Cry Out

I read an essay on Saturday that moved me to tears. Like most essays I read about sexual trauma, it followed the thread that ties all survivors together, that is, it was very like my story, and wholly unlike it as well, as every experience is different.


You can read it here, yes it's Glamour, it's also the only part of the magazine I read, so don't hate :)


It was pretty triggering for me, and I'm in a good place, so if you're not, maybe skip it. It's not necessary to understand my entry here, but it is what prompted it. http://www.glamour.com/sex-love-life/2010/03/i-chose-to-live-one-womans-story-of-surviving-sexual-abuse

The part that got to me the most was this quote: "In a way I was used to dying. Those nights in his room, when my grandfather circled like a shark, I swam away, up and out of my body. I floated near the ceiling, suspended and numb until I sank back, spent, into the shell of the girl on the bed. It was dying to not bite and scratch. It was dying to be a good girl, to shove the bad memories down and eat cornflakes for breakfast like a regular family. Dying is not easy, but it’s familiar."

That's pretty classic dissociation when it comes to sexual trauma, but this part, wow :

"It was dying not to bite and scratch, to be a good girl."

I want to know what we do that teaches our children not to fight, what I was taught that made me fight the urge to scream. I want to know why "being a good little boy or girl" is more important than screaming, clawing, biting, ANYTHING, that makes abuse stop. That shows us we have the power to make it stop, because if there's one thing childhood sexual trauma, and really any childhood abuse, tries to teach us, it's that we're powerless. People will hurt you, so don't trust them. It takes years to unlearn that thought pattern, I'm still unlearning it. Why don't we teach our children to cry out? Why don't we teach them that the last thing they should do when someone (ANYONE) tells them not to tell is follow that instruction?

I didn't cry out at first. Most people I know who have been sexually assaulted don't, and like the author of this article, they and I, we carry it around underneath our normal day to days. We don't acknowledge it until we have to, until the pain becomes unbearable.

My brother's abuse of me was sinister in that way as well, and pervasive in the same way. He told me "shh, shh, it's ok," while he made everything undeniably NOT ok. And I carried around underneath my daily life. And everything looked fine on the surface. Until it erupted, and it wasn't fine anymore.

I carried it around under my eating disorder as a teenager because if I was thin and pretty, I was in control, and I was ok.

I carried around under my anger in college.

I carried it around under the quiet desperate moments where I panicked and didn't know why (but I did), and I did anything not to feel. Drinking, fighting, volatile relationships, cutting, all to avoid that scream that was still stuck in my throat.

The cutting was a last resort, the drinking and the fighting, those are, not necessarily acceptable, but less frowned upon shall we say, than cutting. I remember after one such "last resort" I took to wearing arm warmers, luckily they were in style and it was winter, but I'm pale, so the cuts stood out pretty obviously on my skin. I would head it off at the pass though, before anyone saw them, and say my cat did it. I didn't want to get caught unawares and have to think of a lie in the moment. I formulated my cover even as a sank the blade into my skin, because I had to. I worked in mental health then, and I still do now. I knew they'd see right through me if I got caught off guard. And now, I can still see the light scar of one of those cuts, and I'm reminded why I stuck to the more socially acceptable of the negative coping skills for so long. And I'm reminded of the better place I'm in now.

The author in article speaks of suicidal ideation, and I definitely experienced that, but cutting is parasuicidal behavior, meaning, it's self-harming, and runs along similar thought patterns, but it isn't considered a suicide attempt. It is, however, a very common behavior of survivors of sexual trauma. Why? Who knows. Everyone has different reasons for doing it. I did it to numb out. Your body has a shut off valve and will direct your brain to the sharper pain being experienced in the moment. My emotional pain was wild and heated, but digging a knife into your arm will redirect that for you right quick. That isn't an endorsement. It's just an explanation.

I think the worst part for me was the sadness, the mourning of the lost parts of yourself that were taken from you, like the author of the essay says, "the parts that whither away to ash." I ran from the sadness for years. The anger was powerful and invigorating. And I saught the numbness. It was cool and controlled. But the sadness for so long terrified me. It was a giant dark ocean I was hovering over, in constant fear of falling in, of being swallowed, of drowning.

When I found myself out here alone, after moving to California, it caught me. I cried for months. It futher alienated my already alienated marriage. The flashbacks got more powerful, the panic, almost hallucinatory. Now I realize that was all a part of the healing, of the wound cleansing itself. But it was probably the most agonizing portion of my life to date. Because all of the pain I had run from for so long by hiding behind the thrashings of what we so lovingly refer to as "behavioral issues," in my field, had finally caught up with me, and had me by the ankles. I kicked. But I gave in shortly.


I remember the therapist I had at the time, when I told her my panic attacks felt like a scream stuck in my throat, saying "Have you ever thought about just screaming when you feel like that?" I was speechless. No. I had not. And when I finally did try that, the scream was a wrenching, ripping, primal sound that led directly into sobbing, then to an almost trance-like state that felt like something I hadn't experienced before: Peace.

As a society, we cannot subvert our children's impulses to scream and save their own lives. It creates dysfunction as it did in my family, and as it did in the essay author's family, as her attacker left a stream of survivors in his wake. We have to empower our children, so that they can fight, and know that they are allowed to cry out at the wrong and tyrannical.

Healing will and has to be a choice. All survivors make it, when they choose to loose that frozen scream, so they can take what has happened and turn it into something positive.

"Hope is the thing with feathers."