Elizabeth Oldfield speaks with writer and speaker Thordis Elva. 27/09/2023
Episode disclaimer
Elizabeth
Hello. Before we kick off today, I wanted to let you know that this episode and the subsequent reflections were recorded before the allegations against Russell Brand emerged in the UK. We wanted to leave the episode largely as it is because Thordis, and Thordis’ story are broad and touch on a number of themes, only one of which is sexual violence. And because the issue of sexual violence itself is broad and complicated, and does not centre on just one set of allegations or one story. But we did think deeply about this, because particularly in the UK, that story gives a context for this story that it didn’t have when we record it, and we realise that there will be complexities and sensitivities around it as you’re listening. Hope we’ve made the right call. We might not have done. I’d be really interested in your thoughts. So as usual, please do get in touch. I’ve written a little bit about my personal connections with some of that story over on my Substack. If you’re interested, you could check that out there. But meanwhile, I really hope you enjoy this conversation with Thordis.
Introduction
Elizabeth
Hello and welcome to The Sacred. My name is Elizabeth Oldfield, and this is a podcast about our deepest values, the things that are sacred to us, the things that we want to define and drive our lives. And relatedly, about how we live together well, about how we can find more curiosity and empathy for people who are not like ourselves. It was born in 2017 as a reaction to the spike in polarization and tribalism that I think many of us, particularly living in the UK and the States, were seeing in our societies. Every episode I speak to someone who has some kind of public voice or public platform, someone who is shaping in some way our common life. And I speak to them about really the vision of the good that drives them, although that’s a grandiose “philosophy seminar” way of putting it. I ask them about the values that drive them and what they’re trying to do, what really is their vocation. And this is especially important, I speak to people from all different perspectives, political tribes, professions, people on different sides of some of our most painful and neuralgic debates. The hope is that by listening you will come to understand better what might be driving some people not like you, and it might even open up a little space for all of us to engage in more healthy and humane ways across those divides.
In this episode, I spoke to Thordis Elva. I am sure I’m not pronouncing that with a sufficiently Icelandic accent, but I also know that she is very gracious and won’t mind. Thordis is a playwright, an author and an activist and has spoken and advised and worked with governments globally on gender–based violence and violence against women and girls. She’s perhaps best known for writing a book with the man who raped her when she was 16, and going on to deliver a TED Talk with him that has been seen more than nine million times. We spoke about sexual violence, of course, and this, if it’s not obvious by now, is your warning that this episode contains discussion of sexual violence. We spoke about growing up in Iceland and various different parts of the globe. And we really got quite deep, I think philosophically, on her conviction that it’s important to say and to demonstrate that rapists are human and that it is only when we are committed to our connections and to our common humanity that we can come to understand these incredibly intractable and painful issues like sexual violence properly and make any progress. There are some reflections from me as usual at the end and I really hope you enjoy listening.
What is sacred to you? Thordis Elva’s answer
Thordis, I am going to ask you straight off this question that I know you’ve been sitting with and chewing over for a little while. Just what is sacred to you? What has bubbled up for you?
Thordis Elva
Oh gosh, so many things. I feel it’s such a luxury to get to sink my teeth into this one. And after much thinking – and it was such a frustrating journey, because my list was just growing with things that I own sacred. And I was like, “I can’t I can’t show up for this talk with you with a kilometres–long list of things that I hold sacred, so I had to really try and dig towards what it is that unites them. What is it that all these things have in common. And that’s when I had this epiphany, that they’re essentially two fundamental elements in life, and the facilitation of those two fundamental things in life are the things I hold sacred. And those two fundamental things are “connection” on the one hand – and when I say connection, I mean to something beyond us, our common humanity, for example. That is a connection that I think is absolutely sacred. And also beyond that, to nature, and to the fact that we all belong to nature, and therefore, to each other. That connection, I feel, and everything that facilitates that, is sacred. But we also live in a world that encourages disconnect. So it is when we disconnect from our common humanity that we can start othering people, that we can start objectifying people, that we can start rendering them down to a means to an end. When another person becomes something that you can use for your own personal benefit, a mind to manipulate, a soldier to recruit, a hole to fuck, a mind to colonise… that’s when we’re disconnected from the fact that we all belong to the same oneness. And that’s when we see war, and violence, and destruction. And the same when we disconnect from the fact that we belong to nature, that we are of her, and she is a part of us. That’s when we can also have that same process happen, where we objectify nature and she becomes something to exploit, to plunder, to pick apart and sell off. So, for me, the things that facilitate the connection to common humanity and to nature, are sacred. So a walk in the forest can be sacred. Seeing someone else’s humanity and identifying with something someone else said, relating to someone else’s pain: all of those things help us remember our oneness. So those all become sacred to me. But the fact that we do live in this kind of disconnected world where disconnection is effectively encouraged, I think that the other fundamental aspect in life for me is “healing”. Because healing helps us back to the oneness. So, everything that facilitates connection and healing are sacred to me. That’s why laughing can be sacred, because it can be so healing. That’s why I feel that parenting is also sacred, for those two reasons. It connects us to another human being right off the bat. Motherhood and itself is the only human experience where you literally are one in the same body for months, you know, yeah. So that is that is the most intimate connection you can have. But life is hard, and it’s painful. And we’re all set up to fail at certain points and to stumble, and to fall, and to get up again. And I think that what I’ve learned as a mother is that it’s not my job to protect my children from hurt and harm. It is more so to help them heal from it when that happens, because hurting is an inevitable part of life.
