is that women saw themselves. They existed and their struggles became real and I think anyways. We can help our patients write stories create art. Imagine themselves in other contexts begin to dream different dreams begin to have fantasies about other lives. They could be living and tell their stories in different ways, the creative aspect of our healing for me has been absolutely the most profound.
36:49Um Ann I want to just say one last thing before I talk about apologies. Kindness goes a long, long way mothering goes a long, long way, nurturing goes a long, long way, and I have to say that.
37:04When I got really sick with cancer uhm.
37:07I was really freaked out by this one hospital. I went to because they were not kind. They were very, very violent. I would say we have to understand that if you are touching a woman's body or her mind. But particularly body. If you are operating on a few putting him some ometer into or if you're putting a needle into her. It's an opening and if a woman has been violated its retriggering because any orifice any opening is a reminder of an original invasion.
37:37How we put a needle into an arm? How we put an idea into a patient how we put a thought the carefulness of that will determine how it's received and how it will work its alchemy inside the patient and I will just tell you this beautiful beautiful story when I was diagnosed with.
37:54Cancer they found a huge tumor in my uterus. The size of a avocado that had broken through into my colon an they didn't know how far it had gone whether it was in my liver and I had to go. I went to the Mayo Clinic, which is an absolutely wonderful place and there was this startling Lee, handsome doctor, OK like an ridiculously so and what I had to do for this. Doctor is have my rear end checked and so I was like OK. This is a nightmare of nightmares and.
38:25An I'm so in this nightmare like bending over a table and thinking OK, the handsome is man in the world is now going to you know, and it was just awful awful an as I was in this tortured sweaty state of like.
38:40He stopped everything he walked around the table.
38:45He looked me in the eyes and he said.
38:48I know everything you have done for women and I'm here to say. I'm going to take really good care of you and I'm going to do everything in my power to make you better. I could cry again and I'll tell you in her moment. I actually knew I was going to live. I had found somebody who is going to help me live. It was one sentence right. But we don't know what one sentence will do we don't know the sentence with that will give someone confidence?
39:20And we don't know the sentence that will turn them upside down and fill them with dread and fill them with despair, so I can't talk about kindness enough how we approach how we listen how we sit with what presence were in with people what love we bring into the room.
39:37It may I published a new book, called the apology for many years after my father sexually and physically abused me. I believe my father would one day wake up out of his narcissistic belligerent blindness. See me feel me understand what he had done that he would then step into his deepest truest self and finally apologize guess Watt.
40:02It didn't happen.
40:04And yet the yearning for that apology never went away and I know this is true for many, many survivors uhm. I think this longing to hear I think of the comfort women. For example, in Japan, who in the Philippines and all over Asia, who were taken by the Japanese government during World War 2 and held in in a comfort stations, which were rape camps. Many of them in their teens and early Chinese. Some were raped up to 50 times a day tide to beds for 70 years.
40:35Those women have been demonstrating outside the embassies all they want is the Japanese government to say. I'm sorry that's all. They want and they can't get that so I believe this yearning. This hunger lives in us and I. I can't tell you how many times. I've rushed to the mailbox. Unconsciously believing that finally today. There will be that letter that amends a closure an explanation to set me free. It's 31 years since my father died for over 22 of those years I have spent my life struggling day in and out to end violence.
41:09All women and girls, I've watched his women break. The silence shared their stories face attack doubt humiliation open and sustained shelters dart hotlines. I've been part of a movement that 70 years old begun by African American women fighting off the rape of slave owners and white supremacists. I've witnessed the recent iteration of me too. I've seen a few men lose their jobs or standing a couple go to prison. Afew paste public humiliation, but in all that time.
41:39I have never seen or heard any man make a thorough, sincere public apology for sexual or domestic abuse.
41:49Actually, in 16,000 years of patriarchy. I have never seen or read or heard a man make a public apology for sexual or domestic abuse. It occured to Maine that this there must be something Central and critical about an apology. So I decided I wasn't going to wait anymore that I was going to climb into my father. An let him come into me an I was going to write his apology. I was going to say the words speak the words the truth. I needed to hear.
