Five Poems

A grandmother’s lost leg. A mother’s scarred sacrum. A daughter transformed into stone. In these five poems, history dwells in the body, the past deep in the bone. Confronting themes of poverty, intimate partner violence, and childhood sexual trauma, the poems speak to the varying ways the poet and women in her family have insisted on survival. These poems bear shifts in landscape and language, namely, from St. Lucia to the United States, from Antillean Creole to American English. Part of a manuscript in progress, the poems seek to probe inherited and lived-through pain so as to move the spirit ever more deeply toward healing, wholeness, and promise.

Attachment, Self-Esteem and Subjective Well-Being Among Survivors of Childhood Sexual Trauma

The current study is a quantitative exploration of the relationships between attachment security, childhood sexual trauma, sexual self-esteem, and subjective well-being. It was predicted that higher levels of secure attachment, lower presence of childhood sexual trauma and higher levels of sexual self-esteem would contribute to higher levels of subjective well-being. Participants were 213 undergraduate students at a Midwestern university. Theories of attachment (Bowlby, 1973) and well-being (Lent, 2004) provided a framework to guide the hypotheses of the present study. We hypothesized that higher attachment security would be related to higher sexual self-esteem and higher subjective well-being, and that participants who scored higher on a scale measuring childhood sexual trauma would have lower sexual self-esteem and lower subjective well-being. It was found that high levels of attachment security and sexual self-esteem predicted high levels of subjective well-being, whereas presence of childhood sexual trauma predicted lower levels of sexual self-esteem. Results from hierarchical regression analyses fully supported the hypotheses of the present study. Future research should analyze possible coping mechanisms that may contribute to subjective well-being restoration as well as coping efficacy.