Shelter from Our Secrets, Silence, and Shame: How Our Stories Can Keep Us Stuck or Set Us Free

By Rebecca L. Brown, MSW, RSW

AS a mental health clinician, Rebecca Brown has been a safe place for many to seek shelter from their secrets, silence and shame. Inspired to finally slow down, stop running from herself and share her own story, she found ways to seek and savour her own shelter.

Rebecca's personal journey takes us through sadness, tragedy, self-sabotage, the impossible pursuit of perfection, distorted thinking and eating, engaging with her shadow self, divorce, and numbing with alcohol, all in an attempt to avoid the story needing to be shared.

Dispelling the limiting beliefs we hold about ourselves can unlock our limitless potential to reach goals we never dared to dream. From the Boston Marathon to working with horses, Rebecca sets out to prove to herself that anything is possible when you don't listen to the negative stories you tell yourself.

Everyone has a story. We become who we are because of what has happened to us, and because of the stories we tell ourselves. But do our stories continue to serve us well, or keep us stuck? Are our stories fact or fiction? Is it time to rewrite the versions we have been telling ourselves?

Shelter provides strategies to help reframe the thinking patterns we have developed, and offers tools to recognize when we are suffering from our own thoughts, feelings and actions. Resilience-building techniques are woven through the pages, and encouragement for the lifelong journey of collecting moments of awe and happiness.

Seeking and reading Shelter is a gift of self-compassion and self-discovery. Rebecca's hope is that it will be read with a highlighter in hand, pages folded down, re-read, recommended to a friend, and used as a guide to start sharing our own stories with those we love.

We may not have written our beginnings, but we have the ability to write every word from this point forward and just imagine where our stories can take us when we are free of secrets, silence and shame.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Tellwell Talent
• Release date: Jan 7, 2022
• ISBN: 9780228859420

Rebecca L. Brown, MSW, RSW

REBECCA BROWN is a clinical social worker with over 35 years in practice ranging from medical social work, childhood trauma, vicarious trauma for first responders, international psychological first aid, and Equine Assisted Therapy. She is honoured to hold a faculty appointment with Department of Family Medicine at Western University in London, Ontario. She teaches extensively on the topics of trauma and resilience and has delivered keynote presentations throughout North America. She shares her life and career with her husband, a family physician and trailblazer in the field of Lifestyle Medicine. Together they live and work on the shores of the Great Lake Huron, where they seek and share shelter with their six adult children, four grandchildren, extended family and friends, two dogs, two cats and one horse.

Book preview

Copyright © 2023 by Rebecca Brown, MSW, RSW

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed, or transmitted in any form or by any means, including photocopying, recording, or other electronic or mechanical methods, without the prior written permission of the author, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical reviews and certain other non-commercial uses permitted by copyright law.

Cover and author photo courtesy of Rebecca Brown.

Tellwell Talent

www.tellwell.ca

ISBN

978-0-2288-5941-3 (Paperback)

978-0-2288-5942-0 (eBook)

Table of Contents

Prologue

Introduction

Chapter 1:     2017

Chapter 2:     1973

Chapter 3:     1975

Chapter 4:     1987

Chapter 5:     20 April 2009

Chapter 6:     2014

Chapter 7:     2008

Chapter 8:     2013

Chapter 9:     2017

Chapter 10:   2018

Chapter 11:   May 4, 2019

Chapter 12:   2021

Chapter 13:   2020

Chapter 14:   Spring 2021

Chapter 15:   Resilience Building Workshop

Final Thoughts

Appendix One: Resilience Tool Kit

Appendix Two: What’s My ACE Score?

Appendix Three: Recommended Reading

About the Author

A collection of stories—

some are my own;

some belong to others.

Stories shared with me in search of

emotional safety and shelter.

Stories we tell ourselves;

stories we tell others.

Stories we don’t want to tell;

stories we don’t know how to tell.

I have been a safe space to share stories

and secrets for those who struggle

and suffer under the burden of silence

and shame that these secret stories create.

Seeking shelter,

safely breaking the silence,

setting the secrets free, and

living free of shame,

is my goal in sharing our stories

This book is dedicated to my grandmother,

keeper of the secret.

By giving her story a voice, setting her secret free,

and using my words wisely,

I share our stories in hope that

others will not wait one hundred and ten years

to share theirs.

