The Shame That Was Never Mine

On surviving violence, carrying guilt, and learning to put down what was never ours to carry.

Written by Felice Munroe, Survivor Advocacy Outreach Program Advocate

There are some things a survivor learns to carry so quietly that, after a while, she forgets she is carrying them at all. Shame. Guilt. Fear.

The constant question of whether she could have done something differently. Whether she should have known. Whether she should have fought harder. Whether she should have left sooner. Whether her silence meant consent. Whether the way she dressed, spoke, trusted, loved, drank, stayed, returned, froze, or survived somehow made what happened to her less worthy of being called violence. Sometimes the heaviest part of surviving is not remembering what someone else did. It is remembering what you told yourself about it afterward. For a long time, she believed shame was simply the price of surviving. She carried it into classrooms, workplaces, relationships, doctor’s offices, friendships, and quiet nights when sleep would not come. She became exceptionally good at appearing fine. She learned how to smile while hurting. She learned how to say, “I’m okay,” when what she really meant was, “I don’t know how to explain what is happening inside me.”

She became accomplished. Responsible. Helpful. Compassionate. The person other people could depend on.

And perhaps that was part of the problem.

She became so good at caring for everyone else that no one noticed she had never quite learned how to care for herself. She had spent years believing that if she could become good enough, useful enough, successful enough, strong enough, perhaps the shame would finally leave. It didn’t. Because shame is clever. It does not always tell you, "You are worthless." Sometimes it whispers something much more convincing: "You should have known better. You let this happen. You stayed. You trusted the wrong person. You didn’t say no loudly enough. You should have fought. You should have left. You should be over this by now."

And because survivors are so often asked to explain their behavior instead of the perpetrator’s, shame finds fertile ground.

In the book, Beyond Survival: Strategies and Stories from the Transformative Justice Movement, the authors explore the ways shame can become an identity rather than simply a response to something we have done. The distinction matters. Guilt can say, I did something wrong. Shame says, I am wrong. The difference between those two statements can be the difference between healing and a lifetime spent trying to punish yourself for someone else’s violence. That distinction stopped her one day. Not because the words magically erased the past. They didn’t. But because for the first time, she wondered:

What if this shame was never mine?

What if she had been carrying something that belonged at the feet of the person who caused the harm? What if the guilt she had spent years dissecting was actually evidence of how much she cared about being a good person, not evidence that she had failed to be one? What if surviving imperfectly was still surviving? 

There is a particular challenge in being a survivor who works in advocacy. You learn the language of trauma. You learn about safety planning, coercion, consent, trauma responses, dissociation, victim-blaming, and the ways violence can rearrange a person’s understanding of themselves. You learn how to sit beside someone in a hospital room when they are frightened. You learn how to listen without asking the questions that make survivors feel responsible for what happened. You learn how to say, “I believe you.” You learn how to tell another person, “This was not your fault.” And sometimes, after saying those words to someone else, you return home and realize you still do not believe them about yourself. That is one of the strangest contradictions of surviving. You can become fluent in compassion for other people while remaining painfully illiterate in compassion for yourself. She had sat with survivors who trembled while telling their stories. She had watched people struggle to put words around experiences they had spent years burying. She had witnessed the moment someone finally realized that the thing they had been calling their fault had another name. Violence. Abuse. Exploitation. Rape. Trauma. None of those words belonged to the survivor. Yet shame had taught her to keep looking inward. So, she began to ask different questions:

Not, Why didn’t I stop it?

But, Why was someone willing to hurt me?

Not, Why did I stay?

But, What made leaving difficult or dangerous?

Not, Why didn’t I tell someone?

But, What had the world taught me about what would happen if I did?

Not, What’s wrong with me?

But, What happened to me?

