Secrets: When and Where to Reveal Them

It has been three weeks since Anna Bates, Lady Mary’s gentle maid, was brutally raped on this season’s Downton Abbey first episode. I woke up later that night remembering my own abduction and rape in 1990. My husband and I were serving as Catholic missionaries in apartheid South Africa then. I don’t think about that day very often now. I have been able to move from victim to survivor to thriver over these years. Why was I distressed over this event now? I realized it was because Anna’s choice was to keep the rape a secret as thousands of women and men before and since have done.

What has made the difference for me in my healing is that I have told my story again and again. I told it first to the detectives and police in the black homeland where I lived, then to the women I worked with in South Africa. In fact, they knew before I told them. Bush telegraph was alive and well in spite of limited communication technology.

When I returned to the States experiencing reverse culture shock, I was reluctant to tell the secret about my two years in South Africa. Why spoil the story of two amazing and life changing years with a painful one? I have found very few people who listen to pain well.

Secrets are important and have a way of taking care of us. The question is how and when to tell our secrets so they don’t destroy us and the people we love. I had made sure I told my two sisters personally–knowing they would need to know I was ok. I let them tell my two brothers which was a mistake. My brothers were much more upset about my rape than I expected. In hindsight I should have given them the benefit of a personal phone call as well.

Mostly I didn’t share my secret very broadly but in 1995, I learned that one of my friends in the Cleveland Ursulines (I spent 16 years as an Ursuline sister) had been brutally raped and murdered on the motherhouse grounds. That was the second Ursuline friend to meet this fate. Sister Dorothy Kazel was one of the four churchwomen raped and murdered in El Salvador in 1980.

It was time to tell the secret. In my workshops and retreats assisting missionaries to go overseas and to help them with the acute life transition of returning, I tell my story. I tell my secret, not as an attempt for sympathy, but as a catalyst for helping the missionaries to confront the violence and trauma that exist in our world.

The last two episodes we learned that Anna Bates’ secret was revealed in spite of her. Now she has a chance to begin her healing. I have been blessed over and over again by the healing power of telling the secret of my rape. I am convinced my secrets are important to who I am as a person. I need to reveal them only when and where the time is ripe!