Elizabeth
I always think sometimes some people find it very easy to know what’s sacred to them. And some people find it very hard. And it’s it is a concept that you can take in any direction. But one of the things I often think about is moments of big decision. Sometimes it can be the sacred that guides us. And sometimes, we can feel pressured to compromise on the things that are sacred to us, our sacred values. And sometimes we choose for them, and sometimes we choose against them and against ourselves. I think that’s part of all of our stories, but can you think of a time where those things that you hold sacred have guided you, have been key in a decision that you’ve made?
Thordis Elva
Yeah, absolutely. I think that there’s a need to feel a sense of belonging. To feel a sense of belonging to a greater community, and also to understand myself and feel connected to my own feelings, have been such driving forces. For example, when I was young – I was only 16 when I fell in love for the first time – and it had been somewhat of a mystery to me that my girlfriends would fall for boys. I felt they were absolutely primitive creatures. Their spitting contests and their grabbing your bra strap, and just being generally obnoxious. I did not get it. But then this Australian exchange student walked into my junior college and just swept me off my feet. And it was a beautiful love story. It was two teenagers, holding hands, gazing deeply into each other’s eyes during lunch breaks. Quite cringe worthy, today, reflecting back on it. But just lovely. And it all felt like it was unravelling very naturally, to me, trusting myself with him. Sort of enjoying being a woman for the first time. Seeing that through his eyes. And it made me eager to want to shed more layers of my childhood. But it led to a night of drinking. There was a school ball, and I got very drunk and incapacitated, essentially. And I felt very blessed and lucky to have this knight in shining armour save me from the situation I’d gotten myself into, as I had hugged the toilet bowl most of the night and drifted in and out of consciousness. And it was the first time that I wasn’t in the care of my parents – that’s how much of a child I was. And he scooped me off of the floor in the ladies room where I’d spent the night vomiting, essentially, and took me home. And I felt like my knight in shining armour had rescued me. And I felt just such gratitude as he undressed me and put me in my bed. But that soon turned to horror as he proceeded to take all of my clothes off and sexually assault me for what ended up being two hours at night. And that, of course, sent me into a deep confusion first and foremost, because my ideas were very childish and stereotypical about what sexual assault could be. And who could commit such an act? It certainly, in my mind, wasn’t your model student, eloquently spoken, handsome boyfriend who charmed your mother. And it certainly didn’t happen in your own bed. It’s something that I thought happened in dark alleyways and similar to sort of the clichéd ideas I’d seen play out in television shows and movies. So I think this is where I entered my era of disconnect. Where I was trying to outrun this hurt, this betrayal. No one wants to believe that the first time they fall in love, their heart is mangled in this way, and abused in this way. I think anything else becomes more bearable. So I didn’t want to look it in the eye, this stark, naked truth that my first boyfriend had raped me. I couldn’t really stomach that or admit that to myself until a year or two later. And by that point, he had completed his exchange student programme and was back in Australia, which is effectively as far away from Iceland as possible on the planet. So I spent the next decade just trying to escape from the pain inside.
Thordis’ childhood: basic humanism, progressiveness, and everyone a feminist
Elizabeth
If you’re happy I would love to hear a little about you before. I’d love to get a sense of the girl you were, the ideas that were around in your childhood. How would you just paint me a little picture of young Thordis growing up in Iceland, which many listeners may not have a sense of what that was like. Could you describe yourself and your surroundings a little bit?
Thordis Elva
Yeah, sure. I didn’t grew up in Iceland alone. I moved around a lot. I was trilingual by the age of five. My parents were studying. My dad was studying to become a surgeon. And Iceland is so small. And we have not a lot of traumatic injury and violent death happen in this country. Our police don’t even carry guns. It’s funny to be able to say that we moved around so much as a child, because my home country is essentially so safe.
Elizabeth
Can’t train as a surgeon!
Thordis Elva
Exactly. It’s essentially so safe, and healthy, and holistic, that I ended up living in the States. I ended up living in Sweden. And had a very sort of layered identity from an early age, when it comes to ideas about nationalism, what country I’m from, where I belong. I’ve never lived more than five years in one place. And I think it is both the restlessness but also a curiosity in me.
Elizabeth
Do you think your parents, were they explicitly or implicitly imparting values to you? Some people have very strong religious upbringing, or very strong political ideas passed on? Was there any of that?
