#24 || HOW TO TURN A MONSTER INTO AN APOLOGIST
TRANSCRIPT
Note: Transcripts may contain errors, and audio should be checked before quoting in print.
[00:00:00]
STEPHANIE
So Eve Ensler -- famous playwright, performer, and activist (you might know her from her play The Vagina Monologues) just wrote this unbelievable book called The Apology, where she imagines the apology her father never gave her for the sexual physical and psychological abuse he inflicted on her as a child.
Yeah, that's kind of like the imaginary Reckoning with Pope Francis in episode 22, but Eve Ensler did it for her own father. And she was just interviewed about the book by Lauren Schiller on Inflection Point -- a podcast about how women rise up. And it is a beautiful interview with so much resonance to Reckonings, so I'm serving it up right here in the Reckonings feed.
Enjoy it!
And when you're done enjoying it, please let Eve Ensler that she would enjoy Reckonings. You can let her know on [00:01:00] Instagram @TheApology. That's just @TheApology. Okay, here we go.
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Q 01 Intro:
I'm Lauren Schiller and this is inflection point with stories of how women rise up. This summer. I was invited by the Commonwealth Club of California to talk with Eve Ensler about her book The Apology.
Obviously I jumped at the chance Eve is known for her Tony award-winning play The Vagina Monologues. She also founded v-day a global platform to end violence against women and girls and she founded 1 billion Rising the largest global mass action to end gender based violence in over 200 countries.
Eve's latest book The Apology is already a best-seller and it's a powerful and personal life changing examination of abuse and atonement and the transformational power. Of an apology. It was an emotional evening and dare. I say [00:02:00] the start of a movement. I'm thrilled to share my conversation with Eve Ensler recorded in front of a live audience in San Francisco on June 11th of 2019.
I should note a stress warning. This episode does contain conversation about sexual assault and violence.
Q 03: Why wrote the book
So let's start you tell us a bit about why you wrote this book.
Why did I write this book? I've been in so many cities in so many days. I, my mind is just like, um, well I think there were a combination of factors. Why I wrote this book. Um, one, um, I was sexually abused by my father from the time I was five until the time I was 10. And after that, um, he began to physically abuse me, um, in kind of renders and scary ways, almost murdering me a couple of times. And I think all my childhood, I dreamed that my father would apologize to me. I sort of thought that moment will come. Um, I actually wrote him apology letters because I was always wrong and always bad and, and, and it was always expected of me. But I think there was also a part of me that thought if I wrote them enough apology letters, he'd get the idea and he'd write one back. Um, and then he died. And so he's been dead for 31 years. But still the yearning for the apology has always been there.
So that's one piece of it. The second piece is that having been an organizer and an activist for 21 years, my whole life really, um, in the movement to end violence against all women and girls, I've watched women tell her stories, break the silence Colemen out bravely tell our our our hearts and souls and, and, and, and, and risk, humiliation, risk attack, and an all that time, I have never heard a man apologize publicly, authentically, deeply for what he's done. And in all the recent integration of the me too movement, I have never heard a man publicly, authentically, deeply apologize. So I started to think, why is that? And then I started to ask people, have you ever heard Amanda? It's sort of the way I started the vagina monologues, you know, tell me about your vagina. I would say the, you know, women, um, have you ever heard a man?
And then nobody could answer one p one instance that, and then I started thinking 16,000 years of patriarchy. Have we ever heard a man in recorded history? You know, that we could read a public apology and no one could point to one. So I suddenly realized that this might be fundamental to why we're still where we are and that maybe I could actually write my father's apology and say the words and create the words, um, that I needed to hear in order to get free. Um, and I embarked on this process, um, which was grueling, um, painful rev Latori, um, and ultimately, um, profoundly liberating. So that, that's the kind of genesis of it. Thank you.
Q 04 Reading 1 :
Well book is written as your father writing to you. Um, and we have readings from the audible edition of the apology which are performed by Eduardo Ballerini who channels you channeling your father. Um, and we're gonna play a couple of, of excerpts from the beginning of the book. So, um, if we can hear reading one and reading too, please.
Father 1: How very strange to be writing you am I writing to you from the grave or the past? Well, the future am I writing as you, as you would like me to be, whereas I really am beneath my own limited understanding. And does it matter? Am I writing in a language I never spoke or understood what you have created inside both of our minds to bridge the gaps, the failures to connect? Maybe I am writing as I truly am, as you have freed me by your witness. All right. I'm not writing this at all, but simply being used as a vehicle to fulfill your own needs and version of things.
Father 2: You always wrote me letters. I found that peculiar and strangely moving. We lived in the same house, but you are writing to me, you're a little girl handwriting attempting straight lines but wandering all over the page. It was as if you are trying to make contact with some aspect of me, the you could not find in the heated moments of our conflict because if you're trying through poetry to appeal to a secret self that I had once made available to you usually wrote apology letters. So fitting that you would now want an apology letter from me. You were always apologizing, begging for forgiveness. I had reduced you to a daily degrading mantra of, I'm sorry,
Q 05 How did it feel:
how did it feel to hear that?
Eve: Well, the first time I heard a man read this it with, um, it was really weird and eerie and um, but it was also just like, I, you know, I was interviewed by this lovely man, Ron Charles at the Washington Post and he asked me if this was going to become a theater piece, which I'm really happy to say that it is. And, um, I said, I think I said, I think women would pay a lot of money to come here and man make an apology, you know? And the truth of the matter is like every time I hear it, I feel more and more released because there's something about the concrete as a nation. There's something about an apology that is the alchemy of that, which I'll talk about more later that is so releasing of so much in our bodies because we never hear it.
Eve: And as weird as it sounds in his areas, it feels, it just feels like, oh, okay. I what I knew to be true all along West drew long and now we're having a dialogue and we're going on a journey where that's going to get told, you know?
?Q 06: What looking for in the reader
Yeah. What were you looking for? I mean, is it even possible to put your finger on the characteristics that you were looking for in the delivery of the apology?
If you mean from the man?
Yeah, we'll get,
you know, I think writing this book with, with such a, a, a very strange experience and I think you have to go back to that. Yes, let's that because
Eve: I, you know, um, I was in the Congo and, and for me, everything, um, everything amazing happens in the Congo, um, because it's one of the most mystical spiritual places I've ever been. But it's a place that lives in the heart of, of, of, of ambiguity. Um, it's, it's been more colonized, more, there's been more racism, there's been more war, there's been more raping and, and of people of pillaging, of resources, of stealing, of land. And yet at the same time, it's the most beautiful country. The people are the most beautiful people. There is a life force in spirit there that is just like nothing I've ever experienced. And so whenever I'm there, I feel like I'm in the center of that, that incredible dynamic ambiguity and wisdom and churning. And I was, I was at city of joy in late summer and I was, I was listening to women tell their stories and the experiences they were going through.
And that's when I realized this thing about apologies. And the minute I made this decision that I was going to write this letter, um, from my father to me, um, and I, and I called my agent from Congo like at 12 o'clock at night and she was like, you have to do this book. I know this is what you have to do. You know, she's the most amazing woman and I know you all know who Charlotte Sheedy is. She's like been the greatest feminist. And she supported some of the greatest writers from Audrey Lorde to, um, and anyway, so I came back and when I, when I opened the portal, when I, when I just invited my father to come in, it was as if I literally went into some trance state and he went into me and I went into him and except for a few days, for four solid months, morning, noon and night, I was in there.
And, um, I don't really know who wrote this book. Do you know? I don't, I don't know if it was me or my father or me and my father or where we live or where we meet. Because what I really discovered, and I think all survivors know this, is that our perpetrators, when they rape us or beat us or hurt us or demean us or harass us, they enter us. Um, they become embedded in us. And for my whole life, I was in dialogue with that father inside me. As a matter of fact, I've lived within his paradigm. I have been a perpetual victim to his abuser my whole life. That's framed my life. That paradigm has been the story of my life. And so it was not hard to access my father because he's always been there. And I think also for those of us who've been abused, particularly if it's a family member and it happens over and over, you know, your abuser, some ways better than yourself.
You know their footsteps. You know the sound of their voice. It indicates whether they've had one or two drinks or if they're in a bad mood or a good mood, you learn to read every little aspect of them in order to learn how to pretend to protect yourself. Right. And so I think once I began to find my father's voice, he took over in a way. It was like that thing where somebody's writing, you're moving your hand. You know, and I have to tell you a lot of his vocabulary, I don't know. Um, I think his voice is much more formal and authorial, and it's not my voice. It's his voice. And, um, it, in that sense, I think looking at actors and thinking, who should read this? Um, I know that the, the person has to be charming and seductive and scary and intimidating and authorial and, um, someone you're drawn to in a terrified at the same time. You know? Um, and I think Edwardo, I listened to a bunch of people before I heard a Dorito and then I heard him and I thought he gets it, you know, um, and he had a really profound experience doing it. He broke down sobbing in the middle of it, like it just because he has two daughters. So that was a really interesting thing what he went through doing the audio.
LS: Yeah. I was wondering if he realized what he was getting himself into.
Eve: I think he did because he had read. I don't think he realized the depth of it until he started to do it.
LS: Yeah. Well, and as you take this out to become a performance, that's going to be another interesting experience for everyone involved.
Q 07: Zoom out
Well let's, let's zoom out for a few minutes and talk about what you referenced when you talked about why you wrote this book, which is what the state of apologies is between men and women. We don't have a culture of apology unless you're a woman in which case you over apologize your motives for yourself and everyone around you. Your rate and existing an existing range is taking up a little bit of space. So and, and in the me too movement, we heard thousands and thousands of stories that you already knew or out there. I mean, you've been living in this, in this world and catching these stories, but we heard hardly any apologies. And in fact on, you know, Brett Kavanaugh lets you know who refused to apologize and talked about beer. Right. So, um, so it seems like we need to understand, or maybe they need to understand what is an apology that there's not necessarily a template for it?
Eve: Well, I, I just want to say I think, um, I've learned so much about what an apology is writing this book I learned about the anatomy of an apology and the tenants of an apology. And I want to say a couple things. I think an apology is a humbling, it's making yourself vulnerable. It's an equalizer. I think it's everything about an apology is in the details. Um, the liberation of the victim or the survivor is in the details. It's not, I'm sorry I sexually abused you or I'm sorry I hurt you. Or I'm sorry if you feel bad, it's, here is exactly what I did. And here was my intention behind what I did. And I think we live in a country that has diabolical amnesia, diabolical amnesia. We don't remember anything. We don't remember our origins, the, the genocide against the indigenous whose land we stand on.
We don't remember the 400 years of Nial aided hundreds and thousands of people and then moving into Jim Crow and then moving into mass incarceration. We don't remember our own families, the events that are happening in front of us as they're happening, we're erasing them and we don't remembers yesterday's news. It's already gone. Um, so I think what I really learned is that an apology is the antidote to Amnesia. It actually makes what occurred. It makes, it, makes it real. It did occur, I think of the comfort women, um, who I've had the honor to know in, in the Philippines, but there were a comfort women throughout Asia that were taken by the Japanese government and World War II and there were held in rape camps when some of them were in their teens and early twenties. Sometimes they were raped up to 50 times a day to serve those soldiers.
The comfort women had been waiting 70 years for an apology from the Japanese government. 70 years. Most of them have died. Many of them are infirmed. There's only a few left. All they wanted was the Japanese government to say that what happened did happen. We're not crazy people. We know what we, we know what w w what we experienced in our bodies and beings that we've carried all these years and I think an apology actually does that. It says what occurred did occurred. The other piece that I really learned is that for an, for a man to apologize, one has to go back in time and history and understand what made you do what you did, what happened in your life, what happened in your origins, what happened in your childhood? Nobody is born a pedophile. No one is born with a machete in their hand.
