Meet Janet Bentley

Hi Janet, appreciate you sitting with us today to share your wisdom with our readers. So, let’s start with resilience – where do you get your resilience from?
I am not really sure. I have often wondered about this myself. I have read a lot of research on resilience, and it seems that genetics actually play a much smaller part of this than earlier thought. My childhood was not filled with love, caring, and support – and yet that is exactly what seems to be a strong indicator of resilience.

I am not sure what the answer is, but what I know is that all the stress and abuse I experienced as a child caused me to turn my anger inward as a survival strategy. It was too dangerous to show that anger at my abusers because they were mostly my caregivers. I think what I did without being aware of it was to use that anger to motivate me to never be like them. Almost every decision I made, things like getting straight A’s, never smoking, etc. were made in an effort to be very different from my family.

I am the oldest of 8 children and was put in a position to care for them from a very young age. We all turned out so differently, and I would say that I ended up with more resilience than most of them.

I can check off every item on the ACE’s Quiz and yet here I am with my own nonprofit trying my best to do good while many of my siblings turned to addiction and suicide.

Let’s take a few minutes and cover your story. What should folks know about you and what you do?
I founded a nonprofit called Courageous Survivors in 2020. Our mission is to support adult survivors of sexual trauma and offer them tools for healing. When I first started out on my own healing journey, I struggled to find what I needed. It can be difficult to get the right therapist, and difficult to find any kind of a support group. Support groups are a crucial component of healing from sexual abuse as it provides a huge relief to feel less alone. With Courageous Survivors, I set out to find a way to help others find those things.

Our nonprofit is growing and is reaching more and more survivors. We offer virtual support groups, events, activities, and reliable resources and tools. In the future, we want to offer specific courses, peer support, and mind/body retreats. These things will help survivors realize that there is so much hope for healing.

We had a first gala last October called “Evening of Hope”. We will be having our second “Evening of Hope” on September 28th this year. We are incorporating feedback that we received from our last event, and our hope is that it will reach even more survivors – whether directly or through the community of therapists, advocates and other treatment programs that attend.

We are currently rebranding and recently redesigned our logo to incorporate the Lotus Flower. I believe this is a very appropriate symbol representing survivors – “growing through the mud to become the beautiful humans we were meant to be”. We will be launching this officially at our gala in September.

There is so much advice out there about all the different skills and qualities folks need to develop in order to succeed in today’s highly competitive environment and often it can feel overwhelming. So, if we had to break it down to just the three that matter most, which three skills or qualities would you focus on?
I think for me the qualities that were most impactful were passion, perseverance, and self-care.

It is extremely helpful to have a passion and belief in what you are doing. I may have come by this passion from the abuse and trauma I was a victim of, but today I love what I get to do.

The perseverance came from the belief that I could someday find a way out. I am extremely grateful that I had that hope in my heart. That hope kept me searching, and even though there were many times I was discouraged and felt like giving up, with the help of so many wonderful people put in my path, I picked myself up and kept trying.

The self-care is SO important. For me, self-care looks like therapy, a support system around me who I can count on, making time for the things that bring me peace and calm like nature, fun, and family and friends.

As far as advice, I can only share my own experience and what worked for me. I had to develop self-compassion slowly to counter those strong survival strategies. Now when I am in the middle of my attempts at perfectionism, or criticizing myself when I can’t do “everything for everybody”, I try and pause, breathe, and tell myself I am human,

Okay, so before we go we always love to ask if you are looking for folks to partner or collaborate with?
At this point in my nonprofit’s growth, I am looking for quite a bit! I am looking for sponsors who are willing to commit funds to our mission. I am looking for board members. I am looking for volunteers and recurring donors.

To continue our mission, we need dollars and volunteers. I need help with so much – right now I frequently get overwhelmed, and have to accept that to get to the next level, I can’t do it on my own.