Alice Munro, Silence, and Your Brain

Many of us have been thinking about our own childhood traumas since Alice Munro's daughter, Andrea Skinner, recently shared her painful life-long struggle to be heard in her family and culture, both during and following repeated sexual abuse by her stepfather.

This experience is so familiar to so many people: too many of us have been the violated, silenced child. I bow to Andrea, and to her siblings, too, for finding their way through the pain, anger, rage, confusion, guilt, shame . . . These abstract emotion words are not abstract at all when we live them: they are in the body, and our bodies speak many dialects of suffering. (And of healing, too . . . but one topic at a time.)

In an essay published in The Toronto Star, Andrea detailed the way her stepfather sexually abused her in various ways from the age of nine until she was a teenager. Gerry Fremlin was accused of exposing himself to children by others as well, spoke in sexual ways to Andrea in front of Alice Munro, and was eventually convicted of indecent assault. It was ‘hushed up’ even though the nine year old girl Andrea had told her brother, who told his mother, who told Andrea’s father (Alice Munro’s ex-husband, Jim Munro). Jim Munro not only didn’t tell Alice or raise in the alarm in any way: he sent Andrea back every summer, accompanied by one or more of her sisters.

As we know from decades of research and thousands of testmonies—in research in community and academia, in police reports, in memoirs, in songs and stories— when a powerful adult (or an out of control child or teenager) sexually assaults a child, a common response from adults is to turn away, blame the assaulted child, ignore the child, accuse the child of lying, or tell the child to forget about it. Often other adults take steps to protect the adult or the abusive young person—as all the adults in Andrea Skinner’s life did. Every single adult in her life failed her. The adult criminal was protected; Andrea was left to fend for herself.

This is a tragic reversal of everything that childhood is supposed to be; it is a grave betrayal trauma, and many of us are painfully familar with it. It is still the norm, not the exception. Which complicates speaking about it. I feel no particular surprise about this story, sadly: I’ve always found Alice Munro’s work technically briliant, and oddly cold. She didn’t inspire me because she rarely touched my heart. (I never agreed with her comparison to Chekhov, for example. But anyway. Her work is the last thing that interests me about this case.)

If you are interested in learning more about healing from betrayal trauma, including childhood sexual assault and abuse, I’ve already written here and will continue to write a series of posts about the subject over the next couple of months, exploring this painful, often soul-damaging (or destroying) experience, its cultural and societal reality, and how and why it repeatedly ‘goes underground’.

If you’ve experienced any kind of betrayal trauma within your family, community or friendship systems, you may notice how difficult it is to talk or write about your own history or the larger family / community history. Anything that involves sexual assault (a term I prefer to the vague ‘sexual abuse’ moniker) is potentially even more fraught because of the intimate, private, sacred nature of our sexuality and the shame that’s often attached to conversations, words, and thoughts around sex. If there has been sexual transgression, a child will often know it, sense it, but not know the words for the body parts or know how to describe what has happened to them. Often—so very often—when children report, they are shamed for reporting. Shamed and ignored.

I will write more on that in another blog.

 If we've experienced repeated adverse events or traumatic events, our brains have also been exposed. Part of the reason why it's so difficult for us to talk about abuse, assault, and betrayal trauma in general is because certain areas of our brain may move into the same fight flight or freeze mode that happened at the time: these are automatic full-body reflexes that are meant to protect us (and any mammal) in situations of grave danger.

Reading Andrea Skinner’s powerful essay, seeing her video at The Gatehouse website (the Gatehouse is a centre in Toronto that helps people who’ve experienced sexual abuse), I noticed this slowly-unfolding silence in myself. Even with excellent therapeutic skills and many years of healing behind me, I often found myself, as I thought about this, lapsing into a deep, almost bodily silence and stillness. Partly I was thinking . . . Partly something was happening to my brain-body-spirit.

 When we remember traumatic events, language processing areas of the brain do what they did when we first had those experiences: blood flow decreases, making it hard to speak, or to yell, or even to think clearly--because we think in words much of the time. Broca’s area is also a language production area so it’s literally hard or impossible to speak.

 Tools we can use to increase self-connection and to get Broca's area back online:

 --any physical activity that feels GOOD, especially ones that involve bilateral stimulation of the body which stimulates both hemispheres of the brain

 SUCH AS: walking swaying dancing tapping your left shoulder and your right shoulder (with your arms crossed is even better--Look up the butterfly hug)

 ---noticing how one foot connects to the floor and then switching attention and noticing the other foot while humming a song you like

 --talking to yourself in the third person

 --talking about the situation OR talking about something else, something less triggering, with a friend you trust . . .

 Pictured below is my favorite place to be silent and to write. To listen and to look.

We’ll be holding our first Olive Grove Healing Retreat in May 2025, on the island of Lesvos, Greece.

Send me an email here karen@karenconnelly.ca with the subject line WAITLIST to learn more.