Triggers, Land Mines, and Things That Aren't Fair....

(**Trigger warning, for anyone with PTSD and/or issues regarding any form of abuse.)


This may be the first time I have sat down to write already in tears, touching a deeply buried well of fear and pain, and although I refuse to label this feeling self-pity, I have to put that out there just to get it out of my own head, where it's lurking in the shadows, taunting me for daring to express these feelings of "it's just not fair".... I've been minimizing the severity and duration of the sexual abuse I suffered in my childhood for so long, and genuinely unaware that so much of my lifelong battle with emotional paralysis began so early in my life that I can't distinguish the long-term effects of that abuse from what I've always considered my awkwardness.... I brush it aside, because years of therapy as a young adult helped me deal with most of the conscious issues surrounding self-blame and the 'classic' symptomology of Incest Survivor Syndrome. I felt healed, felt my ownership of my sexuality, and had many years of feeling free of the burdens of shame and unworthiness that attach so persistently to so many of us. No one ever mentioned Complex Trauma, 20+ years ago no one was talking about PTSD except a handful of veteran's advocates, and no one was connecting that symptomology to changes in the brain, or speculating about how a prolonged experience of violation and helplessness would affect a child so young that the cognitive ability to recognize one's self hadn't fully formed yet. No one knew, then. We had barely begun to acknowledge the obvious impact on behavior and self-image, the using of sex to secure love in adolescence and adulthood, the tendencies to withdraw, self-injure, the eating disorders that often become a growing girl's last-ditch attempt to control something, anything, about her body in relationship to the world and people around her.... Because even a single episode of sexual abuse or assault can produce the same perceivable psychological effects, as can sexual assault at any age, the focus of therapy in those days was consciously grappling with and releasing internalized self-blame and asserting our right to healthy self-esteem and relationships built on trust, and learning how to feel healthy, adult desire. It was about self-empowerment, mostly; how to not be a victim anymore. Self-love was supposed to naturally follow this self-empowerment process. "I am not a victim, I am a survivor." That was the mantra, the manifesto, the emblem that announced to the world that while you may have been weak and helpless in the past, you were claiming and asserting your strength from here on out. It seemed so obvious then. Clear-cut, once we summoned the courage to speak of our pain, share details of specific episodes with each other, because telling was important, supporting fellow survivors as we fought shame and fear to speak of our experience. I remember joining an incest survivors' group on campus my sophomore year, not realizing that confronting these buried demons would make concentrating on classes nearly impossible. Individual therapy was required to participate in the group, thank goodness- the staff in charge had the foresight to realize we would be stirring up intense, potentially incapacitating repressed emotions and would need one-to-one support to help us through the healing process. We all bought a copy of The Courage to Heal, the incest/sexual abuse/rape survivor's bible. I remember how dog-eared and highlighted mine became, I remember the chapter devoted to partners trying to understand the roller coaster of emotions and confusion they had been drafted into, and all the tips for honoring their own sexual needs without pressuring their healing partner into unwanted sexual activity. Partners were strongly advised to find their own support network, as the healing survivor would not be able to prioritize her needs over her partner's in a healthy way for some time. I remember feeling a lot of resistance to telling my story, we met weekly and took turns, cautioned not to compare our pain with each other's; that we weren't supposed to minimize our own suffering because someone else's abuse lasted longer, or was more violent, or minimize their pain if the reverse were true. Abuse is abuse, they said, and we believed them. I still do- and I don't want my story to be used to minimize anyone else's, truly. Violation of the body and will is traumatic, period. At any age, by anyone. When someone shares the story of their violation, it's to free themselves from the burden of the secret, not to diminish the experience of anyone else. It's to give the amorphous cloud of shame and yuck inside them some kind of finite dimensions, to regain some sense of control, to own the memories they were told to keep to themselves forever. It's part of allowing yourself to believe it really happened, that you aren't crazy, that you didn't die from it and you're not in some hazy delusional coma. In a way, it's a rite of passage. The transition from victim to survivor, from powerless to empowered. If you can stand to tell your story, and others can stand to hear it, you gather around each other and hug and cry and feel enormous relief at believing yourself enough to speak of it, and being believed, often for the first time. [-So very awkward later, seeing each other on campus in unrelated venues- and