Severe Weather

The Weather Channel used to fascinate me. Every morning I would turn it on and try to catch my local forecast. Over time it became easier to catch the weather on the internet and the local television stations started sending text messages with weather watches and warnings. Now I have an app on my phone I check long enough to see if my kids need to wear a jacket. As a result I have been caught in the rain a few times. To avoid being a soggy cold mess all I had to do was pay attention to the warnings.

This past week I did not pay attention to warning signs and found myself picked up by an emotional tornado, spun around, and tossed on the ground so hard the wind was knocked out of my chest. I did not see it coming because I had become too comfortable.

I had convinced myself the worst was over. So much work and writing had taken place, demons faced, tears shed, and addictions conquered. I was sure I had reached a stage of being a support for others rather than someone who needed to be supported. This attitude and complacency landed me flat on my back, struggling for breath.

Listening to a woman tell her story started me down the path towards the tornado. Storm clouds started to form but rather than listen to my body’s reaction, I chose to dismiss it and not take it as seriously. Previously I have taken notes regarding my reactions and where they started so I would have a point of reference later if I needed to work through something. No notes were taken and at the end of her story my head was starting to spin. There were many similarities with my story. It was the chaotic situation surrounding her abuse and age that hit my heart. The deeply rooted desire to feel special and feel affection in her story coincided with mine. I had felt the same love/hate relationship with my first abuser.

Already fighting the tornado strength winds, another woman brought up having a health sex life. I am still working on this with my own husband, but the memories of my first husband and the mental and sexual trauma he delivered jumped to the surface. I only wrote his name in my notebook. The tornado was beginning to carry me off and I was losing ground.

Next came the frustrations of a single woman wanting to be in a relationship but she feels she has too much emotional baggage due to the abuse. She is convinced no one will want to take her on as a girlfriend/wife.  All of the emotions tied to the abuse, especially the anger, are so overwhelming she did not know how to express them.  This young woman knew she had closed herself off with thick walls around her heart, determined to never be hurt again. This woman represents everything I have ever been and what I still struggle with. I had to face the fact I still need to open myself up more, especially in my relationship with my husband.

I went home rather shell shocked. I went through the motions of getting the kids and myself in bed. My head was still clogged and I felt unsteady on my feet but was convinced it would all be better in the morning. The next day started pretty well. My brain was fuzzy but I managed to function most of the morning. At lunch I had started to write on the debriefing sheet what I had felt and experienced the night before. It is usually best to do the sheet within 24 to 48 hours, while the information is still fresh. As I began to write the warning bells started going off in my head. The world was swirly and confusing and my emotions started to get the best of me. I made rash decisions, got wrapped up in paranoia, and just fell apart. While I had already written my story, I felt an urgent push to journal another part of it, to face an incident I had yet to deal with. I also needed to understand what had been stirred up the night before. I was in a bad place.

Fortunately my off balance ramblings were kindly squelched by a person who is familiar with my recovery process. He reminded me to breathe and not overreact to my emotions. I was also encouraged to sleep and not push myself to figure everything out at one time. I needed to slow down and really think about what was happening; to recognize the origin of the emotional panic and put it in its place.

This did not happen overnight but over the next couple of days I started to debrief myself. I started writing and logic started to beat out emotion. The 3 events I mentioned above were written out and I made the connections to my own story rather than getting mine mixed up with theirs. The storm started to move away. I was able to feel the ground under my feet again.

Being comfortable with the progress I have made is not a terrible thing. I do not want to feel there is a piano ready to drop on my head at any moment either. There is a delicate balance that has be learned and recognized. There is no doubt another victim’s story will stir up emotions in my heart. There will be situations that will cause initial panic at their familiarity with my abuse. However, I need to learn to take a deep breath, put them in perspective, and not let amped-up emotions override logic; in no way an easy task. It will come with time and practice.

Facing the Enemy

I am headed into a battle; a battle to win the war of gaining my intended life. I am working to find my purpose. I was simply not created to mop up the need of my abusers. God has a much better plan for my life, for all of our lives.

For the last 3 to 4 months I have felt a nagging in my heart to no longer work around my core feelings by focusing on symptoms. Not that I am finished with symptoms, but I really believe if I do not get to the center, the symptoms will stick. I could stop right here and still be able to live an okay life, working around the damage of the abuse and maybe moving further past it. However, I do not want an okay life. I want the life I am meant to live, the one God created me for. I need to feel whole and fully experience life.   