Thordis Elva
I absolutely think they did. They were not religious. I live in the most secular part of the world, the Nordic Region. And I think my parents, they were the epitome of that, I’d say, very progressive, very liberal, scientifically–minded… And I think I was just raised with basic humanism, in terms of values. So, treat others the way you wish to be treated, and to approach other people with open mindedness. There was never any talk of any other social group or demographic in any negative way, as I was growing up, which I find quite remarkable today. And I’m so grateful for that. But I think the most important thing that was role–modelled to me was equality by my parents. There was no such thing as a woman’s job in the home, or a man’s job. It was just chores, and we all did them. And my dad, being a surgeon, of course, was away a lot and worked more than mom. But when he was around, he cooked just like her, and he folded laundry just like her. And I think that was probably one of the things that marked me the most, just witnessing equality. It’s sort of taking it for granted for a long time. And having that innocence, so that when I was met with inequality outside of the home, it was such a shock. “What?! Isn’t everyone a feminist?! What is this?!” So yeah, for sure, those were the values I think modelled most clearly to me.
Forgiving her rapist: living parallel lives, looking the past in the eye, and letting go of hate
Elizabeth
Thank you. You led us to this point where, several years after you’ve been raped by your first boyfriend, having lived with disconnection and your talk in the book about really just dealing with that trauma in some very unhealthy ways, and shutting down, and just doing the things that humans do to survive something so dislocating and painful as being raped. And then you reached out to him. What on earth triggered you to try and make contact with this man that had hurt you so much?
Thordis Elva
Right? Ah, such a good question. But it brings me back to what I was saying earlier about the disconnect I felt inside, and how it was propelling me to unhealthy patterns such as working way too much, just piling on things so it never have to stand still. Because standing still is dangerous, because then this inner dialogue would start. And also of abusing food, abusing alcohol, abusing essentially things that could numb the way I was feeling. And disconnect is what I believe to be the source of all suffering in the world. It is when we’re disconnected from ourselves or others that we can inflict pain. Certainly, that’s true for what my first boyfriend, Tom, did to me. He was disconnected from values that he only discovered later he holds sacred, such as the basic respect he should have had for my boundaries, and my bodily autonomy, and my human rights, essentially. So yeah, it was that disconnect that I felt inside that I thought: “I can’t live this way. I am going to fall apart unless I find a way to heal from this.” And I realised that the first thing that needed to happen on that journey was to just return the shame to its rightful owner. This is not my burden to carry. This is not something I should have to weigh myself down with, for the rest of my life. If we look at life as a journey, if we’re all on this path… we’re all on different paths, but we’re walking towards the destination. And we don’t want to fill our pockets with rocks, or unnecessary weight. We’d find ways to leave them by the side of the road. And then I’d come to that point in my journey where I was like, “I’m not going to carry this weight anymore.” So I reached out, and I essentially just confronted Tom with what he’d done, not thinking he would take it on. I thought he might shut me out, he might deny it. But he ended up very graciously and full of regret opening his arms to this responsibility, and ended up being a saving grace for him too. I don’t think he would be alive today if he hadn’t also stopped and quit trying to outrun the dark deed he had committed all those years ago, because it was taking the same kind of toll on him. And that is one of the remarkable discoveries of this journey, is that we were living parallel lives. He, because he was trying to outrun a very justified shame and responsibility that belonged to him and him alone. And me, because I don’t live in a vacuum. I was raised in a society that does tend to blame victims, and I’d taken on a lot of that “victim blaming” ideology along the way. So yeah, when we stopped and looked the past in the eye on each other, this exchange started to unfold correspondence, to begin with, that lasted eight years, where we delved into the consequences of that night, how it has impacted our lives. And that was a fascinating analysis, that I think was deeply healing for both of us, essentially. And I would never have done that, if I didn’t sense a deep longing in him to make things up to me and to be there for me in a way that would help me heal from what he’d done. And so I decided to embark on that dialogue, thinking there could be things in here that are useful for me, and things that I might even be able to pass on, in the form of knowledge, because I’ve worked with this cause and with survivors of violence for two decades now. So yeah, that’s I think what led me to not just leaning into this, but actually yearning it and being mended by it. And that is not to say that I wasn’t angry. That is not to say that I didn’t want to make him squirm, which I think is a natural and necessary way to react when someone does you wrong. So I do think that there’s a place for anger, and it’s absolutely vital. But for me, it sort of vaporised when I’d sat in this space, in this conversation with a man that was essentially punishing himself far more effectively than I could have. So it became, in a way, almost self–indulgent to hold on to the anger, and the hurt, and the hate, because it wasn’t serving me anymore. And it wasn’t leading to anything constructive. So, little by little, I realised the way for me to set myself free is to take back this energy that has been invested, if you will, in these negative emotions, and reinvest that in myself and things that serve me better. So it was a long journey. And it did have all these chapters, that each served a purpose. But it ended up in a place of peace, where forgiveness came quite effortlessly, as an actual result of all the previous steps on that journey.