And to all the other angels who have touched my life,

thank you for guiding,

challenging,

teaching,

supporting,

forgiving,

accepting,

and

loving me.

Prologue

I am floating.

On the water

calm

clear

soft

quiet.

Dusk,

the sun is setting.

The sky will hold light

for another half an hour

or so.

The beauty is often just after the sun sinks into the water,

then the colours are spectacular.

Or just softer.

It’s been a long day;

hard

heavy

yet healing.

I have no words left in me.

I cannot talk

or listen anymore.

I need quiet

peace

calm

presence.

I have found the shelter that I seek today

on the open water.

My kayak is my shelter this day.

I will paddle until I physically feel the release in my body.

I will watch the sun set until I find the peace in my soul.

I hope to sleep tonight.

Rebuild my resilience.

I will wake and do it all again.

I may need to seek shelter differently tomorrow.

Or not.

Knowing that I must still seek shelter sometimes,

makes it safe for me to continue in this work that I love.

Introduction

I haven’t been sleeping well.

When I don’t sleep well, it’s usually because my subconscious is trying to come to the surface of my conscious mind. There’s something tugging at me, pushing and nudging me to finally do it.

It is a deep longing to share the story, and not just my own story.

I hold a place in me for the stories of others.

I believe that this is the reason for my work; it is time for me to share these stories.

I have worked in the world of trauma for over thirty-five years, and although I know that I have helped the people I interact with personally, I can’t help feeling that I can help many more people if I write a book.

A book to share the insights, ideas, experience, and strategies I have learned from the stories I’ve collected over a lifetime.

A word, or perhaps a title, keeps coming to me: Shelter.

Shelter from our secrets, silence, and shame.

Is this the time to offer what I can to the world in an effort to provide meaning,

affirmation, validation, and tools to help others in their own shelter-seeking?

While I have a collection of stories from the people with whom I’ve worked over the course of my career, I have taken an oath to protect their stories and their secrets. I won’t be sharing any of them directly but more as part of the collective themes I’ve observed. As I work from a trauma-informed perspective, I won’t be telling any graphic, horrific, or triggering stories that could further perpetuate people’s own traumas. Narrative therapy should never prolong or perpetuate trauma by sharing stories that could harm the teller, or the listener.

I’m also hoping to provide shelter for my grandmother’s story, my father’s mother, which has come to light out of the darkness, the shadow, and the grave, where it was been buried with her for over twenty years. During the quiet months of early 2020, I had time to go through some old family albums, and I came across material I had tucked away in a box with some photos and papers about my grandmother’s life. The papers were from the search I’d started a few years earlier online.

It’s ironic that I’ve been working in the field of trauma for my entire career yet had no knowledge of the traumatic secret buried deep within my own family. I have a profound need to understand my grandmother’s pain and suffering as a young girl, a young woman, a wife, a mother, and a grandmother. To our knowledge, she never spoke of this to anybody. Ever. And that’s what makes this trauma a tragedy. We’re all helpless to do anything to ease her pain. It also explains so much about her personality, her vulnerability, her strength, her resilience and her suffering … in silence.

I want to tell her story in a way that releases its silence. I will endeavour to treat her secret story with the utmost respect and compassion. As I unwrap it, I will gently present it and cradle it in the most delicate lace handkerchief, as she would have wanted. I will be that safe space for her secret to finally be set free, and I’ll give her story shelter and honour it with understanding, love, and compassion.

She died when she was ninety years of age. I was thirty at the time. Twenty years after her death, the story came to light. It was like a bolt of lightning struck our family. We’re spread out all over the world: Canada, England, the United States, Australia, and Hong Kong. Staying in touch through social media has helped me feel somewhat connected to my cousins. My father is still very close to his sisters, and they all speak with great pride and love about their children, grandchildren, and great-grandchildren. It’s a family connected by loyalty and love. I know my grandmother was proud of all of us, but it’s now with a heavy heart that I realize her own childhood was nothing like the happy, safe, and connected lives she helped create for her own children. I understand now how important that was to her.

I feel both compelled and encouraged by her memory, which is giving me the voice to share her story and release the secret and the silence, because secrets only survive in the darkness. When we release them to the light and let them rise to the surface, they lose their power and control over us, and this is how we become free of the shame. This is my hope in telling her story.

