Valentine’s Day is also ‘V” Day - a day when theatre groups around the world, professional and amateur, perform The Vagina Monologues. This creative performance piece has become the anthem of the vast and disturbing numbers of women who have experienced sexual violence.
The play’s author, Eve Ensler, has said that she started talking to women about their vaginas and quickly realized that too many women have conflicted feelings about their genitals and that way too many women’s sexual lives have been hijacked by male sexual violence and aggression.
The redemptive power of telling their stories motivated Ensler to create a work that gives voice to this largely unspoken aspect of women’s experience and has, over the years, attracted the imprimatur of many big-name actors. Ensler soon realized she had tapped into a deep well of silent suffering but, as she recently said on Australian radio, women found freedom in telling their truth.
The transformative power of truth telling is unexpectedly enormous. Recently a friend confided in me, telling me of an experience he had had which few knew about and was a source of shame for him. After talking about it I was able to point out to him that this experience was the way he chose to learn, and there is absolutely no shame in that. The experience had the effect of changing the direction of his life, and he acknowledged that was a good thing. I think this lessened the intensity of the shame at the time, and now it has almost disappeared entirely.
I then shared with him an experience that I had never told anyone before. It was a secret I had carried for several years, not realizing what a burden it had been, and how heavy it made me feel.
No sooner had I finished relaying my story I felt instantaneously lighter, freer, and happier. I immediately felt the weight and power of the secret dissipate till it no longer had power over me. I was now free to let it go. To steal Gotye’s line from his international hit song, it quickly became only ‘[something] that I used to know.’
I once read this passage somewhere: That which has light shed upon it, itself becomes light.
Truth telling liberated me from the constraining and limiting effects of darkness. Shedding light on what was lurking in the dark corners of my memory not only caused the shadowy secrets to dispel and diminish, it transformed them into a source of light, freedom and expansion.
Both the secret and its revelation became a source of inspiration by expanding my understanding of the human condition. The emotional effect was to shift me from shame to compassion, for myself and others and, like my friend, it has left me grateful for the lesson.
Telling the truth does indeed set us free.
