***Trigger Warning – contains potentially distressing material pertaining to sexual assault
Capabilities Of The Mind
My mind protected me by compartmentalizing aspects of the sexual assault I experienced and even filed away some of the events that immediately followed afterwards. I developed amnesia for the most horrific aspects, and I split off from myself to cope with the rest. This splitting off is called depersonalization. In a sense, I completely disconnected from everything. I disconnected from my thoughts, feelings, and memories regarding the assault. I became a fragmented version of myself, and I had not even been nine years old for all that long. (In fact, I had only been nine for a few weeks.)
With depersonalization, I felt detached from my body as if I were watching myself as a spectator watching a movie. Being outside of myself kept me from feeling any pain or sensation within my body. I did not have to deal with intrusive thoughts. I did not have to deal with any memories. I do not even recall ever having any visible flashbacks. (Amazingly, flashbacks did not happen until I reached my 30s.) The trauma of the experience did not even seem to be connected to me, and if it were not for me being a bystander in the conversations of others, then I would surely not know that I was the topic of discussion – the survivor of a vicious attack.
Yet, even hearing other people talk about me in my presence did not seem real. Sometimes I felt disconnected from my surroundings, and this is called derealization. Despite being able to hear the conversations of others in my aunt’s neighborhood about what happened, I simply was unable to connect to the feelings behind their words. I could hardly believe that the events some people described were even associated with me. So anything that was said went into one of my ears but quickly ran out of the other without ever taking hold within me to stir my emotions.
My mind had made my emotions dead to me as those emotions related to the attack. I absolutely could not feel a thing in regards to the trauma. I could not feel people, and I could not feel myself. In many ways, that was protection too, but I was trying to cope. I needed to cope. I needed to survive. Although my body kept track of the events, my mind had erased them. So this explained the body sensations that I was unable to explain and why I simply could not connect any physical repercussions of the attack with the attack. My mind made me forget.
Shame Becomes Anger
After the hospital visit, my aunt took us to her apartment – the place that I called home during that summer but a place that no longer felt as safe as before the attack. It was the first time since the attack that I had a little recall of what had happened to my body. I looked in the mirror at myself and was horrified by my reflection. I had been beaten so badly that I did not even recognize myself. I had a swollen eye, a lump on my head, darkened blue and red bruises all about my body, and swollen lips.
My aunt was careful with me, but I could tell that something was off with her. She behaved in the manner as if she had been attacked … as if something bad had been done to her. I felt like I needed to walk around on eggshells with her because she was strangely distant towards me. Perhaps she simply did not know how to react to me, but her distance hurt my feelings. Interestingly, I remember those raw feelings well. It felt like rejection. I could not stop wondering if she saw something horrible about me, and that sinking feeling left me with deep shame.
The first time I felt shame was when I was three. So I knew the feeling, but this time it was a lot worse. The only way that I can describe it is to say that I wanted to cover up and hide. I wanted to run and hide within the shadows and not ever be seen again. I wanted to curl up into a ball within myself and disappear forever.
What had happened to me could not be changed, and I believe my aunt and I wanted a do-over badly. Although neither of us articulated this fact to each other, that was the feeling I had while she was sitting with me. She still needed to contact my parents, but before she did, she ran a hot bath for me, and told me she wanted me to relax.
Once I did get into the bath water, I felt instant pain all over my body. I do not recall ever hurting so badly. The water felt inviting, and I sank into a comfort as I explored my bruises. I studied the bruises in locations that I did not expect to find bruises. I had been roughed up quite badly. Yet, through all this, I made no connection to the assault. Although I was aware, my brain was foggy on details. My mind had really shut down.
It was strange to see bruises and feel aches but not correlate them to something vicious. I was in a state of dissociation/depersonalization/derealization. It was almost as if I were in a dream-like state – present but absent, connected but disconnected, attached but detached. I believe I had been given medicine to take, but I do not recall exactly what. I was feeling more relaxed than normal but ever still emotional.
