Why a Trauma Therapist Recommends Chessy Prout’s Story
By: Peter Pruyn
Tags: Women, Recovery, Trauma, Sexual Assault, Books

Why a Trauma Therapist Recommends Chessy Prout’s Story

A High School survivor teaches how to heal

Survivor, author, and advocate Chessy Prout with her book, I Have the Right To: A High School Survivor’s Story of Sexual Assault, Justice and Hope. Photo: The Japan Times | Kyodo

As a psychotherapist who works with trauma survivors, I was deeply moved by Chessy Prout’s 2018 memoir, I Have the Right To: A High School Survivor’s Story of Sexual Assault, Justice and Hope. Written with investigative reporter Jenn Abelson, I Have the Right To chronicles Chessy’s journey from being sexually assaulted as a 15-year-old freshman at St. Paul’s boarding school in Concord, New Hampshire, through her recovery and present-day advocacy.

Throughout the book, Chessy’s relentless honesty provides the rest of us with a gift: intimate insight into the world of trauma and the arc of trauma recovery. Because her recovery is ultimately so successful, her narrative is a rich source for clients to learn about many elements of trauma recovery, as well as a source of inspiration for clients and therapists, alike.

Chessy’s relentless honesty provides the rest of us with a gift: intimate insight into the world of trauma and the arc of trauma recovery.

Here I will summarize just a few of the features of trauma recovery that Chessy’s honesty allows us to witness, including: secure attachment, counseling and psychotherapy, supports, shame, dissociation, emotional regulation, and post-traumatic growth.

Secure Attachment

A critical element of healthy human development is a safe and reliable relationship between care-giver and child. This results in what is called secure attachment. Secure attachment provides two things. First, as the name implies, it gives the child a sense of safety in the world by the parent acting as a refuge to which the child can always return. In this way, the parent becomes a trusted “base of operations” from which to explore the world. Second, the parent models healthy emotional regulation, thereby teaching the child to develop an independent capacity to regulate their emotions. Secure childhood attachment is a key factor in how resilient we become later in life.

It is clear that one of Chessy’s many assets in her journey is secure attachment with her parents, Susan and Alex Prout. Two days after her assault, Chessy had not yet told her parents. As she sat alone on the floor of a dorm room at midnight debating whether to call her mother and tell her, the thought that gets Chessy to actually make the call is “Mom always made things better.” Months later, just before entering the courtroom on the first day of her assailant’s trial, Alex says to Chessy, “Listen, Chessy, anytime you need me, I am right here. I am sitting ten feet away from you. You can keep your eyes on me.” Chessy then writes “Dad was my hero.”

Such secure attachment at home later enables Chessy to form additional supportive attachments with others along the way, including therapists.

Counseling and Psychotherapy

A key feature of Chessy’s successful recovery was that she and her family had a pre-existing relationship with the school counselor. As a result, Susan knew who to call after Chessy told her about the rape, and Chessy knew who to go to for support. Her counselor provided a crucial non-judgmental oasis within an institution that was about to become abusive, itself. Chessy also gained specific tools for self-soothing and psycho-education about trauma.

After leaving school for the summer, Chessy then engaged with a psychotherapist near her home on a longer-term basis. This engagement eventually provided a forum for the family to discuss difficult on-going choices, such as the gut-wrenching decision of whether Chessy should return to the school in the fall. By advocating for Chessy’s autonomy in this choice, this therapist planted seeds for Chessy’s on-going sense of empowerment.

Supports

Time and time again, Chessy emphasizes how the on-going support of her family saved her life during her recovery. The first family member she told about her assault was her older sister, Lucy, who was graduating from St. Paul’s that same week. After Chessy told her, Lucy’s first words were, “It’s not your fault.”

Throughout her ordeal, Chessy reports how critical hearing those words were to her, both in that moment as well as over the next two years. Similarly, when Chessy tells her mother about the assault on the phone the next day, Susan’s first words are, “It’s going to be O.K. Are you safe right now?”

Tragically, such supportive initial responses from loved-ones are atypical. Victims often delay telling loved-ones out of shame — if they tell them at all. It is far more common for family members to respond with “Why didn’t you tell me?!?” or victim-blaming, such as, “Why did you go out with him?!” Sadly, these only result in heightening the victim’s shame.

Over time Chessy’s support network gradually extends well beyond her family, connecting her with other survivors and advocacy organizations, some of whom she is working with as an advocate today.

No one survives alone.

Chessy with her parents, Alex and Susan Prout, at her high school graduation. Photo: The Prout Family

Shame

Shame is central to the sexual abuse survivor experience. Meanwhile, shame is so powerful that most of us are ashamed … to even talk about shame! As a result, the shame persists.

