MEET CAREY JONES

A childhood sexual assault survivor shares her recovery experiences and extensive personal research into the topic in this manual.

When Somes was about 4 years old, her lone confidant was her imaginary friend Carey Jones, a nonphysical presence that always offered her understanding rather than judgment. Many years later, while in therapy with Alpern, or Jerry as she calls him, she revealed a frightening truth—just before turning 5, she was pursued and violently sodomized by a neighborhood boy on numerous occasions. Somes confronted the way this impacted her life, delved into why she never told anyone about this abuse, and started to understand why she created Carey to help her. She also began extensive research into the subject of childhood sexual abuse. The result is this succinct yet thorough compendium—written with Alpern—that supports and informs not just sexual abuse survivors, but also their caregivers, parents, and educators, backed up with stigma-busting statistics. Concepts like triggers and self-care, oft ridiculed even as they become more broadly known, are explained along with their roles in developing effective coping techniques, avoiding harmful ones, and finding the resulting trauma behind anxiety and depression, sexual dysfunction, eating disorders, and addiction. Ways to spot abuse, handle revelations about it, and even discourage it by recognizing grooming behavior are also detailed, with an emphasis on frank communication between children and their parents or other sympathetic authority figures. The book approaches the topic of childhood sexual abuse in a straightforward, intellectual way, avoiding alarmist tropes or exploitative accounts. Much of the information here is presented as learned through Somes’ therapy, but facts and figures are still well cited. Her own experiences are intercut with other resources, from books like Marilyn Van Derbur’s Miss America by Day and Dr. Bessel Van Der Kolk’s The Body Keeps the Score to guides from organizations such as Darkness to Light and the WINGS Foundation. The instruction presented here is practical, with the subjects including what a survivor should look for in a therapist and what questions to ask. The book also addresses the possible, often discouraging bumps in the road that may be encountered along the way. Somes’ personal experiences keep this advice from becoming too clinical. Numerous lists, with extensive appendices featuring further reading and useful outreach tools, make the manual easy to revisit.

Personal tragedy informs a valuable and meticulous guide to dealing with childhood sexual trauma.