Interview on Surviving Sexual Abuse with Allena Sindler

This interview was conducted in 2018 by a Northwestern University student who was 

using it as source material to create a performance piece. Allen Sindler's "Heal CTA" 

premiered at Chicago's 2018 PEACEBOOK festival and was recently accepted for the

2019 "Mother Moon" festival in NYC. I am honored to have been part of her healing

art. It was also healing for me to reflect on my own journey and theorize

 from a place of pain. 

Note: I made some minors edits to the original transcript but kept it as close to the 
original as possible.

Dr. Sekile Nzinga-Johnson Interview

INNER PEACE

Inner peace, for me, is really not a destination but a process and a practice, it is something 

you claw at everyday. The reason I say claw, is because life is really hard. You have to fight 

to stay alive. You have to fight to decide to stay here. For me, one of the ways I fight is trying 

to figure out what is joy filled in my life. Not foregrounding my pain, not backgrounding my 

pain, but just letting the pain live right there and out loud. I’ve also been really really fortunate 
to have my life since those traumatic events be very joy filled. For me, that’s what has been 

my inner peace. 

I know that I’m lucky because for someone else, they might have had another round of trauma. 

It’s difficult for me now, so I can’t imagine what it would be like if I got hit with something else.

 I live often in a state of terror because I have a daughter, and I say to myself “please don’t let 

anything happen to my daughter,” but knowing there’s a high chance that it could because of the 

world that we live in. So, I live in this state of terror, praying, because that would undo me. 

I’ve put myself together well enough to make it, but if another round hit me, then my fragile 

notion of inner peace would surely be dismantled. 

That's what I mean when I say we have to claw at life and fight at life. I don't know if it’s peace 

so much as it is struggle to stay here. I’ve had some really shitty things happen to me, but I’m 

still here. Right? And I want to live. And if I want to live, then I got to find some other stuff to help 

me stay sane in all of it. I really don’t know, but I can’t necessarily say that it’s a peaceful place 

so much as a place of acceptance and contentment. But I also think that space of inner 

peace is really hard to get to when you’re hit over and over again by violence. So maybe it’s 

not sexual violence but the violence of poverty, the violence of racism, violence of homophobia. 

There are so many forms of violence, and we tend to forefront one or the other, but so many 

people are being hit by so many forms of violence that it’s hard to reach this notion of inner peace. 

There’s a line from this movie called Sankofa and there’s a woman, an African woman who was 

enslaved and her name was Nunu. There was, I think this line she would say, “this is just the flesh, 

you can’t touch my spirit, my spirit is in Africa.” So when she, well I won’t spoil the thing, but I 

remember that really stuck with me. That distinction between what happened to my flesh and

what happened to my spirit. And I don’t practice any religion but I think about that, and I use that 

metaphor in my life. 

When I think about being a professor and what it was like for me struggling to get tenure and all, 

navigating this often hostile climate as a black woman, I would think about what happened to me 

in my childhood. What I was going through and I would put it in perspective. Like actually this is 

not real, this is the Matrix--fiction, a fabricated world! This is not pain, that was pain. Like this feels

 painful because it’s horrible and people are ridiculous and assholes for no reason but this is not 

real right? That was real pain. So I use it, I use the pain to ground me, too. All this other stuff is 

smaller than that. 

I think people can find inner peace by tapping into this spirit and also thinking about taking things 

into perspective. Those are kind of like strategies that I use, but I think inner peace is a practice. 

Like you literally have to practice it, remembering the joy, because sometimes the pain is so big 

and so multifaceted that it can make you forget. And that’s why it makes sense for some people 

to have spiritual practices to kind of remind them, like “what do I have to be grateful for?” And I 

guess the challenge for me in saying what I’m saying to you now is, that some people say you 

should only focus on that. “Well look you’re still alive! Look you didn’t die” So sometimes people 

use spirituality and religion to minimize people’s pain. I don’t want you to think that’s what I’m 

saying. I think your pain gets to sit right where it needs to sit, and no one can tell you where 

you’re supposed to put it because it hurts. Anyone who is like “I wish you could talk about it 

and move on,” No. It takes a lot of work to put that pain in perspective, especially if it’s happening

 multiple times. And for most women it’s happened more than once in their lives. And so they hold 

all that guilt because they think well I did something. So inner peace is very you know um, 

hard to get at. It is an active practice, it is not a destination. And I don’t blame anyone who hasn't

begun their journey yet because there’s a lot of shit that folks are working through to hold onto it, 

you know? Yea. 

HEALING 

Sexual trauma can look different for different people. Everyone has a different experience, and no

two people’s healing looks the same, but I think that healing, in general, from trauma, sexual or

other forms of violence is cyclical and enduring. I don't think that we ever quite heal, I think that 

you can be feeling very well for a decade, and there can be a moment that takes you back to the 

moment of victimization. And so part of it is knowing, and being aware of what your experience 

has done to you psychologically and physically. Having the support to be able to heal and to be 

authentic about what is troubling you and being able to name your pain and to friends and to 

family and to the world, to not be shamed for your experience and to know that that support is 

ongoing. 