Something happens to boys that makes them turn and become different kinds of beings in this world. And I think one of the most profound aspects of writing this book and the most difficult, and I just want to say about this book, it's an offering. It's not a prescription. It's not a half to it. There are many survivors who don't want an apology, will never want an, and that's all amazing and good. There is no, there's no must. I knew for me, I was at a point where I had vestiges left. Um, I had anger left that was poisoning me. I was still living with him, my father's story. And I wanted to be living in a different story and I wanted to see if I could get into that story. Um, but I think one of the things that I discovered in going back into my father's story, it's like I began to unravel the y.
And I think for all of us who've been abused, whether it's racial injustice, we are obsessed with the why. Why did my best friend drug me and date rape me? Why did it please shoot me? Because I'm a black person. Why did my father wants to kill his only his oldest daughter? Why? Why, why? And I think when you begin to go back and, and I began to unravel and my father began to tell me the story of his psychologicals emotional evolutional or d evolution. In his case, I was like, oh, I see, I see, I see the story. I see the story that led up to him becoming, and in that sense it wasn't about me anymore. I thought it was about him. I thought it was on him. It was what had been done to him that led him to do those things.
But it has nothing to do with me being a bad person or a slut or a jackass or a whore or any of the terrible things he ever called me. And it really released me by understanding that why. And then I think the last piece or the second last piece is being accountable, being accountable. Once you've gone through that whole journey of self interrogation and self reflection and you've spelled out the details of what you've done and you've looked into your mal intentions, then it's taking responsibility for that in a way that your victim or survivor feel satisfied and indicates that you couldn't, you've gone through a deep enough journey where you couldn't possibly do that to somebody else. To me, that's an apology. We teach prayer in school, right? We teach the devotion of prayer and the concentration of prayer. We teach the humbling of the petition, but we don't teach the practice of apology. We teach maybe, oh, I'm sorry, but that's not an apology. An apology is a deep, profound spiritual, psychological, political act. And we live in a country that is so not about apologies. It's punitive. It's violent, it's punitive, it's violent, it's it. That's the cycle we're in. The apology is the practice that can break us out of that cycle.
LS: this is starting to sound like a movement.
Q 08: Traitor to men
So you write in the book, in your father's words that to be an apologist is to be a traitor to men. Um, and I'm wondering, do you, well, you've said already that you opened a portal and he came through you. Um, but I still have the question. Is that, do you think that huge really felt that or do you think that he was using that as an excuse?
Eve: Well, I think when my father said that to me and I really felt like he said it too, because I don't know how I would know that. Um, he, he just basically said to me to be an apologist is a trader to men. Once one man apologizes and the myths, he knows that he's wrong and he knew what he was doing was wrong. The whole story of Patriarchy begins to crumble. And I really literally stopped in my tracks for the rest of that day. I was like, wow, this is a column. This is a major column of Patriarchy. The apology. And I think, I think what I really understood, I mean there's a point in the book where my father is, he gets to move from limbo to hell and in hell he meets all the fathers or the fathers and he, he actually says to me at one point, I would rather spend in hell and be within the tribe of men.
Then I would apologize because at least within the tribe of men, I know my identity, I know my value. I have privilege, I have power, but to give this up, who would I be? And I think one of the things that, that, um, patriarchy is so genius at is offering no alternatives, right? It's constantly dividing people and separating people with no with no doorways out. So I think, and I, and I've said this my whole life, that the tyranny of Patriarchy has been much, much more devastating to men than it has to women. We have our hearts and tax, we have our spirits and sacked. I think what's happened to men and, and I, and I really learned this in this book, is getting, I can just say a little bit about my father's childhood. My father was born like 12 years after the last child in his family.
He was the mistake that became the miracle. He was the golden boy, the divine right of kings. He was going to bring the family to the promise land. And my father was adored, adored, but at a ration is not love. And I really want to make this distinction. We adore boys. And what that means is we have projected ideal images of who they're supposed to be, that we project onto them, that they have to live up to having very often nothing to do with who they really are. And so every time a boy is his experiences, his tenderness or his vulnerability or his heart or his sorrow or his wonder, and that's not in keeping with that adoration. He's got to push it underground and he's got to push it underground and he's got to push it underground. And in my father's case, he pushed it so much underground that it eventually metastasized into another persona called the shadow man, who he talks about in the book.
And that shadow man actually surfaced at my birth because what happened was I was the first daughter and my father was overwhelmed with the tenderness. He did not know how to experience. He had been robbed of his own tenderness. He didn't know how to be tender to himself, and he didn't know how to be tender in the world. And so when I was born, he didn't know to sit with tenderness, you know, I was saying last night, my granddaughter was in the audience. I look at my granddaughter's sometime and I'm filled with such overwhelming love for them. I don't know what to do. I tell him to just sit and cry. It's just so big that love, and I know how to sit with that tenderness like I, I just wheat. But if you've never had the experience of having tenderness, you want to get rid of it.
You want to smash it, you want to exploit it, you want to rape it, you want to conquer it, you want to dominate it, you want to, you want to make it go away. And I think that's what happened in our, my father's early years with me. I think he began adoring me and, and being overwhelmed by that. And then it became very perverse and sexual and weird. And I think part of what we have to look at it, why are we separating our boys from their hearts? Why are we creating idealized images of them, of who they're supposed to be when they're actually just brilliant who they are. They're tender and they're funny and they're wise and they're full of sparkle. And if they want to wear pink, let them wear pink. And if they want to dress with fairy wings, let them dress with fairy wings.
But we have all these ideas of what they're supposed to be in. And so what we do is we separate them and we separate them and we separate them from their hearts, from their selves, from their feelings. And then we ask ourselves, why is this 18 year old boy lying on top of a girl raping her when she's screaming, no, no, no. Well, he's not feeling anything. He's not feeling what she's feeling because he's not feeling he's been robbed of his feelings. So I think that really opened up a huge piece of compassion in me towards my father, not to, to justify his behavior. I think there's a big difference between justification and explanation. But I explained it and if we don't get underneath why men are doing what they're doing, if we don't get underneath this story, we keep going at it and add it, we are going to disappear as a human species. We are going to disappear. We're going, we will become extinct. So I think that's what that excavation taught me.
Q 09: Making the movement happen
So you and I had a chance to talk almost exactly a year before the me too movement exploded. And I just want to give Kudos to you for being a visionary always. And in this particular conversation you said that we are at a tipping point for men to rise up and declare they're going to bring in a new idea of what manhood is and what it means to live in a world where women are safe and free. And I mean, I feel like with your publishing this book and you know, getting your message out to as many people as you are in the way that you are, that you are manifesting that movement and you are making it possible for that to start happening. Um, I mean it feels like the logical next step in where we are with women raising their voices and saying what happened to them that men need to take their part and own that responsibility. Um, and I was wondering if we could talk just a bit about, you know, like you said, we weren't, we can't erase our history. It took us a long time to get even here. Um, where kind of where we are on the chain of events that could lead us to this moment where this could actually work.
Eve: Well, I think the $10 million question is what will catalyze men to engage in this process, right. I have to say I'm having been on this book tour now for five or six or seven weeks. I can't remember at this point. Um, I've been really move by men. I've been moved by male journalist. I've been moved by men who've invited me on their shows. I've been moved by men and audiences. And I think, I think we're at, I think we all feel this. We're at this moment in human civilization. Either we're going to perish over or we're going to break through to the next level of human consciousness. And I know I can only say that I don't believe in punishment. I was raised on punishment every day. I was punished every day of my life. It didn't educate me, it didn't transform me. It didn't make me a better person.
It made me bitter and made me defiant and made me raging and may me hateful. And I think if we look at our prison system, uh, obviously it's, it's a diabolical system. Um, which is highly in just in terms of the racist aspects of it and the economic injustice aspects of it. But prisons don't make people better. They make people, they hardened people and they erase people and the exile people. And I think what, I guess I've always believed what Castro said, that we only need 10% of the people that have a revolution. We need 10% of the men to be brave now and to come forward and to begin the process of reckoning and begin the process of, of, of speaking into and doing the deep work, asking themselves why they've done, why they continued to do the things they do, not expecting attack and to be thrown away, but we have to open a pathway so that this process can occur.
Because otherwise we're really going to just be, we're at a stalemate and, and, you know, um, I was really moved to see that the Myp d apologized for stonewall. I thought that was really profound and I thought it's in the air. Like something's beginning to shift. I've, I've been seeing these little little doorways of apologies beginning to open, but I don't know about you. But that was a very profound thing to hear a police officer say we were wrong. We did something that was unjust and we are taking responsibility for that. And I think, um, you know, we have a website now called the apology book. Dot Net. We're wonderful people have been writing about what is an apology and why is it important. And Farah Tanis did this beautiful, beautiful, um, guide for how to do apologies. But we've also been inviting people to write in apologies either to their victims or right apologies to as their Vic as their perpetrators to themselves.
And we got our first apology, I'm happy to say. And um, and it was a man, and I have to say it was a real apology of, of, of a boy who had molested a 15 year old when he was 21 years old. And in his letter he took complete responsibility for what he had done on every level. I knew that you were younger. I used you, I manipulated you. I got you to believe and trust me, but I took advantage of that. He went down bunker but, and I have to say just reading that letter, other things got released in me because it's a communal process. When one person apologizes, you begin to feel what's been holding in you all these years. You begin to feel the tentacles of that releasing. And I just think what I'm hoping, what I'm dreaming, what I is that men will now feel embolden to come forward.
And I just want to say this, you know, people keep saying it's so hard for men to come forward. We have been doing this work for 70 years. Women starting with the African American women who came forward initially to fight off white rapists and put their souls on the line and risk all kinds of violence. We have put ourselves on the line. We have told our soils we have risk shame. We've been under attack. I mean we all only have to look to Anita Hill or Christine blossy Ford. We have done that scary work and we're still standing and then can now do that scary work. And we have to obviously help create a pathway, but there have to be the brave men who are willing to say, all right, I'm going to come forward and do that. And what's the payoff? The payoff is you don't get out of this world.
You don't get out of this world having done something violent and evil and mean without contaminating yourself forever. You don't. And you're holding it in your body and your being, whether you're conscious of it or not, and it's impacting everything you do everyday of your life. So the payoff is you get free, you get free. And I think the point of existence is to get free. So I hope there will be a cadre of men who step by step by step, begin to come forward and break their silence and begin to tell their stories and to begin to reckon and apologize and the way that women need to hear
POD BREAKF
Q 10: Not ready to forgive
So not everyone's ready to forgive. Right. So how well, I mean, what do you, what would you say to women who are, they're not quite in the place where they even want the apology. I mean, is it, is it part, like, is it possible for man to still go through the process even if there's not someone there that is ready to forgive them?
Eve: Well, I don't think the apology should be based on forgiveness. Um, I don't even know if I know what forgiveness is and I'm just going to be honest. I, the words always kind of creeped me out and, um, and, and I'll just say why I feel that always has religious overtones and it always feels a man dated. Um, like it's an obligation. Yeah. And um, I don't know how to do that. I don't think the onus is ever on the victim to forgive.
I don't, I don't. But what I do believe in is the alchemy of an apology. I think when someone sits and looks at you across the table and you are clear that they have given you a detailed accounting of what they've done, where they've gone into their souls and they've investigated why they've done it, what led them to do it, where they've, they've gone through every detail of unveiling their intentions and made amends. Something actually happens in your body and your mind, in your spirit, you can feel the tentacles of rancor and betrayal and hate. All of it just begins to go bing, bing, bing, bing, bing. If that's forgiveness, I'm all for forgiveness. You know that. If that's what forgiveness feels like, um, I don't think anyone has to forgive. I don't, I, I, I, I sometimes hear bad therapists telling survivors, you know, forgive now and get over it.