On the humanity of rapists, and on how to give them an appropriate public voice
Elizabeth
I want to come back to the concept of forgiveness, because it’s profound and difficult. But I want to start with something almost more basic, which is the thing that is very surprising about your story, and which people have reacted against. Because you’ve told the story in a book and in a TED talk, and in both the book and the TED Talk, Tom has a voice. You tell the story together, in a way that I found extraordinarily helpful and illuminating. Given that we know what the statistics are about rape and sexual assault, the proportion of Tom’s in the world walking around with something like this in their past is frankly quite horrifying. But we have no way of knowing what that experience is like for them, and how it affects them. And so hearing from Tom, who, granted is the sort of most palatable end… let’s not dress it up, he raped you when he was 18. And he has been unwaveringly clear how wrong that was, and how much he has to make up for it, right? But still. To put your rapist on a stage and to put his voice in a book speaks to an underlying value, which you come back to again and again, which shouldn’t sound shocking, but is: which is, rapists are human beings. You said, “How can we recognise the damage done in human societies by sexual violence, if we refuse to recognise the humanity of those who commit it?” I guess I would just like you to talk about that. Did you know how much you would be transgressing a huge taboo by essentially saying and demonstrating, “Yes, this man raped me. Yes, he is a human being. And his understanding, his story, is important for all of us.”
Thordis Elva
Right? Well, yes and no. Like, I was deeply aware that this would be a divisive topic, that it will be controversial. And it should be. It shouldn’t be something we take for granted, that someone who’s committed sexual violence is given attention and a voice. I think that’s absolutely something to be weighed very carefully. But I also think it’s so naive to think we’re not already seeing rapists take up space and have a voice in this world. I mean, look, at the time when we did this, can I just remind people that Donald Trump was sitting in the highest office in the world, having bragged about sexually assaulting women. So here we have one of the most powerful people on the planet normalising, minimising, deflecting responsibility and acting like sexual assault was just a part of men’s culture, locker room culture, if you will. So, for someone who yes, has committed sexual assault, and yes, it’s terrible. But for someone to take the stage and say the opposite, say “It’s terrible. It should not be minimised. It’s not a normal part of men’s culture. We should be, as men, talking about our responsibility. And I want to tell this story alongside my victim in the hope that someone out there may listen, and hear, and identify, and relate to this, and not do what I did, not make the mistake of assuming consent or being so consumed with the idea of entitlement that I have a right to my girlfriend’s body irrespective of her consent or her state, essentially. If telling my story here will make just one man think twice about violating a boundary so deeply the way I did, then it will all have been worth it.” So I think that if we just ask the fundamental question, “Should rapists be allowed on stage?” My answer is, “It all depends on what they’re saying.” It really does. Because we do have rapists on stage, we do have them playing our national test games, we have them in our films, we have them on our political podiums. They’re everywhere. But we need them to be saying the right things. And that’s where I feel that Tom’s voice was so important.
Meeting in person in South Africa, common humanity, and learning about consent
Elizabeth
And after these eight years of correspondents, you met in person for a week of really quite emotionally intense conversation. And I think it’s not an accident that you went to South Africa. Could you tell me why you felt like the context of that nation was the appropriate backdrop?
Thordis Elva
Well, we decided to meet in the middle. It was supposed to be neutral ground. So we essentially just found a tool on the Internet called “Radius on a map”, and I just drew a radius from Australia and from Iceland, and saw the cities where it overlaps and South Africa, Cape Town, ended up being one, and we went there. And yes, it was not entirely coincidental, because the whole history of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission that was established there to heal the wounds caused by the disconnect that is Apartheid – where we disconnect from our common humanity, where we other people, because of the colour of their skin – the work that had taken place there felt like a beautiful backdrop for a conversation where we too, were trying to heal this rift that had been created by Tom Steve. Not just between us, but within us and ourselves. He had to reconcile with the 18 year old boy that did this inside of him. And I have to forgive myself for years of self–blame, and shame, and essentially, untie all those knots around my heart where this had festered for so long. And yeah, the backdrop of South Africa was perfect in many ways, because it’s also a place where people have had to, and still are sitting with wounds that will take generations to heal. It’s not something that can be solved swiftly. And it’s the same, this problem that Tom and I were trying to heal and solve between the two of us. This centuries–old, millennia–old problem of violence against women, that even soft–spoken boys from stable homes that have had a quality model to them, can still become guilty of, can still commit. And trying to answer that question has been one of my passions in life. What makes that happen? Where are we going wrong? How can we have that conversation with children from a young age? Because I think when we start talking about sexual violence, and sex, and boundaries, to children, it’s often too late. They’re often well into their teens, and these ideas of boundaries have already been set. I think that that conversations should happen so much earlier in life. And I find myself doing that with my kids, having that conversation from the very moment where they start realising that they have a body. And it’s such a fun discovery, that you have a body, and that it tickles, and that it bends, and that it can run, and that it can jump, and that it breathes, and that it’s cosy to snuggle up against someone else’s skin. And in all of those beautiful moments of realisation and self–discovery are ample opportunities to start seeding the idea of: “this is mine” and “that is yours”, and we can certainly share these moments but we also have to learn about consent, and comfort, and boundaries.
Elizabeth
It’s making me think actually about the body as sacred. And how if we treated our own and other people’s bodies with a bit more reverence, that might help in how swiftly or how comfortable we feel with transgressing someone else’s boundaries.