I also want to write this book from the perspective of the child I was and from the lens through which I viewed the world around me at the time. My understanding of events and situations that happened to me, or around me, impacted me in profound ways. I’ve held on to a great deal of pain and shame, and through my own inner work and working with many people who had similar experiences, I’ve learned how to reframe and understand a different perspective to the stories I told myself and held on to for so long. Stories are often recalled in fragmented snapshots of moments, which get stuck in our minds. I’ve learned how to connect the dots of these moments and weave meaning and understanding through them to create a mosaic of memories that has become the fabric of who I am.

I now understand that I was hurt and angry for a long time, and that I created a protective barrier to hide behind. I’m now able to see how and why things played out for me the way they did. I’ve done a great deal of work in the past few years, and I’ve been able to work through this pain, so I don’t want this book to come across as angry or blaming, but from the perspective of understanding, compassion, and forgiveness.

I too have caused a great deal of pain to the people I love most in my life. It’s also my hope that by releasing my story and secrets, my shame will diminish and I’ll find shelter. By sharing my story, perhaps others will feel less alone with their secrets and shame, and they’ll trust enough to start sharing their stories in a way that releases them and allows them to seek shelter.

It took almost an entire lifetime for my mother and me to begin to heal our relationship. It’s still a work in progress, but we have begun. It started in the fall of 2020, somewhere between the first and second wave of the COVID-19 pandemic, when I realized that life was too short to stay stuck in the anger and hurt. I had wanted to go on a journey of my own life’s timeline and visit all the places I had lived as a child. This is an exercise I often suggest to people I work with. When we create a life timeline and reflect on it, significant events, defining moments, and experiences—good ones and not so good ones—become the turning points that determine our choices and paths. When we visualize every experience as a steppingstone that has led us to exactly this moment in life, it can have a profound impact on how we see and understand ourselves.

Otherwise, as in the case of my dear grandmother, the story may stay buried and secret for over one hundred years.

My story begins with childhood, and as tragedy and trauma propelled me too quickly through adolescence, I got lost for a time in my life of responsibility, perfectionism, and people pleasing. I started to see myself unravelling and tried desperately to hold on to who I thought I was supposed to be. My long and winding road takes me through valleys of pain, shame, and self-loathing … and then gradually, one step at a time, up and out the other side to a place of honesty, acceptance, and authenticity.

I write this book because I’d like to share the collection of knowledge, wisdom, and expertise I’ve collected along my journey. I have sought shelter in the words of wise ones who have written their stories long before my own. I am sharing, referencing, quoting, and encouraging you, dear reader, to go on your own journey, to seek shelter in the footsteps of those who travel this road with you. It’s too lonely a road to travel on our own.

When we become too focussed on the goal or the destination, we risk not seeing the beautiful possibilities and moments of happiness and awe right before our eyes, in this present moment.

We can turn to our drugs of choice: alcohol, caffeine, cannabis, pain killers, food, chocolate, potato chips, exercise, work, self-harm, sex, competition, shopping, social media, or a million other things.

Or, we can seek shelter through music, mindfulness, nature, laughter, yoga, running, working out, tea, meditation, cooking, creating, reading, connection, animals, hobbies, art, or a million other things.

Essentially, the question to ask ourselves is: Do I want to numb out or tune in to what I am thinking, feeling and doing?

There is so much hidden beneath the surface of calm water;

hidden secrets and buried treasure.

But we cannot heal what we keep hidden.

When we become quiet and stop listening to the stories we have told ourselves, and instead seek shelter in our wisdom, when we are willing to risk being vulnerable, open and authentic we can start to imagine the new stories waiting to be written.

I hope that my words will help lighten, enlighten, and lead you through your own journey to find the shelter you are seeking.

Chapter One

2017

I am standing at the podium in the grand ballroom of the conference centre outside Austin, Texas. There are over five hundred law enforcement officers, real-life Texas sheriffs, judges, lawyers, child protection workers, therapists, social workers, and juvenile justice workers in the audience. I’m very aware that I’m one of the few people in the room not carrying a gun.

The room is now hushed,

lights lowered,

all eyes on me,

waiting for me to speak.

And all I can think is, What do I know?

So that’s how I start my keynote address.

I clear my throat,

take a deep breath,

steady myself against the podium,

and start to tell my story.