I just think that's deadly. It's deadly. It's, it, that's not something that can happen or that's not my experience of what can happen. What happens is you go through a process and I think if you can get an apology from you're, you're, you're, you're a perpetrator. And in many cases, women can't. I would highly recommend doing this exercise. I'm not alone. You should do it with a counselor or a therapist or a clergy or friend. But I will tell you something. We hold these perpetrators inside of us and when we write letters from them to ourselves, we can move how they live inside us. So, for example, my father was here for years and years and years, monster lodged here. And I was in this dynamic with him where I was victim to his perpetrator forever. I mean, everything I do was about you. See, I'm not the stupid person you thought I was proving to him or always in relationship to that.
And that was his story. Right in writing this apology, I moved him from monster to apologist. I moved him from terrifying entity to broken tragic wounded boy. And in doing that, he lost power over me. He lost agency over me and I think it at city of joy a month ago, Christine decided she would try this exercise out. City of joy's is sanctuary for healing and a revolutionary center in the Congo. Um, that VA is a VA project and it's run by Christina Shuler describer and it's, it's just the most beautiful project where 90 women come for six months, um, to be trained, to be healed, to be supported, who have suffered very, very bad sexual trauma. And she introduced this exercise and she said, it's unbelievable what started to happen. And she came into her office last week and there were piles of letters. Women had been up all night writing letters from their perpetrators to themselves and they were feeling so free and they were feeling. So I think it has the potential to liberate in all kinds of ways.
Yeah. Does seem like it. You said you can fill it in the era. It does seem like, you know, there's the restorative justice movement and there's, there are now just all these fresh ways of looking at how to deal with the past in a way that is respectful and I'm acknowledging of what really did happen and not brushing it over.
Q 11: Make you apologize
Um, so in, in your book, you, I mean, you do go, you talked about the details to you. You Go, you go into a wrenching detail, um, the, he writes that he would enumerate what you did wrong, uh, ev every week or every day and have his secretary type it up on his letterhead and then present it to you so that you would have to apologize for every item on the list.
Eve: Um, right. I mean, was even weirder than that. I mean, he would, he would type up all the things I had done wrong. I'm a memo from the desk of s and slower and it would be typed up and then I was 16. He had a ping pong paddle and it would take down my underpants and bend me over his bed for everything I would done wrong. He would whack me with the ping pong paddle. So there was a whole kind of sadistic thing built into the, I'm sorry, bit do you know? Um, and I think, I think it's why I, I I, I think it's why I despise torture so much. Why I despise punishment so much. Why? Um, because I think something I really learned as a child, the only way to survive that is to separate from yourself. The only way to survive that kind of ongoing violence is to leave your body.
I can remember hearing him call me down and knowing I was going into a brutal session and I was standing in front of the mirror and I would look at myself and I would say, you're going to go away now. You're not going to feel anything. You're going to disappear. You're not going to go into this. You stay here and the rest of you, we'll go downstairs. And then I would go downstairs and he throw me against walls or he punched me or d and I wouldn't feel a thing. I wouldn't feel thing. And that prepared me to live a life where I would put myself in constant danger and not feel a thing. Right. And so that's what we do when we brutalize people. We, we, we prepare them and at either to become brutalizers and in the, in the case of men who feel like they have power in the world, that's where they go. Um, in the case of some women who feel like they finally can't bear it anymore, they act out and they have violence. But for a lot of us, it's just about separating from ourselves and becoming kind of, um, open to the violent mercy of the world because you don't feel and protect yourself from the danger that's around you.
Q 12: So tragic and interesting
What's so interesting, tragic. I'm not sure what the right adjective about that is that that's the same way that you talked about your father having this alternate self. Yeah. Also, um, do we want to do another reading? Sure. Okay, let's, can we play reading? Uh, actually before, let me set it up for a second. So this is, well, this goes into the details. So a trigger moment may just prepare yourselves. We'll be intense. So everybody's just prepare a little bit. I'm reading four please. And Five,
Father 4: I would find myself in your room at some twilight hour. I only felt alive between the daylight and darkness and that crepuscular realm where dream and memory are indecipherable. That's how I controlled you. Those a photonic hours where others in the house were lost in sleep and you were in a trance separated from your body. I would find myself sitting on your bed somehow carried there by shadow man. You would pretend to be asleep as if what was happening was not happening. You desperately wanted it in me to go away. I didn't go away. I never spoke, never uttered a sound. The silence was my power. Words would break the spell, make it real and ugly and what it was.
Father 5: What kind of bastard have I been? What kind of destruction have I brought? I have lied and lied to myself and you. I cursed your future of love. At Five I took your body. You didn't give it to me. I contaminated your sweetness. I ripped the protective golden gates from your garden. I betrayed your trust. I rearranged or sexual chemistry and the basis of your desire, wrongness and excitement or forever fused together. I made my stain. I left my stinking mark. I infected you by invading and overwhelming your body. I killed your yearning so early you did not and could not give me permission. There was no consent. You did not seduce me with your criminal and petticoats. You was simply being an adorable child. I overstimulated your five year old body and planted the seeds of intensity in thrill. You would push herself too far, take heroin, jump off bridges, drive 100 miles an hour. I robbed you of the ordinary. I destroyed her notion of family. I forced you to betray your mother.
You lived in perpetual self hatred and guilt by created hierarchy, distrust, and violent competition between you and your siblings. None of you would recover from this. I robbed you have agency over your body. It didn't make any decisions. You didn't say yes. That was my projection. In order to satisfy my needs. You were five years old. I was 52 you had no sovereignty. I exploited and abused you. I took your body. It was no longer yours. I rendered you passive. You compulsively gave it to whoever wanted it because I taught you you should. I forced you out of your body and because you were dislocated and Numb, you are unable to protect yourself. I compromise your safety and ability to defend yourself. I made it so that rape became what turned you. I eviscerated you're necessary boundaries so you never knew what was yours and when to say no or how to say stop.
I tore the delicate walls of your vagina and made it vulnerable to disease and infection. Your Body didn't and couldn't say yes. This was a convenient lie. I told myself you didn't know it was sex. I took what I needed by convincing myself. You needed it to, hi, exploited your adoration. I forced you into secrecy, to lie to your mother, to develop a dual life. This splits you in too. I made you feel like a whore. I made you feel you are never worthy of legitimate love. I made intimacy claustrophobic. I left my poison in you. I destroyed your memory by making you want to forget everything. This impacted your intelligence and ability to contain facts and take tests. I stole your innocence. I dimmed your life force and made you feel your sexuality was the cause of bad things. I used your being and body to serve myself. I did all this.
LS: Thank you for letting us share that.
Q 13: Mom
there are a couple of questions have come in asking about your mom and where she was when all this was happening. Do you want to talk about that?
Eve: I think, um, I think, you know, I, my mother and I went through a really long journey after I confronted her, but I, I, I think my mother was of a generation where they didn't believe they were equal to men. Um, they believed that men had the power, but my father was like a CEO. My mother was at best, his executive assistant, you know, and I often felt like he had four children and she was one of them. Um, she was a woman who had been very poor at grown up in the Midwest. Um, and my father was her way out of that poverty. And I think by the time, um, the abuse started, she had three children and she had no economic security.
She had no economic wherewithal. She had no job, she had no prospects. And when I, when I confronted my mother, which was probably the hardest thing I've ever done in my life, to just sit and face my mother and say what my father had done to me. Um, of course she knew it was very odd because at the, at the end of it she said, well, I know your father was murdered you. I was there for all the times he did that when he beats you and everything, but I didn't know about the sexual stuff is the beatings were all fine. It was just a weird little moment. Um, but um, w later she, she repented for that, that it was just like a weird, but, um, I think my mother, um, said to me, uh, months after I confronted her, she called me up at four o'clock in the morning and she was hysterical one night and she said, I realize I sacrificed you.
I sacrificed you. I could not bear the idea of being poor again and I really let your father do what he wanted to you to keep my security. And as devastating as that was it, I knew it was true. And so it was the beginning of my mother making amends to me because she told me the truth and we went through a very long journey before she died. And I feel like every day she once said to me something really startling, and it showed me the power of perpetrators over our, our lifetime. Not just this lifetime, but many, many lifetimes. She said to me, what if I meet your father in the next life? And he's mad at me that I believed you had to be. That was the most shuttering things she ever said to me because he even had power in, in death over her.
And, um, I don't know why that just, I just remembered that. It just makes me so sad because I don't think we can underestimate ever what violence does to us, how deeply it goes in not just to the cellular makeup of our physical bodies, but into the, the, the spiritual DNA of not only this story, but our ancestral story. It just goes on and on. Intergeneration because fear is so powerful. It's so powerful. And so I think with my mother, um, because she trusts, kept going back at it to try to go deeper into it to explain and understand why she had done before she died, when she died, we were in a beautiful place and I was able to really let her go. And she was a, I feel like she, we left this world and really, she left this world in a really good place.
Q 14: first person told
Yeah. Um, you're well, who was the first person that you ever told that this was happening? Was it your mom?
EVE: No, no, no by no means, no, it was, it was the violence. The first time I ever talked about it, I was drunk with my two roommates and everyone was laughing and talking about things and, and I was talking, I was just, you know, when you grow up in, in a violent situation, you have no context to understand that that's weird or abnormal. So you'd just think everybody's family does that. So I had these two fabulous roommates and I was making a joke and I went and then my father said to my mother, Chris, get the kitchen knife. And everyone paused and said, what? And I said, yeah, he told my mother to get the kitchen lights so he could stab me. And they like that is not normal.
LS: That is not okay.
Eve: You know, and it was the first time anyone reflected back to me, right. That I had grown up in a very seriously dovish to situate him. Um, um, and I think it wasn't until later when I went into therapy that I be in too, because for many, many, many years, I had no memory of the first 10 years of my life. Absolutely no memory. It was just brought up like I began a 10. And then as I became, as I began to melt and my numbness began to melt over time because I was highly anesthetize, I was raging alcoholic and a drug addict. I just anesthetized. And so it took a process of numbing and, and coming out of numbing and melting and melting. So I began to feel and then began to remember, you know.
Q 15: How break the cycle
Um, so how, how did you, how did you break the cycle of abusing yourself?
EVE: Basically? I mean, through drugs and alcohol. How did you, with the help of really amazing people, I mean, I, you know, somebody said the other night, like, what are the things that saved you? Right? And I think there were two things that saved me. One was imagination and the ability to imagine another world where I was going and people who would be coming. And the other was with just amazingly kind people who intervened on my behalf throughout my life. And I don't think we can underestimate how one person's kindness towards somebody can absolutely radicalize their life, particularly when you've come from total deprivation. Do you know? And I, I think I was in the 12 step programs for a long time. And, and um, when I came into the 12 step programs that was, there was like no women. And, um, and people were so kind to me.
There was just so kind to me. And it was that, you know, I'm believing people could see me before I could see myself and they held a vision of me that I could live into. And I think it's why I believe, um, I don't know, when I hit bottom, I hit rock bottom as an alcoholic and it was a really bad scene and I almost died. And I got on my hands and knees in a parking lot in Puerto Rico. And, um, and I just said, I don't remember this like it was yesterday. I was 23 years old. I said, if you don't let me go crazy or die, I promise you, if you help me get better, I will go back for the others. I swear to God. And you know what, that was the best vow I ever made. You know, because I think when you give people what you want the most, you heal the broken part inside you.
Um, it's always going out to help people that you heal yourself because it's too hard in here, you know?
