Window of Tolerance: A span of tolerable levels of arousal in which internal or external stimuli can be processed in a flexible and adaptive manner. Outside of the window for this particular state, the individual moves toward chaos or toward rigidity of response. Pocket Guide to Interpersonal Neurobiology: An Integrative Handbook of the Mind, By Daniel J. Siegel
When childhood sexual abuse – mine or anyone’s – comes up in conversation, there can be…a moment.
Not exactly disbelief…
Not quite judgment…
A pause…
A subtle shift…
A bit of distance enters the room…
A quieting…
I think of that moment as the disconnect.
At a friend’s party years ago, someone said to me, “I mean really, Sally—how bad could your childhood have been? Look at you! You’re so normal.”
I paused…contemplated…do I say it? And I did – “What part of my parents being sexual with me before the age of seven sounds not so bad?”
No longer quiet…silence.
In 1991, when I was diagnosed with what was then still known as Multiple Personality Disorder (MPD) – now Dissociative Identity Disorder (DID) – the disconnect became clearer. Some friends quietly pulled away. Two close friends believed the diagnosis must be wrong. Without including me, they set out to prove it.
They didn’t ask how I was thinking about it – what I was experiencing…what it felt like for me…
No curiosity about what was going on within me…or whether I wanted to talk about it…
They talked a lot about it – about me – with everyone…except me.
It wasn’t that they thought I was lying.
It was that what I was describing did not fit their internal map of reality.
The cultural debate at the time gave people language that sounded careful and rational. It created space to doubt—not me, exactly—but the possibility itself.
Easier to believe something didn’t add up than to imagine childhood sexual violence.
Easier to assume it couldn’t be that severe than to expand what was possible inside a family.
In my psychology master’s program, teachers questioned whether I could truly have been abused. I was so grounded. So articulate. So normal. Abuse, even with their expertise, would’ve left visible damage.
Again, it wasn’t that they thought I was fabricating.
It was that they couldn’t fathom it.
And here’s the heart of the blind spot:
If I’m so grounded…
If I’m so articulate…
If I’m so normal…
Why isn’t that reason enough to believe me?
Why does my stability make my history harder to accept?
The disconnect isn’t an accusation of lying.
It’s an inability to take in what is being said.
When people hear I once had DID, they don’t necessarily think unstable or dangerous. They think it doesn’t fit. It doesn’t line up with the person standing in front of them.
Not because I seem irrational.
But because I seem fine.
They can’t match competence with abuse. The two images won’t hold. So something has to give.
And what gives is the story.
There it is…the blind spot.
Our culture struggles to imagine that sexual violence happens inside families that look intact. Inside homes that appear ordinary. Inside communities that consider themselves healthy.
We prefer abuse to be extreme, obvious, monstrous.
We struggle to hold it can be hidden, relational, woven into everyday life.
So when an adult survivor appears regulated and capable, the mind resists.
Not her.
Not that family.
Not that kind of childhood.
And this is precisely why so much abuse of children goes without help.
Because we can’t take it in.
In that way, the disconnect mirrors what happens inside a child.
When abuse is happening, it’s unfathomable. The child can’t fully absorb that the people meant to protect them are violating them. So the mind adapts. It fragments. It dissociates. It survives.
Adults do something similar.
When faced with the reality of child abuse, we soften it. Question it. Reframe it. Distance from it. We dissociate from the implications.
The child had to dissociate to survive.
We dissociate to stay comfortable.
If we want to change how abuse is addressed, we have to strengthen our collective capacity to know what we don’t want to know.
To hear grounded, competent adults describe abuse – and not turn away simply because they don’t look destroyed.
So what is abuse?
Abuse is the use of power to override a child’s autonomy, body, or reality.
It can look like:
• An adult involving a child in sexual behavior.
• A parent sexualizing a child’s body or innocence.
• Being touched in ways that create confusion, fear, or secrecy.
• Being required to meet adult emotional or sexual needs.
• Being silenced when something feels wrong.
• Growing up in an environment where boundaries don’t exist.
Children can’t consent.
Children can’t leave.
Children adapt.
Dissociation is one such adaptation. It allows a child to survive what can’t be comprehended, let alone escaped.
But the adaptation is not the origin.
The violence is.
Closing the disconnect requires more than belief in an individual. It requires increasing our window of tolerance for a painful truth.
When survivors speak, the task isn’t to reconcile them with our misguided assumptions.
The task is to stay present.
To resist the impulse to look away.
To widen what we’re willing to know.
That’s how the blind spot begins to see.