A little more than two years ago, when the nation heard Donald Trump brag to Billy Bush about sexually assaulting women, it reignited a debate that brought forth a public wave of survivor stories. We were about to enter a cultural moment of how we talk about and deal with sexual aggression.

Since then, there’s been a constant public negotiation about what sexual assault looks like, how commonplace it is, who is believed and what the consequences should be. In the past, political coverage of sex scandals largely focused on consensual affairs. That’s how the nation viewed Bill Clinton’s affair with Monica Lewinsky in the ‘90s, though it might be seen differently today.

Now we have started talking about power -- which is really at the root of sexual violence. Unwittingly, then-candidate Trump forced the country to reckon with sexual abuse, harassment and assault in a different way. The old ways -- shame, hide, dismiss -- had perpetuated generations of trauma. The language he used when talking to another man spoke to his ability to overpower. Those who dismissed his words suggested men spoke this way all the time. Consider that the allegations surrounding Brett Kavanaugh, his Supreme Court nominee, reflect the same core debate around Trump’s own words and alleged actions. Who do we believe? What are the consequences?

In the process of getting from Trump’s infamous tape to Kavanaugh’s hearings, the floodgates of our collective trauma burst. For some, it’s been two years of revisiting buried pain. We’ve been hearing reports of various kinds of sexualized aggression nearly nonstop; stories that sound all too familiar. The news cycle has been punctuated with the high crimes of high-profile abusers -- Harvey Weinstein, Bill Cosby, Larry Nassar -- and a seemingly endless list of powerful harassers, who used their positions to take advantage of women and ruin lives and careers.

The progress -- removing those who behaved badly or criminally from positions of power -- has come at a cost beyond the harassment, vilification and threats faced by some women who have come forward. There’s been an emotional cost borne by every person who has ever been victimized. People who could never confront their attackers began bearing witness on social media. Others started re-examining their own past, confronting repressed memories and struggling with hard questions: Should you reveal your experiences? Should you talk to your family about them? If so, how? How should one respond to upsetting stories or reactions from friends or family?

I’ve found that the most useful response is compassion. To my friends and readers who have shared their traumas, all I can say is that I believe you. I’m angry this happened. It was never your fault. You are not alone.

The MeToo movement has felt like a tsunami, or as if a long-dormant volcano erupted in our national discourse. But this movement toward justice is better imagined as an ocean, with tides that will continue to roll in. They will crest, then recede. Every new revelation is another reminder of the roles in all stories of sexual violence: the victim, the abuser, the Greek chorus of judgment. In each case, we are forced to react to a person’s pain and make a judgment. That in itself is draining.

Perhaps it was the dismissive response to the “Access Hollywood” tape that started to unsettle the previously silent: those who had been “grabbed,” groped and worse. When women started to come forward to corroborate Trump’s “locker room” talk with allegations of abuse and assaults he committed against them, others also started talking.

Statistics we’ve long heard -- 1 out of 4 girls and 1 out of 6 boys experiences sexual abuse before age 18 -- turned into real voices of real people we could not turn away from. If there was a cancer that affected as many children as sexual abuse, we would declare an epidemic and focus everything on a cure. With sexualized violence, our society had internalized the false idea that there was no cure. That this was an incurable societal affliction.

It’s not.

The only way to move on from pain is to transform it. We have started to believe new narratives about sexual violence. We can reduce how often it happens by educating people on how it happens. We can expose the attitudes and circumstances that allow it to persist.

We can enforce consequences. Survivors can be empowered to help others.

From years of torment, there will be healing.

Senators will soon consider the credibility of allegations of sexual assault against a Supreme Court nominee.

The court of public opinion is also paying close attention. Voters, including parents worried about similar scenarios that their own high-schoolers may witness or experience, are taking note. And a series of logical questions prevent reasonable people -- including several Republicans -- from simply dismissing the allegations against Brett Kavanaugh.

Christine Blasey Ford, a psychology professor at Palo Alto University, reluctantly spoke out about a traumatic assault at a party when she was in high school, more than three decades ago. She says Kavanaugh pinned her down, groped her, tried to rip her clothes off and covered her mouth so she couldn’t scream. She said she thought he could have inadvertently killed her in his drunken state. She was 15. He was 17.

There are those who have tried to discredit her before any further investigation has happened. But for those considering her account more objectively, it raises questions that go to the heart of what is believable and credible.

First of all, why would Ford tell the same story to her husband and a therapist six years ago, in 2012? The therapist has documented notes of the same incident.

Why would she willingly take a lie-detector test (that she passed)?

If she was making up a story, why would she say there was another person in the room? She even names this person: Mark Judge, Kavanaugh’s friend and classmate at Georgetown Preparatory School. In her account, Judge jumped on top of them, sending all three tumbling, which allowed her to escape possibly being raped. Judge and Kavanaugh have both denied all the allegations.

Even more telling, after seeing what happens to women who speak out against powerful men -- such as what happened to Anita Hill during the Clarence Thomas hearings in 1991 -- why would Ford subject herself to humiliation, death threats and harassment by coming forward?