?Q 16: Put back together
So when, when did you feel like you kind of put yourself back together that the two parts of you were reunited and to finding yourself?
EVE: I think it's like a gradual process. You know, it didn't, I think bits of you come in. I remember when I was performing the vagina monologues and I had been living way outside my vagina for many, many years. Like looking down at it. Um, I was performing it for months and months and one night I just landed in my vagina. I was like, Oh my God, I'm in my vagina. Like I literally went woof and, and like, okay, so that I came back in there and then like, and then I was in, you know, and then like, like little pieces.
Then one day you come back into your heart and one day you come back, you know, it's like, it's a, it's a process of return, right? It's a process of coming back in and it doesn't happen overnight. But if you steady at it and you keep working at it and you keep any of you want it, if you want to live in the body of the world, if you want to live in your body and in the body of the earth, if that's your desire, it will happen. I think the worst thing they tell rape survivors and survivors of violence is that you're broken forever. That's the second rape and it's just not true. It's just not true. We can, we can come back in, we can be just, we can be more amazing because we've gone through all of that and we can be more strong and more vital and more energized after. And I think we have to get out of this idea that we're forever locked into that story, their story. We have to create our story now. Our story is not about victims and perpetrators. Our story is about this, you know,
?Q 17: radical empathy
and that, and that comes back to what you had a conversation with Kimberly Crenshaw off a week or so ago and she called it having, you have to have radical empathy. I mean you, I mean radical like at its root empathy to be able, I, it feels like to be able to break out of out of that because you have to be able to hold what happened to you and know that it was real. And also to be able to have, to start to have an understanding of where it came from.
Eve: Totally. And I think part of it is checking out with yourself. Like I feel like I used to, I would have empathy for this person and this person, but I had conditional empathy, right? There were the people, I just didn't have empathy for men. Right. Um, and, and this book really changed that. But I want to tell you this one little story, the story because this was, this was the day when, when I began to understand how empathy can be conditional. I was working at Bedford Hills correctional facility and it was running groups. And I had this group of amazing, um, longterm, um, inmates who were all there for violent crimes, mainly murders. And I, I had one session with these women. I fell completely in love with all of them except for one. And this woman gave me this super creeps and I didn't like Arcon and everything about our correct me out and, and um, and I had no compassion her and no empathy for her and everybody else would tell them.
And so we were going around every week and each week it was like, you tell one story from one to nine that would really evidence what you went through that period. So we'd go around the circle and um, and the second session that woman came in and she sat down next to me and I was like, Oh God, like I had such a creepy feeling about this woman, I can't tell you. And, and so all the women around, and I want to tell you that just about every woman in that circle who had, had been radically sexually abused, radically horribly abused as children. Right? So we got to her and I was actually like, Kinda leaning like this, you know, like a way from her. And she started to tell her story and she told her story and I can cry again hearing this story. And she said that when she was a child, her mother and her stepfather, um, rented out as a sex toy and they let all the people, you know, they had all these clients that would use her basically as a baby dildo and they would do everything to her and they were tired to beds and they were just horrible things.
And that her mother died and her stepfather married her. And he then turned her into his little pimp where she would go out and she would find children in the neighborhood and bringing them in so they could abuse them. And one of the children died and she came to prison. And when she was in prison, she had no idea why she was there because she had never lived in any other moral universe. She had nothing to compare it to. She didn't understand that what had happened to her was bad because that was all that she knew. And it took her five years in prison to understand it. And then she started to cut herself to try to kill herself. And she actually said in the group, never let me out of prison. And I just started to sob and I realized I had made a story up about this woman because of her pockmarked skin and the way she looked and her vibration, and I had written her off.
I had written her off and I made a contract with myself that after that day, I would just assume that any person that I sat next to was traumatized and had been through something really terrible. And if it wasn't first, it wasn't primary, it was secondary or they were witness to it and that everybody we're sitting next to is traumatized. Some more than others. Some have more privileged in their trauma, but we're all suffering and were suffering so much in this country. I'm sorry, I'm crying. Purchase bit around this country for the last days, days, I feel like I've fallen into the center of the wound. We are so hurting in this country. We are so exiled, were so lonely. We're so separated. We're so divided and if we're going to go on, we have to reach out and feel each other and let each other into ourselves and take everybody in so that we feel each other and we understand we're not alone in this and we're in the same struggle to evolve as human beings tend to become free from our suffering. Sorry, spit a lot. A lot of stories, you know.
Q 18: How others can use approach
yeah. And I mean, based on this whole conversation that applies to women and men and all genders, everything in between. Yeah. Yeah. Um, well let's, let's talk about how others might use this approach. I mean, you've set up a website, um, you're going to do a play. You, you said that it's an offering, not a prescription. Not, maybe not everyone's going to want to do it. Um, but you're, you're starting to see results. And I mean, I feel like you're creating a model for how the world can be by doing this.
EVE: Well, I think there's so many people doing such amazing work right now with restorative justice and really beginning to understand the prisons are not the answer. And that's the metaphor. Like we have to get out of prisons, just even cages, the idea that we, we, we harden that we harden things rather than releasing things and moving through things.
And, and what I hope is is that first of all, I hope that men will be inspired on their own to begin to come forward, to start to work with clergy, with counselors, to go through a process where they look at their behavior, where they look at what they've done, where they begin to write their apologies and right in and go through a process. And you know, Kimberly country as I were talking, like how does this apply to justice? Maybe there becomes a way were prosecutors say to victims, what do you want? Do you want your, you want your perpetrator in prison or do you want an apology process? Do you want to see your perpetrator go through a year or two where they do massive therapy, massive work on themselves, spiritual work where they go through something and at the end we have panels in communities of advocates and social justice people and, and, and therapists who sit and listen to the perpetrator.
Make an apology to the victim. And if the victim accepts it, then the apology, the panel and the victim determine whether that person has done the work or they have to go back and do more work. But we have, we have ways out of this, so we're not freezing people forever in their badness and then their mistakes because we're all prisoners to racist patriarchy. It's brought us all up and if we're all going to, we have to admit to that, like the system has created all of us. So what we need is the men now to catalyze this and say, I'm coming forward to break out of the system.
LS: Yeah, I sense more. Applause.
Q 19 audience: Father express fear
um, so we, we do have some audience questions. Okay. Um, let's see. Um, this is about your father. Did your father express fear before his death as if he perhaps sensed he was headed for limbo until he became accountable for his abusive you?
Eve: No, as a matter of fact, um, he never let me know he was dying. And a few days before he died, he came out of his, you know, um, drugged stupor to tell my mother to take me out of his will. And he said to her, if I ever told her anything, it was a lie because I was a liar. And it's really interesting when I confronted my mother, she said, if he hadn't said that to her, she wouldn't have believed me. But because he was so worried about it coming out, he came out of a morphine stupor to say it to her. So I think that's really profound. Yes. Yeah.
LS: Do you think that was the one and only time he ever even would have alluded to it in his whole life?
EVE: Well, I think so much about my father after he had kind of destroyed me through the sexual abuse, I was the walking reminder of that by my, yeah, I cut off all my hair. I was always belligerent. I, I, it was always like depressed. You know, I was, I was kind of a pathetic child after that. And I think he, he, I was evidence of what he had done. So he wanted to destroy the evidence and he wanted to destroy me. And, and I think, I think one of the things I learned writing this book is what perpetrators do to de legitimize all the people who know the truth is exactly what our Predator in chief has done over these last few years, which is d constantly de-legitimized different groups to make them feel like they are nothing and no one. And he does it through all these things that there's nobody who can call him who's legitimate on what he's doing. It's also making himself the victim, which is what perpetrators are genius had. Like suddenly we're all, it's all a witch hunt and were all after him. And it, that's always when my was my father's, look what you've made me do to you. I had to beat you almost to death because of what you did. I'm the victim here, you know, is that turning things around?
Q 21 audience: Women dont become abusers
And here's another audience question. Um, and we've been speaking mostly of men as of users. Um, so you speak of boys being robbed of certain feelings and emotions. But the same happens to women. We were raised not being allowed to be angry, spirited or even speak when not spoken too. Yep. Yet women did not turn into abusers. What explains the difference?
Eve: It's a good question. Um, I, I mean I can only, I think my, my thought about that is, and maybe I'm wrong about this, is that we not have allowed to express our anger, but we weren't. We were allowed to have our hearts. We are allowed to feel, we were allowed to cry. We were allowed to be connected to ourselves. Um, and, and, and, and I can't say what the impact of testosterone versus estrogen. I have no idea. But I do know that even if we're not allowed to have, are anger. And even if we're, we have relationship, we have relationship like Aye. Aye. Aye. Who was I talking to the other day that they were just saying like, they know so many men who don't, who aren't in deep relationships, they are alone. And, and, and part of when we remove people from their hearts and remove people from their tenderness, we removed them from community.
We removed them from those deep relationships. So I know what saved me is having women, friends and girlfriends and people I, I could emote with constantly because I was just an emotional creature in my whole life. And I think when you're not allowed that, you know, um, I was once in Casado and um, and I'll never forget this. And I had gone with friends, um, after the war whose house had been destroyed and I went to help them clean their house and we were going around and we were finding people in the communities who needed mattresses and help and all the roads were full of landmines. It was really crazy. And we went into this backyard and we found this mother and her daughter and their house was all graffiti'd and they were living in the backyard and they were sleeping on the ground and the mother was really concerned because her two sons had not returned for two years.
And we came back the next day and we bought the mattresses and five minutes before we hit arrived, her son had come home. And I heard in the backyard is huge commotion. Everyone was crying and screaming, and it was just like this wild, it was wild. And I walked into the yard and for some reason he saw me. And because America had helped cause of, oh, I don't know what it was. He was like, oh my God. And he threw himself on me and he started to wail. I mean, well, just like, and I had two thoughts. This was many, many years ago. Oh my God, there is a man and he's wailing on me. And Oh my God, there's a man and he's wailing on me. And they were very conflicted. And I realized in that moment that me feminist eve was having issues with the big man wailing on me, right?
That even built into my DNA was, oh man, don't do that. Men are strong. Men are this better that, and in that moment I went, oh, I get this as this man was in my arms weeping and weeping, I went, oh, bullets are hardened tears. That's what they are. They're hardened tears. The tears that didn't get to happen. Right? And I really think if we really allowed men to begin to release the pain that's inside them, there will be a tsunami of feelings that begins to start to tumble out. And that will be the beginning of our liberation. I really believe that
LS: that's an incredible story. That's an incredible story.
Q 22: the apology reading
Well that that takes us to our, I got to as many questions as I could you guys, um, to our last reading because ultimately, spoiler alert, there is an apology in the book. Um, and we're going to hear it. So reading six, please.
Father 6: Let me say these words. I'm sorry. I am sorry. Let me sit here at the final hour. Let me get it right this time. Let me be staggered by your tenderness. Let me risk for agility. Let me be rendered vulnerable. Let me be lost. Let me be still. Let me not occupy or oppress. Let me not conquer or destroyed. Let me believe in the rapture. Let me be the father. Let me be the father who mirrors you're kind heartedness back to you. Let me lay no claims. Let me bear witness and not invade. Eve. I free you from the covenant. I revoke the lie. I lift the curse old man. Be Gone.
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LAUREN
That was Eve and flare playwright activist and author of the book the apology speaking with me at the Commonwealth Club of California on June 11th of 2019. You can check out inflection point in hear more stories about women rising up at inflection point radio dot-org.
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STEPHANIE
And remember how Eve said, she'd never heard a man apologize publicly authentically and deeply for what he'd done? Well, remember to tell her about Reckonings on Instagram @TheApology :) I'm Stephanie Lepp [00:50:00] and you've been listening to a special edition of Reckonings.