I define shame, and it’s close-cousin guilt, for my clients in the following way. Guilt is the emotion we feel when we know we’ve done something wrong. Shame is the emotion we feel when other people know we’ve done something wrong. It includes the fear of being found out and cast out by others. It is the opposite of a sense of belonging, acceptance and dignity.

Lucy and Susan’s initial responses to Chessy laid the foundation for the sense of belonging and acceptance that her family provided throughout. This served as a potent antidote to the subsequent deliberate shaming by the school and her classmates. One could frame Chessy’s journey over the next two years as successfully shedding that shame.

Dissociation

A little-known aspect of trauma is the capacity for our brains to make us “check-out” during moments of trauma. This hard-wired response allows us to survive the pain. If being fully aware of our five senses and what is happening to us is being fully associated with reality, the opposite is being dissociated. Sadly, dissociation is frequently over-looked and misunderstood by even members of the mental health profession. Chessy does an enormous service by offering an intimate description of her experience of dissociation in terms that anyone can understand.

During the assault, she writes that she repeatedly tried to resist verbally, “but the pipeline that delivered words to my mouth was gone…. I felt paralyzed…. I…felt myself float above my body…. I was lifeless…. I couldn’t feel my body anymore.” Such muteness, freezing and numbness during trauma has nothing to do with lack of courage, will, or vocabulary. It is a result of the brain switching into survival mode. This includes the area of the prefrontal cortex that is responsible for speech processing going off-line.

Such basic brain science can help survivors feel less guilt and shame over their response during an assault

Emotional Regulation

It’s normal to have a complicated relationship with our feelings. But in the end, feelings are nothing more than feedback, messages in a bottle that offer guidance about our needs and choices — if we’re willing to listen to them. Meanwhile feelings are a lot like the weather: sometimes they’re sunny, sometimes they’re cloudy, but they never last forever. Healthy families foster healthy emotional regulation by modeling the appropriate expression and processing of feelings. This is facilitated by what is called emotional attunement between family members, that is, the experience of “feeling felt” by others on an on-going basis.

Before reading Chessy’s book, I had various clinical ways of describing a healthy family. After reading the book, here is how I would describe a healthy family. Each phrase is derived from a scene in the book.

A healthy family is a family where: when someone is afraid, they say so, and someone is there to hold their hand; when someone is sad, they cry, and someone is there to hug them; when someone is angry, they vent, and someone is there to hear them; when someone needs solitude, they say so, and others give them space; and when someone is joyful, they celebrate, and someone is there to cheer them on.

Post-Traumatic Growth

Post-traumatic growth describes the personal growth that occurs — sometimes with startling speed — once someone has recovered from trauma. At first this term may sound like an oxymoron. How can trauma cause growth? Such growth occurs because healing from trauma releases the survivor from the shackles of shame and the avoidance of the people, places, and things that used to be triggering. Once liberated from these, the world becomes their oyster once again.

I can’t think of a more compelling example of post-traumatic growth than Chessy Prout. Her inspiring journey from victim to survivor to thriver and impassioned advocate contains all the elements of successful trauma recovery.

In Vulnerability, Strength

These are only a fraction of the lessons I Have the Right To offers. In addition to Chessy’s narrative, the book ends with a heart-felt open letter by Susan and Alex to other parents, including an ample list of resources.

Trauma pioneer Judith Herman characterized the essence of trauma as the experience of disempowerment and disconnection. Trauma recovery, therefore, is a process of cultivating empowerment through a sense of connection. This is the essence of Chessy’s journey.

Nothing dismantles stigma like a first-person narrative of success. At an author talk at Simmons College, Chessy ended the Q&A with this: “I’m no longer afraid to speak my mind. I don’t care if I’m called a bitch or bossy. When men speak their minds, they’re called ‘confident’, they’re called ‘leaders’. And I’m not going away.”

On behalf of my clients and colleagues, Chessy, I’m so very glad.

Epilogue

Chessy Prout is now a thriving sophomore in college and active advocate for the non-profit PAVE (Promoting Awareness, Victim Empowerment).

Jenn Abelson is now an investigative reporter for the Washington Post.

Susan and Alex Prout are co-founders of I Have the Right To a victim’s rights and advocacy organization. Alex is also founding chair of the Solidarity Council of Vital Voices, a global leadership development organization for women, and a recipient of their Voices of Solidarity Award for 2018.

St. Paul’s School has acknowledged a decades-long history of sexual misconduct and is now under oversight of the New Hampshire State Attorney General’s Office in lieu of criminal prosecution for child endangerment.