Why would she want to relive what must be among the worst memories of her life, publicly, in front of the nation? What could compel a woman to stand to lose so much -- her credibility and her privacy -- while risking her safety?

Ford tried to raise her concerns anonymously, and eventually spoke out after reports of her story came out. Most women and the vast majority of children and teens don’t report it when they are sexually abused or assaulted.

But how many women would attempt to bring to light information about their attacker if he were about to assume a lifetime appointment to the highest court in the country? It doesn’t make sense to invite this amount of pain and trouble into your life unless the stakes are too high to remain silent.

Perhaps the answers suggested by these questions is why Republicans like Sen. Orrin Hatch and an editorial in the Wall Street Journal are bringing out the worst sort of defense for Kavanaugh -- that even if he did it, it’s not that bad. These defenders are trying to claim that an attack on a girl is irrelevant to the confirmation of a Supreme Court justice, and they are doing President Trump’s nominee a grave disservice.

Attempted rape is not youthful indiscretion. There are 17-year-olds sentenced to prison for it. Supreme Court nominations have been derailed for far less.

Each of us will have to decide whether Ford’s allegations or Kavanaugh’s denials ring true. We will have to consider who has more to gain from lying. We will be able to judge if our values align with those who say an attempted rape in one’s teens is really no big deal.

Perhaps there was a time when such allegations, even if most people believed they were credible, were not taken seriously enough to impact a powerful man’s rise.

That is not this time.

I recently met with a willing, would-be executioner: a man who said he would gladly kill former presidents Barack Obama and Bill Clinton. Hillary too, of course.

At first, I figured he was joking. He assured me he was not.

“I think you underestimate the number of people who would pin a medal on me,” he said. Later, over email, I asked him to clarify. He wasn’t actually serious about murdering anyone, was he?

“My disgust for the conduct of the Clintons and Obama while they were in office is such that after they were tried and convicted, I would be glad to serve as their executioner. Preferably by driving over them in my car, several times,” he replied.

I got to know Edward Chapman, a 75-year-old retired federal employee who worked for the Department of the Army in St. Louis, when he started writing to me years ago. He was always polite and good-natured in his responses to my columns. Initially, I responded to his notes because he seemed genuinely curious about my ideas and beliefs, and he could disagree without being disagreeable. I knew we were on opposite sides of many political issues, although I had no idea of the depths of his animus toward former Democratic presidents.

He has emailed me at least a couple of times a month for several years. Once, he didn’t even know where to begin in taking down an argument I had made for better gun control regulations, so I asked him to send me articles he wanted me to read. Weeks later, I received a package with a half-dozen pro-NRA articles and a used copy of a book by John Locke. After I wrote about my disgust for the Trump administration’s family separation policy, he was so incensed by my position, he said, that he’d taken a day to cool off before writing me.

When a producer from StoryCorps reached out to me this summer about sitting down with a reader for a face-to-face, recorded interview, I immediately thought of Chapman. StoryCorps is a nonprofit that records interviews that can be submitted to the Library of Congress or aired on NPR. Its mission is to “preserve and share humanity’s stories in order to build connections between people.”

Going into the interview, I was inspired by the spirit of bipartisanship at Sen. John McCain’s recent funeral, and ready to find some common ground. Then, when we finally met, Chapman’s first question to me was whether I actually practiced Islam, which he considers one of the greatest evils in the world.

There may not be as much common ground here as I had hoped.

He informed me that he was convinced that “raghead Obama” is a Muslim. I asked if any evidence could convince him otherwise. He said that the Pope himself could vouch for Obama’s Christianity and Obama could present Jesus to him, and he would still believe Obama was a Muslim. (For the record, Obama is a Christian.) I’d had no clue that my loyal reader was so deeply committed to conspiracy theories -- although, a 2016 poll found that two-thirds of Trump supporters believe Obama is a Muslim, so maybe I shouldn’t have been so surprised.

I told him about the boy in seventh grade who called my mom a “raghead” every day after school. Chapman said I was less of “an Islamic” in his eyes than Obama.

I encourage my children to talk to people outside their bubble of those who agree with them. It’s the only way to get a better understanding of the world we live in. But is there value in talking to people who reject reason and evidence and embrace bigoted views of others?

I honestly don’t know.

What I do know is that I ended up spending two hours talking to someone I normally would have written off. I discovered we both care deeply about protecting the environment, and that both our lives have been touched by Alzheimer’s (his wife, my grandparents).

I learned how easily people can compartmentalize their views: Chapman seemed completely sensible on certain topics and unhinged on others.

I seemed to puzzle him the same way. He said I’m a contradiction to him, because I’m a Muslim woman who seems like an intelligent, American suburban mom, whose writing he enjoys. How can this be?

I am perplexed how a man who would take joy in killing Obama, and who believes newspapers distort or hide the truth, could appreciate anything I have to offer.

We each must hope that we can influence the other in some way. More than “making connections” or recognizing our shared humanity, I think we both realized the limits to understanding.