Thordis Elva
That also always brings me back to this sense of common humanity. And it is when you realise that there’s nothing in the human condition that you can’t relate to, that’s when it becomes impossible to judge. So it was when I realised that I had been othering Tom and my anger – and that was necessary, I needed to judge him for what he did. And I needed to judge him harshly. But it was when I realised that there was nothing in the motivating factors behind his terrible deeds that night, that I am above. It was when I realised that I’m not above any of that. Where holding a grudge and judging him for something that is in me became that much harder, and I lost interest in it. It became useless, in a way, for me. It became self–indulgent again. So, realising that he acted out of greed, realising that he acted out of a very self–centred, self–serving place, seemed so alien to me at first, because I was focusing on what it led to. And I thought I could never do that to another person, I can never sexually assault another person. But when I backed up and examined, “But what were the factors? What were the catalysts? Have I ever been self–serving? Yes. Have I ever been self–centred? Yes. Have I ever been greedy? Yes, I have.” It may not have manifested in the same way. And yes, of course, there are differences in outcome, absolutely. But that is essentially a difference in degree. And Rumi, the poet, he once said, “All differences in this world are of degree and not of kind, because oneness is the secret of everything.” And I think that people are so uncomfortable with that, that rapists are humans and that they essentially are acting on the same base feelings that we don’t want to act on, and we try so much, and spend so much energy on not acting on. But I think that’s what people find so aggravating and hard to sit with, is that it’s still a part of the human condition. And it doesn’t set us apart, it actually underlines our flawed humanity.
When “cancel culture” is justified, forgiveness, and the danger of nesting in anger
Elizabeth
I want to stay with this for a minute, because your book was making me think so much about the moral atmosphere that is currently dominant in our public debates. And how, that what drove the Truth and Reconciliation Commission was a very similar posture, which was “racists are human”. People who perpetrated violence against people of colour under Apartheid are human. And they need to be held accountable to their actions, but they also need to be healed and reconciled within our community, otherwise, we as a nation cannot move forward. And that I’m hearing from you such a strong ethical posture – that we are all connected, that we are all fallible and fragile, that we all are capable of cruelty and disconnection towards each other. And when we are able to hold that posture – and for me, that comes really strongly from my theological principles – then we are able to do the hard work of… I don’t think I would be able to do the kind of hard work you did, frankly, Thordis, but we are hopefully able to do the kind of work in whatever moments of disconnection, and hatred, and hurt that we find ourselves in, of attempting to hold the relationship, of attempting to retain a sense of the other person’s humanity and dignity, even as sometimes we need to rage at them. And we need to accuse them, or have them rage against us and accuse us. Do you see the loss of that in public debates: our desire to go, “Okay, you’re a racist. You’re done.” Our desire to externalise evil into other people, or groups of people, and shut them away from us, rather than hold that really painful truth that we’re all implicated in this stuff?
Thordis Elva
Oh, absolutely, yes. And I think the word “cancel culture” is something you’ve been tiptoeing around in that question.
Elizabeth
It’s a complicated phrase, right? Let’s just let’s just name it very clearly. There was a lot of suspicious around the possibility of forgiveness and change. That’s the bit that seems to be missing, that if someone is genuinely repentant, or as Tom was, apologetic, that should be enough. There’s a sense of people’s identities getting fixed in the worst things they’ve ever said or done. And that I am very nervous of, whatever you call it.
Thordis Elva
Right. I share some of your worries, but I can also kind of see it from the other side that, as I was getting at with both the centuries old, if not millennia old problem of othering people due to the colour of their skin, and also the othering of women, and how we’ve been oppressed under the patriarchy for such a long time. That if we look at that, then the anger and the condemnation that is bubbling to the surface now, and cancel culture, is justified. And I think it’s healthy and necessary that you see that and that we express it and display it. Because for so long, there wasn’t a venue for that. However, I also have sat with the question and been quite unnerved with how we should then move on from there. Because anger is a very toxic place. It’s a place where you should move through and not reside, I feel. You should not build a home there. But it’s a very necessary part of the journey when wrong has been committed. Anger is a healthy response. So I think if I just look at the journey I had and other took, then anger was a chapter that propelled me forward, and helped me sort things. It’s an active emotion. Whereas shame is one of those paralysing emotions where you just want to dig a hole and disappear into it. Well, anger makes you rebel. Anger is the driving force behind all revolutions. It’s what changes the world so many times. But it’s not good for the human condition to live there. Do not make a nest in your anger. But that’s what I see in in the public discourse now, is we were struggling to move beyond that, and we’re not ready to enter the realm of forgiveness, or to have that conversation, oftentimes. And certainly not in the public discourse. And I’m hoping that we can find our way there one day. I hope that we’re moving in that direction, because, again, no one will walk through this life without fucking up. No one will walk through this life without transgressing or hurting other people. Again, differences in degree: it may not be sexual assault, but we will all absolutely violate someone else’s boundaries in some way, shape, or fashion, we will all make mistakes. We will all do something that ends up impacting another human being deeply. And we have to be able to learn from that pain. I think that’s why we’re put on this earth, essentially. I think that’s how we grow. And we’re stifling growth if we’re not letting people move through pain, if we’re keeping them there, because we’re angry. Then that is also a self–indulgent thing to do: to keep someone in anger, to imprison them there to get an outlet for our own anger. And that’s why I felt weirded out – for the lack of a better word – when people said that I didn’t have a right to forgive the person who assaulted me. I felt that that was a very strange position to take, because if you look at it long and hard, it’s not essentially about my healing: it is about their anger. So like, “Wait a second. Do you want me to heal? Or do you just want to stay mad?” You know? These are two very different things. And sometimes I think that people aren’t looking beyond themselves. They’re not connecting to the common humanity. They’re not looking to connect beyond their own hurt feelings. And at times that may be necessary for them, at times it may be a place where they need to dwell a bit longer. And if that’s the case, then I respect that. And I’ve always said, “Each person needs to dictate their own healing journey in whatever way that feels safe and right for them.” But for that to be the reason to judge someone else’s way of moving through pain is where I seriously question people’s motivations.
