Struggling

When I started this blog, my idea was to chronicle how far I've come on my healing journey. My hope was that the people who would most benefit from my story would find their way here, and find comfort and strength in my words. At the very least, they would no longer feel so crushingly alone.

But the events I wrote about in my previous blog entry have made me feel like the lonely little girl I once was.

Sure, I have Sheldon. Don't get me wrong -- he has been amazing lately, not just as a husband but as my friend and ally. I have Randy. I have my support group. That is all great, and I am so, so thankful.

But I'm still that little girl.

Only now my secrets are out.

It's both relieving and horribly scary. I'm not sure what I want, other than to hide in my bed. I want some sort of reassurance. I want to feel safe.


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13 again

My brother began sexually abusing me when I was 13 years old.

Now, decades later, my husband told my parents. I had told my mother some time this past year, saying that Damien had molested me for years and that Randy, my therapist, described it as sexual abuse. On the phone with my husband, my mother denied that I had said any such thing, claiming that I had said only that my brother and I had had "problems".

My husband told them to expect a letter from me. It seemed like an excellent idea, but I've been stressing over it ever since then.

I was a young 13 year old. Physically I looked much younger. I'd "shot up" over the summer to almost 4'9", and I was a scrawny little thing, just barely beginning to develop. My period didn't start until almost two years later. Emotionally...well, most kids seemed more mature at that age.

Today, during therapy, I turned 13 again. At first, it was just my emotions, but then I morphed back into that little girl. I sat huddled on the couch and asked Randy fearfully if he thought my parents would get angry at me. Earlier I had told him how inept, stupid and ugly I had felt at that age, and how dirty I felt after the incest started...how I knew something was seriously wrong with me but couldn't figure out what it was...how I longed to be invisible. Now I WAS little me back then. I felt it...heard it in my voice. I started crying, and told Randy that I really wasn't a bad girl, I didn't mean to do bad things, I wasn't trying to be bad on purpose. I didn't tell him that I was afraid he didn't believe me, that I was afraid I was in trouble, that I was afraid he was going to get mad at me.

Randy was saying adult things and I couldn't figure out why he was talking to me that way. I told him that I didn't understand, but he just repeated himself. It was way over my head. I felt stupid. I wanted to ask him what he meant, but I was afraid he would get mad at me or make fun of me. I wanted to ask, "Why are you telling me these things? I'm just a kid!" His words didn't make sense. I wondered why he was treating me like an adult. It felt confusing and scary.

Then I remembered that, in another world, I'm supposed to be an adult. I wanted to ask Randy to help me find my way back to my adult self, but I didn't know how, and I was scared.

I forced myself to look around. I looked at my wedding ring and reminded myself that I'm a grown-up now; I'm not that little girl. I took off a ring my husband gave me, one I wear next to my wedding ring, and turned it over in my hands, reminding myself of where I was and who I am now.

It worked, mostly. Randy's words started making sense as he recapped our session. But I didn't feel completely adult. When I hugged him goodbye, I wanted him to reassure me, to tell me he didn't think I was a bad girl, to promise to talk to my parents and tell them that. But I was enough of an adult to keep those thoughts to myself.


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Trying to make sense of therapy

From 2009:

When my therapist and I started talking about the rape, I thought, "Great. In 6 weeks I'll be completely cured." Where I got this wacko idea, I don't know. Then I thought we would just deal with the rape...but we started looking at it in the immediate context of what was going on in my life in the months before and after, and suddenly more things began to make sense, such as why the older of my two rapists was able to gain my trust so quickly...why I was especially vulnerable to being set up...

As we processed the written account, my therapist would pick up on certain things I'd said in almost an offhand sort of way. He would see a significanse there that I didn't. So we would end up tugging on that piece of yarn, so to speak.

I started getting frustrated because I felt like we were taking detours. I had this whole plan in mind and then, in the middle of dealing with stuck point number whatever, we were suddenly talking about something completely unrelated to the rape...and I was reading books about this new thing, etc.

Now I'm beginning to see a pattern. I make some seemingly casual remark in the midst of a bunch of other stuff. My therapist says, "Wait, go back" and seems to think whatever I said needs to be looked at more carefully. I say, "Oh, that's nothing." He disagrees. I get defensive. Then I surprise myself by starting to panic. I realize that my mindreading therapist is trying to uncover something that seems to frightening for me to deal with. I insist, "We can't talk about this!" and either refuse to say why or come up with some excuse. (My latest is "Because you're a guy.") I become adamant that this is THE ONE THING I refuse to tell my therapist. In fact, I refuse to think about it. I'm angry at him for reminding me if whatever it is.

I go home. The panic builds. I can't stop thinking about the forbidden topic. I wrestle with myself over it. In extreme cases, I strongly consider quitting therapy. I feel like I'm going crazy. The pain is overwhelming. Finally I reach a point of such desperation where the need to tell the thing outweighs my fear of disclosing it. I drag myself to my next session, huddle on the couch trembling, hide my face, and force myself to talk about whatever it is that I've sworn to myself I would never talk about.

I am just beginning to see that some of the stuck points of my rape, the ones that I can't seem to work through, the ones that I least want to face, are somehow connected to something that happened years before. These "detours" really aren't. The more resistant I am to talk about something, the more important it is for me to bring it out in the light.