Then in a sudden fury, my aunt burst into the bathroom. She had a stern look on her face. I immediately recoiled and covered myself in embarrassment. I discerned that something was wrong, and what I had thought about my aunt’s thoughts before turned out to be devastatingly true. There was a look in her eyes that seemed contemplative but angry at the same time. She was in thought mode and trying to figure out her next move.
My aunt began asking me round-about questions, and some of her questions made me feel very uncomfortable. She seemed to be trying hard not to upset me, but my becoming upset was inevitable. She began talking about aspects of the assault. I heard her but tuned her out up until I realized that she was laying all the blame on me. She insinuated that I must have done something that caused those boys to go after me. I was dumbfounded, but I did not answer. I felt like I had answered similar questions before and tried to remember.
In essence, though, my aunt blamed me. She literally blamed me. She blamed me for taking a different route to get to her building even though it was a route she taught me to take as a shortcut. She blamed me for the clothing I chose to wear even though she helped me to pick them out when she took me shopping. She blamed me for going to pool lessons at the school that day even though she thought I should learn how to swim. She blamed me for not sticking with the new friend I had made when the new friend decided she wanted to separate from me and walk with a group of girls.
My aunt said a lot of things, and everything she said all articulated to me that I was at fault for all that had happened to me. Her words probably sounded less harsh than the atmosphere she created around her words. All I could do was cover up in shame. Her words literally hurt my heart, and I no longer wanted to listen to her. I felt such a grave amount of shame that all I could do was cry. I sobbed loudly and uncontrollably. They were the kinds of sobs I thought would never stop. Somewhere deep within my psyche there was tremendous sadness, and it was so strong that I could touch it. My aunt’s words had penetrated that sadness and made it worse.
Although the effects of the assault were still fresh within my body, my mind was numb. Yet, my body felt the intensity of my aunt’s words, and I hurt. My body seemed to respond to everything. All I could manage to think was that a horrible injustice had been done to me, and my body would not let me forget. My body took on the anger that my mind simply could not take on, and before I realized it, I unleashed my anger onto my aunt.
I remember screaming at my aunt to leave me alone – to get out of the bathroom and just go away. I had become hysterical, and although she attempted to calm me down, I would not relent. I basically screamed bloody murder, and I was so loud that the neighbor in the apartment above my aunt’s apartment knocked on my aunt’s door to see what the commotion was all about. Before retreating to the living room to talk to the neighbor, my aunt shushed me into silence. When my aunt re-emerged, she apologized to me, but the damage had been done. The anger became rooted in those moments of her blame against me, and to be honest, I felt justified in that anger.
I felt justified in my anger because of the craziness of being blamed for something that I did not cause. It was not my fault, but my aunt more than insinuated that I could have done things differently. Although I have thought about those events as I have remembered them through fragments of flashbacks over the years, I wished that I had done things differently to alter the course of what happened to me. It was not my fault, but everything that I wanted to undo made me believe I was at fault.
In fact, I wish that I had never spent the summer with my aunt, or ever wanted to learn how to swim, or hung out with a girl who decided to leave me to walk the rest of the way alone so she could hang with other girls, or taken the shortcut in an open area behind the apartments, or worn the clothing I wore, or encountered those boys in the first place, or fought back harder, or played dead, or screamed, or died, or even never awakened that morning. I wish that I could have changed so much about that day, but I cannot. It is what it is, and what happened happened. There is no redo.
In those moments of my aunt speaking, she made me so angry for being alive and for having survived a vicious sexual assault. I was filled with such anger I wanted to scream. I wanted to scream because my aunt was only thinking about herself. She care about what her neighbors would think of her because the police were called, and a report against those boys was filed by the kind woman who came to my rescue. She only cared about ways to hide what happened to me from my father, and erase those events from time. She only cared about pretending and moving on as if nothing had ever happened to me. I felt betrayed.