Compartmentalization of the abuse is a defense mechanism. There are compartments holding memories, emotions, and self-protection. While I have cried and experienced feelings about the abuse I had to stifle, there was always a part I did not touch, avoiding the core driving my life and decision making.

About a month ago, after great personal physical harm was experienced, my counselor and I decided it was really time to excavate, to dig into the core. He asked where I wanted to start and, much to his surprise, I chose to start with the most destructive emotions. There were a few reasons for this. First, I had pretty good control over the anger, sadness, and over protection. Second, I was starting to spiral down from the destructive thinking and there was a very real threat to my physical body as well as emotional stability. Lastly, if I could survive getting to the core of harmful emotions, it would put the others in a different perspective and possibly be less painful to work through.  

The lies we believe are hurtful and deceitful. Any cutting, toenail removal, or other painful physical action I took was driven by the lies. For the longest time I was able to keep them under control and not really expose myself to origin. I hid from them out of fear of experiencing the incredible pain.

I created this monster of lies within. My abuser (nickname Junior) told me the sexual abuse was my fault. If I was not cute, sweet, or pretty, he would not do those things to me. Junior was excellent at convincing me he just could not help himself because I was so desirable that I was the instigating factor. I made him a bad person because I was purposely tempting him and therefore responsible for all of it. I was 3-½. Even now I can hear Junior feeding me these lines. I shoved all those “responsibility” feelings and lies into a compartment. Without being conscious of it, I was punishing myself for causing the abuse, for creating a monster forced to sexually assault me based on my actions.

My therapist’s intern, who has participated in my sessions, made a casual remark that struck a nerve. She wondered if I also acted out of un-forgiveness? Was the inability to forgive myself lowering my resistance, inspiring the physical harm because I felt I really did deserve it? It was ultimately decided to explore this in the next 2-hour session he had available. There was concern a 55-minute session would not be enough time to “regroup” afterwards and the goal was to avoid cutting or worse. With the longer session there was time to recover if it got really bad. For the record, there was not any pressure to actually do this in the 2-hour session. It was completely up to me how it went. If I deferred, it was not a big deal and the time would be used for other issues.

In the few weeks leading up to the longer session I started to write down the possible negative emotions behind the self-destruction. Once I had the list, I put it aside and waited. I was nervous about getting too involved without proper protection in place.

The self-hatred was composed of my abuser’s lies about my being to blame and all the other negative emotions I have about myself whether abuse related. The list of hurtful emotions consists of un-forgiveness, self-hatred, vulnerability, intimacy, brokenness, and unworthiness.

My therapist gently took me through the basics of the emotions. He showed me how they are all lies. It was not my fault, so there is nothing to forgive. I did not create the situation or encourage it, therefore I should not hate myself. Vulnerability and intimacy are good things that were twisted and made to feel bad. It is going to take time and I have been taking steps to become vulnerable in safer situations and I am making connections with people I never had before. The abuse is not the only thing making me feel broken and flawed. There is nothing in my DNA making me less of a person, making it okay to abuse and/or hurt me. Something in the abuser broke and he sexually abused me, not the other way around. I am not less valuable because of the abuse. The feelings of unworthiness not only stem from the abuse, they also reach into my relationship with my father. After my parents divorced I did not see or hear from him for a long time. He essentially disappeared into his military career and new wife. My therapist helped me see his actions came from his own hurt and had nothing to do with me. Every child believes divorce or absent parents have something to do with them. If I was somehow a better daughter, he would not have left me behind. By the time the divorce took place I had been abused, adding to my feeling I was not good enough for my dad to stick around.

The session was the most emotional I have endured to date. It was raw, honest, and excruciating. I have cried in therapy several times but this time the pain and tears came from my core. I felt everything. I was sifting through devastating emotions and could not hide. Once I started the option of cutting the process off was out of my control. I was fully present, could not dissociate from it, and crushed by the power of the pain. After 1-½ hours my therapist and the intern stopped me and we talked about how to take care of myself when I left. Everyone in the room was drained by the end. I was safe and put back together at the end of the 2 hours, exhausted but no longer defeated.

 Did recognition of all this fix everything? No, but some of the power is gone. The feelings were dragged into the light. Now I can see them and can sort through and reorganize, reshape, and put it them perspective. This will take time and a lot of work, more work than I really think I want to do. I am taking 30-plus years of damage and repairing it. Just as one does not gain or lose weight overnight, I did not wake up the next day all better. A lot of effort on my part needs to take place and I will need help to keep it all in proper perspective. I can do this and have been doing it a little at a time all along. I will slip along the way and have dig my way out, but I honestly think the cutting and other physical harm is over with.