I watched the Senate Judiciary Committee struggling to understand Dr. Christine Blasey Ford’s and Judge Kavanaugh’s conflicting stories about what happened about 36 years ago. Much pain and confusion.

I cannot relate to Ford’s fuzzy earlier recall of details of the actual abuse. Both as a survivor and as a therapist who assisted many clients in processing their abuse, I’m familiar with our human tendency to recall in detail the abuse which violated us physically or emotionally. In my experience, even abuse that occurred years earlier was initially recalled in photographic detail.

Yet memories could not be counted upon to be entirely accurate. Taking out memories and examining them, often incorporates into the memory our response to the event just recalled. So, while Dr. Ford appears to have been victimized by a sexual encounter many years ago, her recall may include inaccuracies.

As a sexual abuse survivor who worked as a professional in the mental health field, I am disappointed by Ford’s lapse in professionalism by not processing this trauma earlier. In both my undergraduate and graduate preparation, the importance of our responsibility for mental health self-care was emphasized.

One graduate professor wrote “THERAPIST” on the board. Then she drew a line like this, “THE/RAPIST.” She advised that if we chose to not do “our own work,” we were positioning ourselves to become, “emotional rapists” because we would continue to carry “trigger” memory fragments. Those fragments could be activated by events in our lives or the lives of our clients and cause us to harmfully “over or under” respond, distorting reality.

So it is significant that Dr. Ford, who worked in the mental health field for many years, had not chosen to process her early trauma. Her choice kept herself vulnerable to intense responses from triggers in her environment. She has caused herself to lose some professional credibility and personal stability by not embracing her responsibility of self-care.

Yes, survivors of sexual abuse deserve respect and sensitivity. Those accused by survivors of abuse deserve factual evidence in order to be convicted. Anything less is institutional abuse, which may be as harmful as sexual abuse.

And now we are to trust our FBI, with their pattern of “Straining out a gnat and swallowing a camel”? (Matthew 23: 24.) Recall their selective, biased, hypocritical application of principle regarding Hillary vs. conservatives. Knee time. Dear God, help!