profoundly unsettling, if you'd managed to NOT think about it for a brief time. None of us knew each other socially, and we weren't supposed to mention group as where we met each other-- revealing someone's past abuse FOR them is understandably forbidden, a betrayal of confidence of unimaginable magnitude, yet another violation of one's will. It makes me queasy to even think about it.] One by one we told our stories, dutifully cautioned not to compare or minimize, we were each here to assert our own truth and be validated.... I remember a girl, painfully thin, still struggling with a teenage eating disorder, her father a powerful man, a judge if I recall correctly, and one of the only stories I've ever heard in which the abuse had not ceased at some point, for some reason, at the very least during the high school years. And now he was holding her tuition over her head as blackmail to make sure she still came home for holidays. I was sickened by her story, for her, and infuriated- I wanted to protect her, expose him, kill him if he wouldn't stop, even if it meant flying to a distant city and learning to skulk in the shadows until the right opportunity presented itself. Getting angry for her helped me get angry for me too, which is yet another reason why we tell.... Knowing with certainty that she was not to blame, that the shame she felt was an additional unfair burden on one already suffering- helped me to grasp that the same was true for me. Feeling empathy and compassion for her helped me connect to those feelings for myself, finally. Hearing her story helped me understanding that telling is not about 'confessing our sins' though it may feel that way at times... It's more like jamming a finger down your throat to puke all that sickness and shame back onto the perpetrator, where it belongs. Unpleasant, but necessary. It sucks, but it helps. There's no prize or anything, and the damage doesn't just evaporate, but when you speak the unspeakable, it loses power. When you tell The Big Ugly Secret, it becomes the ugly truth. Still ugly, but not so scary. Plus, when you break the "don't ever tell" rule, you see how flimsy the other rules were (maybe are, for some, still)..... Don't resist. Don't complain. Be a good girl. Do as I say. Don't say no. Don't cry. Don't look so sad. Don't look so scared. Tell me you liked it. There's power in telling, at least when you tell the right people, and they hear you, and validate your words, and your right to speak them. There's power in hearing each other's stories too, hearing for the first time possibly, at least in person, that you are not the only one. Not the only one this happened to, not the only one who feels this way, not the only one with this seemingly impossible task of healing such devastating wounds... But really, you are still the only one your story happened to, and the only one who can tell it, own it, and honor yourself as the victim of an unspeakable crime. It's terrifying, even knowing in advance that you'll be believed, and supported. I can't even imagine the additional layers of trauma added for those who have told, and suffered consequences: disbelief, reinforcement of shame and guilt, ridicule, anger, punishment, and continued or intensified abuse. To tell the truth, and be called a liar, or worse. To ask for help and not receive it. To cry for help, compassion, understanding, respite, rescue, release... and find yourself still alone. To starve yourself or slice your own flesh in a silent scream for someone, anyone, to notice that this is a manifestation of how you feel inside, and be labeled attention-seeking, disordered, defective. To reach the care of medical professionals, still mute with fear, hoping that someone will ask the right question and pause long enough for your tongue to thaw, for you to find the words to describe your experience, or somehow miraculously interpret your silence for what it is, sheer paralyzing terror.... Despite all the cautions against it, I still compared, and minimized my own horrors. I still do, I can't seem to help it, especially if I'm speaking aloud. I can get a little closer in writing, at times, but still censor the most painful parts, even from myself. Knee-jerk self defense, for the most part, but also always a sense of deeply buried shame. We have a better understanding now of how repetitive trauma at a very young age embeds this sense of shame within the roots of the developing psyche, they call it "toxic shame". It contaminates everything. It's embedded deeply within my mind as far back as I can remember, and it keeps me silent, most of the time. I can write things I still can't force myself to say, sometimes. I still minimize, deflect, change topics, often against my will, hoping someone knows the question that unlocks my frozen tongue. But I was feeling shame long before I had the language skills to express it. When my conscious awareness of my self came into being, it was already permeated with toxic shame. I've sloughed the top few layers off, more than once now, and it helps, I hope it's a real start, and that with my newfound understanding of c-PTSD I can get some momentum going. I know stumbling across others who have faced court battles with narcissistic abusers, and finding a common theme of PTSD as a court-inflicted injury catapulted me out of the dissociative state I've been in since the trial 2 1/2 years ago and into some intense