So I suppose my therapy seems somewhat freespirited in that regard. Sometimes it feels disjointed. But I'm realizing that the rape was not my only trauma, and that some strongly held faulty beliefs I've clung to all my life have made it really difficult to work through parts of the rape.


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Feelings flash cards

From 2009:

I'm thinking the right kind of flash cards could be useful in therapy.

Therapist: How are you feeling right now?

Me: Now? Um...(shuffling through flash cards and then holding up one that says "tired")

T: You hold that one up every week! I want to know how you are really feeling about what we just discussed.

Me: Uh, what about this one? (holding up one flash card after another) No? Do you think I might be feeling like this? Or maybe like this? What do you think about this one?

T: I think you should tell me how you are feeling.

Me: I know! I know! I'm pissed off about having to figure out how I'm feeling! Let's see...where is the "pissed off" flash card...


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Therapy clothes

From 2009:

Tomorrow morning is my therapy session, which means, among other things, that I'm picking out what to wear. The last thing I want is to be late to my session because I'm having one of those mornings where the simplest decisions are paralyzing. Even worse, what if I could not handle the stress of a decision that early in the morning and had to call my therapist's office to cancel? ("I can't decide what to wear...no, really...I can't decide what to eat either...I can't decide anything this morning...")

Then it dawned on me --- I should design a special line of clothing for women to wear to their therapy sessions! Of course, I have absolutely no fashion sense and couldn't design something even as simple as a bath towel, but why should I let that stop me?

Here are some of the features this wonderful line of therapy clothes will have:

- Comfortable. And comforting. Most outfits can also double as security blankets

- All items are washable and easy care. Can handle copious tears.

- All items are completely non-trauma-inducing and non-triggering. No tight neck openings to pull over the head, no noisy zippers or velcro.

- Keeps the wearer safely covered and feeling unexposed.

- Attractive and yet not too attractive. Actually NOT attractive -- who wants to attract their therapist? ICK! OK, so most of the clothes are pleasant looking.

- Some nondescript styles, frumpy styles, and baggy styles for those who would feel safer in such styles.

- Extra-large hoodies can be used to hide the face.

- Sleeves are specially designed to wipe away tears you don't want the therapist to see. ("Me? Crying? Of course not!")

- Each outfit comes with a "Feelings Cheat Sheet" concealed in the sleeve. ("How am I feeling? Hmmmm....let me see...I feel inebriated. Oh, wait. I don't have my reading glasses on. I think I meant to say infuriated. Yeah, that must be how I feel.")

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Learning to trust a male therapist

Written during the early months of therapy:

My therapist is a man and he seems to understand why that is sometimes an issue for me. A few weeks back, when I completely fell apart and had somewhat of a flasback during our session, he kept calmly reminding me where I was, and telling me that I was safe, he would never hurt me, etc. When I expressed some doubts about him and about being able to really trust him because he was male, he reacted in just the right way. He simply acknowledged what I was saying, but didn't try to defend himself, argue, tell me we needed to work through my issues with men or anything. He didn't remind me of how crucial it is for me to trust my therapist, and he didn't repeat his statement about not hurting me. He didn't turn any if this into being about him. He just sat with me calmly and, without trying to convince me of anything, simply WAS safe. That was huge in building my trust. That and the time he called my old boyfriend a jerk and laughed with me when I lamely tried to defend the jerk...and all the other times he has done and said things that make me realize that, for a man, he really does "get it".

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Therapy is driving me crazy

From a letter to a friend, written in 2009:

Let's face it, the therapist-client relationship has got to be the most bizarre relationship there is. At least it's the most bizarre relationship I've ever had. There is nothing else remotely like it. Not in my life. There is no one else that I visit once a week, usually dreading the visit, and yet paying for it, even though major parts of each visit feel like torment. And then there is the weird way we communicate. I almost always start out reading horrible, awful stuff out of my journal, usually punctuated by me saying, "Oh, no, I can't read that next sentence" and my therapist encouraging me to read it anyway. He asks clarifying questions and then we discuss, in excruciating detail, what I read. Periodically he asks what I am feeling at that moment. There is no way I would relate to anyone else in my life in such a weird way. I can just imagine getting together with a friend and reading awful hideous stuff to her so we could then discuss it, while I huddle on the couch, curled up in a ball, feeling miserable, vulnerable, and tormented. Who would want a friendship like that?

There have been times when I've felt like saying, "Can't we talk about something nice for a change?" but who wants to spend money to chat about how lovely the weather is? Then again, who wants to spend money to be tormented? See -- therapy is crazy.

Then there is the whole one-sided aspect of the therapist-client relationship. I spill my guts and tell him all sorts of gory, intimate details of my life that I don't share with anyone else. Does he open up in return? No, he just says, "Hhhhmmm..." and asks questions. What's up with that? Where is the give and take?

Then there are all the boundaries. In most of my relationships, one or both of us feel free to invite the other out for coffee, over to each other's house, or just to hang out somewhere. But there are all sorts of rules about what is and isn't appropriate in the therapy-client relationship, and it seems so restricted and artificial.

Plus, the whole goal is to get to the point where you say "goodbye" to each other. Is that strange or what? I typically don't start relationships with the hopes of ending them.

And somehow this really bizarre relationship is supposed to help me, among other things, have healthier relationships? Hahaha.

