I just wanted to forget about getting raped. It was too much to process. I did my best to move on so that I didn't feel overwhelmed. At 22, that seemed like the best option. The problem is that when you don't adequately process an emotion, you can get stuck there. I didn't know how to process that much rage and betrayal. I had never known so much distress, and I didn't know if I would recover or how. For me, being stuck looked like projecting my anger and fear of my rapist into anger and fear of men in general. Rape was always right under the surface when interacting with men, especially strangers. I still wanted my rapist dead. I hated him. I felt a righteous anger that I channeled into activism. I made it productive. I saw myself as wise-to-the-world rather than traumatized. I mean, who wants to be traumatized?
I did a great job coping, I think, but that's not the same as healing. I started dating someone 7.5 years after being raped. It wasn't a very good relationship, and soon anxiety got the better of me. I'd always been an anxious person, but I had found ways to manage my life so that it didn't interfere with my functioning. But once the relationship started, my anxiety escalated. So I went to therapy.
I knew anxiety is often a side effect of sexual abuse, but I wasn't able to connect the dots at first. I'd been living with extra anxiety for so long, I just thought that's how I am. After I resolved the relationship issues (by getting the fuck out of that relationship), my therapist suggested addressing the rape with a therapy called EMDR— Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing. It’s a treatment for PTSD. It was tested on combat veterans. (Fun fact: the majority of people with PTSD are rape survivors.) The idea is that you can enter into a deep state of your memories, and then remember them differently, or with a different understanding. So instead of remembering an event as making you feel worthless or vulnerable or ashamed, you can remember it as an unfortunate event that happened to you— a valuable or safe or innocent person. Your memory is still there in the end, but it’s like someone else’s memory, or foggy, or blurry around the edges, or just far away. It made me think of Professor Slughorn’s altered memory of Tom Riddle.
Here’s how it went: I closed my eyes. I used headphones to listen to a beeping noise. I could adjust the speed and volume. At the same time, I held a little vibrating pad in each hand, which corresponded to the beep. I could control the intensity. I used the thoughts of a calm place and support people as resources. My therapist guided me back to a disturbing memory, and I thought about my support people telling the younger me what I needed to hear at that time. I pictured a shield that deflected the event from hitting me. I focused on the more neutral or positive lessons that I’ve come to understand, instead of the harmful one that I absorbed in that moment. That was the practice run, on a slightly disturbing incident.
I did EMDR for the rape in another session. I re-remembered getting raped as just leaving his room safely. I can describe being raped because I've told it many times and it's written in my diary, but when I try to remember it I see myself leaving over and over again. I have to force myself to remember the rape itself, and even then it's a bit fragmented. It's like I can remember the story more than the event. When I think of my rapist I still generally wish he would just get hit by a bus already, but in the way that we're hoping Bill Cosby (or your nemesis of choice) would just drop dead to save us all the headache. During the EMDR session, I felt so sad for 22-year-old-me. How unfair that she had to go through that; she didn't deserve that. She doesn't deserve to carry all that trauma for years. But present-day-me is OK, is safe.
I did EMDR a total of 3 times. They were all intense. I was weepy for a few weeks each time. But now when I remember those events, I see the alternate memory. I can still tell you what happened; the memory is still there, just its effect has changed. I can see those events as things that didn’t damage me. Or, they did, but they don’t anymore. They memories are no longer disturbing or emotionally-charged. I didn’t even realize (or I didn’t want to admit) how traumatized I was, even though I had a lot of good support from some of my friends (and people who became friends), even though I see myself as strong and resilient, even though I had more or less moved on. Recovery is possible. That little trauma monster inside you can turn into the emotional equivalent of a house plant.
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