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Protecting Oneself From Rape Memories [1]

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Date: 2023-04-29  

Obviously this needs to start with a triggering warning. I’m writing this as a more detailed response to Cmae’s diary yesterday: www.dailykos.com/…

Thanks to Cmae for writing that. It took me back, and I’ve been processing a lot since then. I suddenly realized my memories of the location where it happened, what the poem below is about, are from a visual perspective of being on that bed with ”HIM” hurting me while I looked at the ceiling. I’d known it, just not known it. Let me explain.

I’ve spent most of my life believing I never was raped, that my childhood was idyllic, if lonely. I also spent that same time very dimly aware I was hiding something, that some rottenness lay at my core, and trying to prove to the world that despite what it seemed to think of me I was better than that. I could be fairly obnoxious about that, challenging teachers in school, for example, while also always ready to believe I was nobody special and shouldn’t complain when I didn’t get what other people did. I never noticed the innate conflict in that.

I accepted an abusive marriage, fighting through it but still not enough to change anything until I saw what was happening to my kids. Then it was worth leaving. Not for me, but them. I emerged with the “nobody else will love you” message drilled into me, still never seeing the conflicts between that acceptance and the fight not to believe.

A very good support group — for other, non-addiction causes — came along, and within that three things happened. I started expressing myself in poetry, I made “best friends” with the gentle, loving man I married decades later, and I got into therapy. My therapist wasn’t pushy, didn’t supply answers, but offered questions I might consider asking when I was ready. When I was, I sat down with my parents, asked if they could identify a room I described to them (which had haunted me all my life though I didn’t share that part, nor, yet, what I was coming to believe happened there) and could they tell me where/when I might have been there.

They could. I learned when it happened, some time before kindergarten. I learned who else was there, a relative living with us briefly to “help out”. By the time I was asking questions, he’d already been dead for years, so any thought of confrontation was eliminated. When I had my information from my parents, more pieces fell into place, and I finally let them know what had happened so many years ago. They had two reactions. The first was to ask was I blaming them? No. The second was what I felt as total betrayal, denying it had ever happened. We never discussed it again, though I have since in other settings where either I got more help or could help others by sharing my story.

The brain as an amazingly protective organ. For years it continued offering little hints and then backing off, letting me believe I was safe, while still giving enough of a prodding that when I was ready I could deal with what happened and put things into a proper perspective. Most importantly, I could finally sort out who I was from what had been done to me. I had a “why” for the memories of pain. I could heal. And finally, I’m able to share here just where I was before that healing process started.

The Room

There is a room I cannot enter.

My memory lets me walk

All through that house

But there.

For me

Even its door does not exist.

What happened there I think I know.

Child Within was there

And from the darkened prison

Where she hides

She haunts my dreams

And private moments.

For years I did not know the room was gone.

I’d had no need to enter.

Now others tell me I have need,

Tell me what I’ll find.

I am afraid.

Memory paces up and down that hallway

But the wall stays blank.

Imagination wills a door

Designs a room

Builds a window

Slopes a ceiling

But I’m left pacing in the hallway

And still the wall is blank

And still I am afraid.

I claim I do not need the room

Or “someday” I will enter.

And I struggle with the pieces of my life.

I juggle one piece, then another

Build new competencies, skills,

And hide, even from me,

The blackened core within.

I know it’s there now, waiting,

And the hiding isn’t working very well,

And soon, though I am still afraid,

I’ll be back pacing in that hall,

Not in that room,

Not free to go.

Child Within, forgive me:

I’m not ready yet to help us both

Be whole.

There is a room I cannot enter

And I think my biggest fear

Is that when I walk in

I’ll find it empty

And I will know

That all the awfulness

Is only -

Has always been -

From inside me.

[END]
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[1] Url: https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2023/4/29/2166603/-Protecting-Oneself-From-Rape-Memories

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