42:19This was a profound often excruciating and ultimately incredibly liberating experience in the process. I learned the significance of an apology and the profound transformation and healing that can come from it. I've learned what a true apology is we teach our children. How to pray. We teach them. The humility of prayer, the devotion of prayer, they attention required the constancy. But we don't teach our children. How to apologize, particularly are boys. Or maybe they get to say an occasional meager.
42:51If I hurt you, or I'm sorry, you feel bad, but what I learned writing. This book is that an apology is a process a sacred commitment are wrestling down of demons. A compensation with our most concealed an controlling shadow. I learned that an apology has 4 stages. All of them must be honored the 1st is a willingness to self interrogate to delve into the origins of your being what made you a person who became capable of committing rape or harassment or violence.
43:22To investigate what happened in your childhood and your family in the culture in my father's case, he was the last child. The accident that became the miracle. He was born 15 years after the last child. An he was adored but adoration is not love. Adoration is a projection of someones idealized image self image on to you, forcing you to live up to their idea at the expense of your own humanity. My father was never allowed to be tender vulnerable.
43:52Full of wonder expressed doubt or yearning. He was never allowed to cry. All of those feelings had to be stifled pushed down and in doing so, they metastasize and eventually became what he calls in the book, The Shadow man. This Berry Creature, who later surfaced as a monster. The second stage is detailed accounting and admission of what you have actually done. Details are critical to apologies because liberation only comes through the details your accounting cannot be vague.
44:24I hurt you, or sexually abused you doesn't do the trick. These words really don't mean anything one must say what actually happened. Then I grabbed you by your hair and I beat your head over and over against the wall. This investigation into details includes a masking your real intentions, and admitting them. I belittled you because I was jealous of you and wanted you to be less survivors are always haunted by the why, why would my father want to kill his own daughter? Why would my best friend drug and rape me.
44:56Difference between explanation and justification knowing the origin of a perpetrators behaviour actually helps you understand and by understanding. It helps you get free. One of the hardest things writing. This book was how deeply I didn't want to feel my father's pain. I didn't believe he had earned the right for me to feel his pain, but to be honest with you, I when I wrote this book. I was in my you know it was literally a few years ago and I was in my 60s.
45:26And I was still stuck in a paradigm that my father had designed I was still a victim to his perpetrator and I was still living in a state of ongoing rage as my father's mother told him in the book. Anger is a potion. You mix for a friend but you end up drinking yourself feeling my father's pain and suffering.
45:49Was really, really, really painful, it broke something open in me, but ironically it was the thing that released me from his paradigm.
46:00The 3rd stage is opening your heart and being an allowing yourself to feel what your victim felt as you were abusing her allowing your heart to break allowing yourself to feel the nightmare inside her. The betrayal, the horror and then allowing yourself to see and feel and Oh the long-term impact of your violation. What happened in her life because of it who did she become or not become because of your actions and the 4th stage of course, is taking responsibility for your actions making amends or reparations.
46:31All of this indicating you have undergone a deep and profound experience that is changed to an made it impossible for you to ever repeat this behavior.
46:41Why should anyone want to undergo such a grueling and emotional process?
46:46The answer is simple freedom. I don't believe anyone commits violence or bad. Nisour terriblr acts on another who is ever free of that action. It contaminates when spirit and being an without a Mens often creates more darkness depression. Self hatred and violence. The apology freeze the victim. But it also frees the perpetrator, allowing them deep reflection an inability to change their ways and their life.
47:16My father wrote to me from Limbo where he had been stuck for 31 years. I truly believe after writing this book that the dead need us to be in dialogue with them and that through this exercise in communication with my father. I honestly believe he got free, he moved on to a now more enlightened realm.
47:35And I want to say, and I think this is something we're beginning to do with city of joy. We've been doing this exercise with our women who can't get apologies from their perpetrators. So we offered this as an exercise where they could write apology letters to themselves from their perpetrators and this quote on so dramatically that the morning after it was offered my Christine walked into her office and there was a pile of letters, where women were writing all night long to themselves. I believe that writing an apology letter to yourself can shift.