Good morning, my name is Rebecca Brown, and you’re probably wondering, as I am—what do I know? Let me share with you what I know about Vicarious Trauma, Compassion Fatigue, and Resilience as they relate to those of us working in the field of trauma.

Over the next hour, I share evidence about how the body and mind absorb stress from the work we do and the lives we’ve lived. I explain that our childhood experiences; our primary traumas; and our drive or calling to be helping professionals, first responders, health care workers, teachers, or social workers can take a toll on us if we don’t find ways to balance our work with the person we have become. I don’t have time on this day to get into my own history in detail, other than to share that I, like many of them, have a back story that has led to the career I’m in. My job is to help them recognize the cost of caring for other human beings and how they can build their resilience in the face of this extremely challenging work.

I give my talk.

The room erupts in applause.

A dozen people line up to thank me or say a few words at the end of my session.

One man in particular stands out.

He is well over six feet tall and wearing a full Texas sheriff uniform.

He has greying hair and is likely close to the end of his career.

He pumps my hand as he shakes it, almost leaving it numb.

He thanks me for my talk. Great stuff, he says.

And then he hands me his business card.

But it’s not quite a business card.

It’s a photo card, like a baseball card, or a kid’s hockey card, with the player’s name, position, and smiling face as they stand posed to take a shot in their team uniform.

Only this is of a man on a black horse.

More precisely, it’s this man, a Texas sheriff on his beautiful black police horse.

I thought you’d like to have this, he says. My horse is Canadian, like you.

And then he says something that has stayed with me,

because he couldn’t be more right:

Everyone in this business should have a good horse!

He meant the business of trauma.

I couldn’t have agreed more.

I still have his business card.

Two years later, I went back to Texas to teach a three-day workshop on resilience to youth detention workers. I tried to look up my Texas sheriff, but he had retired. I hope he’s finding more time to enjoy his good horse. I’ve shared the story of our brief encounter and his photo card with many police officers over the years. And every one of them agrees: horses can heal humans. I’ve found shelter with horses. Sometimes in the saddle, but mostly not. My story will get there. Eventually.

I finished my keynote address and spent the rest of the day at the conference on Youth in the Justice System. People stopped me in the halls of the hotel, telling me how much they enjoyed my talk. Later that evening, I went for a run.

And then I drank a bottle of wine and went to bed.

My back story begins with a career in medical social work, my dream job. I knew from the time I was sixteen years old that I wanted to help people with the challenges life puts in our paths. I was a pretty good student, and in my last few years of high school I really buckled down because I’d set my mind on exactly what I wanted to do. I knew which university I needed to go to, and I worked hard to get there. It was also the farthest university in the province from where I lived, which was exactly where I wanted to be at that time. As far away from home as I could get.

I also knew that I didn’t want just any social work career. I wanted to work in a hospital with people who had experienced trauma. This felt comfortable to me. I could stay calm in a crisis and understood the impact of life-changing traumatic events on a person and their family. I worked hard through my undergrad program, and in my fourth-year internship, I was accepted to work in a hospital rehabilitation program for patients with spinal cord injuries.

I was exactly where I needed to be.

I knew that I could help people here.

I loved this job.

My patients were primarily sixteen-to-thirty-year-old males who were injured while engaging in high-risk behaviours, like cliff diving, drunk driving, or contact sports, or in vehicular accidents. Some had attempted suicide. Others had just been in the wrong place at the wrong time and had broken their necks, backs, or seriously damaged their spinal cords.

My patients were beautiful young men,

full of life and

often the life of their parties.

Until the accident.

My job was to help them process the psychological and emotional impact of a devastating, life-altering spinal cord injury. I worked with the patients themselves, their families, and their partners, because this type of injury impacts everyone connected to the patient.

Lives become divided into before the accident and after the accident.

This is where people learn that life is not fair.

But it doesn’t mean that life can’t be rich, rewarding, and happy again.

But it takes time, courage, pain, and most of all, resilience.

How do I know this?

Because I’ve lived it myself.

I watched as the first love of my life broke his neck.

I was not quite sixteen; he was eighteen.

Kids in the country do crazy things.

Like swimming in abandoned gravel pits and quarries.

Tailgates of pickup trucks make great diving boards.

At almost sixteen, I didn’t know how fragile life was.

