Here is a tricky topic to talk about if ever there was one. Add to that the difficulty of writing a short article that’s both potentially helpful and also speaks to a broad audience, particularly since it’s so personal. But it seems to me that many of the challenges of navigating the topic are the same whether written or spoken. So lets try the same thing here that I do in an initial session — go slowly.  Obviously it’s different engaging in a one-on-one conversation and learning where the edges of the person’s comfort zone are, so when I do this live I may or may not say any of this, depending on what feedback I’m getting; but lets give it a try:

So right now, I’m not going to ask you about what happened — unless you really want to just jump into it. In fact, I’d like to start off by introducing a skill that really helps with difficult topics: the “meta” conversation. A metaconversation is talking about talking about an event (and no I didn’t repeat myself). We don’t want to jump into a potential minefield without a map, so you can consider the metaconversation to be the process of map-making and finding out what a person is able to talk about. Heck, I’ll tell people they have my full permission to lie if they think they need to — better than feeling guilty about it if they do. Obviously lying to your therapist is probably not the best long-term strategy, but it may absolutely be the best starting point.

I certainly don’t want to drag information out of anyone, or force a difficult conversation onto someone who’s already had control taken away from them; I want to give them as much control as possible. A metaconversation is the plan we make before talking about something, the conversation we start if we need to come up for air because it got too intense, and it’s the way we find the right words, or at least placeholder words, when talking about the subject. 

For instance the preferred term “survivor” is what we’re “supposed” to use to be empowering. Sure, but it only took one person looking up at me and asking, “But did I survive?” for me to not make that mistake again. If someone feels like they lost an arm and are actively bleeding to death, saying “Hey, at least you survived!” won’t be very helpful. Sometimes people are so used to hiding things behind the curtain of “no it’s fine,” that the first step may be to validate them as a victim.

But also people are all unique. Not everyone is sensitive to word choice, though, so we’ll have meta-conversations before we even approach the topic itself. This is the point in the conversation where the person asks themselves what they actually want to say, rather than what they think they “should” say. However this also leads to a second problem: we’re trying to talk about a topic where words really are truly insufficient. A person may literally not be able to speak about it. 

There are actually several reasons for this, but one is purely neurological and can be seen in the research on brain responses to trauma. Language and raw experiences are stored on opposite halves of the brain, and much of trauma treatment can really be summarized as working to get the two sides on the same page about the experience. The confusion itself is a serious injury. If we don’t know what to think, or even how to think, about something, how can we trust ourselves to navigate the world?

And this is why I’ve saved a particular word for the end. The word “rape” is also insufficient. It will draw to mind some preconceived idea of what it means — maybe a story developed in middle school. Or perhaps it draws to mind a legal standard of some kind and fills a person’s brain up with thoughts of legal criteria. Or perhaps the word draws to mind someone else’s story, from a friend or movie. This word, and particularly the idea of what the word means, becomes the thing a person compares with their own experience, and judges themselves by. I hope it goes without saying that judgement of this kind is self-destructive. But if I wanted to do that topic justice, it would take a chapter, if not a book, of its own.

So you pick whatever words work for you right now, and I’ll go along with that. Remember, this isn’t a legal proceeding, and you’re not stuck with just one way of thinking about something forever. You may even need to use words that don’t entirely make sense to you. Sometimes it becomes a difficult bind when the religious language of “good” and “evil” may be the only words that fit the feeling, but maybe you’re not religious. You don’t have to be. This is where I go back to what I said earlier, the confusion itself is a serious injury, and establishing these things in a metaconversation is the first step to organizing your thoughts.

In a session it’s typically somewhere around this point that we start making a plan to measure when the person might feel comfortable enough to talk about certain things, and how they can take control of our conversations when they are.