48:06How the perpetrator lives inside you for once, someone has violated you or entered you they occupy you we often know them. Perpetrators better than ourselves, particularly if they are family, we learn how to read their footsteps in the sounds of their voices in order to protect ourselves by writing my father's apology. I changed how my father lived in me, I moved him inside from a monster to an apologist from a terrifying entity to a broken little boy.
48:36And in doing so, he lost power and agency over me.
48:40We cannot underestimate the power of the imagination. It is almost astonishing tool in shifting trauma and Karma that has numbed or frozen or life force and the deeper more specific my imagining in conjuring in the book. The more liberation. I experienced when finally at the end of the book. My father or me or me and my father unto this day. I'm not clear who wrote this book. My father says to me old man be gone. It was exactly like at the end of Peter Pan.
49:11When Tinker Bell just goes and banishes into the ether my father was gone and to be honest, he is not them back.
49:20People have asked me throughout the tour of my book what will it get?
49:24What will it take to get men to want to apologize this is the 25 million dollar question but at one point in my book. My father told me that to be an apologist is to be a traitor to men, once one man hits. He knows what he did was wrong and admits it the whole story of patriarchy begins to collapse, so really. I have to say what we need to do is be working with men so they can.
49:55Grow into wonderful gender traders and stand with us and apologize so we can all begin to get free. I think it is really critical that we start having groups for men who have done things that they know are wrong and shameful and creating Contacts where they can undergo long-term thorough deep apologetic processes. I truly believe they are a pathway to freedom.
50:23There are so many apologies by the way that need to get made here our entire country rests on Recon Landfill. That's why it's so Easilly becomes unraveled think about the massive apology and reparations do the First Nations people for the stealing of lands or the rapes, the genocide. The destruction of culture and ways think of the apology and reparations to African Americans for 400 years of Diabolical slavery lynchings raped separation of families. Jim Crow, an mass incarceration. I honestly believe that.
50:54Apologies deep sacred apologies are going to be our pathway into the New world and I don't think we would have ever had. This predator in chief. If we had a country that had ever reckoned with our past.
51:14The last thing I wanted to one of the last things I want to talk about is the body and how connected the body is to mental health dancing breathing, yoga exercise. Breathwork you when we started 1 billion rising 8 years ago. It was going to be a one year campaign, I'd gone back to Congo after my surgery. and I was really, really skinny 30 pounds. Lighter Ann Walden. I really look scary. I looks like really scary old, White Woman Anne.
51:45I got there in the Congolese women took one look at me and they were like Oh God. This is scary an on off and what women do in the Congo when everything else fails, as they dance an they started to really dance and I suddenly realized that there were like.
52:01200 women dancing and every single one of them had been horribly raped.
52:06And I thought to myself, wow what it's a whole world rose up on the same day. All the survivors of the world and danced just put our bodies into motion are energean started to raise the vibration of the world into a new reality. So we put out the call the first year and it was crazy. How many people responded because I think every survivor knows that dancing is Medison. It's the thing that keeps us going and keeps it keeps us surviving and keeps changing it and the first year 200 countries rose and it was crazy.
52:38Seeing people walking through the streets with camels in India, while they were wildly dancing and cutting to Antarctica and cutting to Germany and but you know it's 8 years later and the movement is growing and growing and growing and I remember once this British. British guy on this TV show called Hardball. He looked over at me and he said. Tell me Misantla? What does dancing do?
53:06An I said, well what doesn't it? Do you know I mean, it creates community it builds enerji it releases trauma that allows you to express yourself? It's free corporations can't control it, you can do it anywhere you know.
53:22I I'm not going to tell you this story this woman. I met a few weeks ago when I did this wonderful panel on what's happening in Brazil. Her name is cellular shaka. Banshees the head of the shock about tribe. She's the foremost leading indigenous woman now fighting for the Amazon and fighting for the indigenous people who are saving the Amazon and I want to tell you what she told me, she said in the first world March of indigenous women. Everything she says, is about your body and she said to me. We are very, very connected Eve.
