Mary Pember: Alaska Native woman shares story to help others

“What are you hiding?” the elder asked Rose Domenic. It was a simple question in response to Domenic’s request for help overcoming her mysteriously growing, incapacitating fear. But Domenic was stunned by the query and involuntarily blurted out that she had been sexually abused repeatedly as a child. Now in her 50s, she had told no one except a visiting Catholic priest who’d come to her Yup’ik village church many years ago.

“When I was 11 years old, I told this priest about the abuse [suffered at the hands of a relative]. Instead of helping me find a way to stop the abuse, he absolved me of my sins and told me to say five Our Father and five Hail Marys. I decided then that it was my fault and it would be a secret I would take to my grave,” she says.

When she had blurted out her secret to the elder she unexpectedly found herself transported back in time, reliving the abuse. “I was right there with all the smells and feelings. Suddenly I started crying and puking,” she recalls. “The elder reassured me that it was okay. She said to me, “Rose, this is how sick this trauma has made you. Now, the sickness is going.”

Gradually, Domenic found she was able to allow her body, mind and spirit to process the trauma. The progression of her healing, although gratifying now, has been difficult and painful. The first two years after she began acknowledging the abuse were the most challenging; seemingly unrelated events or experiences, sounds or smells, would trigger terror and/or anxiety that she later learned were related to her childhood trauma.