The more support we have early on, the more likely we are to be stabilized. The less likely we are 

to have support, to be believed, to be affirmed and to name our pain, I think the longer that 

healing process takes to begin, and to take root. I’m a survivor of sexual trauma, and it is a 

process. I describe it as an ongoing process. There is no end point. I will be living with this pain for 

the rest of my life, and so for me, and for others, I think it looks like trying to figure out how to live 

and hold both your pain and joy in life. How to hold them at the same time. I think that is part of 

the healing process, finding ways to hold both pain and joy and to continue to claw at life and to 

live. Doing this though, you are going to need to be wrapped in resources informal and formal. 

Informal is your family and friends and formal may be therapeutic, or faith based forms of support, 
or it may be your hobbies, or exercise. All these things have to be with an eye on healing. Nothing

detrimental to your experience. But you could enter those spaces for healing and experience 

secondary forms of trauma. So those spaces have to be safe, and take up your quest in the 

healing process. 

So I’ll give you an example of someone who might have survived a rape and might go to the 

hospital to report the rape. And they're interrogated,” where were you?” “Why did you go there?” 

All these questions that begin to target you as the person, you who made a poor choice. What 

we call victim blaming. And somehow all of it has gotten away from the person who victimized 

you, to “what were the conditions surrounding the victimization and what role you played.” And 

so that is a secondary form of trauma. Because now you’re made to feel guilty or question your 

role in all of this. That is an additional traumatic event. The same thing happens when you go to 

the police. There’s often this notion that the police are this safe space, but that may not be true. 

Many women and femmes are victimized at the hands of law enforcement--sex workers, trans 

women, working class women, femmes/women of color, and femmes/women who are 

incarcerated are more likely to be victimized again when they come into contact  with law 
enforcement. These are compounding forms of sexual trauma. Maybe they’ve already experienced 
some form of sexual trauma in their life and then they come contact with this organization that is 

supposed to be supporting them or even rehabilitating them, and it becomes a site for more 

violence. Maybe you go to your minister looking for support, but that becomes a vulnerable space for 
many people who have been victimized. So, trust in that person who is in power, also becomes a 
vulnerable space to be in. So, I think we don’t really talk about that. There are so many forms of 
secondary violence and complex trauma that happens when we are told to go to these spaces 

that are supposed to be helpful. 

SUPPORT 

I feel that we need to be heard, I think we need to be validated, our experiences need to be 

validated. I think we need to know that our communities are safe and affirming and welcoming.

 I think that communities need to hold people who have victimized others accountable. I think that 

whatever accountability looks like it has to evoke their humanity and not compromise it. 

If you put someone who’s victimized someone in a more inhuman setting, we can’t 

necessarily say that that’s going to make that person a better person at the end of the 

accountability process. I would want that person to become a better person. To somehow 

be able to recover and to be able to think through the harm they have caused to the person 

they have victimized, to themselves, and to their community and to think through “how do I 

become a whole person after this?” I also think that person who is a perpetrator is also a 

victim, because they have now compromised their humanity. I think that the person who has 

been primarily victimized needs to be prioritized and protected and needs to be empowered to 

know that they can move forward. We are stronger than we think we are. And how do we 

remember to hold pain and acknowledge that still there is opportunity for joy. But it’s really hard, 

depending on how violent the attack was and depending on how much you trusted the person 

who attacked you. The conditions make it really hard. 

I feel like that person needs to be loved, protected, and affirmed, listened to but we have to be 

really patient with survivors. Because we want people to get over it, we want people to snap out 

of it, but you can’t! It has shaken you to your core, whatever that thing is that happened to you.

And you need time to put yourself back together. If you were told that it didn’t happen to you, 

if you were told or received societal messages that said it was your fault, it can take a really long 

time. If you haven’t been given the resources and you have to show up at work or school the next 

day, if it happened to you at work or school--because we’re assuming that these things are only 

happening in dark alleys and parking lots. No, it’s happening at home, most people who have 

been sexually victimized are being victimized by their partners, or people they know. Married 

women are victimized by their partners, girls are victimized by their boyfriends, right? Children 

are victimized by adults that are supposedly protecting them, teachers, priests, coaches, parents, 

aunts, uncles, older siblings. Then you get to college and it happens on a date or after a party. 

So I think that there’s also an assumption that its only happening once in someone’s life, or that 

we should get over it when it’s really persistent and chronic. And so if the attacks against our

 humanity are persistent and chronic then I think the affirmation in support of our humanity 

has to be persistent, consistent and loving.