Disbelieving Trauma Survivors

I have been working on a new book, Seven Ravens: A Journey and Spell to Gain Back Your Power from Abuse. This book has quickly taken shape since I attended Mystic South 2025. However, I find myself stuck. After making good progress, I find myself floundering.

As I have mentioned in this blog, my health isn't excellent, and this week I have fought off a flu/cold issue. It caused me to spend a day in bed resting. Now I am back in my office flopping through my book and trying to make progress. I am doing research at the same time to bolster my book's information.

One of the problems that I have discovered is that my heart rate goes into exertion mode while I am actively writing about abuse. Something I would have never known without my Visible band (not an endorsement or advertisement). The Visible band tracks your heart rate and categorizes it into three zones: resting, activity, and exertion. The goal is to stay in a moderate exertion mode all day to avoid crashing at the end of the day.

I spent four hours in one day writing actively about abuse and found I was in the exertion zone for all four hours. I was gobsmacked.. This work is more stressful than I ever imagined, and now it makes sense why I have never been able to curate a book on abuse before now. I had been blaming social pressure on my lack of movement, with no fundamental understanding of how much stress writing about my personal history of abuse puts on me.

Additionally, writing a book on any topic is stressful. My good friend Dree Armandi Pike and I recently commiserated about how difficult birthing a book is. How stressful. We shared how much anxiety surrounds the creation and release of a book. (Get Dree's book here.) Will anyone read it? Will anyone care? Will it lead to future books? There is a distinct reason I didn't write another book after Family Coven: Birthing Hereditary Witchcraft, even being exceptionally ill directly after.

My cohost at Urban Unwitches, Kyler Pettry, read through the first section of Seven Ravens. He told me it was well written, drew the reader in, and was difficult to read, not because of the language used but because of the subject matter. My story, I conceptually understand, is not for the faint of heart or really for people who don't have an understanding of where I am coming from. It is a story that needs to be written.

Social pressure, however, does have a part to play. In the pagan community, my opinion regarding abuse has been dismissed because I have never hidden my childhood trauma. As if my childhood trauma somehow makes me less of an expert on trauma. Which quantifiably makes no sense. I have spent decades reading and studying trauma, including years in therapy around the trauma that has shaped me. This should make me more of a subject matter expert than an unreliable narrator. And this is part of the problem with trauma.

Our society has taught us to be distrustful of victims of traumatic abuse. Surely nothing that heinous could have happened? Surely! We would, as a society, act differently if that type of abuse were happening in this gentle world of civilized culture. If someone has experienced abuse, then they aren't thinking clearly, are misremembering, or are mistaken about the details. All of these explanations are easier than facing the trauma others have experienced because of responsibility. I only realized this recently as I was working on Seven Ravens.

I wrote about my experience after having received help from the battered women's shelter in Dawsonville, Georgia.

After I was settled into the apartment, I found it in the attic of a bed and breakfast on the outskirts of Dahlonega, Georgia. I was visited by a Psychiatrist and the intake woman. While there, the idea of returning to college came up, and I was asked if I knew anyone who could help me. I said I did. My high school best friend’s family was Christian, rich, and liked me. So I said I would reach out to see if I could get help getting further away from my family and possibly get help getting back into college.

Margaret was old southern money, and her daughter Tara, had befriended me in public high school before we moved to Dawson County. Tara was a deeply loyal friend who loved me and encouraged me and my self-esteem. I remember Margaret being sophisticated and kind. Her husband worked from home and was as handsome as Margaret was pretty. They lived in a mansion and owned property all over the South, including a horse farm where Tara rode. There were pictures of them with the Bushes in their home, and once I overheard someone say that the President had called. To say I was outside of their league was an understatement.

I tracked down Margaret and asked to meet with her. She agreed to come to my crappy apartment. She came in, and I took her coat. We sat nearly knee to knee. I took a deep breath and began.

“I am here because I went to the battered women’s intake center in Dawsonville. They are helping me off the books. Some benefactor is funding me but I don’t know who it is. My dad…he was raping me all my life and beating me. This last time lasted for two days. I knew he was going to kill me, so I ran. I had hoped you might…..”

“No,” she says, somewhat bewildered, “No, this isn’t true. You would have told us back then. You would have asked for our help if this were true. We thought of you as another daughter. You know we could have helped you. Besides, I have met your mother, and she is lovely and a good Christian. She wouldn’t have stood for that. Isn’t your dad in law enforcement now? No, you are lying.”

She rose quickly, and I grabbed her coat, I helped her back into.

“I am coming to you for help now,” I say quietly. “I need help now.”

Shaking her head sadly, she looks at me with pity, “You’re lying and trying to take advantage of my family. No. I don’t believe you. I won’t help you.” She leaves quicker than she had come. I sat back down on the chair I had started in, looking now through the window of the door she had left in, defeated and told I was a liar once again.

In that moment, I had never felt more alone. No one to believe me but a stranger, a psychiatrist, a doctor [who had examined me], and my mysterious benefactors, whoever they might be.

By this time in my journey, I had sought help from an uncle who kicked me out of his house for being a liar, and in high school, I had told a friend who told me that I “wasn’t allowed to have problems." [Shout out to my high school friend who, as an adult, apologized to me for her reaction and gave me her belief much later in life.]

I don’t know why I had thought this encounter would be different.

I go on to write that the reason for the immediate reaction of disbelief is responsibility. If what I am saying is true, then Margaret would have to admit she missed signs of my abuse when she knew me as a teenager, that she was silent and perhaps somewhat complicit in active child abuse. This is not true.

Bystanders only become complicit when they turn away victims of traumatic abuse after they come forward. Then they are part of the societal machine that keeps victims silent and abusers safe from recriminations. Advocates of the abused emphasize how important it is to believe survivors. Often, this belief comes on the heels of the shame, silence, and years of trauma as the abused reach out for help for the first time. Your support or discouragement can change the course of that person's journey away from abuse.

It is no doubt that Margaret's disbelief changed mine and is still affecting me today as I struggle to help others on this journey of survival after traumatic abuse.