I didn’t know how strong love could be.

I didn’t know how resilient the human spirit can be.

I didn’t know that this tragedy would change the trajectory of my life.

I spent my sixteenth birthday in the hospital Intensive Care Unit with him.

It was not sweet.

It was sad, and I was scared.

It was the only place I wanted to be.

He was paralyzed from the chest down.

He had holes drilled into his skull connected to metal pins and rods, called a Halo traction, to stabilize his fractured C4-5 vertebrae, which had been snapped, his spinal cord severed.

He was hooked up to a ventilator because his lungs had collapsed when he had sunk to the bottom of the gravel pit before our friends realized something was wrong and he hadn’t surfaced.

He had a breathing tube inserted into a hole in his throat.

He could only move his eyes.

I had to stand on tiptoes and lean over the rails of the hospital bed

so he could see me.

And every time he saw me,

he cried.

He couldn’t talk because the tube he was breathing through didn’t let sound come from his vocal cords.

So I did all the talking.

Telling him how much I loved him.

How much his friends loved him and were rooting for him.

Not many people were allowed in to see him,

so I became the spokesperson for them.

When I ran out of words, I read to him.

I stroked his arm, held his hand.

Until I remembered that he couldn’t feel his hands;

he would never again hold my hand back.

I stroked the side of his face, his head, ran my fingers through his hair.

He could feel this, and it comforted him when he was sad, scared, or angry.

I learned that love is powerful medicine.

As he healed, the halo traction and breathing tube were removed, and he was transferred from the ICU to a rehabilitation ward for months of physical therapy. He learned how to sit in a wheelchair. I learned how to change catheter bags and

how to be an adult before I was one.

Spending time in the hospital was my happy place, because life at home wasn’t always. My parents were divorced, and my sister and I lived with our mother. She had remarried and had a new child—a sister who was twelve years younger than me. I adored her. What I didn’t adore was being her substitute mother when ours wasn’t there. It had become my responsibility to look after my sisters when the adults were working.

Until the accident. All I wanted to do was be with him. And because I wasn’t home to help out, my stepfather, my mother, and I had a falling out. Or rather, I was kicked out. The proverbial line had been drawn in the sand. If I didn’t want to live by their rules, then I could find somewhere else to live. So I did. I went to live with a friend and her family.

My friend Karen’s family was nice. They made arrangements with my father, and he paid them a share of the child support to cover my room and board. I was sixteen. They only asked that I keep my room clean, let them know where I was and when I’d be home, and go to school and stay out of trouble. What trouble could I get into? I was working part time and spending every spare moment in the hospital with him. My identity became the girlfriend of the guy in the wheelchair. I spent the next year of high school hearing whispers as I walked by: She’s the one going out with the guy who broke his neck. The silence was deafening when I walked into a room. I got looks of pity and sympathy, or an averted gaze. People just didn’t know what to say, or how not to say the wrong thing. So they didn’t say anything. They felt bad for me. I felt their discomfort, so I became very good at making others feel comfortable. This was the beginning of the people pleasing personality path I found myself on for the next forty years. I became very good at comforting others, making the situation lighter, less awkward, okay. I was so concerned that others didn’t feel pain or suffering that I numbed out these feelings in myself and refused to allow them in. Until I ran out of room in me.

I kept a diary for five years that had been given to me one Christmas. It was red leather’ish. I wrote in it every day from the time I was eleven until I was sixteen and a half. I still have it. Every time I read through it the memories instantly come back to life. I wrote about falling in love with Glenn. How he made me laugh, and how he made me feel like I mattered.

He was beautiful.

I blushed every time he looked at me.

He was two years older than me.

He was smart.

So smart that he skipped a grade in school.

I was in tenth grade, and he was in his senior year of high school.

He was popular, athletic, smart, funny, and good looking.

Everything I was not

What did he see in me?

I felt so grown up when I was with him. He took me to parties with the cool kids. We drank. Country kids all drank. I didn’t like beer, but I liked sweet stuff like rye and Coke, or sparkling wine.

Glenn taught me to drive. He lived on a dairy farm and drove his dad’s pick-up truck. I can still picture the two-tone blue GMC half-ton truck with the bench seat. He would pull me next to him and rest his arm across my shoulder when he drove. He’d pick me up for school, and I felt on top of the world when we