“This is how people die.”

I remember this thought, coming clearly into my head, mere seconds after I felt the blow.  The thought came, after I felt the accompanying nausea and disorientation, after I found myself grabbed from behind by someone, after I realized my arms had been pinned to my sides with one of their arms, my face covered with the other.  After my brain had eliminated the possibility that this was a joke – perhaps it was my boyfriend – he hadn’t meant to hurt me – he just wanted to scare me.  The thought came, after I realized it wasn’t my boyfriend, nor anyone I knew.   

“This is how people die.”

The day had been completely unremarkable.  I came home from work, at my usual time.  I hit play on the answering machine messages, I put some water on the stove to boil.  Then I ran up the stairs to change out of my work clothes.

He came from behind as I cleared the last step. 

He would later tell police he had jimmied the front door lock open, gained entry and locked the door behind him.  He had been there for several hours when I arrived home.  

The blow to my head opened up 3 inches of scalp.  Hours later, in the Emergency Room, I would realize he had hit me with the unopened bottle of Amaretto (liquor) that my roommate had received for Christmas. It had been sitting on top of our fridge for four months.  Glass shards from the bottle cut my face, neck and arms.  The liquor within caused pieces of glass to be stuck all over myself and my clothing.  Head wounds bleed profusely (even when you are not a bleeder like I am).  I had blood and liquor in my eyes and down my face.  Both ran down onto the dress I wore. 

As he grabbed me from behind, the momentum carried us both several steps forward, into my bedroom.  I remained completely frozen, although a primal scream tore up from inside of me.  In the weeks and months after the attack, this fact would bother me more than anything else.  I had not started fighting.  More than any other thing, I was left with the shame of my immobility.  I believed this incident had exposed my true character.   That, deep inside me, I was nothing but a coward, a victim.       

He expected me to go unconscious, after the blow.  When I didn’t, he seemed unsure of what to do next.  Moments passed and I felt him loosen his grip on me a little.  He turned me around slowly, so I was facing him.  Still in his grip, I found myself in an embrace of sorts, my body pressed to his.  I saw camouflage fatigues between the fingers covering my face.  In a shaky voice I heard myself asking who he was.  It seemed very important to me, that I had a name or an explanation for what was happening.  Anything to help make sense of this.  He removed his hand then, and I looked up into his eyes.  They were completely devoid of emotion.  I recognized him.  He had come to the door a few weeks before, asking for one of my two roommates; the one who rarely, if ever, lived there anymore.    At this point he said.  “I’m sorry.  You scared me.”  He released me.  He walked down the stairs and out of the house, closing the door behind him.

Later, the police would find a severed cord, cut from my roommates curling iron, pushed beneath my mattress.  A knife was found between the cushions of the couch.  A pair of my pajamas, ripped down the middle, were found beneath my roommate’s mattress. 

I was in so much shock that I walked down the stairs after him to lock the door and turn off the stove.  I didn’t even consider calling 911.  My only concern was that I wanted to take a shower.  Regroup.  I called my roommate.  I knew she was at her mothers house, having dinner and doing laundry.  Her mother answered the phone and I calmly asked to speak to my roommate.  As soon as she came on the line, I became hysterical, explaining what had just taken place. 

She was the person to call 911.  She was the person who sped across town with her hazards on.  She was the person who handled things with the police.   None of that was me.  I was taken to the Emergency Room, by ambulance.  I got sutures in my head.  They cleaned up the tiny cuts on my face, neck and exposed arms.    I don’t remember leaving the hospital.  I don’t remember showering.  I don’t remember who cleaned up the landing, which had blood, liquor and broken glass all over it.  I don’t remember where I slept that night, or if I was able to sleep at all. 

He was located about 5 days later.  He plead guilty to a felony, breaking and entering with intent to do great bodily harm. This was a plea deal, which saved me the experience of testifying on the stand in front of him.  Unfortunately, though, not before his preliminary hearing, in which I had to face him.  He came in with a few other men, all in orange inmate jumpsuits.  They were handcuffed.  He scanned the room and found me.   He nudged the man next to him, whispered something.  They both looked right at me.  I had been hoping he wouldn’t have remembered what I looked like.  Wouldn’t have spotted me.  I knew then, I was in his memory, in case he decided to come looking for me when he was released.  He also had my name at that point, because it was part of the public record. 

One night the following week, I came home to an empty house.  I was unable to climb the stairs.  I was frozen, at the bottom of them.  Completely incapable of movement.  A very foreseeable trauma response.  I stayed there till my roommate came home.   Several years later, the same thing happened.  I was a mom of two then, we had just moved to our second home.  I had pulled into the garage and was getting my children out of their car seats when something triggered me.  To this day, I don’t know what it was, but I went on high alert.  I was unable to go in the house at all until two neighbors searched my entire house to make sure nobody was hiding inside.  I took normal precautions after that.  We always had a security system and I always armed it when I left the house.  It couldn’t absolutely prevent another crime from happening to me, but it gave me peace of mind that nobody had gotten in and was hiding while I was gone.  Any door or window would have tripped the alarm without the code to disable it.   This, also, was a trauma response.  Predictable, of course. 

Let me tell you a second story.

When I was 8 years old, I was spending the night at a friends’ house.  They had a pop-up camper on their back porch, which we were getting to sleep in that night.  Her mother came in to get us settled before bed.   Just as she turned to leave, she looked at each of us directly and said – ok, girls, now don’t wet the bed.  I wasn’t a bed wetter.  This wasn’t a problem I’d had or something I feared doing.   Sometime in the middle of the night, though, I woke up.   Guess who had wet the bed?   I felt shame, primarily.  Followed by fear. I mean, it was the one single thing I had been warned against going into that night – and I had done it.   

