Oftentimes folks post positive feel-good updates on social media and blogs. I'm totally guilty of this. I often live through the tough times in my daily life, without finding ways to share in this forum. The plus-side of this strategy is that shiny-happy posts abound. The down-side is a missed opportunity to share experiences that may be helpful to others. When Hashtag-Me-Too emerged, friends around me shared their in-person stories of rape and sexual abuse. I did the same with them, and my community seemed fortified by the sharing.
Last year I learned that a former partner's daughter, now an adult, was raped early in her professional career. I was in this young woman's life from ages 5 through 8, and stayed peripherally in touch, even after the relationship with her father dissolved. For the next decade after the split, we were not in contact. She grew up happy and healthy under her dad's roof and dreamed of joining the military. She joined the air force, and was attacked in her first year by a fellow cadet. She has since completed her training,but left the service. After the attack, she filed a complaint and little disciplinary action followed.
There's more to the story, but I'm thinking about my role in her life and whether having my support might have helped her in some way.
When I was raped, at a few years younger than she was, I blamed myself for all that happened. Many women do, because frankly society has told us it is somehow our fault. The immediate result of my owning the blame and shame of the attack, was that I became suicidal and developed a pretty significant eating disorder. After a failed attempt on my life, I began to fixate on food, purging after family meals, this quickly evolved into late night bingeing and purging. That was replaced, almost a quickly by calorie counting, continuing to purge family meals, followed up by late-night exercising. In my head constantly was the commentary of the boy who raped me, talking about the curves of my under-developed body (which was covered from shoulders to ankles in an over-sized black track suit, which advertised the STEM summer camp that I attended each year in red and white lettering). In my head the lower calories and exercise would eventually eradicate any trace of a womanly form, and keep me safe from predatory men.
As with some who cultivate food-related obsessive compulsions, I found ingenious ways to hide what I was doing. When I purged, I gargled and swished with baking soda, to protect my teeth from the acids. When my weight dipped down to an uncomfortable range, I dressed in baggier clothes. The added musculature from 2 hours of nightly cardio and weight training left me looking fairly healthy, if flat-chested and slim hipped. At age 20 or so, I gave it all up. I weighed just north of 100 lbs and I was tired. Plus, I was suddenly surrounded by a protective wall of friends, folks who kept me safe by their sheer numbers: it was a rare event to see one of my closest friends out without seeing the others!
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| L to R: Me at age 21, then 2 -3 years later, then 3 years after that, and 7 years after than, and then me in 2022 |
Talk therapy, throughout my late teens and early adulthood helped me to address some of the lasting effects of being raped as a kid. Eventually, I learned to stop blaming myself, but I have had more than a few disturbing flashback episodes of PTSD. The most recent one took me by surprise a couple years ago, as I walked home from my office. One minute I was strolling and recalling an event from the workday, the next minute I was crying and shaking, trying to dislodge the visions of a decades old sexual assault from my mind's eye. When it ended, I resumed my walk home, disturbed. That night me and hubby talked it over.
In an ideal world, young women--and young men, and children, and adults, and the elderly--would not be forcibly assaulted at all. But this is not that world. In our world, the best thing that can happen to a rape survivor is that they get immediate medical attention and immediate mental healthcare, and get the bastard arrested. According to my psych textbooks, the sooner the psychological journey of addressing trauma occurs (whatever it may be), the more complete the recollection of the event remains. Intact memories of the traumatic events rarely become visual/auditory/tactile hallucinations that intrude unbidden and unwelcome on the survivor.
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| Me and a friend , sometime between the first and last photos above. We are posing at the Pow Wow. |
I wish that I had been in my ex's daughter's life more before her assault happened, and I wish that I had heard the stories of the women I know today, all of those years ago. But wishes are not knowledge, and the more that we women (and men, and adults, and the elderly) speak about pain in our lives, the less the stigma. The less the stigma, the more empowered our society becomes. The more empowered, the more we fight against these types of assault. The more we fight, the less it's tolerated. Less tolerance, less occurrence...see what I'm getting at?
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