high speed processing that has already transformed my life for the better. Understand begets acceptance, for me. Feeling resistance, pushing up against it to measure it, nudging my way in around the sides just a little. Catching my breath and backing off when it stings, examine what I've learned. I can see that I've been hopping around enough to illustrate my point, following each intriguing thought before completing the one that sparked it. I've been calling this ADD for 24 years, but many of these symptoms overlap with PTSD and c-PTSD, and many more with the gifted intellect/creative thinker/introvert labels I've received over the years. I've often thought I must be mildly autistic, with a savant-style facility for written language. And there I go again, starting a new chapter, when I still haven't gotten to the point of this one. And since it's late, and I've lost the solitude I need to focus, I'll skip to it: When the other young women in my therapy group told stories of abuse at the hands of their parents, I was thankful that for me it was "only my brother". When they told stories of telling their mothers, and receiving scorn, I was grateful that although I never spoke of it directly, my mother noticed something was wrong, and tried to stop it, though she failed for reasons beyond her control. She tried, and it actually did get better for a long time, and by then I was old enough to make myself scarce more often than not, though he remained an unpredictable, sometimes explosive presence in my home, one whose voice made my skin crawl, until I was nearly 17. When my friends in my therapy group told stories of having their pre-adolescent bodies violated by adult men, I was so affected by my empathy with their pain that I couldn't help but be thankful that my brother was "only 2 years" older than me. When I finally told my story in group, I pushed myself and was both proud and relieved that I was able to say as much as I did, and I really did fight my tendency to minimize and redirect, with some success. But I know I left a lot out, some of it important, that I'm still struggling to even type, because letting it out of my head feels dangerous, like the part about how I'm pretty sure it started around the time I was three. And the part I was crying about when I sat down to write that feels so unfair. How because I was only 3, and the self-awareness portion of my mind was not fully formed, I have almost no ability to self-validate.... I can't consistently trust my own character, the thing in my head that feels like "me" is like a shadow most of the time, and when I catch a glimpse of her I think she might just be a rare and wonderful person, a human poem, but I can't be sure. That's the lived experience of "minimal ability to self-validate", I'm pretty sure, something I usually work around by being sure of my values and living them consistently, by feeding my thirst for poetry, nature, art, and people, by listening to them and loving them, leaving myself as much room for both solitude and spontaneity as I can.... Most of the time that does the trick, but when I'm overwhelmed, by sound or stress or not enough time to think, or when I fear I'm being silenced, I shut down. It's like a self-induced emotional coma, also known as dissociation. I can't self-validate at all in that state, and that shadowy "me" in my head loses almost all definition... That's the set-up for the part that's really unfair, the spring loaded sucker punch legacy of the narcissistic abuser from later years, the one who toyed with my mind for his own amusement, who courted me with poignant, fervent, irresistible love until I felt safe and special in his arms, and then turned on me. The first emotional scar he ever gave me was inflicted with the words "when did you get so fucking needy?".... When realistically, I hadn't been particularly needy at all, and was only trying to initiate some affection after a long absence from each other. Eventually he convinced me that to have needs at all was to be too needy, and that being too needy was the most tedious and unforgivable flaw a person could have. It's the combination, the complex in the Complex Trauma, the 'c' in the c-PTSD, that's so goddamn unfair. When I can't self-validate, I can't believe in myself, or sometimes even remember who I am inside. But I'm scared to seek validation elsewhere, because that's needy and I don't get to need anything. I might inconvenience someone. It's just fishing for compliments, for crying out loud, unforgivable. Repulsive. Selfish. Shallow. Pointless really, since asking for it is proof I don't deserve it. So yeah, not fair. I was crying tonight because an old friend said something nice about me, and I noticed that the flare of feeling recognized was almost absurdly gratifying, which highlighted my catch-22. Can't believe my own praise, can't seek it elsewhere. It's not usually this intense, there's a lot more middle ground most days, and some of the methods I've devised to deprogram my inner critic are paying off, lightening the weight of the "don't have needs" burden substantially. Enough that I can see it for what it is, an unfair toxic legacy I can and will get rid of. That I am actively getting rid of, day by day. Yay me! And hey, looky there. A hint of self-validation, with just a hint of weary sarcasm, not much.... It's a start. And it's 3:40 am, so it's going to have to suffice for now....