Vachon Imagined

When a survivor speaks out about anything—sexual assault, abuse, or harm—they are entering a field of consciousness they now relate to both differently and the same.

Speaking from personal experience, these events never fully go away. I do not have control over memory in the way people often imagine. Memory has a way of returning on its own terms. It is part of consciousness itself. I cannot erase it any more than anyone else can erase what has shaped them. I can alter my relationship to it. I can soften it. I can integrate it. But I cannot make it disappear.

And perhaps I am not meant to.

Because eventually, what we experience finds its way into the wider human field. It lives again in someone else’s story, in another body, in another mind. Nothing fully vanishes. It transforms, it repeats, it echoes.

So when survivors—who in many ways may still feel like victims—speak, it is often from a willingness to meet others where they are and say: I see you. I understand you. I understand your experience, your shame, your guilt, whether it should be there or not.

It is already there.

And it returns.

In those moments, when one person says “I’ve got you,” they become, in human form, something like a witness or a guide. Not separate from suffering, but inside it. Not above it, but with it.

I am here with you.

Not apart from you.

With you.

I am here with you as you suffer, and as you begin to come out of it—one moment, one breath, one memory at a time. My body recognizes what yours knows. I feel it. I do not turn away from it. I allow it to be here without forcing it to become something else.

Where there is shame, guilt, and fear, this kind of presence becomes difficult. Force replaces understanding. The need to be right replaces the ability to listen. A fixed version of reality cannot make room for other forms of consciousness. It becomes rigid, defensive, closed.

But something in us remains capable of movement.

The one who is free can go anywhere—not through force, but through surrender and gentleness. Not through suppression or removal, but through presence.

Some systems, including religion at times, have attempted to deal with this through shame and control—placing guilt over desire, or moral judgment over sexuality and experience. But what is pushed down does not disappear. It finds expression elsewhere, often in ways that are unrecognized until they repeat.

The answer is not to erase what is human.

The answer is to make room for it.

To meet it.

To see it.

Not because we are forced to, but because, in time, we are willing to.