So, last Wednesday, before I had my breakdown, I read my anti-therapy rant to my therapist. It's not the first anti-therapy rant I've written, but it's the first one I've read to him. I've told him before that I was living a completely happy life before therapy ruined it all for me, and he just says, "Oh, yeah?" and laughs. Once he even responded, "Your mother was right. No good can come of therapy." I suspect he wasn't being serious. But then again, maybe he was. Therapists are kind of weird.

So this is what I read. My comments are in brackets.

"Therapy is so stupid and painful and it's made everything worse. It made me suicidal and all crazy. [I'm over the suicidal part...not sure about the crazy part.] I've gotten drunk more times. Then there's times like now when I want to get drunk so bad. The whole therapy thing hurts so bad. [Apparently it also makes for redundant writing.] I can't believe we are paying money so I can torment myself. Before therapy I didn't...[insert personal stuff and examples of how therapy is ruining my life]

I'm confused so much of the time and things hurt so much and I want to go back to not really thinking about all this stuff, not having nightmares, not hurting so damn bad and being so afraid. I really don't want to face any more of the truth because it's all ugly and painful and I was way better off not knowing. I just want it to stop hurting so damn much....I hate being so desperate to make the pain go away that I force myself to tell [name of therapist] all this awful stuff only it just keeps hurting more and more and I can't keep on doing this anymore..."

What did my therapist say to all this? "Hhhhmmm..."

So I went on reading the very next thing I'd written in my journal, which was my feelings about the stuck point I've finally decided not to avoid any more.

See? Therapy is driving me crazy. One moment I'm quitting because the whole process is too painful and the next I'm writing about the very stuck point that has been causing me the most pain.

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Memories

From December 2009:

One of the many things that has worried me since starting therapy is that, as I've allowed myself to think about and remember the rape, I would "remember" things that didn't actually happen. In my journaling, I tend to put all sorts of disclaimers such as "I think what happened is..." or "Maybe..." whenever I'm writing about something that seems like a new memory. Also, I tend to go into some sort of detective mode, looking for things that will serve as evidence for that memory.

The gaps in memory have been frustrating to me as I've been trying to process the rape. The fact that I was so drunk has made some of the memories shaky at best. But there are things that I've always remembered clearly...sometimes, it seems, too clearly.

All that is conflicting: I want to remember, but I want to forget.

There was a long time when I thought that the whole secret to healing from rape was to try to forget...that the less one remembered, the better it was. I think that's a common belief. My husband was shocked that, in therapy, I've been dredging up every little detail of the rape that I could. "Isn't the whole point to forget about it?" he asked.

Sometimes it's hard to trust in the therapeutic process when a lifetime of "Why dig up the past?" is ringing in my ears and when that digging up is so damn painful. And scary.

Then there are the body memories, the times when I can literally feel physical sensations of the rape. I didn't expect that. It made me feel like I was going crazy or that, in some sort of bizarre way, I was being dragged back to the rape and would never be able to return to now. My therapist has explained that I'm finally allowing myself to feel things that I have supressed for so many years. After the rape, I felt numb...very separated from my body...to the point that I have no idea how injured I may have been, other than the bruises on my upper body, which I saw but didn't really feel.

There was something in that long night that Randy, my therapist, has always thought significant. It was after both of my rapists had fucked me in the bedroom, separately, and then dragged me out into the living room and dumped me on the couch. At first, all I told Randy is that I asked them to let me go home. I knew that the old guy had said things I found upsetting, and then they had poured more alcohol down me. One of my huge stuck points was that I didn't resist my rapists...didn't scream...etc.

I knew there was more to what happened at that point than I was remembering. In fact, I was remembering more than that, but didn't want to think about it, didn't want to put the feelings into words. I would describe that part of the rape in almost completely unemotional terms, as if I had calmly asked, "May I please go home now?" and they had answered, "Sorry, no" and that had been that. Randy, mindreader that he is, wasn't satisfied with that version. One day during therapy, he said, "I think you did more than just ask to go home. I think you cried. I think you begged. I think you pleaded."

He was right. It was then that I had done everything I could think of to get them to stop...and it was then that I had felt utterly defeated by them...had realized that there was nothing that I could do to stop them. That part of the rape was significant in many ways. I did say no. I did try to get them to stop. But, more than that, I expressed my feelings about the rape, about what was happening, in a way that I would not do again for many years, until therapy.

Gradually I've been allowing myself to think about it more, to allow the memories to surface. I couldn't remember what the old guy said to me, but I could remember how I felt in reaction to his words, and how I felt completely defeated and hopeless. I sort of knew the gist of what he said.

Last night I remembered more. I remembered more clearly some of the things that were only ghost memories before. Something triggered the memories and I grabbed my journal and poured it all out on paper, while I was remembering, while I was feeling. It was all there...the fear, shock, sadness, sense of betrayal, disbelief, helplessness, hopelessness, even self-blame...I remembered some of the things I had said when I was weeping and pleading with him...I remembered some of the ugly, cruel things he said to me in return, and I realize that I had actually remembered them before, carried those messages with me, used those very words in therapy to blame and accuse myself.

I was alone in my office last night while all this came crashing in on me. I had the sense to stop journaling twice, when things got too intense. I took a break. But then it was like some barrier had been removed and all those vague ghost memories suddenly took form and I had to let them out, had to get them on paper.