53:53You believe in vaginas and I know that the Earth is a vagina and the uterus. So our struggles are interconnected and I was like we are here, but she said in the First World March. They were marching and they arrived in Brasilia and there was an immense police barricade and they managed to enter conjure Congress with their singing and dancing. They believe in this only weapon we have which is our bodies.
54:23So I just want to say you cannot heal a woman whose body has been broken by talking to her head. It just doesn't happen and so whatever therapy whatever mental health. Whatever whatever whatever treatment. She is going through her body has to be part of it and I have noticed. Often, that therapy is so siloed right. We talk about the head over here. We talk about the world over here. We talk about the body over here. We're actually one person were actually living in this whole system holy.
54:55So I think if we're really serious about treating women. We have to treat their bodies. We have to treat their souls. We have to treat their political response and the political reality. They live in. We have to know this issues. They face the specific realities the traumas. We have to listen deeply. We have to be kind and we have to encourage activism. I really believe that when women start to get active and start to find their power in the world to affect and make change.
55:25They begin to heal we have to know histories in educations. We have to know our own blind spots and we have to live in our imaginations. I also want to say no one wants to be saved. I know I didn't want to be saved. We're not here to save people were here to be in presence with people were here to stand with love for people we're here to listen to people, particularly survivors because our agency has been robbed from us so long ago, so the last thing we want anyone to do is to come and rescue or save us.
55:55It's another form of colonization, but it's also a form of robbing one of ones own power. We have to understand the world. Women are living in. In the impact of that world on their emotional mental and physical health and on their dreams and on their sense of limitations and we have to look deep and hard at violence against women as one out of 3 women will be beaten or raped in her lifetime and I think also.
56:18Check out what you believe we can't help women if we don't believe it's possible to end violence against women. If we think it's a given or just part of the human condition, if we're not outraged by violence. If we don't want it to end because we're going to project that into women and they're going to believe this is normal and they're going to accept it. We have to offer alternative methods for healing storytelling. Breaking the silence creative approaches tailor made for each patient like Sue created that chemo story for me.
56:48Think about apologies's Medison how we inspire are perpetrators or write them to ourselves and finally we must move from solely dishing out anti depressants and I'm just going to have a moment on this, I when I was coming up. Everybody didn't get anti depressants and I'm not saying there aren't women who need anti depressants. But we can't just give antidepressants that is not enough. We have to work with women as they are on anti depressants to work on the trauma and to work.
57:18At the underlying issues that are compelling them forward or else what we're doing is in slaving women and another paradigm.
57:28I see so many women now who are anti depressants and are just getting deeper and deeper into isolation. An pulling away because they're not working on any of the attending issues that are causing them to feel that depression and feel that isolation and I just want to say something, I learned from this book. We're all in this country so terrified of pain were so scared of it, but we're all in pain. OK is this weird contradiction here don't let us be in pain, but we walk around in total pain.
57:59What I learned writing this book is that each one of us has a wound we each have a wound something that happened to us at a particular time that in some ways steers and directs our life.
58:10The work is not to sit outside the wound.
58:14And be afraid of the wound, so the radiation of the wound comes down upon us. The work is to find healers to find therapist. Find mental health providers who are willing to be our guides our support. Our friends and going through the wound in going through the wound. It's not to say there won't be immense immense immense pain in the center of the wound, but it's like that thing when you cross the time barrier. An you shake shake shake shake shake and then she threw out the other side and to clear space.
58:44That was my experience of writing this book, it was really, really, really hard. It was really excruciating. It was really Darryl. Ann then it was free and that requires somebody to be with you to be by you to hold your hand to sit with you to be to be your to be your person. Finally, we have to come into the world and I think my dream. I'm about to go to Taiwan and give a talk, for 5000 women who run shelters.
59:15And one of the things I'm going to say is that we need now to escalate our efforts. Violence against women. Unfortunately is not ending femicide is rampant in so many countries right now, including our own. I was just in Paris, where 114 women have been killed or reading this year by their husbands the same is true in Spain, the same is true in Italy. We all have to really begin to see that our work as mental health providers is not just helping women come out of.
59:45Their depression, but how do we help them become leaders in creating revolutionary change. Thank you very much.
59:57Thank you.
