The aftermath of trauma rendered me mute, despite my success as a writer. This piece, originally published on Medium, says what I was never able to say.
5:00 a.m. I’m awake, but not by choice.I knew I wouldn’t go back to sleep, so I’m downstairs with my laptop, facing a long day. Starting to write.
…How do you tell a huge story when it doesn’t feel true? It was true when you lived it! No, not really true — but also not a lie lie. But it’s not real. Something in the story misses the mark. Erasure follows fast.
Here I default to adult language, and I’m up and running.. This is how young children experience trauma. You grow up carrying two stories that conflict. Young kids know instinctively that if they don’t adapt to their caregivers’ view of reality, they won’t survive. It also means, in most cases, that the caregivers are guilty of some kind of abuse.
In my case, the parental abuse was “invisible.” It was emotional neglect. The original trauma was visceral, a full-body sexual attack by an adult male cousin whom my parents admired. He got to me in secret on a Saturday just shy of my sixth birthday. He had flown in to visit us from another country, and when he left, he was gone. No problem! I didn’t see him again until I was a teenager, and that was only a brief visit. I haven’t seen him since. Now, he’s dead.
My parents knew I had been attacked, as my mother mentioned to me two decades later. “Mentioned” reveals her attitude. It was simply too bad, oh dear. Well, talking about it won’t change anything. Their solution over the years was a kind of magic, allowing all of us to keep on as before — outwardly. They pretended nothing had happened, and they continued exchanging Christmas cards and news with my cousin.
Since I wouldn’t make it to adulthood without drinking their Kool-Aid, I went along with the ruse, pretending so well that I forgot the attack until a week before the conversation with my mother. Forgetting was the healthiest thing I could have done. If, at age six, I had tried to name the horror that overtook me, I would have been ostracized, cast into an emotional wilderness. I imagine I would have been diagnosed and medicated as some version of crazy.
How easy telling my story must appear to people who encourage me to write about it! It will be “cathartic,” I’ve been told. “Sharing the story is how you can heal.” In fact, these folks don’t just mean well. They are right. Contemporary neuroscience and psychotherapies back up their claims. Humans are inherently social, so any wound to the psyche that prevents full participation in human interactions can only be healed within relationship…one of words given, of eye contact, hugging, of words offered back as gifts. #MeToo is all about that.
Storytelling heals. But I grew up split in two. Half of me was a normal child who was praised for writing well. The other half of me lived underground, scarcely breathing and in cold silence. At 13, acting out in rebellion against the lie I had been forced to live, I fell prey to a pedophile teacher at my school. At 14, he took my virginity, took it for the second time. I was glued to him, drawn to the attention he paid me, to his bombastic opinions, to his romantic notions about what mattered in life.
Other than getting him fired, the school and my parents did nothing about our relationship, which continued as as before. My familiar, functional self re-learned, over time, the lesson I had absorbed as a child, adapting it to the developmental needs of a teenager. I was afraid of things other people aren’t, like travel, sleeping away from home. I have never felt fear from walking around the city alone at night.
Since I married the teacher at age 18 and stayed with him until I was 26, in essence my first 20 years were spent organizing a self based on avoiding my own darkest feelings. I was half me.
How do I tell a healing story now? I can easily describe what happened. When I was an adult, both of my parents confirmed the truth. That was the easy part.
It’s not easy to wake up at 4:30 in the morning in a comfortable bed beside my very dear, very gentle second husband Steve, knowing I won’t go back to sleep. It’s hard to feel like some underground fire is causing toxic smoke to creep into the house from creepy, subterranean caves below our nice house in a very tranquil neighborhood just outside Philadelphia.
That’s a powerful metaphor. Impressive, perhaps. The thing is, I was able, once Steve finally woke up, to discuss how his organizational habits are wreaking havoc in our kitchen. I laughed with him over an unnecessary but “urgent” email sent by one of his co-workers. The truth is, I am also terrified. I am terrified because my old strategies to deal with the long memories of the teacher aren’t working any longer. For years, I never thought about them. Now I can’t stop.
My body isn’t letting me get away with it. I can’t sleep well right now because it feels dangerous — on a basic, wordless level, I’m certain I’ll be attacked if I lose consciousness. And, as I said to Steve before he went upstairs to start his work day, dealing with this stuff is a massive libido killer. He understood. He nodded slowly. There’s no easy fix.
This is what I’ve learned since beginning my healing journey shortly after my first child was born over 30 years ago: I need these sleepless nights if I am to heal further. During most of our marriage, I also needed to keep splitting the truth in order to be present for my kids. This morning I need to sit here in my bathrobe, giving myself permission to feel unwashed, exhausted, and greasy. I need to simply be with whatever comes up.
I tell the story, then I doubt its emotional truth. I know it’s true. I don’t want to feel it. I lie when I’m telling the truth: I’m fine today. I’m not really fine at all, I’m desperate…No, I’m fine. The splitting that allowed me to become a functioning adult is simply part of the Alice-in-Wonderland territory that I discovered when my adult male cousin pushed me down the rabbit hole and raped me. I left me there and climbed back up to continue living in the light of day.
The language of healing is the language of magic, of myth. It transcends cultures, it is larger than what Western culture calls “sanity.” It’s couragous. It’s totally inadequate. It depends on instinct, not rationality. Rationality is essential — without it, I can’t function.
11:00 a.m. And now, having written this, I feel like something is complete. I just spent five hours doing nothing. I just spent six hours doing everything. I know the territory. I’m on my way. Spring is coming, and it’s going to be a good day.
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