This whole process is still so strange to me. People have told me, "You will remember when you are ready to remember." Last night, during one of my breaks from journaling, I thought of how thankful I was that I didn't have such specific, detailed memories before...that I was glad I'd already worked through some of this stuff in therapy. Last night was hard enough.

This feels like yet another piece of the puzzle has been put in place...I've been able to make more sense of what happened...why I reacted the way I did...and why Randy always sensed that was such a significant part of what happened that night.

Finally, after I'd written all I could, I went home, feeling completely shaken and undone. I forced myself to hang out with Sheldon, to choke down a late dinner, to act as if I didn't feel on the verge of complete craziness and panic and emotional breakdown. Everyone finally went to bed. It was just me and the dog, watching some stupid, mindless TV. Then I walked downstairs, paused at the liquor cabinet...and kept on walking, straight to my bed. It felt like a victory.

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My fictional life was so much better than this

From November 2009, to my support group:

The truth I'm having to face in therapy is agonizingly painful. It's something I've tried to forget, deny, explain away, minimize, pretend didn't really effect me, etc. I hate the ugly words my therapist keeps on using to describe what happened, but I can't argue with the accuracy of those words.

My beloved older brother, the guy who was my best friend in the whole world, sexually abused me over several years, beginning when I was 13 or 14. I don't think I'll ever understand why he did what he did or why I let him. The truth sucks.

After therapy, I was getting angrier and angrier at my brother. My therapist had brought up forgiveness and I realized I was nowhere near being ready for that. As I was driving home and my anger was mounting, I thought, "I don't want anything to do with my brother. As far as I'm concerned, he's dead to me!"

Then I remembered...oh, wait...he IS dead. I guess I have a weird sense of humor, but this actually struck me as funny.

There is all this confusing back and forth about what the truth is. This morning I'm thinking that what I wrote here just now can't possibly be true. Maybe I should just delete the whole thing. It's not that I'm denying what happened. It just seems so extreme to call it sexual abuse. That makes it sound like my brother was some horrible person who snuck into my room at night and forced himself on me in my sleep...or that he overpowered me or threatened me. Abuse sounds so...abusive. I'd rather think of it as something weird and inappropriate.

But then I remind myself of all the things about my rape that I have tried to minimize or deny. For example, I remember my attempts to convince my therapist that it was a consensual sex act when I came to and realized some guy was fucking me -- and didn't even know who it was at first. I actually tried to argue with my therapist when he asked how I could give consent when I was unconscious.

So maybe my attempts to call this not-really-abuse are the same sort of denial that I've become so good at over the years. Or maybe I'm trying to call it abuse so I can absolve myself of my guilt. I don't know.

Part of me wishes I'd never brought this up on therapy. Then again, my mind-reading therapist has a way of knowing when I'm holding out on him, and he somehow manages to get me to disclose stuff I've sworn never to tell anyone.

Working through this confusion, made worse by the typical self-blame we survivors tend to heap on ourselves, was nightmarishly difficult. I could never have done it alone, without a good therapist and a group of awesome survivors to support me.

The truth does set us free. But first it often has a way of hurting like the dickens.


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Best therapy homework ever

In November 2009, I wrote this to my support group:


Thursday was a rough day. I felt as if the foundation had been knocked out from under me. On Wednesday we had gone through some really difficult stuff in therapy, dealing with things that happened in my teen years that are horribly painful for me to face. The emotional fallout from that was really rough.

It's hard for me to acknowledge that my family wasn't safe in many ways...even harder to acknowledge how the people I love hurt me. I'm not even sure I know who they are anymore or who I am. I feel as if no place and no person is safe for me.

So I had an emergency session on Friday morning. I read him the stuff that I'd journaled Wednesday night and Thursday. It was a good session in many ways, but I felt on the verge of breaking down and sobbing the whole time.

Randy's homework assignment was, "Do something fun this weekend".

Fun? I had no idea what to do. I wasn't sure if I was even capable of having fun.

Luckily I have a husband who hasn't forgotten how to have fun. The instant Sheldon heard about this homework assignment, he leaped into action. By the end of the weekend, I was deliciously exhausted, and actually almost relaxed, from all the fun we had.

I could get used to this kind of therapy homework.


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Why no nice secrets to face?

I wrote this in October 2009 to a member of my support group who had reminded that truth was healing no matter what:


Thanks. You're so right. It's just that I'm getting a bit weary of the process of uncovering more and more painful stuff in therapy...all this having to face difficult truth. Just once, I'd like to uncover something nice in therapy -- have some sort of happy realization, such as:

Wow, my mother was an even better mother than I ever thought. Plus, I've always had her approval and acceptance. How cool to finally realize that!

No one in my family abused me. It was all done by some other guy. What a relief!

The rape? Just a bad nightmare. None of it ever happened!

Yeah, that's the sort of stuff I'd like to uncover in therapy, instead of having to admit that the truth is that things were much worse than I've tried to pretend all these years.


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The truth isn't all it's cracked up to be

From October 2009:


I kinda got dragged into therapy. It started out with members of our family seeing the therapist because of a family crisis. Then, during a session where it was just me, something really triggering happened and it seems like the next thing I knew, I was having weekly sessions and trying to finally process my rape. I thought 6 sessions would pretty much fix me. I thought we'd deal with the rape only and then everything would be hunky-dory.

Wrong. I can't believe how wrong I was.

