Understanding the Context: Family Dynamics
Alice Perle (pen name) shares reflections on context, family dynamics, and the resolve to keep going and to keep growing.
Survivors and others affected by SSA, often carry a unique kind of silence, not just from the harm or abuse itself, but from trying to safely navigate the dynamics within the family that surrounded it. Beyond disclosure, the issues that compound trauma begin, especially when families are unsupported, and disclosures come in adult life, not in childhood.
In the sub-title of Resolve are the words ‘healthy inquiry’, because it felt healthy, to go squirrel around, to understand what I could, then take it in and see if that mattered to me. I could be an honorary ‘something’ through a university after all I read and worked with to create Resolve. Personally, as a survivor, I greatly appreciated the recognition and validation I felt through research and reflection, and the sense of relief that came with it. If I wanted to do something with what I learned, what would I do? Would I do nothing and move one? If something (eg. my intimate relationship) was important to me, what did I need to do about that? It is up to me to make those choices.
I was choosing to see my trauma story, and not stay in it. I had a plan to know what I didn’t know, take it, often grieve, and then come back to me, who I am now.
This post is for readers who aren’t yet in therapy, can’t put words to what they are feeling and thinking, or who might not know where to begin with the complicated feelings that arise when we start unpacking our childhood homes. It can feel like betrayal to look back with an investigative – or an honest and curious – lens, especially if we’ve grown up in environments that avoided conflict, kept up appearances, wanted to be loved, or lacked the emotional tools to face hard truths.
Why Context Matters
Reading the work of the Dr John Cafarro, Salazar et al 2005, and Anne Welfare has helped me make sense of why Resolve resonates the way it does. Salazar rates a mention in some of John Cafarro’s papers and I haven’t spotted that before. They emphasise that:
Family dynamics are crucial to understanding the context where sibling sexual abuse (SSA) occurs. It is rarely about just two individuals. It’s about the air the whole family breathed, the roles we were expected to play, the patterns we inherited, and the silences we were taught to keep.
Anne Welfare’s work speaks to the whole-family impact. I first read her research during the writing of Resolve, and I returned to it again last week.
This time, re-reading her work, I had to pause. I found myself filling in more gaps, not just for my own understanding, yet maybe I was more ready now. What I found myself slowing down over were parts of my family puzzle I could piece together now.
Anne’s work talks about how each person in a family are affected. No one tells us this stuff! We need to go find it and thankfully Anne Welfare is coming to speak to us in November on this very topic… more below!
Resolve captured the essence of that in non-clinical language, attempting to share the post-disclosure experience in a way that felt accessible, human and real. How I expressed it was as if I were there, in the micro-moments, looking through my eyes, hearing what I did, feeling all the feels and trying to see from other perspectives as best I could, and what we could have done better. What my mother and I could have done better together more specifically.
SSA Is Not a Single Trauma
In my family, some members reacted with confusion, hurt, shock then dissociation. Thankfully my husband, father and younger brother all responded with love and protective male energy. I don’t know what I would have done if I didn’t have that. Others remained in denial, wanting silence, afraid of what the full picture might reveal – that’s the shame in control… hold on, and that’s also the need to keep everything under control, as it had been until then! Oh dear.
Some chose to hurt back or what my psychologist called additional traumas deepening the complex PTS I took forward with me. So many times she had to remind me ‘it’s okay to feel hurt, when it hurts.’
SSA is being more commonly referred to as Sibling Sexual Trauma and Abuse (SSTA), because even if it were one single event of harm, SSTA is more complex than us saying we are dealing with that single event. It’s not clean or clear. There are many parts of us affected by the actual harm, and all the family dynamics that often aren’t managed well, beyond the time it occurred.
What I have come to see is that everyone has agency. Choosing familiar but unhealthy dynamics, to hold onto protective illusions and defence mechanisms mistaken for love: how is that working for them? I understand that some people don’t have the capacity to do more than that. My mother doesn’t for a range of reasons and I know she will not change.
To me, there is a healthy alternative way of being, if we choose to, and we get to model that to others.
