Just got home from my Michigan tour promoting My Peace I Give You: Healing Sexual Wounds with the Help of the Saints, (details to follow after I get some sleep) and would like to highlight a couple of brave admissions that were made during the past couple of days by women on the Web:
- Katrina Fernandez, whose blog is The Crescat, announces that she is "silent no more."
Among the saints, or, rather, saints-in-waiting, Katrina is in good company. As I note in My Peace I Give You, Dorothy Day also lived with profound regret over having had an abortion and, like Katrina, struggled over whether to communicate her experience to other women.
- Jennifer Fulwiler reveals that, in the aftermath of recent traumatic events, she has seen a therapist for the first time.
The kind of therapy that Jennifer is receiving appears to be a type of exposure therapy, which is helpful for victims of certain kinds of post-traumatic stress. (That particular type of therapy, in which traumatic events are relived, should be done only under the direction of a trained professional, as I stressed to Jennifer when she interviewed me about My Peace I Give You for the National Catholic Register.) Although the therapeutic technique is itself helpful, she writes that she is getting more out of it because she is taking her faith into it:
Before I started therapy, I had slammed the door on those troubling memories. They festered in darkness, where nobody was allowed to access them—not me, not even God. For me, the process of therapy has been the process of cracking that door open, little by little. It may take a while, but it has begun to open, and finally those bad moments can be bathed in the healing light of Christ.