Note: Transcripts may contain errors, and audio should be checked before quoting in print.
[00:00:00]
STEPHANIE
So Eve Ensler -- famous playwright, performer, and activist (you might know her from her play The Vagina Monologues) just wrote this unbelievable book called The Apology, where she imagines the apology her father never gave her for the sexual physical and psychological abuse he inflicted on her as a child.
Yeah, that's kind of like the imaginary Reckoning with Pope Francis in episode 22, but Eve Ensler did it for her own father. And she was just interviewed about the book by Lauren Schiller on Inflection Point -- a podcast about how women rise up. And it is a beautiful interview with so much resonance to Reckonings, so I'm serving it up right here in the Reckonings feed.
Enjoy it!
And when you're done enjoying it, please let Eve Ensler that she would enjoy Reckonings. You can let her know on [00:01:00] Instagram @TheApology. That's just @TheApology. Okay, here we go.
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Q 01 Intro:
I'm Lauren Schiller and this is inflection point with stories of how women rise up. This summer. I was invited by the Commonwealth Club of California to talk with Eve Ensler about her book The Apology.
Obviously I jumped at the chance Eve is known for her Tony award-winning play The Vagina Monologues. She also founded v-day a global platform to end violence against women and girls and she founded 1 billion Rising the largest global mass action to end gender based violence in over 200 countries.
Eve's latest book The Apology is already a best-seller and it's a powerful and personal life changing examination of abuse and atonement and the transformational power. Of an apology. It was an emotional evening and dare. I say [00:02:00] the start of a movement. I'm thrilled to share my conversation with Eve Ensler recorded in front of a live audience in San Francisco on June 11th of 2019.
I should note a stress warning. This episode does contain conversation about sexual assault and violence.
Q 03: Why wrote the book
So let's start you tell us a bit about why you wrote this book.
Why did I write this book? I've been in so many cities in so many days. I, my mind is just like, um, well I think there were a combination of factors. Why I wrote this book. Um, one, um, I was sexually abused by my father from the time I was five until the time I was 10. And after that, um, he began to physically abuse me, um, in kind of renders and scary ways, almost murdering me a couple of times. And I think all my childhood, I dreamed that my father would apologize to me. I sort of thought that moment will come. Um, I actually wrote him apology letters because I was always wrong and always bad and, and, and it was always expected of me. But I think there was also a part of me that thought if I wrote them enough apology letters, he'd get the idea and he'd write one back. Um, and then he died. And so he's been dead for 31 years. But still the yearning for the apology has always been there.
So that's one piece of it. The second piece is that having been an organizer and an activist for 21 years, my whole life really, um, in the movement to end violence against all women and girls, I've watched women tell her stories, break the silence Colemen out bravely tell our our our hearts and souls and, and, and, and, and risk, humiliation, risk attack, and an all that time, I have never heard a man apologize publicly, authentically, deeply for what he's done. And in all the recent integration of the me too movement, I have never heard a man publicly, authentically, deeply apologize. So I started to think, why is that? And then I started to ask people, have you ever heard Amanda? It's sort of the way I started the vagina monologues, you know, tell me about your vagina. I would say the, you know, women, um, have you ever heard a man?
And then nobody could answer one p one instance that, and then I started thinking 16,000 years of patriarchy. Have we ever heard a man in recorded history? You know, that we could read a public apology and no one could point to one. So I suddenly realized that this might be fundamental to why we're still where we are and that maybe I could actually write my father's apology and say the words and create the words, um, that I needed to hear in order to get free. Um, and I embarked on this process, um, which was grueling, um, painful rev Latori, um, and ultimately, um, profoundly liberating. So that, that's the kind of genesis of it. Thank you.
Q 04 Reading 1 :
Well book is written as your father writing to you. Um, and we have readings from the audible edition of the apology which are performed by Eduardo Ballerini who channels you channeling your father. Um, and we're gonna play a couple of, of excerpts from the beginning of the book. So, um, if we can hear reading one and reading too, please.
Father 1: How very strange to be writing you am I writing to you from the grave or the past? Well, the future am I writing as you, as you would like me to be, whereas I really am beneath my own limited understanding. And does it matter? Am I writing in a language I never spoke or understood what you have created inside both of our minds to bridge the gaps, the failures to connect? Maybe I am writing as I truly am, as you have freed me by your witness. All right. I'm not writing this at all, but simply being used as a vehicle to fulfill your own needs and version of things.
Father 2: You always wrote me letters. I found that peculiar and strangely moving. We lived in the same house, but you are writing to me, you're a little girl handwriting attempting straight lines but wandering all over the page. It was as if you are trying to make contact with some aspect of me, the you could not find in the heated moments of our conflict because if you're trying through poetry to appeal to a secret self that I had once made available to you usually wrote apology letters. So fitting that you would now want an apology letter from me. You were always apologizing, begging for forgiveness. I had reduced you to a daily degrading mantra of, I'm sorry,
Q 05 How did it feel:
how did it feel to hear that?
Eve: Well, the first time I heard a man read this it with, um, it was really weird and eerie and um, but it was also just like, I, you know, I was interviewed by this lovely man, Ron Charles at the Washington Post and he asked me if this was going to become a theater piece, which I'm really happy to say that it is. And, um, I said, I think I said, I think women would pay a lot of money to come here and man make an apology, you know? And the truth of the matter is like every time I hear it, I feel more and more released because there's something about the concrete as a nation. There's something about an apology that is the alchemy of that, which I'll talk about more later that is so releasing of so much in our bodies because we never hear it.
Eve: And as weird as it sounds in his areas, it feels, it just feels like, oh, okay. I what I knew to be true all along West drew long and now we're having a dialogue and we're going on a journey where that's going to get told, you know?
?Q 06: What looking for in the reader
Yeah. What were you looking for? I mean, is it even possible to put your finger on the characteristics that you were looking for in the delivery of the apology?
If you mean from the man?
Yeah, we'll get,
you know, I think writing this book with, with such a, a, a very strange experience and I think you have to go back to that. Yes, let's that because
Eve: I, you know, um, I was in the Congo and, and for me, everything, um, everything amazing happens in the Congo, um, because it's one of the most mystical spiritual places I've ever been. But it's a place that lives in the heart of, of, of, of ambiguity. Um, it's, it's been more colonized, more, there's been more racism, there's been more war, there's been more raping and, and of people of pillaging, of resources, of stealing, of land. And yet at the same time, it's the most beautiful country. The people are the most beautiful people. There is a life force in spirit there that is just like nothing I've ever experienced. And so whenever I'm there, I feel like I'm in the center of that, that incredible dynamic ambiguity and wisdom and churning. And I was, I was at city of joy in late summer and I was, I was listening to women tell their stories and the experiences they were going through.
And that's when I realized this thing about apologies. And the minute I made this decision that I was going to write this letter, um, from my father to me, um, and I, and I called my agent from Congo like at 12 o'clock at night and she was like, you have to do this book. I know this is what you have to do. You know, she's the most amazing woman and I know you all know who Charlotte Sheedy is. She's like been the greatest feminist. And she supported some of the greatest writers from Audrey Lorde to, um, and anyway, so I came back and when I, when I opened the portal, when I, when I just invited my father to come in, it was as if I literally went into some trance state and he went into me and I went into him and except for a few days, for four solid months, morning, noon and night, I was in there.
And, um, I don't really know who wrote this book. Do you know? I don't, I don't know if it was me or my father or me and my father or where we live or where we meet. Because what I really discovered, and I think all survivors know this, is that our perpetrators, when they rape us or beat us or hurt us or demean us or harass us, they enter us. Um, they become embedded in us. And for my whole life, I was in dialogue with that father inside me. As a matter of fact, I've lived within his paradigm. I have been a perpetual victim to his abuser my whole life. That's framed my life. That paradigm has been the story of my life. And so it was not hard to access my father because he's always been there. And I think also for those of us who've been abused, particularly if it's a family member and it happens over and over, you know, your abuser, some ways better than yourself.
You know their footsteps. You know the sound of their voice. It indicates whether they've had one or two drinks or if they're in a bad mood or a good mood, you learn to read every little aspect of them in order to learn how to pretend to protect yourself. Right. And so I think once I began to find my father's voice, he took over in a way. It was like that thing where somebody's writing, you're moving your hand. You know, and I have to tell you a lot of his vocabulary, I don't know. Um, I think his voice is much more formal and authorial, and it's not my voice. It's his voice. And, um, it, in that sense, I think looking at actors and thinking, who should read this? Um, I know that the, the person has to be charming and seductive and scary and intimidating and authorial and, um, someone you're drawn to in a terrified at the same time. You know? Um, and I think Edwardo, I listened to a bunch of people before I heard a Dorito and then I heard him and I thought he gets it, you know, um, and he had a really profound experience doing it. He broke down sobbing in the middle of it, like it just because he has two daughters. So that was a really interesting thing what he went through doing the audio.
LS: Yeah. I was wondering if he realized what he was getting himself into.
Eve: I think he did because he had read. I don't think he realized the depth of it until he started to do it.
LS: Yeah. Well, and as you take this out to become a performance, that's going to be another interesting experience for everyone involved.
Q 07: Zoom out
Well let's, let's zoom out for a few minutes and talk about what you referenced when you talked about why you wrote this book, which is what the state of apologies is between men and women. We don't have a culture of apology unless you're a woman in which case you over apologize your motives for yourself and everyone around you. Your rate and existing an existing range is taking up a little bit of space. So and, and in the me too movement, we heard thousands and thousands of stories that you already knew or out there. I mean, you've been living in this, in this world and catching these stories, but we heard hardly any apologies. And in fact on, you know, Brett Kavanaugh lets you know who refused to apologize and talked about beer. Right. So, um, so it seems like we need to understand, or maybe they need to understand what is an apology that there's not necessarily a template for it?
Eve: Well, I, I just want to say I think, um, I've learned so much about what an apology is writing this book I learned about the anatomy of an apology and the tenants of an apology. And I want to say a couple things. I think an apology is a humbling, it's making yourself vulnerable. It's an equalizer. I think it's everything about an apology is in the details. Um, the liberation of the victim or the survivor is in the details. It's not, I'm sorry I sexually abused you or I'm sorry I hurt you. Or I'm sorry if you feel bad, it's, here is exactly what I did. And here was my intention behind what I did. And I think we live in a country that has diabolical amnesia, diabolical amnesia. We don't remember anything. We don't remember our origins, the, the genocide against the indigenous whose land we stand on.
We don't remember the 400 years of Nial aided hundreds and thousands of people and then moving into Jim Crow and then moving into mass incarceration. We don't remember our own families, the events that are happening in front of us as they're happening, we're erasing them and we don't remembers yesterday's news. It's already gone. Um, so I think what I really learned is that an apology is the antidote to Amnesia. It actually makes what occurred. It makes, it, makes it real. It did occur, I think of the comfort women, um, who I've had the honor to know in, in the Philippines, but there were a comfort women throughout Asia that were taken by the Japanese government and World War II and there were held in rape camps when some of them were in their teens and early twenties. Sometimes they were raped up to 50 times a day to serve those soldiers.
The comfort women had been waiting 70 years for an apology from the Japanese government. 70 years. Most of them have died. Many of them are infirmed. There's only a few left. All they wanted was the Japanese government to say that what happened did happen. We're not crazy people. We know what we, we know what w w what we experienced in our bodies and beings that we've carried all these years and I think an apology actually does that. It says what occurred did occurred. The other piece that I really learned is that for an, for a man to apologize, one has to go back in time and history and understand what made you do what you did, what happened in your life, what happened in your origins, what happened in your childhood? Nobody is born a pedophile. No one is born with a machete in their hand.