Those questions changed everything. Not immediately. Healing rarely happens like a movie, with one beautiful revelation followed by sunlight and closure. Sometimes healing is much less glamorous. Sometimes it’s waking up and realizing you slept through the night. Sometimes it’s hearing a story that would once have shattered you and discovering that you can breathe through it. Sometimes it’s setting a boundary and not apologizing afterward. Sometimes it’s realizing that being alone does not mean being abandoned. Sometimes it’s allowing yourself to want things again. Love. Marriage. Tenderness. A home. A safe bed beside another person. A life where intimacy does not feel like surrendering ownership of yourself. And sometimes healing means admitting that you want those things while also being terrified of them. Because survivors can carry contradictory truths. She could desperately want love and still be afraid of being known. She could long for partnership and still wonder what it would feel like to share her bed, her space, her routines, her body, her life. She could want closeness and simultaneously crave the safety of being alone. None of these contradictions made her broken. They made her human. For years, she thought healing meant becoming the woman she had been before. Now she understood that perhaps healing was not about going backward. Perhaps it was about becoming someone new without abandoning the woman who had survived.

This is where transformative justice offers a different possibility. Transformative justice asks us to imagine responses to harm that do more than punish. It asks what safety, accountability, healing, and transformation might look like within communities, particularly when traditional systems have failed survivors or created additional harm. The movement emphasizes addressing the conditions that allow violence to occur while creating pathways toward accountability and change. That does not mean minimizing what happened. It does not mean asking survivors to forgive. It does not mean reconciliation. And it certainly does not mean placing the responsibility for someone’s transformation on the person they harmed. For a survivor, transformative justice can begin with a radical truth:

Your healing does not require you to carry the burden of fixing the person who hurt you!

Accountability belongs to the person who caused harm. Safety belongs to the survivor.

Healing belongs to the survivor. And community has a responsibility to stop making survivors carry all three alone. Imagine a world in which a survivor does not have to disappear in order to be safe. Imagine communities that know how to respond before a crisis becomes an emergency. Imagine friends who do not simply say, “Let me know if you need anything,” but actually show up. A meal. A ride. A phone call. A place to sleep. A person willing to sit quietly without demanding details. Someone who remembers the appointment. Someone who says, “I believe you,” and means it. Someone who does not disappear when the story becomes uncomfortable. Because sometimes the wound after violence is not only what the perpetrator did. Sometimes it is what happens afterward. The people who don’t call. The friends who become uncomfortable. The people who say they support survivors but become strangely silent when the survivor is no longer easy to be around. The communities that love the idea of healing but struggle with the messiness of an actual human being trying to heal. A survivor can survive the violence and still be wounded by abandonment. She knows this now. She knows that surviving did not make her weak. It made her someone who understands the extraordinary cost of being left alone with pain. And perhaps that is why she eventually found herself sitting beside other survivors. Listening. Believing. Advocating. Not because she had somehow escaped the pain, but because she knew what it felt like to wonder whether anyone would stay. She could not change what happened. She could not go backward and place a protective hand on the younger version of herself. She could not erase the nights she cried. She could not retrieve the years shame had taken. But she could refuse to let shame write the ending. There is still grief. There are still moments when the old questions return. Was it really that bad? Could I have done something differently? Why did I let myself believe them? Why am I still affected?  When those questions come now, she tries something different. She answers herself gently. You were surviving. You were doing what you knew how to do. You deserved safety. You deserved to be believed. You deserved tenderness. You deserved a life untouched by someone else’s decision to cause harm. 

And finally:

It was never your shame to carry.

Maybe that is what survival eventually becomes. Not forgetting. Not pretending. Not becoming untouched by what happened. But learning to separate yourself from the story that violence tried to write about you. You are not what happened to you. You are not the silence that followed. You are not the fear. You are not the person who hurt you. You are not the shame. And you are not the guilt. You are the person who remained. The person who got up. The person who kept loving. The person who kept working. The person who kept believing that life could still contain something beautiful. The person who, despite everything, still has the courage to imagine tomorrow. And perhaps one day, when she looks back, she will not see a broken woman carrying an unbearable weight. She will see a survivor finally setting it down. Not because it became lighter.

But because she finally understood that it had never belonged to her in the first place.

Source of Inspiration for the Author:

My reflections on shame, accountability, and healing were informed in part by Beyond Survival: Strategies and Stories from the Transformative Justice Movement, edited by Ejeris Dixon and Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha. The collection explores transformative justice through personal narratives, practical tools, and community-based approaches to violence, accountability, and healing. 

Reference

Dixon, E., & Piepzna-Samarasinha, L. L. (Eds.). (2020). Beyond Survival: Strategies and Stories from the Transformative Justice Movement. AK Press.