My aunt did not take my side, and I was instantly angry as I realized this fact. I was hurt and super angry about it. I was especially angry that she made herself out to be the victim when I was the one who had been assaulted. According to her, she had to rearrange her schedule for me and do things differently all because of what happened as if it were my fault. The fury and rage that I felt against her while she lashed out at me was too big for me to carry. The anger was a burden, but I was unable to lay it down. I had never been so angry before, and I did not know that the anger was only going to grow worse over time.
Taking My Assault To The Grave
At some point, my aunt had to call my parents. She called her mother (my grandmother) first. I attempted to listen in on the conversation, but my aunt had taken the call to her bedroom and shut the door. I even tried to listen in at her door, but I could not hear anything over the television. Whatever occurred in the conversation made for a lengthy phone call, and I would later learn from my aunt that my mother was in on the call too. I had to wonder where my father was in that moment. I did not know. My aunt never let me speak to anyone.
Shortly after the phone call, my aunt reemerged into the living room where I sat nonchalantly pretending to watch television. I felt anxiety. I wondered what had been said. When my aunt sat down next to me on the couch and attempted to put her arms around me, I knew something was up. Oh how I wanted and longed for my aunt’s hug when I was sitting in the doctor’s office and very shortly after I knew she had learned of the assault, but she was cold and distant towards me. Yet, after a phone call my aunt shared between my mother and her mother, I knew that she was only reaching out to hug me because there was a hidden agenda. My body stiffened. I was not receptive, but I listened to her intently while trying to be aloof.
My aunt mentioned that she had talked to both my mother and grandmother, and they planned not to tell my father about what happened to me. Although my heart sank a bit, in a strange way, I was glad because I was really ashamed. I had never considered what my parents would even think, and the thought of either of them knowing suddenly became unbearable to me. I put my head down, but my aunt lifted my chin with her hand. She looked me in my eyes, but I felt broken and wanted to cry.
I hated my mother and grandmother knowing this “secret” trauma because I determined that they would not be sympathetic towards my plight. They were both narcissists (although I did not know this at the time). They did not have a thread of empathy sewn into them. Just to have them know made me feel even more ashamed because just like my aunt had blamed me for what had happened with her insinuations, I knew to expect the same from my mother and grandmother. For some reason I knew that they would forever have power over me from which I would not easily escape. My brain caved in and shut down even more.
What my aunt said next broke me in a manner that I did not comprehend as a nine year old, but it affected me in a way that I internally understood. My aunt told me that I was never to speak of this assault ever again to anyone. She made me promise to basically take it to the proverbial and literal grave. She reiterated that my father was never to find out. In that moment, I realized that my aunt, grandmother, and mother were going to bury my secret because they wanted to keep what happened to me from my father.
If my father found out, my aunt reasoned that it would apparently break him and even cause him to no longer love me and treat me coldly. For whatever reason, my aunt’s words pierced my heart, and in that moment, I not only buried the “secret”, I buried several fragments of myself and the anger I experienced slowly but silently raged onward.
This level of secrecy was too much to wrap my mind around, but essentially I took it to mean that what happened to me never really happened. Although I felt a sense of betrayal, my mind willingly cooperated by never allowing me to remember the sexual assault for years. But I was deeply saddened that I was being shushed into silence by a woman I dearly loved and ultimately by the women (my grandmother and mother) who influenced her into keeping me silent.
It turns out, my aunt, mother, and grandmother were concerned that my father would be angry but not necessarily with me but more with my aunt. My aunt had been entrusted to take care of me and to keep me safe. The fact that I had faced trauma would indicate to my dad that my aunt had failed at the task of looking after me.
Although I do not know what my father would have done to my aunt as a punishment, I felt and believed that I had been erased. For me, it was the ultimate rejection, and my heart was never the same. That night, I descended into a pit of grief, depression, and anger. I hurt tremendously. The after effects of the sexual assault seemed far worse for me. The life I had days before the sexual assault were forever over.
Stay tuned for the next post.
My Voice Unchained 