Elizabeth
It was really interesting reading about the response to your TED Talk and some of your talks, and people trying to get the talks cancelled, and picketing outside… And I can understand if you’re a victim of sexual violence, the idea that a rapist would get a platform… I can both really understand the reaction against it, and as you’ve explained, the kind of, “Once you work through what that means, we can’t get to a place where we’re actually trying to stop this happening in society.” If we don’t…
Suffering Prelabour rupture of membranes, and love as a birthright
So you’ve spent a long time researching, and campaigning, and writing, and speaking globally about sexual violence against women and girls. Not uniquely, but predominantly. The book is something you wrote a while ago now, and you alluded when we first started chatting that that you’ve changed, that things have developed in your life. Could you tell me a little bit more about that?
Thordis Elva
Yeah, absolutely. Reading that book now, there are chapters where I’m like, “Oh God, no! Who is this person? What?!” Things like me ordering a steak.
Elizabeth
It’s not you, now.
Thordis Elva
Oh, God, no. I haven’t eaten meat for four years. My awareness of climate change, and just my responsibility, and my future, and the planet that I’m leaving to my children, has developed. So things like that for sure. And I guess a deepening. But the deepening came again from pain: maturity. Emotional maturity comes in the hardest packaging. The packaging sucks because the packaging is so often trauma. It’s so often illness, or pain, or disease, or divorce, or death, or loss. Something that shakes us to our core. And since I wrote that book, I’ve had plenty of life–altering events, the biggest one absolutely being the birth of my twins. Actually, the pregnancy and birth of my twins that are five years old today. To make a long story, shorts, they posed a threat to my life when I carried them, because when an amniotic sac burst – these are fraternal twins, so they didn’t share an amniotic sac. And it led to a three month bedrest where I had to lay on flat on my back, and essentially not move, because if I sneezed or sat up, then amniotic fluid would come gushing out of me, because of an amniotic sac cannot heal. So it was an impossibly precarious situation, undulating between life and death, with doctors saying there’s “less than 1% chance that your babies will make it, so we recommend abortion.” And I wasn’t hearing any of that, because in my mind, it was super clear. “You said 1%, right? Well, someone has to be that 1%.” And I decided that it would be us. So I undertook that journey of fighting for their lives. And fighting for someone’s life sounds so dramatic and heroic, but in my case, it entailed lying flat on my back, sipping drinks from a straw and watching RuPaul’s drag race. That was me fighting for my children’s lives. But of course it was it was so touch–and–go. I was in danger the whole time, because I was at a risk of having an artery rupture in my womb, which would have led to death within 12 to 15 minutes, and I did not live close to the hospital. And the amniotic fluid puddles I woke up in every day were growing bigger, and redder, and angrier. And I was deeply aware that this was dangerous. So me living in Sweden posed a problem, in the sense that my family and friends are mostly in Iceland, but also scattered around the world. So as opposed to updating 200 people every day, which would have been an impossible task – everyone was worried sick – I decided to just tell my story every day what’s happening through a vlog, if you like, if that’s even the right word, but on my Instagram story. And I thought it would just be watched by my friends and family, but it grew into this beautiful social media movement where people from all over the world would just rally around us and root for me and my children. And it was so beautiful and revealing to me how people across borders, across religion, across cultures, would come together and daring to hope, right? It’s an impossible situation. Everyone’s aware of that, but they would pray. They would wake up in the middle of the night to pray to Allah. I had people go to the Wailing Wall in Jerusalem and send me a message saying, “I just stuck a note in the wall for you”. I had people with prayer circles all over the States. I had Catholic saints sent to me. I had Hindu god figures said to me. Someone planted a mango tree in Borneo. Someone climbed Mount Everest and planted a flag on top for my unborn twins. And so, to me, what became very clear is that we may not all believe in the same God, but we all seem to have a common belief in miracles. And it’s not even an belief in miracles, I think. I think it’s just daring to hope, because hope is the antidote to dread, and fear. And what ended up happening is that the tsunami of love just kept growing with people wrapping us in prayer and light. And so I started affectionately calling this my Army of Light, because it was my darkest hour for sure. And I started drawing little hearts on a map, because it floored me how global this movement was. And I decided when my twins were born, I’m gonna give them this map to show them how loved they were by the entire world before they even arrived. And yes, they ended up surviving. I’d love to tell you about how they survived, but to backtrack, all of this also served to show me how transactional my ideas about love were. Because I felt so undeserving of this tsunami of love, this unconditional support from strangers. I felt it was daunting. I thought “I will never be able to pay off this karmic debt”. And that’s when I realised, “Why am I even thinking this way? Why do I feel like I need to have earned love from other people? Why? Where does that come from, you know? Where’s that idea seated in me? Why do I feel that love from a stranger is not the norm? What do I feel that is the exception? What is this? I need to deconstruct this. I need to unpack this. Why am I not deserving of love just because I belong to the sacred oneness? Why am I not deserving of love, just because I am connected to the humanity we all share?” So this really