Something happens to boys that makes them turn and become different kinds of beings in this world. And I think one of the most profound aspects of writing this book and the most difficult, and I just want to say about this book, it's an offering. It's not a prescription. It's not a half to it. There are many survivors who don't want an apology, will never want an, and that's all amazing and good. There is no, there's no must. I knew for me, I was at a point where I had vestiges left. Um, I had anger left that was poisoning me. I was still living with him, my father's story. And I wanted to be living in a different story and I wanted to see if I could get into that story. Um, but I think one of the things that I discovered in going back into my father's story, it's like I began to unravel the y.
And I think for all of us who've been abused, whether it's racial injustice, we are obsessed with the why. Why did my best friend drug me and date rape me? Why did it please shoot me? Because I'm a black person. Why did my father wants to kill his only his oldest daughter? Why? Why, why? And I think when you begin to go back and, and I began to unravel and my father began to tell me the story of his psychologicals emotional evolutional or d evolution. In his case, I was like, oh, I see, I see, I see the story. I see the story that led up to him becoming, and in that sense it wasn't about me anymore. I thought it was about him. I thought it was on him. It was what had been done to him that led him to do those things.
But it has nothing to do with me being a bad person or a slut or a jackass or a whore or any of the terrible things he ever called me. And it really released me by understanding that why. And then I think the last piece or the second last piece is being accountable, being accountable. Once you've gone through that whole journey of self interrogation and self reflection and you've spelled out the details of what you've done and you've looked into your mal intentions, then it's taking responsibility for that in a way that your victim or survivor feel satisfied and indicates that you couldn't, you've gone through a deep enough journey where you couldn't possibly do that to somebody else. To me, that's an apology. We teach prayer in school, right? We teach the devotion of prayer and the concentration of prayer. We teach the humbling of the petition, but we don't teach the practice of apology. We teach maybe, oh, I'm sorry, but that's not an apology. An apology is a deep, profound spiritual, psychological, political act. And we live in a country that is so not about apologies. It's punitive. It's violent, it's punitive, it's violent, it's it. That's the cycle we're in. The apology is the practice that can break us out of that cycle.
LS: this is starting to sound like a movement.
Q 08: Traitor to men
So you write in the book, in your father's words that to be an apologist is to be a traitor to men. Um, and I'm wondering, do you, well, you've said already that you opened a portal and he came through you. Um, but I still have the question. Is that, do you think that huge really felt that or do you think that he was using that as an excuse?
Eve: Well, I think when my father said that to me and I really felt like he said it too, because I don't know how I would know that. Um, he, he just basically said to me to be an apologist is a trader to men. Once one man apologizes and the myths, he knows that he's wrong and he knew what he was doing was wrong. The whole story of Patriarchy begins to crumble. And I really literally stopped in my tracks for the rest of that day. I was like, wow, this is a column. This is a major column of Patriarchy. The apology. And I think, I think what I really understood, I mean there's a point in the book where my father is, he gets to move from limbo to hell and in hell he meets all the fathers or the fathers and he, he actually says to me at one point, I would rather spend in hell and be within the tribe of men.
Then I would apologize because at least within the tribe of men, I know my identity, I know my value. I have privilege, I have power, but to give this up, who would I be? And I think one of the things that, that, um, patriarchy is so genius at is offering no alternatives, right? It's constantly dividing people and separating people with no with no doorways out. So I think, and I, and I've said this my whole life, that the tyranny of Patriarchy has been much, much more devastating to men than it has to women. We have our hearts and tax, we have our spirits and sacked. I think what's happened to men and, and I, and I really learned this in this book, is getting, I can just say a little bit about my father's childhood. My father was born like 12 years after the last child in his family.
He was the mistake that became the miracle. He was the golden boy, the divine right of kings. He was going to bring the family to the promise land. And my father was adored, adored, but at a ration is not love. And I really want to make this distinction. We adore boys. And what that means is we have projected ideal images of who they're supposed to be, that we project onto them, that they have to live up to having very often nothing to do with who they really are. And so every time a boy is his experiences, his tenderness or his vulnerability or his heart or his sorrow or his wonder, and that's not in keeping with that adoration. He's got to push it underground and he's got to push it underground and he's got to push it underground. And in my father's case, he pushed it so much underground that it eventually metastasized into another persona called the shadow man, who he talks about in the book.
And that shadow man actually surfaced at my birth because what happened was I was the first daughter and my father was overwhelmed with the tenderness. He did not know how to experience. He had been robbed of his own tenderness. He didn't know how to be tender to himself, and he didn't know how to be tender in the world. And so when I was born, he didn't know to sit with tenderness, you know, I was saying last night, my granddaughter was in the audience. I look at my granddaughter's sometime and I'm filled with such overwhelming love for them. I don't know what to do. I tell him to just sit and cry. It's just so big that love, and I know how to sit with that tenderness like I, I just wheat. But if you've never had the experience of having tenderness, you want to get rid of it.
You want to smash it, you want to exploit it, you want to rape it, you want to conquer it, you want to dominate it, you want to, you want to make it go away. And I think that's what happened in our, my father's early years with me. I think he began adoring me and, and being overwhelmed by that. And then it became very perverse and sexual and weird. And I think part of what we have to look at it, why are we separating our boys from their hearts? Why are we creating idealized images of them, of who they're supposed to be when they're actually just brilliant who they are. They're tender and they're funny and they're wise and they're full of sparkle. And if they want to wear pink, let them wear pink. And if they want to dress with fairy wings, let them dress with fairy wings.
But we have all these ideas of what they're supposed to be in. And so what we do is we separate them and we separate them and we separate them from their hearts, from their selves, from their feelings. And then we ask ourselves, why is this 18 year old boy lying on top of a girl raping her when she's screaming, no, no, no. Well, he's not feeling anything. He's not feeling what she's feeling because he's not feeling he's been robbed of his feelings. So I think that really opened up a huge piece of compassion in me towards my father, not to, to justify his behavior. I think there's a big difference between justification and explanation. But I explained it and if we don't get underneath why men are doing what they're doing, if we don't get underneath this story, we keep going at it and add it, we are going to disappear as a human species. We are going to disappear. We're going, we will become extinct. So I think that's what that excavation taught me.
Q 09: Making the movement happen
So you and I had a chance to talk almost exactly a year before the me too movement exploded. And I just want to give Kudos to you for being a visionary always. And in this particular conversation you said that we are at a tipping point for men to rise up and declare they're going to bring in a new idea of what manhood is and what it means to live in a world where women are safe and free. And I mean, I feel like with your publishing this book and you know, getting your message out to as many people as you are in the way that you are, that you are manifesting that movement and you are making it possible for that to start happening. Um, I mean it feels like the logical next step in where we are with women raising their voices and saying what happened to them that men need to take their part and own that responsibility. Um, and I was wondering if we could talk just a bit about, you know, like you said, we weren't, we can't erase our history. It took us a long time to get even here. Um, where kind of where we are on the chain of events that could lead us to this moment where this could actually work.
Eve: Well, I think the $10 million question is what will catalyze men to engage in this process, right. I have to say I'm having been on this book tour now for five or six or seven weeks. I can't remember at this point. Um, I've been really move by men. I've been moved by male journalist. I've been moved by men who've invited me on their shows. I've been moved by men and audiences. And I think, I think we're at, I think we all feel this. We're at this moment in human civilization. Either we're going to perish over or we're going to break through to the next level of human consciousness. And I know I can only say that I don't believe in punishment. I was raised on punishment every day. I was punished every day of my life. It didn't educate me, it didn't transform me. It didn't make me a better person.
It made me bitter and made me defiant and made me raging and may me hateful. And I think if we look at our prison system, uh, obviously it's, it's a diabolical system. Um, which is highly in just in terms of the racist aspects of it and the economic injustice aspects of it. But prisons don't make people better. They make people, they hardened people and they erase people and the exile people. And I think what, I guess I've always believed what Castro said, that we only need 10% of the people that have a revolution. We need 10% of the men to be brave now and to come forward and to begin the process of reckoning and begin the process of, of, of speaking into and doing the deep work, asking themselves why they've done, why they continued to do the things they do, not expecting attack and to be thrown away, but we have to open a pathway so that this process can occur.
Because otherwise we're really going to just be, we're at a stalemate and, and, you know, um, I was really moved to see that the Myp d apologized for stonewall. I thought that was really profound and I thought it's in the air. Like something's beginning to shift. I've, I've been seeing these little little doorways of apologies beginning to open, but I don't know about you. But that was a very profound thing to hear a police officer say we were wrong. We did something that was unjust and we are taking responsibility for that. And I think, um, you know, we have a website now called the apology book. Dot Net. We're wonderful people have been writing about what is an apology and why is it important. And Farah Tanis did this beautiful, beautiful, um, guide for how to do apologies. But we've also been inviting people to write in apologies either to their victims or right apologies to as their Vic as their perpetrators to themselves.
And we got our first apology, I'm happy to say. And um, and it was a man, and I have to say it was a real apology of, of, of a boy who had molested a 15 year old when he was 21 years old. And in his letter he took complete responsibility for what he had done on every level. I knew that you were younger. I used you, I manipulated you. I got you to believe and trust me, but I took advantage of that. He went down bunker but, and I have to say just reading that letter, other things got released in me because it's a communal process. When one person apologizes, you begin to feel what's been holding in you all these years. You begin to feel the tentacles of that releasing. And I just think what I'm hoping, what I'm dreaming, what I is that men will now feel embolden to come forward.
And I just want to say this, you know, people keep saying it's so hard for men to come forward. We have been doing this work for 70 years. Women starting with the African American women who came forward initially to fight off white rapists and put their souls on the line and risk all kinds of violence. We have put ourselves on the line. We have told our soils we have risk shame. We've been under attack. I mean we all only have to look to Anita Hill or Christine blossy Ford. We have done that scary work and we're still standing and then can now do that scary work. And we have to obviously help create a pathway, but there have to be the brave men who are willing to say, all right, I'm going to come forward and do that. And what's the payoff? The payoff is you don't get out of this world.
You don't get out of this world having done something violent and evil and mean without contaminating yourself forever. You don't. And you're holding it in your body and your being, whether you're conscious of it or not, and it's impacting everything you do everyday of your life. So the payoff is you get free, you get free. And I think the point of existence is to get free. So I hope there will be a cadre of men who step by step by step, begin to come forward and break their silence and begin to tell their stories and to begin to reckon and apologize and the way that women need to hear
POD BREAKF
Q 10: Not ready to forgive
So not everyone's ready to forgive. Right. So how well, I mean, what do you, what would you say to women who are, they're not quite in the place where they even want the apology. I mean, is it, is it part, like, is it possible for man to still go through the process even if there's not someone there that is ready to forgive them?
Eve: Well, I don't think the apology should be based on forgiveness. Um, I don't even know if I know what forgiveness is and I'm just going to be honest. I, the words always kind of creeped me out and, um, and, and I'll just say why I feel that always has religious overtones and it always feels a man dated. Um, like it's an obligation. Yeah. And um, I don't know how to do that. I don't think the onus is ever on the victim to forgive.
I don't, I don't. But what I do believe in is the alchemy of an apology. I think when someone sits and looks at you across the table and you are clear that they have given you a detailed accounting of what they've done, where they've gone into their souls and they've investigated why they've done it, what led them to do it, where they've, they've gone through every detail of unveiling their intentions and made amends. Something actually happens in your body and your mind, in your spirit, you can feel the tentacles of rancor and betrayal and hate. All of it just begins to go bing, bing, bing, bing, bing. If that's forgiveness, I'm all for forgiveness. You know that. If that's what forgiveness feels like, um, I don't think anyone has to forgive. I don't, I, I, I, I sometimes hear bad therapists telling survivors, you know, forgive now and get over it.
