As you may have heard, Massachusetts Sen. Scott Brown has a new book coming out (do you smell a 2016 presidential run?), in which he details how as a child he was physically abused by his stepfathers and sexually abused by a camp counselor. Wendy Kaminer points out something interesting:
But there is, perhaps, an encouraging cultural lesson to be drawn from Scott Brown's saga (putting aside the political benefits he'll likely derive from it.) Twenty years ago, when the recovery movement was ascendent, child abuse, especially abuse involving sexual molestation, was considered a life sentence, an always-present trauma that could never be relegated to the past: At best, victims of abuse might be "in recovery," but they could never be fully "recovered." And engaging successfully in the lifelong process of recovery required talking about your abuse. You couldn't begin to address the trauma of it until you acknowledged and talked, talked, talked about it. If you declined to talk about it, you were relegated to the toxic state of denial and destined to perpetuate the abuse, devolving from victim to victimizer.
I haven't read Brown's book, but if he's like pretty much every other politician, his discussion of this history will be, critically, resolved. By which I mean it will be a complete story, one that ends with him overcoming his past, learning from it, and changing in ways that are wholly positive. He won't still struggle with anger, or resentment, or distrust. As awful as it was, in the end, he will have found a way of dealing with it that made him a better person and public servant.
If that's what he does say, it may well be completely accurate. People are remarkably resilient, and there are lots of people out there who have suffered one kind of abuse or another and come out on the other side pretty much OK. But when a politician tells this kind of story, it almost inevitably turns into a tale of triumph, so that we can stand back and admire him/her. It's supposed to be simultaneously humanizing and heroic. Politicians: Just like us, only better.
