During the post-mortem of the contentious Senate vote to confirm Brett Kavanaugh to the Supreme Court, my mind kept going back to what a freshman said in the writing class I’m teaching.

The morning after Dr. Christine Blasey Ford’s and Kavanaugh’s testimonies, I asked how many students had watched the hearings. Nearly two-thirds of the students’ hands went up. I asked if anyone wanted to share how they felt. A young woman, one of the brightest in the class, said: “It made me feel like I didn’t have value. I can’t even put into words how I felt watching it.”

All I could say in response was that a lot of people could relate to how she felt. A few others, male and female students, also shared their thoughts. I wanted to give them a nonjudgmental space to say whatever they were thinking before moving on to the lesson of the day.

But her words and my response have haunted me.

I hadn’t said much by way of specifics to my own teenage children, either. I wanted to give the confirmation process a chance to play out, and the emotions involved felt too raw.

My husband and I talked to them in broad terms about the sexual assault accusations. I debated whether to watch parts of the testimony with my 15-year-old daughter and 13-year-old son, and decided against it because it was so graphic and disturbing. This was a real person’s pain, not a public spectacle.

In the aftermath of the confirmation, the questions are even more difficult: Has anything changed since 1991, when Clarence Thomas was confirmed despite Anita Hill’s testimony of sexual harassment? Why does society still reward men who face multiple credible allegations of doing terrible things to women? Why do so many still blame victims or -- even worse -- try to ruin them for speaking out?

The Republican senators either did not believe what Ford said, or didn’t let it stop them from voting to confirm. One Democratic senator voted in support of Kavanaugh. The Republican president openly mocked Ford at a rally. His supporters heard him and cheered and laughed.

Those are facts, as hard as they may be to accept.

This was a painful process and outcome for millions of people, most of all for Ford. But there has been progress in how our society responds to allegations of sexual misconduct and violence. It’s the difference between what could have been a blowout and ended up a narrow loss.

More Americans said they believed Ford than Kavanaugh. Kavanaugh’s approval rating was in the tank: a majority (52 percent) believed he should not be confirmed. At least a few senators felt they needed the political cover of a hamstrung FBI “investigation.” More than 2,400 law professors signed a letter publicly opposing his nomination. A Republican-appointed retired justice spoke out against confirming him. Kavanaugh was eventually confirmed by senators who represent just 44 percent of Americans. He lost support even from several who publicly supported him before his troubling sworn testimony.

All of this matters.

Ford was an example of courage under fire.

Speaking out about such a personal and painful trauma, knowing that you will face additional threats and abuse because you feel it is your civic duty, is nothing short of heroic.

She also showed us what healing can look like.

After the testimony, we talked to our teenagers again about the risks of underage drinking, the importance of respectful intimate interactions, how to respond in uncomfortable situations and how to be a good friend to someone who has been hurt. We told them that there’s never any shame in seeking help, and that people can survive and thrive after suffering traumas if they get help.

Young people are getting all kinds of conflicting messages in the wake of a series of highly publicized allegations, and the resulting backlash. I’d like to drown out the noise and tell them the following.

To boys and young men: All the research shows that your chances of being falsely accused of raping someone are far, far less than a girl’s chances of actually being raped. I feel confident saying that the vast majority of you know that touching a person against their will is wrong. Do more to make that knowledge part of the culture.

Loudly. Subversively. Consistently. Bravely.

To my student, and other young women and girls: It’s OK to feel angry and frustrated and discouraged and sad. Survivors will not be silenced. We will keep working toward a more compassionate and just society. This country belongs just as much to you as it does to anyone else.

You have immeasurable value.

I can’t imagine my father herding a roomful of kindergartners.

To be sure, he has mellowed from the strict disciplinarian my siblings and I knew, growing up, into today’s grandpa of nine. He started substitute teaching full-time after he retired, and has mostly subbed in high school and middle school classrooms.

But kindergarten?

No way.

Except that’s exactly what’s happened. He’s been called more than a half-dozen times to fill in for a teacher with 20 squirmy kindergartners. My 75-year-old dad has stepped up, and I was delighted by his reports from the classroom.

“They are extremely energetic,” he said. They are curious about his name, so he repeats it with them a few times. Some of them ask, “Can we call you Grandpa?”

“I tell them to raise your hand. You don’t have to remember my name,” he said. A few students finish their work quickly and want to show him right away, as in immediately, right now.

“That can be really hard to cope with. They are coming at you one after another,” he said. He reminds them to raise their hands and wait their turn, and not to interrupt when he’s with another student. “I have to tell them this 10 to 15 times,” he said. Once they figure out that he means it, they wait.

The majority of his students are Hispanic, some are black and very few are white. A few will start speaking to him in Spanish right away, figuring his brown skin means he’s connected to their native language, also.

“When I tell them I don’t speak Spanish, they are surprised,” he said. He knows a little Spanish, but he doesn’t let on in order to encourage them to speak in English. A few will keep talking to him in Spanish the entire day.

His experience reminded me of a question that circulated on social media earlier this year: How many African-American male teachers did you have?

I did not have a single teacher who was black, Hispanic or Asian -- male or female -- in elementary school, middle school or high school. My massive suburban high school had nearly 3,000 students, with very few minorities among them. I had one Hispanic and one Middle Eastern professor in college, and one Hispanic professor in graduate school.

Out of the 80-plus educators who taught me throughout my life, at least 96 percent were white.

I wonder how that shaped my view of the world and of myself. I remember being pulled out of a grade school class, singled out to be tested for speech services. I had been indignant and humiliated that someone in my school had assumed my English was less than perfect even after years of perfect report cards. I didn’t miss a single question on that test, which I remember vividly more than 30 years later.

Maybe I remember how I felt so clearly because it didn’t feel like just my language skills were being tested, but something more than that.

About 2 percent of teachers in American public schools are African-American men. Research shows that nonwhite children, in particular, benefit from having teachers who look like them. Perhaps students are inspired and see them as role models. Perhaps these teachers see their nonwhite students from a different perspective.

I asked my father what he’s learned from his days teaching 5-year-olds.

“Patience,” he said, of course. But, just as importantly, he said he has learned that his youngest pupils are “very intelligent and smart.”

I thought about the disproportionate rate that black and brown elementary school children are suspended from school, how often they are assumed to be less gifted than others, and how frequently their behavior is considered problematic compared to the same behavior in their white peers.

My dad, in addition to how strictly he raised us, also instilled an unshakeable sense of self-worth in each of his children. Perhaps he will pass on that gift to one of his young charges.

It makes me glad that “Grandpa” found his way to a kindergarten class.

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.