I just think that's deadly. It's deadly. It's, it, that's not something that can happen or that's not my experience of what can happen. What happens is you go through a process and I think if you can get an apology from you're, you're, you're, you're a perpetrator. And in many cases, women can't. I would highly recommend doing this exercise. I'm not alone. You should do it with a counselor or a therapist or a clergy or friend. But I will tell you something. We hold these perpetrators inside of us and when we write letters from them to ourselves, we can move how they live inside us. So, for example, my father was here for years and years and years, monster lodged here. And I was in this dynamic with him where I was victim to his perpetrator forever. I mean, everything I do was about you. See, I'm not the stupid person you thought I was proving to him or always in relationship to that.
And that was his story. Right in writing this apology, I moved him from monster to apologist. I moved him from terrifying entity to broken tragic wounded boy. And in doing that, he lost power over me. He lost agency over me and I think it at city of joy a month ago, Christine decided she would try this exercise out. City of joy's is sanctuary for healing and a revolutionary center in the Congo. Um, that VA is a VA project and it's run by Christina Shuler describer and it's, it's just the most beautiful project where 90 women come for six months, um, to be trained, to be healed, to be supported, who have suffered very, very bad sexual trauma. And she introduced this exercise and she said, it's unbelievable what started to happen. And she came into her office last week and there were piles of letters. Women had been up all night writing letters from their perpetrators to themselves and they were feeling so free and they were feeling. So I think it has the potential to liberate in all kinds of ways.
Yeah. Does seem like it. You said you can fill it in the era. It does seem like, you know, there's the restorative justice movement and there's, there are now just all these fresh ways of looking at how to deal with the past in a way that is respectful and I'm acknowledging of what really did happen and not brushing it over.
Q 11: Make you apologize
Um, so in, in your book, you, I mean, you do go, you talked about the details to you. You Go, you go into a wrenching detail, um, the, he writes that he would enumerate what you did wrong, uh, ev every week or every day and have his secretary type it up on his letterhead and then present it to you so that you would have to apologize for every item on the list.
Eve: Um, right. I mean, was even weirder than that. I mean, he would, he would type up all the things I had done wrong. I'm a memo from the desk of s and slower and it would be typed up and then I was 16. He had a ping pong paddle and it would take down my underpants and bend me over his bed for everything I would done wrong. He would whack me with the ping pong paddle. So there was a whole kind of sadistic thing built into the, I'm sorry, bit do you know? Um, and I think, I think it's why I, I I, I think it's why I despise torture so much. Why I despise punishment so much. Why? Um, because I think something I really learned as a child, the only way to survive that is to separate from yourself. The only way to survive that kind of ongoing violence is to leave your body.
I can remember hearing him call me down and knowing I was going into a brutal session and I was standing in front of the mirror and I would look at myself and I would say, you're going to go away now. You're not going to feel anything. You're going to disappear. You're not going to go into this. You stay here and the rest of you, we'll go downstairs. And then I would go downstairs and he throw me against walls or he punched me or d and I wouldn't feel a thing. I wouldn't feel thing. And that prepared me to live a life where I would put myself in constant danger and not feel a thing. Right. And so that's what we do when we brutalize people. We, we, we prepare them and at either to become brutalizers and in the, in the case of men who feel like they have power in the world, that's where they go. Um, in the case of some women who feel like they finally can't bear it anymore, they act out and they have violence. But for a lot of us, it's just about separating from ourselves and becoming kind of, um, open to the violent mercy of the world because you don't feel and protect yourself from the danger that's around you.
Q 12: So tragic and interesting
What's so interesting, tragic. I'm not sure what the right adjective about that is that that's the same way that you talked about your father having this alternate self. Yeah. Also, um, do we want to do another reading? Sure. Okay, let's, can we play reading? Uh, actually before, let me set it up for a second. So this is, well, this goes into the details. So a trigger moment may just prepare yourselves. We'll be intense. So everybody's just prepare a little bit. I'm reading four please. And Five,
Father 4: I would find myself in your room at some twilight hour. I only felt alive between the daylight and darkness and that crepuscular realm where dream and memory are indecipherable. That's how I controlled you. Those a photonic hours where others in the house were lost in sleep and you were in a trance separated from your body. I would find myself sitting on your bed somehow carried there by shadow man. You would pretend to be asleep as if what was happening was not happening. You desperately wanted it in me to go away. I didn't go away. I never spoke, never uttered a sound. The silence was my power. Words would break the spell, make it real and ugly and what it was.
Father 5: What kind of bastard have I been? What kind of destruction have I brought? I have lied and lied to myself and you. I cursed your future of love. At Five I took your body. You didn't give it to me. I contaminated your sweetness. I ripped the protective golden gates from your garden. I betrayed your trust. I rearranged or sexual chemistry and the basis of your desire, wrongness and excitement or forever fused together. I made my stain. I left my stinking mark. I infected you by invading and overwhelming your body. I killed your yearning so early you did not and could not give me permission. There was no consent. You did not seduce me with your criminal and petticoats. You was simply being an adorable child. I overstimulated your five year old body and planted the seeds of intensity in thrill. You would push herself too far, take heroin, jump off bridges, drive 100 miles an hour. I robbed you of the ordinary. I destroyed her notion of family. I forced you to betray your mother.
You lived in perpetual self hatred and guilt by created hierarchy, distrust, and violent competition between you and your siblings. None of you would recover from this. I robbed you have agency over your body. It didn't make any decisions. You didn't say yes. That was my projection. In order to satisfy my needs. You were five years old. I was 52 you had no sovereignty. I exploited and abused you. I took your body. It was no longer yours. I rendered you passive. You compulsively gave it to whoever wanted it because I taught you you should. I forced you out of your body and because you were dislocated and Numb, you are unable to protect yourself. I compromise your safety and ability to defend yourself. I made it so that rape became what turned you. I eviscerated you're necessary boundaries so you never knew what was yours and when to say no or how to say stop.
I tore the delicate walls of your vagina and made it vulnerable to disease and infection. Your Body didn't and couldn't say yes. This was a convenient lie. I told myself you didn't know it was sex. I took what I needed by convincing myself. You needed it to, hi, exploited your adoration. I forced you into secrecy, to lie to your mother, to develop a dual life. This splits you in too. I made you feel like a whore. I made you feel you are never worthy of legitimate love. I made intimacy claustrophobic. I left my poison in you. I destroyed your memory by making you want to forget everything. This impacted your intelligence and ability to contain facts and take tests. I stole your innocence. I dimmed your life force and made you feel your sexuality was the cause of bad things. I used your being and body to serve myself. I did all this.
LS: Thank you for letting us share that.
Q 13: Mom
there are a couple of questions have come in asking about your mom and where she was when all this was happening. Do you want to talk about that?
Eve: I think, um, I think, you know, I, my mother and I went through a really long journey after I confronted her, but I, I, I think my mother was of a generation where they didn't believe they were equal to men. Um, they believed that men had the power, but my father was like a CEO. My mother was at best, his executive assistant, you know, and I often felt like he had four children and she was one of them. Um, she was a woman who had been very poor at grown up in the Midwest. Um, and my father was her way out of that poverty. And I think by the time, um, the abuse started, she had three children and she had no economic security.
She had no economic wherewithal. She had no job, she had no prospects. And when I, when I confronted my mother, which was probably the hardest thing I've ever done in my life, to just sit and face my mother and say what my father had done to me. Um, of course she knew it was very odd because at the, at the end of it she said, well, I know your father was murdered you. I was there for all the times he did that when he beats you and everything, but I didn't know about the sexual stuff is the beatings were all fine. It was just a weird little moment. Um, but um, w later she, she repented for that, that it was just like a weird, but, um, I think my mother, um, said to me, uh, months after I confronted her, she called me up at four o'clock in the morning and she was hysterical one night and she said, I realize I sacrificed you.
I sacrificed you. I could not bear the idea of being poor again and I really let your father do what he wanted to you to keep my security. And as devastating as that was it, I knew it was true. And so it was the beginning of my mother making amends to me because she told me the truth and we went through a very long journey before she died. And I feel like every day she once said to me something really startling, and it showed me the power of perpetrators over our, our lifetime. Not just this lifetime, but many, many lifetimes. She said to me, what if I meet your father in the next life? And he's mad at me that I believed you had to be. That was the most shuttering things she ever said to me because he even had power in, in death over her.
And, um, I don't know why that just, I just remembered that. It just makes me so sad because I don't think we can underestimate ever what violence does to us, how deeply it goes in not just to the cellular makeup of our physical bodies, but into the, the, the spiritual DNA of not only this story, but our ancestral story. It just goes on and on. Intergeneration because fear is so powerful. It's so powerful. And so I think with my mother, um, because she trusts, kept going back at it to try to go deeper into it to explain and understand why she had done before she died, when she died, we were in a beautiful place and I was able to really let her go. And she was a, I feel like she, we left this world and really, she left this world in a really good place.
Q 14: first person told
Yeah. Um, you're well, who was the first person that you ever told that this was happening? Was it your mom?
EVE: No, no, no by no means, no, it was, it was the violence. The first time I ever talked about it, I was drunk with my two roommates and everyone was laughing and talking about things and, and I was talking, I was just, you know, when you grow up in, in a violent situation, you have no context to understand that that's weird or abnormal. So you'd just think everybody's family does that. So I had these two fabulous roommates and I was making a joke and I went and then my father said to my mother, Chris, get the kitchen knife. And everyone paused and said, what? And I said, yeah, he told my mother to get the kitchen lights so he could stab me. And they like that is not normal.
LS: That is not okay.
Eve: You know, and it was the first time anyone reflected back to me, right. That I had grown up in a very seriously dovish to situate him. Um, um, and I think it wasn't until later when I went into therapy that I be in too, because for many, many, many years, I had no memory of the first 10 years of my life. Absolutely no memory. It was just brought up like I began a 10. And then as I became, as I began to melt and my numbness began to melt over time because I was highly anesthetize, I was raging alcoholic and a drug addict. I just anesthetized. And so it took a process of numbing and, and coming out of numbing and melting and melting. So I began to feel and then began to remember, you know.
Q 15: How break the cycle
Um, so how, how did you, how did you break the cycle of abusing yourself?
EVE: Basically? I mean, through drugs and alcohol. How did you, with the help of really amazing people, I mean, I, you know, somebody said the other night, like, what are the things that saved you? Right? And I think there were two things that saved me. One was imagination and the ability to imagine another world where I was going and people who would be coming. And the other was with just amazingly kind people who intervened on my behalf throughout my life. And I don't think we can underestimate how one person's kindness towards somebody can absolutely radicalize their life, particularly when you've come from total deprivation. Do you know? And I, I think I was in the 12 step programs for a long time. And, and um, when I came into the 12 step programs that was, there was like no women. And, um, and people were so kind to me.
There was just so kind to me. And it was that, you know, I'm believing people could see me before I could see myself and they held a vision of me that I could live into. And I think it's why I believe, um, I don't know, when I hit bottom, I hit rock bottom as an alcoholic and it was a really bad scene and I almost died. And I got on my hands and knees in a parking lot in Puerto Rico. And, um, and I just said, I don't remember this like it was yesterday. I was 23 years old. I said, if you don't let me go crazy or die, I promise you, if you help me get better, I will go back for the others. I swear to God. And you know what, that was the best vow I ever made. You know, because I think when you give people what you want the most, you heal the broken part inside you.
Um, it's always going out to help people that you heal yourself because it's too hard in here, you know?