Somehow, in the context of dealing with my PTSD and rape, reading stuff, and trying to work through this mess, all these other issues started coming to the surface. Stuff I thought was no big deal. Stuff I thought I was long over. Stuff I was in major denial over. Somehow my mind-reading therapist knew all that stuff existed and was even able to figure out what some of it was before I told him.

That's bad enough. But the really hard thing is that Randy is not in favor of leaving things sealed up in a box, deeply buried. He seems to belive that some sort of toxic mess manages to ooze out and poison the rest of my life.
So yesterday we were dealing with the contents of one of those boxes. After I'd finished reading my journal to him, he started restating what I'd written.

I tried to argue with his choice of words, but I had to admit he was being accurate.

"You're making it sound so horrible!" I protested.

"It was horrible," he said.

I left the session feeling, for the most part, that sense of relief that comes from unburdening painful secrets and not having the therapist gasp in horror and disgust. Unfortunately that didn't last all that long. Feelings I didn't even know I had hit me like a sledgehammer.

The grief and anger is kinda overwhelming right now.

I've spent all my life carefully maintaining this fiction that my family was near-perfect and I had a near-perfect childhood that was marred only by school. My parents were wonderful. It made no sense that we had issues because our parents were the best parents in the world. My brother was the best brother.

For some reason, Randy wasn't buying this idyllic picture. He didn't think, for example, that my depression at age 14 was just teenage moodiness brought on by my making a big deal out of nothing. He didn't think I was humorless and over-sensitive.

Gradually stuff has come out. I've disclosed some really painful stuff. He has used awful words to describe it, words I never wanted to attach to my family, words I'd like to argue with but can't.

So I'm grieving over the loss of that near-perfect family. I'm grieving over having to admit that some of the people I love the most in the world hurt me in ways I can't bring myself to write about. I'll never have an answer to my question of "Why did you do all that? How could you?" I've lost this pretty picture I had painted and, in it's place all I have is confusion, grief, and anger.


It does get better. It's a painful process, facing the ugly truth, but it is the only way to healing. It's worth it...eventually.


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Another therapy crisis

From October 2009:


A few months ago, I came very close to quitting therapy. I just couldn't handle the fact that I had disclosed my deepest darkest secret to my therapist. I wanted to run away. Somehow I managed to stay, and we worked through it.

Recently I remembered something else, which I disclosed during my session last Wednesday. That was horrible enough. But Randy asked me to journal about what I had disclosed. I tried. I sort of succeeded, although there are parts that I could not write about. Writing about it --- just thinking about it --- made me want to throw up. Sometimes I found myself actually gagging.

So I wrote in my paper journal:

OK. I'm done. There is no way in hell I can read any of this to Randy. I can't talk about it. I wish I hadn't said anything. This is way too awful. I don't see the point. I don't want to do this any more. I want to go home and get drunk. Want to have angry, semi-rough, meaningless sex that is purely physical. Then I want to drink some more. Then I want to do the same thing again tomorrow and the next day, until all this doesn't seem so fresh and raw and painful, until I can just stop thinking about it.

Fuck therapy. This time I really don't think I can go back.

Somehow I managed to avoid the drinking and meaningless sex that night. But the next morning I wrote in my journal:

I decided that I was going to write Randy a letter, thank him for all his help, and then tell him I'd hit a wall --- reached the end of what I felt I could work through.

Then I wrote about what I thought was every possible thing we could talk about in our next session: this new disclosure, the stuck point journaling we're working through, the next two stuck points on my list, etc. I felt strongly that I simply could not handle any of those things, that I had reached the end. I actually started writing my "Dear Therapist" letter in my mind. But then I began to feel conflicted about that, so I wrote:

What am I going to do? Part of me wants to write that letter, but Randy won't let it go at that, and I wouldn't feel right about ignoring his calls.
Maybe I should just sit in his office and tell him face to face that I am way too scared to go on. And then cry my eyes out.

So that's what I'm going to do. Maybe not the crying my eyes out part... But I want to see this through. I've invested way too much time, effort, pain, money, etc. in therapy and I don't want to run away now, just because I feel scared, paralyzed, and stuck.

Randy and I have worked through difficult things before. One of my previous disclosures was so difficult that I couldn't bring myself to do more than hint at it, and he had to ask me questions to find out what had really happened. It was kind of like an extremely painful, therapy version of 20 questions. I've fallen apart during sessions. I've said things that I felt I was incapable of admitting to another person. I've sat curled up in a tight ball, session after session, face hidden, shaking and trembling. I've told Randy things, and done things, that I was so sure would make him gasp and say, "This is more than I can handle! I need to refer you to Dr. Supertherapist, who takes only the most disturbed and deranged clients, although you may be beyond even his capabilities. Perhaps a lengthy stay --- a few years or decades --- in a mental institution might help." Once I was convinced that something I told him would make him so recoil in disgust that he would throw me out of his office or, at the very least, clamp his hands over his ears and exclaim, "Never have I heard such vile filth! I really think you are beyond help!"

OK, so he doesn't actually talk like that. But the point is, when I have most feared that he would react strongly, decide I was too far gone for him to help, suggest I check myself into a mental hospital, or just look at me with disgust, he has never done any of that.

All those sessions that I thought I could not drag myself into his office for, the ones that I thought were the final thing that would make me snap and lose my mind completely --- I've survived them all. So I think I'll survive this too. Somehow.


And I did.