60:00Thank you. Thank you thank you. Thank you. Thank you so much thank you. Thank you.
01:00:12Thank you.
01:00:17Thank you.
01:00:20It's a timing light.
01:00:25OK, we have 6 minutes for questions. Sorry I went over, but I had a lot to take it.
01:00:39Hi.
01:00:40I'm Allan Asper I'm a psychologist in town.
01:00:45Hi Alan, I went high. I want to thank you for this incredibly wonderful talk, which I keep thinking do I want my clients to hear it? Could they tolerate it? Maybe they could Should I buy the books for them. One thing you mentioned in the beginning of your talk about your own experience, which I think doesn't get enough attention in our in our in the Yale psychiatric system is that as a consequence of your repeated childhood trauma, you learn to dissociate.
01:01:16And that is an extremely common response.
01:01:20But it's my belief that there's very few people in the Department of psychiatry that have paid attention to dissociation and I know for a fact that when clients go into Yale psychiatric hospital. They don't get diagnosed with dissociation related disorders. Their histories of trauma are not taken into account in their diagnosis. They get diagnosed with schizophrenia. They get diagnosed with bipolar disorder. They get diagnosed with personality disorders.
01:01:51And I just I wanted to emphasize that because I feel like that's a deep neglect.
01:01:57In this Department of psychiatry that we have not thought enough about how early childhood. Trauma translates into psychiatric problems in adulthood, and how much it behooves us to both advocate for long-term psychotherapy and for taking peoples histories and and committing ourselves to understand people in the context of their histories, which is getting more and more short shrift. So I can't. I can't echo that enough an I I want to say that.
01:02:28I think women.
01:02:30When we are violated as children when we are entered without consent when we are, we leave our bodies.
01:02:38And it takes many, many, many years to come back into your body many years and I feel like for me, I would say this is the core fundamental problem that we have on the planet because if you think about the fact that there are 1 billion women on the planet who have been violated women are the power force of life. We are the power force our imaginations. Our intuition or vision or burning if all of us are outside or a billion of us are outside of our bodies.
01:03:09Not really it means we are not living inside our own Motors inside our own engines. We're living out here and that process of coming back into the body is the most critical product. If we're going to survive as a human species, so not just in the medical and psychiatric is the critical piece and I can tell you it is skipped over and over and over, because I don't think people want women to live in their bodies 'cause it's too damn scary.
01:03:40If you want to know the truth.
01:03:47I think we have time for one more.
01:03:56Hi. Thank you so much for your amazing talk today. It's been an honor to hear you and you mentioned a little bit about antidepressants and I wonder what more you might say about how you feel. The mental health system should change. To actually address the needs of women. I know it's come a long way from the Tri cities that have happened to women historically in terminal system. But I still think we have so far to go and I'd love to hear your ideas well. I think I just gave a lot of them but.
01:04:26I mean, I kind of I mean, I feel like.
01:04:33Clearly, the idea of having world of mental health that our collective that connect to the political reality that involve the body that involve Paula geez that involve imagination. I mean that those were the things that was kind of Speaking of this morning and I think I think one of the things I feel about everything in our culture is the silo fication of everything how some things are heads over here, a bodies over here. This is over here.
01:05:03And I see that in every practice, I see that Medison like when you're treated as a cancer patient. You know one of the studies. They did about Kima. I found out after I had done chemo when they did all the studies on chemo. They checked out all the impact of chemo on the body but they never thought what it would do to your brain.
01:05:21OK so that's kind of important. I don't know. Call me crazy, but but again, it's the size ification of like only looking at your body and now they're forced finding out that there are long-term impacts in terms of memory in terms of cognitive breakdown. But I just I feel like? How do we create processes that are intersectional an and are wildly based with looking at every aspect of the woman?
01:05:51And not separated because the worst thing you can do to a fragmented woman who's been fragmented by violence and split apart by invasion is to fragment her further so how do we create holistic approaches to mental health is? what I would say?
