Suzanne Harrington: Bravo Nora Hegarty for handing the shame of rape back to the abuser
Suzanne Harrington: The action of Nora Hegarty offers hope to all those still locked in their own private prisons
When Nora Hegarty allowed her identity to become public so that everyone would hear about the sexual abuse she endured daily as a child, it was for a specific reason. Not revenge, but transference. A handing over of the shame and hurt she had been carrying since childhood. She handed it back.
Imagine the weight of that shame and hurt, and imagine the feeling of letting it go. Imagine the liberation of finally handing it back to the man who caused it, rather than being its silent carrier. What a relief that must be. And what a flare of hope for others still shouldering their own awful load.
Shame is a prison. Whether it’s been constructed around you by the actions of an individual, like Hegarty’s rapist, or an institution, like clerical sexual abuse, it’s the victims who remain psychologically locked in, rather than the perpetrators.
One of the cruellest aspects of abuse – of anyone, at any age – is that it is the abused who take on the toxic load of shame. Not the abuser. Like some hideous chemistry experiment gone wrong, the shame is absorbed into the abused person – particularly children – who then spend their lives trying to assimilate it. Which is like trying to digest poison into your body, and keep it down.
To keep this shame and hurt inside you, to push it down, requires enormous effort, like trying to keep an inflatable under the water. It really wants to come to the surface, no matter how hard we hold it in our depths. This is why underneath addiction, instability, self-destruction, self-neglect, rage, there is so often pushed-down shame; we ‘manage’ it by getting out of our heads, by sabotaging our own lives, perhaps even by becoming abusers ourselves. It goes on and on, generation to generation. Whole cultures steeped in shame and hurt, paralysed by it.
Bravo then to the 35-year-old Ms Hegarty and her decision to reclaim her life and live it authentically. She chose to put her own recovery from shame and hurt before the feelings of others, despite the eternal conditioning of women to always put everyone else’s feelings first. She made a fuss. She did not let bygones be bygones. She lifted up the carpet under which her shame had been swept, and showed it to everyone. She stood up, and publicly shook off what had been shrouding her life.
So often when we have seen victims of abuse speaking out, they are middle-aged or older, and can no longer live with what they have historically been expected to assimilate, and so we see them standing before committees or investigations, vomiting up their ancient shame. Getting rid of it. The action of Nora Hegarty, of whom none of us had heard until a few weeks ago, offers hope to all those still locked in their own private prisons. Women and men still carrying a weight of shame – Hegarty has demonstrated how we can hand it squarely back. And walk away lighter.