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Therapy can be rough

From my journal, September 2009:


Today was one of those rough, rough sessions. We're working through what I think is my most difficult stuck point. Last week, I read a detailed account of that part of the rape, and some of the effects it has had on my life since then. At the end of that session, Randy said that we would start working through what I'd written, sentence by sentence.

I'd been dreading that all week, and that's what I told him at the beginning of this session. We joked a bit about it and then dove right in. Somewhere in there, I mentioned the stuff I'd read about the power rapist and how a lot of it applied to the older of my two rapists. Randy agreed, and kept pointing out that I was in a lose-lose situation: begging and pleading had not worked at all, and any physical resistance would have only made things worse and escalated the violence. (OK, it's really hard for me to write the word "violence" in connection with my rape, because I've always tried to pretend, until therapy, that as far as rapes went, mine was nonviolent and almost "nice"...maybe it was just sex gone bad, some sort of misunderstanding...stupid, I know...)

So we trudged through, discussing sentence by painful sentence, and it was truly horrible at times. Then we got to one of the worst parts and I kind of freaked out. It was weird. It wasn't my typical flashback where --- boom! --- I'm suddenly there. And it wasn't like when I'm triggered and I purposefully make myself small to avoid the pain. (I don't know how else to describe it.) I felt the physical sensations of that part of the rape, yet I knew where I was. Then it was like something grabbed hold of me and was trying to drag me off, back to the rape. It was really scary. I think that at one point, I was curled up with my face down on the couch. I begged Randy to talk, because I thought the sound of his voice would keep me there, in that room, in the present. I'm not sure what I said, just that I desperately begged him to say something, I needed to hear his voice, I didn't want to go away. It felt as if I was about to be dragged down into a deep dark pit. His soothing voice was kind of like a beacon drawing me back, or like a lifeline I could cling to. It took me a while to be able to make out the words, to understand them, to feel like I was fully back in that room again, and to feel that I was safe.

Then I thought, "Oh, great. I went crazy in front of my therapist again." I think I made some joking comment to that effect, once I was fairly calm again. Randy assured me that I hadn't gone crazy.

I told him that it is hard for me to accept how physically rough the rape was because the way I'd coped for years was by telling myself it wasn't that bad. Now the rape seemed much more scary and awful. I wasn't sure that I could cope with that. Randy told me that I am coping -- every time I walk up the stairs to his office, every time I process things in therapy, every time I journal, etc.

During all this time I was trembling and feeling more and more scared. So I started saying, almost like a mantra, "Maybe it wasn't that bad. Maybe I'm remembering things wrong." Randy told me that was bullshit, I knew it was bullshit, and he wasn't going to let me lie to myself. He reminded me that the truth will set me free -- but first it will make me miserable. It's that miserable part that most people don't want to think about or talk about.

Then we talked about a few actually happy things in my life, and I felt much better: relieved, and like the session had been really cathartic. And I felt grateful to him for helping me find my way back from such a dark place.

He usually walks me out to the front desk and sometimes, if I'm feeling especially brave, we do this sort of cross between a high five and a hand-clasping sort of thing. But today we suddenly did one of those sideways, standing next to each other, arm and shoulder semi-hugs. It surprised me...and it surprised me even more that it felt right in a way, and I didn't get all nervous and twitchy like I often do when I hug men. I think I really needed a hug...and I was thankful for the brief semi-hug because it's all I can handle.


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Waking up from denial

It was in the summer of 2009 that I disclosed the incest to Randy, my therapist. He was incredibly gentle with me, most likely knowing how fragile I was at the time.

Immediately after the disclosure, I felt relief. Only an hour or so later, the panic set in. I was convinced there would be horrible, frightening consequences from my telling. It felt as if I had done something terribly wrong. I had betrayed my brother...in fact my entire family. Even though I don't believe in the dead coming back to haunt us, I couldn't shake the fear that the grave was not enough to shield me from my brother's wrath.

I didn't feel like a rational adult. I felt like a 13 year old girl, a very small and frightened one at that.

Randy continued to be patient and gentle with me. As I grew more comfortable with him knowing my secret, and less panicky, he began pushing me a bit to face the truth and stop minimizing and denying what had been done to me.

That wasn't easy, and it didn't go too well, especially at first. I argued every time Randy used the word abuse. I would go home and scour the Internet for information so that I could "prove" to my therapist that sibling incest wasn't necessarily abusive nor traumatic. I didn't find anything I was willing to show him.

Months later, I had faced enough of the truth to be able to email this to a new member of my support group:

I buried my incest for years and was convinced that it didn't bother me. Even when it was happening, I was convinced it wasn't at all traumatic. It was just "that weird thing" and was completely separate from the rest of my life.

But then the memories surfaced, but I still thought it was no big deal, not even worth bringing up in therapy. After all, we were dealing with real trauma, and not some harmless stuff from years gone by.

Turns out I had been hiding from the truth for years. The incest had a profound effect on me, everything from sexual fantasies to my ability to trust men. We are shaped by our earliest sexual experiences. When those experiences are incestous, it makes sense that our shaping is not as healthy as it should be. I just never realized that, in a way, I had been "acting out" and reacting to the incest ever since it first started.

I'll warn you. It is not an easy thing to face this stuff, especially if you still love your abuser. (I have a hard time with that word.) I'm filled with a lot of confusion and unresolved questions...and a deep sense of sadness. But I'm still in the middle of trying to face the truth of what happened.

