Letters to the editor

Using rankings is a great marketing tool used by companies to promote their products. We’re all behind condom use, but the latest over-stated headline in the IDS, “The Dirty Little Secret about IU: IU drops to 63rd in college campus sexual health ranking” is rather over the top, don’t you think? This is a “survey” that didn’t even account for Kinsey Confidential originating at IU or the “anonymous sex column” in not just the IDS, but in the student papers around the country.

What’s also missing is the impact of IU research on sexual health, such as last week’s presentations at national conferences on condom use, sexual side effects of contraception, bi-sexual men’s health and alcohol effects on sexuality. If there are truly secrets hindering sexual health on campus, let’s expose them. Such sensational headlines give lots of weight to bogus marketing ploys.   

— Jennifer Bass, communications director at The Kinsey Institute

I am responding to the very moving account of Bailey Loosemore’s experience of her sexual assault last year and its aftermath. This account is both an act of courage and a story of emerging clarity as she grappled to name what had been done to her and grappled with questions she herself had asked, as many victims do, about “Why didn’t I do something?”

An aspect of this story that struck me is the role that empathy, or the lack of it, can have in helping or retarding the healing process. In her moving account, Ms. Loosemore shares with us that her friends, for all kinds of reasons, were not available to do the one empathic thing she had hoped they could do, and that is to listen. Often, we don’t know what to say when someone shares a traumatic experience with us, not realizing that it is not what we say but how well we listen that is most helpful to a friend. Most of us do not really understand the true power of empathic listening.

When Ms. Loosemore did finally seek professional help, her experience with her therapist was mixed. Clearly, as Ms. Loosemore recounts, the therapist was right that the trauma had more impact on her than she realized. But Ms. Loosemore also recognized where the therapist seemed to go wrong.

As a result, the therapist was in some significant ways experienced as not empathic. How so? In my experience, sometimes when therapists think of themselves and advertise themselves as specialists in, say, “sexual assault” or “adult children of alcoholics” or other topical specialties, they tend to view and hear everything a client says through that particular lens. In trying to be empathic and helpful, the therapist ends up being neither.

Ms. Loosemore was and is intuitively aware that unless the roots of lack of self-confidence are also addressed, it becomes hard to believe in yourself and your perceptions of what is happening when you need to the most.

­— Gilbert Marsh, M.S.W.