made me think long and hard about my ideas about human worth, and how it’s integral, and how it’s not something you earn or is tied to your productivity or your output, but something that you’re born into. It’s your birthright. And I think most of us actually know that. Deep down, we know this. And that’s why we feel no qualms about sending love or support or light to someone who’s fighting for their children’s lives. But what really, really got to me was when I got a message from a woman in war–torn Syria sitting in a building that had been shot to shreds, and she was praying for me, this privileged woman in the Nordic Region with all the medical help available to her. And there she was, praying for me. And nothing has, I think, revealed to me the bare bones of our common humanity more than that. And also forgiveness adding on to that, because that is something I thought earlier when we were talking about Tom and the common humanity that forgiveness also reveals to us. The most purely distilled facilitator of healing is forgiveness. Many things can facilitate healing, but none as potently as forgiveness, because it allows for a restoration of sorts. Whether it is of a relationship or not, people can forgive and not want to maintain a relationship, and that’s entirely manageable and doable. Those two things do not have to coexist, but it does sever a tie that allows both people to reclaim something for the person that has spent investing energy, in a way that they can now reinvest into something more constructive. That is certainly a gift and something that sets them free. And for the person that has been judged and othered through the judgments, and denied a place in the oneness as a result of what they did, are being invited back into a common humanity that they were denied while they were undergoing the necessary phase of being judged for what they did. Because I think if we don’t judge people when they do wrong, we’re actually robbing them of something. We’re robbing them of an opportunity for growth. So I do think that sometimes the kindest, most beautiful thing we can do for another human being, is to allow them to accept responsibility for their actions and to grow from that, to sit with it and grow from it. And I once read a plaque on a tree in a redwood forest, one of the most sacred places have been, that said: “Without responsibility, there can be no freedom.”
Elizabeth
Thordis Elva, thank you so much for speaking to me on The Sacred.
Thordis Elva
The pleasure was mine.
Conclusion and outro
Elizabeth
So, Thordis’s sacred value was – and she really has spoken to me privately about how much this question has stirred in her, which I’m always really grateful to hear. That asking that question of ourselves can be really generative, and help us reflect in ways that we might not get an opportunity to normal life. And she managed, after quite a long time of thinking about it, reduce it down to this idea of “connection”, connection and healing. And I use that word a lot, and I’m trying to write about it at the moment, actually. And it is one of those annoying words, which there isn’t a particularly helpful alternative for, but also doesn’t carry the weight and gravity that we often want it to, I think. The vision I was getting as she was speaking, was this sense of how possible it is to live just like pinballs, pinging around each other to be in the same home even or the same society as a bunch of other humans but never really see, or hear, or touch each other. And I’m getting kind of implied thought, this is sort of (I would say) spiritual vision of an underlying connection, a sense that we are all connected and we can make choices to affirm that or to deny it, to strengthen those connections or to cut them really, to weaken them and sever them. It makes me want to visit Iceland – the fact that her parents had to move abroad for her dad’s training as a surgeon because there’s just not enough traumatic injury that happens in Iceland.
And then we came to the bit that feels most difficult to tread. And I was just trying to be really honest about my reactions, that I do find the power in Thordis’ work is a large part her telling her story, but then her dogged determination that understanding Tom’s story too – and Tom is the man who raped her – is so important. That the story isn’t full, or true, or as comprehensible as it should be, unless we hear his voice too. And I would recommend going to watch the TED Talk or reading the book, because it is such an unusual thing for a man to own up to being a perpetrator of sexual violence in public and to talk about (as far as they’re able to) what they think the why of that is. And as he says, he had good parents, he came from a good home, he hadn’t been fed directly misogynistic messages. He hadn’t been told by anyone in his life who loved him that he was entitled to a woman’s body, but he had been fed some more ambient messages that maybe influenced his story there. It’s really stayed with me, this sense that we really want people who do bad things to be different from us on some fundamental, cellular level. We really want not to be implicated and complicit in the evils of the world. And it is a very challenging thing for Thordis to say, basically, that there is nothing in humanity that we don’t share or that we can’t… She said, “There’s nothing in the human condition I can’t relate to, and so it becomes impossible to judge.” And what struck me really about Thordis, is the quiet moral rigor behind her very warm and open, chatty persona. And even though I say that, I’m realizing it’s sort of throwing up in me a bunch of my own prejudices and assumptions, which some of them are gendered and some of them are about how people use social media, and how they look, and a bunch of other things. Of course, Thordis can be warm, and stylish, and female, and cool – and be calling us to a startling moral rigour. Of course, those things can go together. The layers in me of nonsense, just nonsense prejudice and BS associations this podcast peels off me – it’s really quite uncomfortable to realise. How much nonsense I carry; and the moral rigour of Thordis’ voice has been one of those moments.