Visiting the apartment

From my journal in 2009:

Today I went to the apartment building where I was raped 28 years ago this month. It's more secure now, all locked up. A guy came out of his apartment and I talked my way in. There's now a fence around the pool, and I made a joke about it before the guy left me alone.

Took a few pictures. Stayed mostly calm, until I walked back out front and started shaking. It took all my self-control not to puke.

Got in the car and had a sort of flashback, where I knew where I was, but my body was feeling part of the rape. I kept trying to scoot away, but there was nowhere to go. It was horrible.

I couldn't stand to be there a second longer, so I drove off. I shouldn't have, because I could barely pay attention. I started crying. So damn afraid. So alone. This was a big mistake.

I'm parked in the marina. I wish I could call someone, but I don't know who to call. This hurts so much. Why did I want to do this anyway?

It's so real. So horribly real.

Later I wrote this:

In a complete and utter panic, I decided the whole damn thing was unbearable. The only way I was going to be able to deal with the overwhelming pain & craziness was to literally run away. So I left my therapist a message telling him about the apartment and that I wasn't sure if I would be back in town Monday for my appointment. Then I drove down to the beach and decided that I would get a bunch of booze, hole up in a hotel room, and drink until I didn't want to drink any more, even if that took all weekend or longer.

About an hour later -- luckily before I went and bought out half a liquor store -- it dawned on me that I can't just disappear without an explanation. Somehow I've got to pull myself together.

At least I'm not shaking any more and not in a crazy panic. It just hurts so much. So damn much.

I still carry around digital versions of the pictures I took of the apartment building. I'm not sure why.

Disclosing to my therapist

After a few months of therapy, something I had refused to think about suddenly refused to stay buried. I agonized over whether or not to tell Randy, my therapist. I even went so far as to tell him, "There is something I haven't told you and I'm afraid to tell."

Before that, my family of origin was off limits in therapy, except when I would describe how supposedly incredibly wonderful my brother Damien was. If Randy probed for the slightest detail of my growing up years, I grew angry and clammed up. Anything before the year I'd been raped was not up for discussion.

Needless to say, this was a major red flag.

Finally the burden of my secret grew too much for me. This is what I wrote to my support group for sexual trauma survivors. I couldn't even bring myself to mention what my secret was:

Last Friday morning, I somehow got up my nerve to tell my therapist what I think is my deepest darkest secret -- something I had so successfully buried that I hadn't even thought about it in many years, until recently. I was torn about telling, because I was convinced I was so "over" this thing, that it didn't impact my life today, etc., etc., But then I started wondering why, if I was so untouched by it, did I keep questioning as to whether I should tell, and why did I keep coming up with millions of reasons not to tell?

The only other person I'd ever told had been Dr. X, a therapist I saw briefly during college. We had been going around in circles during therapy. I wanted to talk about inconsequential things and she wanted, I suppose, to do something therapy-like. So I thought, aren't you supposed to tell your deepest darkest secrets in therapy? Before that session, I walked endlessly around campus, getting up my nerve. I may have even smoked a cigarette. Then I walked in, told her, made excuses, and walked out, never to return.

I told Randy, my therapist, that I was afraid I might do the same thing again.

Before Friday's session, I had tried to write it out in my journal. But all I kept doing is writing the prefacing remarks over and over again until they started sounding more and more polished and semi-eloquent. On Friday, I read them out loud. Got almost to the end of what I'd written and couldn't say the last few sentences. Randy assured me that he wanted to hear it, but didn't want to coerce me. Didn't want me to leave, either.

So I read the last little bit -- that only vaguely hinted at my secret -- and then I said, "That's all I could write." Suddenly even that had seemed way too much, and I put my arms on my raised knees, and buried my face in my arms.

Randy asked if he could ask me a question. He then guessed correctly at my secret. Pretty much the way we handled the telling part is that he kept asking questions and I answered them, with my face buried the entire time. Sometimes we would stop and he would ask how/what I was feeling, and he would reassure me. At one point he asked why I was hiding and I said, "I just can't look at you." But that wasn't all of it. I didn't want him looking at me either.

Towards the end, I felt much safer and was able to lift up my head. By the end of the session, I felt relieved that I had told.

As I left, I thought that if I was going to pick the perfect way for my therapist to react -- well, that's exactly how he reacted. I really thought it would not be some sort of nightmare to face him again. I felt drained, mostly relieved, and surreal.

Then, a few hours later, seemingly out of the blue, all that relief disappeard and panic washed over me. I felt like I could barely breathe, like my pounding heart was going to burst out of my chest.

It hit me: I told. Randy knows. Sure, he was all wonderful and everything, but there was no way I could ever face him again. Telling was a big mistake.

I felt overcome with guilt. My secret involves someone else, and I didn't have their permission to tell. I felt that I'd betrayed them.

Randy called on my cell phone, while I was driving down the freeway, to see how I was doing. I told him how much I now regretted telling. Told him I wasn't sure if I could ever come back. But I did promise that I wouldn't just disappear; I'd let him know what I decided. He, of course, kept telling me that I'd done the right thing in telling. I kept thinking, how therapish of him...

