Donna Jenson used to harbor a horrible secret.
She couldn’t tell anyone that her father was sexually abusing her. She didn’t even want to acknowledge it herself. It took decades before she could reckon with the abuse privately, let alone speak publicly about it.
But now, she’s helping other survivors amplify their own paths to healing. Jenson, a survivor of incest and longtime advocate for survivors of sexual violence, will launch a new audio-video podcast, “Healing Conversations,” on Sunday, Nov. 18, a date she chose because the Hebrew word for the number 18 is the same as the word for “life.” She will release four episodes on the day the show debuts, then once a month after that for a total of 15 episodes.
The podcast will feature one-on-one conversations between Jenson and other survivors of sexual violence. She asks them to say what they survived in one sentence. The sentence that encapsulates her story is, “I survived incest from my father and my mother not protecting me,” she said. Then, she asks them questions about their journey towards healing — when they decided they wanted to heal, how they’ve gone about the process and what’s happened since.
“Those are amazing stories,” Jenson said.
That’s not to say her project is a true crime podcast, however — Jenson’s not a fan of the genre, to say the least. She found the show “To Catch a Predator” sensationalistic: “The irony is, most perpetrators never get caught, never suffer consequences, very small, small percentage [do],” she said. Instead, her show will present survivors’ stories of healing in a manner that is “trauma-informed and centered on dignity, not sensationalism.”
“There’s so many places in our world that sensationalize sexual activity of all kinds, and … when you’re talking directly to someone who’s been affected by sexual trauma, I want to make sure I preserve their dignity in the way I talk to them and the questions I ask to make sure it’s, as much as possible, not triggering, that it doesn’t stir things up so much that they can’t finish telling the story,” she said. That approach also benefits the listener, she pointed out: “I want the material to feel safe enough to take in.”
Jenson ends each episode with the phrase “telling is healing.”
“To me, the first step is telling yourself that you’re a survivor,” she said. “Given how we were harmed and how much the world doesn’t believe it, we can doubt it.”
Jenson, who lives in Easthampton, is also the author of a book, “Healing My Life: from Incest to Joy”; the writer of the play “What She Knows”; and the producer of a documentary, “Telling Is Healing.” After all of that work in different genres, she chose audio-video podcasting for a project because it’s “kind of the new thing,” she said with a smile. She wants to reach more demographics of survivors, so she’s going to share the podcast on sites like YouTube and TikTok – “every platform that’ll have me!” she said.
Jenson first began her path to healing long before social media. She started to reckon with her past in the 1970s, when she was active in the women’s liberation movement.
“About, I want to say, ten years into that work, I began discovering how much the harm that was done to me was affecting how I was being in the world, which was mostly very angry with men in general,” she said. “The source of my raw anger and the shame I carried with that was really from how my father harmed me.”
Jenson also started to do more activism with gay and lesbian activists during the AIDS crisis. She saw how many people were forced out of the closet and the effect that had on the movement, and she realized that it would also have an impact if survivors went public about their abuse.
At that time, she said, “It dawns on me that we survivors have to be counted. Our voices have to be out there. People have to know that we’re in your families, we’re in your communities, we’re in your churches, we’re everywhere. I always say that now: ‘Survivors are everywhere,’” Jenson said.
She staunchly prefers to call herself a “survivor” rather than a “victim” because survivorship is ongoing.
“I was a victim of my father’s harm, no question. But I survived it,” she said. “And to me, surviving’s a verb. I’m still surviving. It’s a lifelong process. Somewhere in my 40s, I realized, ‘Oh, it’s not like I have this program, and when I’m done, it’s gonna be all done.’ … The residual of that experience will always be with me.”
In the late 90s, she started to work with other survivors; in 2008, she launched online writers’ circles, which she still runs today.
Suffice it to say, the landscape of public thought around sexual violence has changed since Jenson’s childhood, but the problem is still far from over. Still, Jenson said, what she wants people to take away from the podcast is, “Healing is possible.”
Listeners who know a survivor of sexual violence can approach them with three statements, Jenson suggested: “‘One, I believe you; two, it never should have happened; and three, it wasn’t your fault.’ And that’s all you have to say.”
For more information about Donna Jenson or to listen to “Healing Conversations” once it’s been released, visit timetotell.org.
If you are a survivor of sexual violence and need support, call the National Sexual Assault Hotline at 1-800-656-4673 for free, confidential help 24 hours a day, or contact Safe Passage, a nonprofit in Northampton that helps survivors of abuse, at 413-586-5066.