?Q 16: Put back together
So when, when did you feel like you kind of put yourself back together that the two parts of you were reunited and to finding yourself?
EVE: I think it's like a gradual process. You know, it didn't, I think bits of you come in. I remember when I was performing the vagina monologues and I had been living way outside my vagina for many, many years. Like looking down at it. Um, I was performing it for months and months and one night I just landed in my vagina. I was like, Oh my God, I'm in my vagina. Like I literally went woof and, and like, okay, so that I came back in there and then like, and then I was in, you know, and then like, like little pieces.
Then one day you come back into your heart and one day you come back, you know, it's like, it's a, it's a process of return, right? It's a process of coming back in and it doesn't happen overnight. But if you steady at it and you keep working at it and you keep any of you want it, if you want to live in the body of the world, if you want to live in your body and in the body of the earth, if that's your desire, it will happen. I think the worst thing they tell rape survivors and survivors of violence is that you're broken forever. That's the second rape and it's just not true. It's just not true. We can, we can come back in, we can be just, we can be more amazing because we've gone through all of that and we can be more strong and more vital and more energized after. And I think we have to get out of this idea that we're forever locked into that story, their story. We have to create our story now. Our story is not about victims and perpetrators. Our story is about this, you know,
?Q 17: radical empathy
and that, and that comes back to what you had a conversation with Kimberly Crenshaw off a week or so ago and she called it having, you have to have radical empathy. I mean you, I mean radical like at its root empathy to be able, I, it feels like to be able to break out of out of that because you have to be able to hold what happened to you and know that it was real. And also to be able to have, to start to have an understanding of where it came from.
Eve: Totally. And I think part of it is checking out with yourself. Like I feel like I used to, I would have empathy for this person and this person, but I had conditional empathy, right? There were the people, I just didn't have empathy for men. Right. Um, and, and this book really changed that. But I want to tell you this one little story, the story because this was, this was the day when, when I began to understand how empathy can be conditional. I was working at Bedford Hills correctional facility and it was running groups. And I had this group of amazing, um, longterm, um, inmates who were all there for violent crimes, mainly murders. And I, I had one session with these women. I fell completely in love with all of them except for one. And this woman gave me this super creeps and I didn't like Arcon and everything about our correct me out and, and um, and I had no compassion her and no empathy for her and everybody else would tell them.
And so we were going around every week and each week it was like, you tell one story from one to nine that would really evidence what you went through that period. So we'd go around the circle and um, and the second session that woman came in and she sat down next to me and I was like, Oh God, like I had such a creepy feeling about this woman, I can't tell you. And, and so all the women around, and I want to tell you that just about every woman in that circle who had, had been radically sexually abused, radically horribly abused as children. Right? So we got to her and I was actually like, Kinda leaning like this, you know, like a way from her. And she started to tell her story and she told her story and I can cry again hearing this story. And she said that when she was a child, her mother and her stepfather, um, rented out as a sex toy and they let all the people, you know, they had all these clients that would use her basically as a baby dildo and they would do everything to her and they were tired to beds and they were just horrible things.
And that her mother died and her stepfather married her. And he then turned her into his little pimp where she would go out and she would find children in the neighborhood and bringing them in so they could abuse them. And one of the children died and she came to prison. And when she was in prison, she had no idea why she was there because she had never lived in any other moral universe. She had nothing to compare it to. She didn't understand that what had happened to her was bad because that was all that she knew. And it took her five years in prison to understand it. And then she started to cut herself to try to kill herself. And she actually said in the group, never let me out of prison. And I just started to sob and I realized I had made a story up about this woman because of her pockmarked skin and the way she looked and her vibration, and I had written her off.
I had written her off and I made a contract with myself that after that day, I would just assume that any person that I sat next to was traumatized and had been through something really terrible. And if it wasn't first, it wasn't primary, it was secondary or they were witness to it and that everybody we're sitting next to is traumatized. Some more than others. Some have more privileged in their trauma, but we're all suffering and were suffering so much in this country. I'm sorry, I'm crying. Purchase bit around this country for the last days, days, I feel like I've fallen into the center of the wound. We are so hurting in this country. We are so exiled, were so lonely. We're so separated. We're so divided and if we're going to go on, we have to reach out and feel each other and let each other into ourselves and take everybody in so that we feel each other and we understand we're not alone in this and we're in the same struggle to evolve as human beings tend to become free from our suffering. Sorry, spit a lot. A lot of stories, you know.
Q 18: How others can use approach
yeah. And I mean, based on this whole conversation that applies to women and men and all genders, everything in between. Yeah. Yeah. Um, well let's, let's talk about how others might use this approach. I mean, you've set up a website, um, you're going to do a play. You, you said that it's an offering, not a prescription. Not, maybe not everyone's going to want to do it. Um, but you're, you're starting to see results. And I mean, I feel like you're creating a model for how the world can be by doing this.
EVE: Well, I think there's so many people doing such amazing work right now with restorative justice and really beginning to understand the prisons are not the answer. And that's the metaphor. Like we have to get out of prisons, just even cages, the idea that we, we, we harden that we harden things rather than releasing things and moving through things.
And, and what I hope is is that first of all, I hope that men will be inspired on their own to begin to come forward, to start to work with clergy, with counselors, to go through a process where they look at their behavior, where they look at what they've done, where they begin to write their apologies and right in and go through a process. And you know, Kimberly country as I were talking, like how does this apply to justice? Maybe there becomes a way were prosecutors say to victims, what do you want? Do you want your, you want your perpetrator in prison or do you want an apology process? Do you want to see your perpetrator go through a year or two where they do massive therapy, massive work on themselves, spiritual work where they go through something and at the end we have panels in communities of advocates and social justice people and, and, and therapists who sit and listen to the perpetrator.
Make an apology to the victim. And if the victim accepts it, then the apology, the panel and the victim determine whether that person has done the work or they have to go back and do more work. But we have, we have ways out of this, so we're not freezing people forever in their badness and then their mistakes because we're all prisoners to racist patriarchy. It's brought us all up and if we're all going to, we have to admit to that, like the system has created all of us. So what we need is the men now to catalyze this and say, I'm coming forward to break out of the system.
LS: Yeah, I sense more. Applause.
Q 19 audience: Father express fear
um, so we, we do have some audience questions. Okay. Um, let's see. Um, this is about your father. Did your father express fear before his death as if he perhaps sensed he was headed for limbo until he became accountable for his abusive you?
Eve: No, as a matter of fact, um, he never let me know he was dying. And a few days before he died, he came out of his, you know, um, drugged stupor to tell my mother to take me out of his will. And he said to her, if I ever told her anything, it was a lie because I was a liar. And it's really interesting when I confronted my mother, she said, if he hadn't said that to her, she wouldn't have believed me. But because he was so worried about it coming out, he came out of a morphine stupor to say it to her. So I think that's really profound. Yes. Yeah.
LS: Do you think that was the one and only time he ever even would have alluded to it in his whole life?
EVE: Well, I think so much about my father after he had kind of destroyed me through the sexual abuse, I was the walking reminder of that by my, yeah, I cut off all my hair. I was always belligerent. I, I, it was always like depressed. You know, I was, I was kind of a pathetic child after that. And I think he, he, I was evidence of what he had done. So he wanted to destroy the evidence and he wanted to destroy me. And, and I think, I think one of the things I learned writing this book is what perpetrators do to de legitimize all the people who know the truth is exactly what our Predator in chief has done over these last few years, which is d constantly de-legitimized different groups to make them feel like they are nothing and no one. And he does it through all these things that there's nobody who can call him who's legitimate on what he's doing. It's also making himself the victim, which is what perpetrators are genius had. Like suddenly we're all, it's all a witch hunt and were all after him. And it, that's always when my was my father's, look what you've made me do to you. I had to beat you almost to death because of what you did. I'm the victim here, you know, is that turning things around?
Q 21 audience: Women dont become abusers
And here's another audience question. Um, and we've been speaking mostly of men as of users. Um, so you speak of boys being robbed of certain feelings and emotions. But the same happens to women. We were raised not being allowed to be angry, spirited or even speak when not spoken too. Yep. Yet women did not turn into abusers. What explains the difference?
Eve: It's a good question. Um, I, I mean I can only, I think my, my thought about that is, and maybe I'm wrong about this, is that we not have allowed to express our anger, but we weren't. We were allowed to have our hearts. We are allowed to feel, we were allowed to cry. We were allowed to be connected to ourselves. Um, and, and, and, and I can't say what the impact of testosterone versus estrogen. I have no idea. But I do know that even if we're not allowed to have, are anger. And even if we're, we have relationship, we have relationship like Aye. Aye. Aye. Who was I talking to the other day that they were just saying like, they know so many men who don't, who aren't in deep relationships, they are alone. And, and, and part of when we remove people from their hearts and remove people from their tenderness, we removed them from community.
We removed them from those deep relationships. So I know what saved me is having women, friends and girlfriends and people I, I could emote with constantly because I was just an emotional creature in my whole life. And I think when you're not allowed that, you know, um, I was once in Casado and um, and I'll never forget this. And I had gone with friends, um, after the war whose house had been destroyed and I went to help them clean their house and we were going around and we were finding people in the communities who needed mattresses and help and all the roads were full of landmines. It was really crazy. And we went into this backyard and we found this mother and her daughter and their house was all graffiti'd and they were living in the backyard and they were sleeping on the ground and the mother was really concerned because her two sons had not returned for two years.
And we came back the next day and we bought the mattresses and five minutes before we hit arrived, her son had come home. And I heard in the backyard is huge commotion. Everyone was crying and screaming, and it was just like this wild, it was wild. And I walked into the yard and for some reason he saw me. And because America had helped cause of, oh, I don't know what it was. He was like, oh my God. And he threw himself on me and he started to wail. I mean, well, just like, and I had two thoughts. This was many, many years ago. Oh my God, there is a man and he's wailing on me. And Oh my God, there's a man and he's wailing on me. And they were very conflicted. And I realized in that moment that me feminist eve was having issues with the big man wailing on me, right?
That even built into my DNA was, oh man, don't do that. Men are strong. Men are this better that, and in that moment I went, oh, I get this as this man was in my arms weeping and weeping, I went, oh, bullets are hardened tears. That's what they are. They're hardened tears. The tears that didn't get to happen. Right? And I really think if we really allowed men to begin to release the pain that's inside them, there will be a tsunami of feelings that begins to start to tumble out. And that will be the beginning of our liberation. I really believe that
LS: that's an incredible story. That's an incredible story.
Q 22: the apology reading
Well that that takes us to our, I got to as many questions as I could you guys, um, to our last reading because ultimately, spoiler alert, there is an apology in the book. Um, and we're going to hear it. So reading six, please.
Father 6: Let me say these words. I'm sorry. I am sorry. Let me sit here at the final hour. Let me get it right this time. Let me be staggered by your tenderness. Let me risk for agility. Let me be rendered vulnerable. Let me be lost. Let me be still. Let me not occupy or oppress. Let me not conquer or destroyed. Let me believe in the rapture. Let me be the father. Let me be the father who mirrors you're kind heartedness back to you. Let me lay no claims. Let me bear witness and not invade. Eve. I free you from the covenant. I revoke the lie. I lift the curse old man. Be Gone.
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LAUREN
That was Eve and flare playwright activist and author of the book the apology speaking with me at the Commonwealth Club of California on June 11th of 2019. You can check out inflection point in hear more stories about women rising up at inflection point radio dot-org.
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STEPHANIE
And remember how Eve said, she'd never heard a man apologize publicly authentically and deeply for what he'd done? Well, remember to tell her about Reckonings on Instagram @TheApology :) I'm Stephanie Lepp [00:50:00] and you've been listening to a special edition of Reckonings.