Since then, I've felt so confused and torn. One minute I will decide never to return to therapy with Randy again. Then I'll decide to return if he agrees to pretend Friday's session never happened. An hour later, I'll decide that we need to look at why I am so distressed over this. Then I'll decide to cancel my next appointment (on Wednesday) just so that I can have more time to sort through what I want to do.

I keep waking in the night, and the realization that I told hits me like a club.

I've told Randy some things that were really hard to admit, very painful...but I've never regretted telling him anything until now.

This hurts. And it's so confusing. And I don't know what to do.

Forgiveness

This is getting way ahead of myself, but I felt a sudden urge to post it.

I know what it's like to hate your rapists. My brother and I even tried to kill one of them. Yes, it is extremely ironic that my former longterm sexual abuser would attempt to murder my rapist.

I think there are levels of forgiveness. I also see a difference between forgiving someone and restoring them to full relationship. There is no way I'd ever want to hang out with my rapists, even if I could. I don't think forgiving my son's sexual abuser means I should ever give him free access to my hypothetical grandchildren. Forgiving someone does not make them worthy of our trust.

My therapist has said that he sometimes wishes my brother had pulled the trigger when he had the older rapist at gunpoint. Rationally and morally he disagrees with revenge killings; he even thinks that it is wrong for him to wish such a thing. But his outrage at what my rapists did, not just to me but to other women, cries out for justice and vengeance.

I used to feel the same way, not that long ago. Many times my rapists were my imagined target for kicks, punches, large wooden sticks, swords, arrows, bullets, etc. Sometimes I wondered if my anger at them fueled my more violent hobbies. I believe in hell, and I'm ashamed to say that I took pleasure in the thought that my older rapist surely must be roasting in eternal torment.

I'm not sure what changed that. We haven't really talked about forgiveness much in therapy, and never in connection with my rapists. If anything, since I'm realizing and admitting how awful the rape was, and how I am still scarred by it in every way but physically, I should be more angry at them. And I have been angry, almost frighteningly so.

But recently I found myself, through no effort of my own, free of the desire for vengeance. What they did was horrible beyond words and almost destroyed me. But I have survived. I have experienced love and joy and the births of my adorable babies. They didn't steal everything from me. And it dawned on me that I would never ever want to be them. To me, that would be a sort of hell in itself. I surprised myself by praying for the older of the two, now most surely dead, "God, please have mercy on his soul." That was surprising on a number of levels, especially since my faith tradition does not include praying for the dead.

But, to me, that's forgiveness. I've tried to will myself to forgive them before, but it never worked. This time it happened without me noticing until it was a done deal. And it feels good...surprisingly freeing.

Getting rid of the hate, anger, and frustrated desire for revenge hasn't made the memories of my rape any less painful. It's just made me feel somewhat cleaner and lighter inside...and part of me is more free than I've been in way, way too many years.


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Protective or controlling?

I completely bought into my mother's stories, that became family lore, of how wonderfully protective my older brother was of me.

Sheldon was the first to burst my bubble. For years, whenever I would tell some tale of supposed protectiveness, he would say, "You'd get angry if I did that." His words baffled and annoyed me. I thought it was a lame excuse on his part for not being protective -- by blaming it on me.

Finally, after I'd been in therapy for awhile, Sheldon spelled it out for me: "Damien was not being protective; he was being controlling." He re-interpreted some of my favorite stories in that light. It made sense.

Randy agreed. He even went further. "He didn't protect you from himself. In addition, when he should have been protecting you as an older brother, he insisted on getting you involved in porn, cigarettes, alcohol, and drugs." He told me a story of an older sibling protecting him when they were in their teens as a way of offering contrast.

It was painful to give up that nice fantasy.

Recently, I had to face the same truth about my mother. She prides herself in her "over-protectiveness" of us. It finally dawned on me that each example of that involved her not allowing us to go places or do things, often because she would worry. It seemed more about protecting herself from worry. But it's not just that...every instance involved her controlling us, especially me.

She didn't protect me from my older brother's bullying, even the times she observed it directly. She didn't protect me from being controlled by him. When I was bullied and teased at school, no motherly protective instinct kicked in; instead, she found it either amusing or too trivial to bother with.

Worst of all, she had no qualms about sending me back to live in the same apartment building as the men who raped me when I was 23. It didn't trouble her at all that every time I looked out my window or walked to and from my apartment, the apartment where I'd been raped stared me in the face. She didn't care that my rapists lived so close to me, that we couldn't help seeing each other, running into each other at the mailbox or in the laundry room. In her defense, maybe she thought they had lost interest in me after raping me and thus no longer posed a threat...or maybe she naively thought they only raped women they lured into their apartment. But she saw no need to protect me from the anguish of seeing them again.

Years later, when I asked her whether she worried about me living there, she waved her hand dismissively. She claimed she thought the older one had left immediately, rather than a few weeks later. She wasn't at all worried about the younger one. Why was I making such a big deal about it? After all, they left me pretty much alone after the rape.

Protective? No. Controlling? Yes.

Not that long ago, she was telling some stories from my childhood. "I was so protective!" she said. "People always said I was over-protective!" Then she told me about all the things she didn't let us do...normal kid stuff that, as a parent, I delighted in letting my kids do. I wanted them to experience exuberant play, even if it meant getting dirty, some messes, a few skinned knees, and a few rips in their jeans. My face must have betrayed my feelings because my mother said defensively, "I did let you talk in your rooms!"

Oh, wow, I guess she wasn't a complete tyrant then!