You don't have to be good.

On surviving scandals and shame.

Monica Lewinsky is about my age. I remember the 1998 scandal that, in sync with an unprecedented digital revolution, exposed and sent her into the sort of humiliation and shame that almost caused her to take her own life. We didn’t have words like power dynamics, gaslighting or slut shaming then and it was hard to make sense of the storm that surrounded this young woman, whose biggest mistake was, in her words, being in love with her boss.

Monica faced a long and expensive legal process, was let down over and again by people she trusted, struggled to pick herself up, moved overseas to study, couldn’t get a job, was continuously hounded by the press and then went to ground. She became a meme in pop culture before memes were a thing.

She emerged publicly in 2014 when Vanity Fair gave her the opportunity to write this piece on Shame and Survival. It starts with her recount of being asked, while being filmed for a documentary, how it felt to be known as the “blow-job queen”. Shocked, realising how naive she was to think she may be taken seriously, she held her own and answered, pointing to the more meaningful issues she had wanted to address for the show, like male dominance in public life. She then says it probably cost her another year of therapy.

She became a contributing editor for Vanity Fair. She wrote this essay in 2018 giving her take on the #MeToo movement.

She writes about the #MeToo collective as a shared experience and notes the power of a social media hashtag, comparing it to the loneliness of what she went through; years before social media and in the very early days of public access to the internet. Support would come slowly through letters in the mail, along with threats and vitriol.

For the same 2018 Vanity Fair piece, Monica spoke to psychologist Jack Saul, founding director of the International Trauma Studies Program and author of Collective Trauma, Collective Healing. “Collective trauma,” he told her, “usually refers to the shared injuries to a population’s social ecology due to a major catastrophe or chronic oppression, poverty, and disease. While the events of 1998 in the United States do not fit neatly into such a definition, they may have led to some of the features we often associate with collective traumas: social rupturing and a profound sense of distress, the challenging of long-held assumptions about the world and national identity, a constricted public narrative, and a process of scapegoating and dehumanization.”

This is where I see parallels to religious trauma. We see so many stories like Monica’s in faith groups. We have untouchable demi-gods for pastors, often with celebrity status, systems that run on the need for them to be right and people trying to stuff their cognitive dissonance into tightly sealed boxes. If scandals are suspected or come out, whole communities can lose trust in those who were meant to be shepherds; there’s a shattering of the-way-things-are-meant-to-be. There are ruptures.

Often very tight-knit faith communities feel the distress of the changes to their social ecology, they’re torn between wanting to maintain the reputation of the faith, the denomination and their own group, and wanting to support victims. So often though, so often, they go the way of scapegoating and blame. They double down. It’s too hard to acknowledge the demi-god could have been wrong, or at fault. Narratives are tightly controlled by the ones recounting them, the ones with the microphones, resources and power.

Even now, despite the 2013 Australian Royal Commission into Institutional Responses to Child Sexual Abuse, churches and faith groups are still not set up well to navigate these ruptures. Very few responded well at the time, often feeling attacked and persecuted and what we’ve seen since feels like the bare minimum for becoming safer, and still without clear lines of reporting when laws are muddy, like when those in power groom adults.

So people who have experienced harm, abuse, betrayal and excommunication are left out in the cold shivering, often with NDAs and a dynamic mirrored by the legal system. There’s nowhere safe enough to process what just happened. They often feel powerless, they blame themselves and don’t know how to move forward.

This is especially true when, like for so many of my clients, their abuse was connected to their jobs, their work experience, their internships, their studies and their vocation. They don’t know anything else, have no other skills and can’t go back. Institutional betrayal breaks trust in systems, they start to see coercive control everywhere.

Counsellor and academic Jaime Simpson recently released research into adult experiences of grooming and abuses of power in Australian churches. The findings are sobering and she is speaking up for changes to laws in Australia that would make abuse of power by clergy illegal.

What we see in the research and in the counselling room are people who feel broken; both being blamed and at times perhaps having been the ones doing the blaming when they saw it happening to others. Both full of shame and knowing that what happened to them absolutely should not have. Rebuilding of identity is a huge part of my work with clients, finding out who they are now on the other side of all this. Picking up the pieces and bravely finding a way through. Holding the both-ands.

In Monica’s 2015 TED talk she shares a bit more of her story (she’s funny), and calls out shaming, noting the devastating impact it can have. We see this cruelty in faith communities too - look what you’ve done, you caused him to sin, you’ve brought down the man of God. The line that I loved in Monica’s talk that stayed with me - you can survive it.

Shame is insidious, the shame of religious trauma, brutal. Akin to a shattering of the self as I often quote from the literature.¹ But, you can survive it.

And, it turns out, you don’t have to be good, you don’t have to “walk on your knees for a hundred miles through the desert repenting.”² You don’t have to earn favour or prove your worth. You are already good, you always were. You can rebuild, you’re worthy of a beautiful life, one that is meaningful to you.

It was Monica’s new podcast that sparked my curiosity to get caught up on the last few decades. It’s called Reclaiming.

It was good to listen to the first candid episode, where one of her team, who was a child in 1998, interviews her on what it’s like to reclaim her life over and again.

She’s adamant, “you can insist on a different ending to your story”. If that feels hard to believe possible, you can borrow my belief that it’s true.

If you’d like to connect or you’re interested in counselling, you can get in touch here.

And if you’re a therapist wanting to get a better understanding of the impact of religious trauma, you can download my new look eCourse here.

Take care,

Jane

1. Panchuk, Michelle, "The Shattered Spiritual Self: A Philosophical Exploration of Religious Trauma" (2018). Faculty & Staff Research and Creative Activity. 313.
https://digitalcommons.murraystate.edu/faculty/313

2. My very favourite poem, Wild Geese, Mary Oliver.

“You do not have to be good. You do not have to walk on your knees for a hundred miles through the desert repenting.

You only have to let the soft animal of your body love what it loves.

Tell me about despair, yours, and I will tell you mine.

Meanwhile the world goes on. Meanwhile the sun and the clear pebbles of the rain are moving across the landscapes, over the prairies and the deep trees, the mountains and the rivers.

Meanwhile the wild geese, high in the clean blue air, are heading home again.

Whoever you are, no matter how lonely, the world offers itself to your imagination, calls to you like the wild geese, harsh and exciting - over and over announcing your place in the family of things.