And honestly, there’s another thing going on in me, which is healthy and uncomfortable, which is about the fact that you don’t directly need to be acting from a religious impulse in order to forgive. And a bunch of you will be rolling your eyes at me and going, “Duh, of course!” And it’s not that I consciously thought that you had to be acting as part of religious devotion in order to forgive people. Of course, I don’t believe that. But the public stories that we tell about forgiveness – and I’m thinking of many of the shootings of black church congregations in the States, parents who forgive their children’s murderer or whatever it is. Every so often, a story will come around and we all go, “Wow, isn’t that amazing? They have managed to forgive someone who did them so much harm.” And almost always, somewhere in the article or the piece, it will be revealed that this is for them something they feel called on by their faith tradition. And so that just becomes a sort of data set in our heads, in my head. And so it’s really good for me to be challenged, to see that Thordis doesn’t draw on that explicitly. She may be drawing on cultural influence – we can argue about that somewhere else – but that she was able to have something of the rigour of something like the Truth and Reconciliation tradition, which did draw deeply on these diverse, but theological roots, to do something as powerful as that in her own life. So yes, that is my confession of another prejudice and assumption that I’m shifting on.
So much in this one. Good people. I wrote down “good people”. We want to believe we are good people. It goes back to this thing of “who gets to be a human? Who gets to have a voice?” And it comes obviously from this incredibly laudable and just instinct that, for example, women have shut up about sexual violence for centuries. Victims or survivors of sexual violence get to be the ones that speak now. Like, “Sorry, perpetrators.” Of course, that makes all kinds of sense. And as with many of these things, when we let it become a kind of watertight, ideological position. We get into problems. Although they’re really different in lots of ways, Cole Arthur Riley talked about in one of our previous episodes – who’s a writer and a creative black liturgist – she talks about when she confronts someone who’s a white supremacist as a black woman with anger and with rage. That part of her anger is in defence of the dignity of the white supremacist. It is a way of saying “you are better than this”, essentially. And it feels like that’s one of the threads in the way Thordis is talking about anger, both at her rapist and at rape more generally, is this dogged commitment to the humanity of perpetrators as well. “You are better than this. I am committed to your dignity as well – which does not excuse you from responsibility.” And I think a lot about how we change. How do we actually change our minds? How do we change our hearts? How do we become people more capable of patience, and love, and self–sacrifice, and forgiveness, and just anger? And it seems to me that when someone says to us, “You are responsible for this harm and I am committed to your dignity” – it’s just an easier thing to hear. Many other thoughts, but not coherent ones today.
Thank you so much for listening to me on The Sacred. This was an episode with Thordis Elva, and my name is Elizabeth Oldfield. You can find five years’, getting on for six years’ worth of episodes with people from all different tribes and perspectives. If there’s an issue that you think “I’d really like to understand why someone might believe this. I’d really like to listen to someone who holds this position that I don’t understand. I’d really like to understand what drives a conservative MP, or a communist, or an archbishop, or a campaigning atheist,” then you should be able to find those people in our archive and hopefully grow in understanding. I tweeted something this week that someone had said to me about the project that, again and again, they are forced to listen to people who they know they disagree with very deeply on some very core issues, but end up reluctantly thinking that they seem like quite a lovely person or quite thoughtful, and how much that just is like preventative medicine against dehumanizing those that we disagree with.
Our production team are Dan Turner and Fiona Handscomb. We’re edited by Drew Hawley and our music is by Luke Stanley with vocals by Lizzie Harvey. The Sacred is a project of Theos, which is a think tank working in the intersection of religion, and values, and identity, and seeking to bring rigorous, intelligent, and gracious perspectives on faith into the public square. If you don’t know Theos’ work, I hope you go check it out. In the meantime, as always, I love it when you write a review. It really does give me a little boost in my day. Some of them have been constructive criticism as well, and I’ve really valued that. I really like chatting to people on social media. Come find me on Instagram or on X/Twitter – I’m sort of holding out there for now. You can get in touch with the team directly via The Sacred social media accounts. And I have a Substack, it’s called “Fully Alive”. It’s morefullyalive.substack, and that’s where I write more personally and directly about some of the things I’m thinking about. If you’ve not yet subscribed and that’s of interest, I love you to sign up. See you next time.
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