Bobbie Becerra is an author, storyteller, speaker, and a survivor of child sexual abuse (CSA).
Bobbie grew up in a strange world. Abuse was a regular occurrence. It was like an open secret – something known but not directly dealt with – and often explained as “just the way it is.”
Bobbie was in her teens when she first heard a therapist actually call what was happening to her “abuse.” According to Bobbie, it was hard to hear. She didn’t want that word used in association with her mother.
Bobbie continued over the years to look for ways to help herself heal. In her 30s, she found a 12-step group for sexual abuse survivors. At first, it was a lot of work for her to just go into the room. For the first couple of weeks, Bobbie could only say her name, but soon started to share a little bit about her story.
“This was the first time I was openly talking about my abuse in a room full of strangers that actually spoke my language. I felt like I was heard in a different way. There was no fear in my gut that made me feel like I’d better explain myself and tell them that I didn’t invite the abuse – it happened, and it was real. Everyone in that room conveyed this nonverbal acceptance that told me I had nothing to prove. That was a pretty amazing experience.”
Bobbie has written a book called Learning to Take It: How I Grew to Accept Abuse to help others who have experienced CSA.
“Deciding to write the book was absolutely one of my best decisions and sometimes life just creates a space for you to do what you need to do. Since I was a little girl, I was always confronting things, always looking for answers, and kept asking questions. I really paid attention to what people said because I wanted to understand and wanted to find better ways to look at life. I took lessons that I could but one thing that was always so present in the world, and almost offensively shocking to me, was this question of why women just decided to stay in abuse. Why not just leave?”
For Bobbie, that question was a punch in the gut with an impact that never went away.
“Through the years I was able to talk about a lot of things, but I never had a voice to answer this question – it was just too much to attempt to verbalize. Over time, I was able to start imagining how I would answer. I felt this urgency in my body, an angry moment of thinking ‘If I’m going to answer this, then hold on, this will take a minute.’ And then, I started to write.”
When Bobbie started writing she knew exactly what she was answering.
“My answer to the question was, let’s start when I was young. I became an abused woman because I was groomed to be one when I was a child. If you are looking at someone who is 25 and talking to her about abuse, well, the conversation is 20 years late. People needed to talk to her when she was five, when she was learning to imagine herself as a woman. Waiting until she is an adult often means she is being questioned and, ultimately, blamed for living a life that she has learned and had to endure for so many years. I hope that sharing my story can help us understand that victims don’t simply choose a life of abuse and maybe we need to start asking a different kind of question.”