From Incest to Joy - Part 1

This week, we begin our series with the amazing Donna Jenson, who is a powerhouse of a woman, activist, and beyond survivor. I can't wait for you all to soak in all of the wisdom she has to offer!

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THREE WOMEN RISING on their journey to end childhood sexual abuse – that’s what you’ll see in this video https://youtu.be/b2BUCIAt5DI. 

Rythea Lee, Producer/Director/Writer, brought me and Filmmaker/Writer/Activist Aishah Shahidah Simmons into THREE WOMEN RISING, her 19th Episode of Advice from a Loving Bitch. What a privilege and delight to be included in Rythea’s groundbreaking work. We all survived childhood sexual abuse and we all spoke to the same questions about healing and activism.

Here are the questions we spoke to:

• What is a glimpse into your story that you feel is worth sharing? 
• What is your activism around the subject? 
• What can you say about joy? 
• Please talk about why engaging in a conscious healing process is worth it.
• What do you think about self-love and healing from sexual abuse?

I encourage all the survivors reading this posting to ask your own self these questions, maybe not all of them, maybe only one or two – the ones that jump off the page to you. 

Go one step further – write out the answers and then read them back to yourself out loud. Hearing our own voices saying what is true for us is incredibly empowering.

I am deeply grateful to be connected to these two women. What a jungle of feelings I’ve macheted through to get to this clearing – this place of feeling my wholeness, my not-so-aloneness in a circle of survivor sisters. Hearing each other’s experience helps shed the shame. Witnessing each other breaking the silence adds up to a collective shattering.

The experience of making Episode #19 was a great one for me – to join with two sister survivors in breaking the silence. The months long process of making the video was a lesson in collaborative power – each one supporting and getting supported, all three becoming a chorus for justice. I hope you are as touched by viewing it as I was in the making of it.

Thank you for reading and watching,

Donna Jenson

Read Part 2: Donna explores isolation and belonging

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In 2009 Donna founded Time To Tell with a mission to spark stories from lives affected by incest and sexual abuse to be told and heard. She wrote and performs her one-woman play, What She Knows: One Woman’s Way Through Incest to Joy, which is based on her own experience of surviving incest and what she did to make her life worth living. 

Her book, Healing My Life from Incest to Joy, a narrative of the choices she made and experiences she had that helped her heal from her childhood trauma, will be released by Levellers Press in Fall of 2017. For more information go to www.timetotell.org




Get your copy of Healing My Life: From Incest to Joy today!