An Invitation to Reflect
If you’re not yet ready to explore your own family dynamics in therapy, or even in conversation, that’s okay. It has taken many of us decades before we were ready to, and when you do, it’s always something that has an ‘enough for now’ element to it. Small chunks of awareness, acknowledgement and seeing paths we can choose, are all we need to work with. Books like Resolve are here for you. They’re not a substitute for therapeutic support, but they can be a starting point to help you name what once felt unspeakable.
An educator recently left this review:
“This is the most compelling book I’ve read on SSA. It won’t be children reading this book, so it is up to adults, parents, carers, and educators to read it and act.”
I recall when I first started reading about how to write a book, I knew I didn’t want to write a self-help book, because we can’t sidestep getting help on the path to recovery from SSTA. We have to walk through it with support. Resolve is not just a memoir, it’s a guide for those willing to step into awareness and do better for the next generation. If you hesitate at the idea of turning pages – I feel that in myself sometimes too – listening to the audiobook version can often be easier as you focus in and out whilst perhaps going for a walk.
So, as I said above, some families will choose not to do anything. I’ve learned to let go of that. My own resolve, at age 10, began when I asked a priest for help. Even then, I I knew: “It doesn’t have to be this way” would be how we all should have responded to the unwritten ground rules of family, stated often as, “that’s just the way he/they/our family is.” No. That’s not good enough, not when we know we all are conscious human beings capable of choice.
Threads Across Time
At the Daniel Morcombe Foundation’s Bright Futures Symposium in August, contextual safeguarding was front and centre, across all kinds of domains: online, communities, schools. It struck me that context is maybe touched on in therapy, but not mapped out in a way that would make us see the context of our family dynamics clearly.
It’s so hard for people who have navigated the silence, secrecy and family dynamics alone.
I felt it was a hard and heavy choice to go looking at that in Resolve. If you’ve read Resolve you might recall I decided to look back up the family tree to understand how this thing could possibly have happened in my family. It did help me but it was due to writing that led me to see that was something I could choose to do… I don’t recall prompting from a professional to explore it.
Understanding family roles, daily life, and inherited beliefs is essential.
It isn’t about blame or shaming the family. (Even writing that, I shake my head, and twist up my lips, because who was the victim there?! Unfortunately that makes me see how seeking answers casts us into the drama triangle’s persecutor or even a rescuer role, and those others in our family slip into the victim role… talking about family dynamics!)
Deep breath. It’s about understanding enough to make a change.
In my earlier drafts of Resolve, I would have raged against dysfunction and toxicity – casting blame far and wide! But today, I see it more simply and I feel the more we understand family dynamics, and not see it solely as the act(s) of abuse, we can step another step forward. Some family dynamics are healthy. Others are not. And for me, discovering the Empowerment Dynamic was a turning point. I found it before writing Resolve, and it gave me something to hold on to.
It showed me that we don’t have to stay stuck in intergenerational cycles of silence, secrecy, and powerlessness.
The silence that lived in our families doesn’t have to live in us, or in our children, forever.
There is a way forward. And it begins by understanding the context that shaped us. We get to decide what we carry and what we need to put down.
We were affected by sibling sexual trauma and abuse. And we know the difference between what is healthy, and what isn’t. We get to choose.
Shared with love,
Alice Perle (pen name)
You’re Invited
On Friday 14th November, join us for the Blue Borage Symposium — a full-day online event from 7:00 AM to 7:00 PM Australian Eastern Standard Time (Brisbane) – we don’t have daylight savings here. It’s a drop-in/drop-out space designed for real conversations that matter. The idea of it being 12-hours isn’t an expectation that people will possibly stay all day, although some will. It is to open the invitation to people from across the world to attend.
You’ll hear from a global lineup of speakers discussing:
- Contextual dynamics in families affected by SSTA
- Shame in families and across systems
- A legal review of Resolve, the memoir, before it was released
- Empowerment frameworks in trauma recovery
- Social workers’ insights from working with children who harmed
- Global parent survey findings shared by 5WAVES founders
- And a closing Conversation Café on family and the road ahead
🎟️ Tickets will be available via Eventbrite soon. AUD $60 gives you access to each session across the whole day. Individual registration will be necessary. Follow Blue Borage Training on socials or sign up for their blog updates to be the first to know: www.blueborage.com.au
This will be a first-of-its-kind Australian symposium — unique, relevant, professional, interesting — with people coming to speak to us, not about us.