01:06:16Hi I really enjoyed the part of your speech when you talk about the apology from a perpetrator an in some way I think you're speaking a little bit about how we can rehabilitate people who have committed sexual violence. An really do believe that that's possible but I also really believe it's not possible who our current system of mass incarceration incarceration because I really don't believe that any rapist can go through prison and come out a better person or come out healed.
01:06:46And some wondering what are your thoughts about what are some alternatives? How do we bring justice not through the criminal justice system? Which we know doesn't do anything for us.
01:06:57Yes, it's a criminally in just system. We know that and what I would say is this having worked and been involved in prisons prisons are places where people actually fall deeper and deeper into depression and self hatred an anger and violence. I actually believe that the apology process that I outlined here like a long, deep sacred committed process where somebody who has committed sexual violence goes through it with the therapist and clergy.
01:07:29Would be unbelievably affective and I think? What would happen is you would determine whether it's a year or 2 year process that the perpetrator would go through that this would be my dream. I'm just telling you my dream, but it goes through. That process at the end of it, they would sit with a panel of their community of legislators, doctors social workers. Artists there would be a panel, the perpetrator would come before them with the victim.
01:08:00And they would make their apology in front of them and both the victim and the panel would determine whether it was a true anthropology. And if it was the perpetrator would be released and, if not, he would have to go back to work on it. I honestly believe that it would be effective because I think what's happening? Is there are so many men who are committing terrible crimes. But even not terrible crimes minor minor horribleness right that they don't.
01:08:31So how to process after they've done it and so they're stuck 'cause it since I've written this book. I am getting so many emails from men who were just saying? How do I get out of this? What do I do and we don't have any platform. We don't have any any place for them to begin to work on this stuff and I feel like we of course, it's fantastic that we're calling men out and we're naming what they've done. But we're stuck right now right you know, I see. I see what's happening in away is like?
01:09:02All these men who got their jobs taken away. There's slowly creeping back and getting their jobs. But they haven't gone into any process of transformation. There's no indication that they went to therapy or dealt with themselves that looked at their stuff. They're just kind of waiting. We're waiting and then we'll get back into it. And this is not going to end violence so part of it is what are the mechanisms we're going to create for men for perpetrators to go through and change having done this work now for all of my life if men don't change folks.
01:09:34We're going to be here for the next 8 years that we have before climate change destroys us do you know?
01:09:40Honestly, so.
01:09:44Hi I just want to thank you very much for coming to us and sharing your stories and giving us hope as a incest survivor as a domestic violence survivor in as a military sexual.
01:09:59Thomas survivor.
01:10:01I heard you talk about the importance of creative arts in bringing back a holistic approach. Can you please help me to help teach my treaters the importance of dance one of the things that I found in my life that.
01:10:18That really devastated me was the last of the ability to dance through the pain when I was diagnosed with Mcnears. It was gone. and I I was to the point of suicidality? How do I help? My treaters understand the importance of creative art creative expression in learning to dance again man singing in the rain is the most powerful thing I think that we, as women in especially me as a woman of color can have so I'm looking to hear.
01:10:48How you will help me help my treaters? Thank you I mean? I think you actually thank you so much for sharing that.
01:10:57I mean, I think.
01:11:01And you're talking about helping you convinced the people who are working for or.
01:11:09That work with me to help me integrate back into society, said again. Oh, you're care providers by can provide you know what you should do was that habit I have dancing and let them know what it feels like like part of it is. When people begin to experience what dancing feels like. What creative art feels like. Then they'll begin to be sympathetic but also I am so tired of living in a country that actually doesn't understand.
01:11:40That art is the most central necessary elemental tool to our survival. It is ludicrous.
01:11:49It is ludicrous.
01:11:52I mean, if you if most people look at the turning points of their life. It was a book. It was a play it was a movie. It was a song it was that thing that gave them hope that turned her life around so part of it is, you building your case based on your own experience and sharing what's happened through your experience, but also finding modalities that do it and using them as points of convincing. You know, I can't even believe we're still at the point where we have to convince people that creative.
01:12:23Arts and creative approaches are the way to heal ourselves, but I'm sure there are people in this room who will help you is that true yes. Can someone can find this wonderful woman afterwards and be her posse to help or push that through OK thank you. Thank you.