A memoir of resilience
Jan Handy, executive director of the Kristen French centre, writes about her childhood of abuse — and healing
It began at the end of a gravel driveway. Her first memory of abuse.
She remembers herself as a two-year-old girl, asserting, discovering her voice for the first time in an argument with another girl over ownership of a rock.
“Mine!” she screamed.
And that is where most stories end, with the first disputes of childhood quickly forgotten as play resumes.
In this case, it was not the end.
Indeed, it would be the beginning of a journey for Jan Handy, who at 64 years old has been the executive director of the Kristen French Child Advocacy Centre Niagara since 2014. The centre, which opened a decade ago, provides a safe, healing space for children and youth to share their experiences of abuse and receive care, support and counselling. One of its goals is to minimize the impact of abuse on the victim by limiting the number of times a child has to recount their story of abuse.
There was no such centre for Jan. No person who cared.
No person who heard her cries and told her that life should be any different.
On that day, her father summoned her into the house, pulled her inside then beat her with a belt. The black-and-white screen of a TV flickered in the livingroom.
She stared at it. In her mind, drifted to the TV in an out-of-body experience, a skill that would later ensure her survival. Her first voice silenced.
Her spirit, shamed.
It is her first memory of the years of physical, emotional and sexual abuse that would follow.
“It was my first effort to say ‘mine,’ and it got silenced pretty fast,” she says.
“It was symbolic of all the times to come.”
In her new book, “The Secret Tribe, A Memoir of Resilience” (FriesenPress, $15.44) she brings readers into her story of inescapable abuse, offering accounts of moments, memories and a dialogue of her innermost thoughts. And yet, it offers hope. A narrative of resilience, at first forced, connects her childhood memories and eventually grows into a chosen resilience that is both empowering and healing.
And that is where strength begins, too. In resilience.
“Never underestimate its power,” she says. “The power to overcome a history of abuse.”
In her life, resilience entered simply because she chose to live. She calls it forced resilience. “Survival at any cost by any means,” she says.
She writes: How do you stop feeling the skin’s response to assault? In Grade 5, she protected herself with imaginary armour every day as she walked home from school. It was heavy and her view of the world was narrowed through the slits in the helmet.
She writes: My body ached all over by the time I got home and I kept the armour on until I went to bed when I had to take it off. I had no choice. I needed to rest. But the King seemed to know that I could not keep this steel skin on during the night, because that’s when he showed up.
Other times, she became the walls of her bedroom, like a “shape shifter” living there, removed from her own body.
By age 12, she began layering her body with a more enduring armour — fat. Maybe if she was less attractive, the abuse would stop? She wondered.
No one told her any different. “There was no other voice but your own,” she says.
When her inner voice said: “This isn’t right,” there was no outside voice to validate that thought. No one to say: “This should not be happening.”
And so her voice remained silenced: “This isn’t right, but I don’t know what is.” She survived alone, isolated.
She calls it “working underneath.” A survival strategy, a place she disappeared to within herself as the abuse took place outside, on her body, on her skin.
It was where her silenced voice lived. “The voice has to live somewhere in your head. Somewhere inside you. Even if someone silences you from the outside,” she says. “When it’s not safe out there, you go within.”
Art was also integral to her survival. When she had no words to speak, she expressed her voice through art.
Her earliest memory was painting a jar with small, stick silhouettes of two people and a dog.
Her interpretation, in retrospect: “It’s an expression of trying to put some normalcy in my life,” she says.
“Art is my meditation. I can get lost in it, in blissful silence.
“It’s a different silence.”
In her 30s, she began writing her memories of abuse simply as an outlet for her creativity.
“It’s all consuming,” she says. “It’s the subject of your life. What else are you going to write about? Someone else’s happy Christmas?”
Four years ago, stronger and always an advocate for others who share the stories of their journeys, she decided that she needed it to be published, in part to make conversations easier for others who live or lived it too.
In her words: “If we don’t break the silence, it’s going to continue.”
Embracing a community of support still feels a bit unnatural, she says. The will to survive was a solitary, powerful skill that helped her endure the traumas of childhood. Even through her early-adult years, she lived with a sense of isolation because she did not have the groundwork of a good childhood to build on and connect her to the people in her life.
She’s had to learn normal experiences by observing, listening, questioning people in her community.
One year, in her 40s, she decided to reclaim Christmas. She invited some family members to her home. Stuffed stockings for everyone. Cooked a traditional dinner.
“We did it. And we did it our way,” she says. “We rewrote it with abundance, with joy and with possibility.”
There were failed relationships. And she still struggles with feeling a need to be perfect, tearing down messages built up since childhood and rewriting them. Am I good enough? Am I smart enough? Am I pretty enough?
She has learned, bit by bit, to relinquish feelings of responsibility for people and events that were beyond her control and authority. It’s not been easy.
In fact, her life career — first as an Anglican priest and then in a variety of roles related to issues of domestic violence and sexual abuse — were driven by an urgency to protect: “Can I do enough work to make sure this does not happen to someone else?” she says.
“To save the world.”
She worries about retirement, knowing children will still need to be protected from harm. “I have a huge anxiety, if I retire, knowing that children will still be abused,” she says.
“All those thoughts and worries have to grow up, they have to mature.”
Recovery and healing is a process, not an event. She has benefited from the hard and rewarding work that comes through counselling.
She still lives with the effects. Always will.
In her book, pen and ink drawings represent the evolution of the adult Handy carrying her “wounded child.” Protecting the history. Keeping her a secret. Ignoring. And then in a final drawing, looking out together, in the same direction, towards the same future.
They live together. Integrated.
“I can look at that child and see her and touch her,” says Handy. “This child I can own. I own her as part of me.
“It’s not so silent anymore. “
The place within where she would disappear to during abuse, has become a different, sacred place.
“It’s where my past lives on a conscious level,” she says.
“And it’s OK. I can live with that and not be overcome by it.
“I can live in this body, in this skin and I don’t have to disappear now.”
*****
The Secret Tribe, a Memoir of Resilience, www.amazon.com/Secret-TribeMemoir-Resilience
Jan Handy. Her website will launch mid-September. www.thesecrettribe.com