I let myself out of the camper, walked home through the darkness, crawled through the doggy door in the garage, let myself into the house and down to my room to change clothes.  I don’t remember if I went back.  I don’t remember if my friends mom was angry.  I don’t remember if my parents noticed I had come home that night.

What I do remember is this – an overwhelming sense of humiliation and disappointment in myself.  The one thing my friends’ mom told me not to do.  Specifically.  I hated myself.  The thought came clearly into my head – I can’t do anything right. 

Out of these two incidents in my life, which do you think did me the most damage, in the end?  Which do you think colored my life through very specific lenses?   The first is a very scary incident.  One of those things every woman fears, on some level.  It’s the reason we take those self-defense classes that teach us to walk with a purpose and hold our keys like weapons in case we need to use them on an attacker.   It’s the reason we lock our doors in the first place.  It’s the reason we own weapons and put sticks in the tracks of our sliding doors to prevent them from being opened from the outside.  Not many people have something like this happen to them.  The fact that I did, well, you would think it would keep me continually looking over one shoulder.   The second incident is almost laughable.  Obviously, the power of suggestion.  Don’t think of a pink elephant, right?  My friends mother had 5 children.  I imagine she did nothing more than shake her head as she put my sleeping bag in the washer and turned it on the following morning.  And yet.

Following my assault, I found myself so panicked, and so ashamed of myself for not fighting that I sought counseling. I didn’t see this counselor for long, perhaps a month.  I don’t remember his name or even where his office was located. I don’t even remember what he looked like. I have a blurry memory of him sitting in a chair across from me, one leg propped up on the other. That is all.  He was able to give me peace, though. He did this simply by suggesting that my mind, instead of cowering in this attack, had been working ahead to give me the best chances of survival.  Perhaps it was my immobility that caused his loss of confidence, his nerve, even flustered him.  Perhaps my reaction caused him to reconsider if he was really that person – to follow through with his intentions (whatever they were) on a wounded, frightened woman.  That it was possible my brain sent one message to the rest of me.  Be still.  It’s your best chance to stay alive.   

Of course, there’s no way this therapist, myself, the responding officers, or the prosecuting attorney could know this as fact.  Perhaps the outcome would have been the same regardless.  Perhaps the ending of this event had nothing to do with my reaction, at all.  The possibility, though, was powerful.  Powerful enough that I was able to process this trauma effectively.  With the addition of this suggestion, I gained the upper hand on him, in my memory of it.   It suggested that a power switch had taken place.  That I was thinking faster, more effectively than he was.  Far from provable fact, but enough to alter the belief of myself reflecting upon this incident in my life.

As for the second incident?

“I can’t do anything right.” This thought would grow.  It would breed inside of me, over decades.  Every time I made an error, got in trouble, didn’t meet someone else’s expectations of me – it was because of what I already knew. I cant do anything right. Confirmation bias. I did do things right. I tried put a lot of effort into trying to do everything right. I payed little attention to the times I succeeded, though. Wrote those times off as dumb luck. I mean, even a broken clock is right twice a day.  When I couldn’t, when I didn’t, this incident would reinforce itself..  See, I can’t do anything right.  I’m incapable of it, no matter how hard I try.  Not only was the belief itself destructive to my soul, it caused me to become a person hyper-vigilant to other people’s expectations of me. Over time, a people pleaser.

It was my reason for everything. Why my children struggled, why the men I wanted to be with didn’t want to be with me, why I failed at being friend, wife, mother, daughter, sister, girlfriend. Because I couldn’t do anything right. I had proved this my entire life.

Here’s the thing about trauma.  I had a lot of misconceptions about it, going in.  My traumas didn’t bring me to my most recent round of therapy over a year ago. The fact that my life had become unmanageable had. Yes, I had a list of things from my past that I was upset about. But moreso, I was really upset about my life. So upset, so out of control. The past few years had tested me so harshly that I’d found myself suicidal the week prior.

I had been seeing my therapist for about four months when she suggested we try trauma reprocessing therapy.  I didn’t care for this suggestion.  I had an idea of what trauma was, and it was not me. Trauma was people who went to war, children who were systematically abused, the people you hear about on the news. Not me. Besides that, I was there to take responsibility for my own actions, not blame them on other people. And that’s how I saw this. Placing blame on others for the things that were wrong with me. That’s where we started. And, you know how the saying goes – when you’re at rock bottom, there’s nowhere to go but up.

Oddly enough, my current therapist uses my assault as a textbook example of processed trauma.  I can relate the facts of it without becoming emotional.  I can see no ripples of it in my current life.  It didn’t reach out and disable me emotionally, in the way the bed wetting incident did.  When we talk about trauma and past incidents, my therapist has me rate my emotional response to them on a 1-7 scale.  I don’t even feel a 1 when talking about my assault.  To be fair, I don’t rate the bed wetting incident high either.  However, it’s the reason I walked in to her office as a 50-year-old woman who truly believed she could never do anything right. Amongst other things. That I was upset about.

What I have found, in nearly a year of trauma processing, is that sometimes the small things we encounter in life cause far more damage than the large things. Yes, the large things cause significant damage of their own. With the large things, though, help is often available help processing them. (As occurred for me after my assault.) When it comes to the small things, though, they often seem so inconsequential that they go unnoticed. And yet, over time, they can be the most insidious.

My therapist started by giving me an example from her own life.  She had a paralyzing fear of public speaking. (A quick Google search suggests 75% of us do, she’s not alone there.)  When she was being trained on trauma reprocessing, they worked on each other.  Her paralyzing fear went back, in the end, to an incident in 3^rd grade, in which she’d been daydreaming in class and was called upon by the teacher to stand up and give an answer to a question she hadn’t heard. She stood up as asked, but of course had nothing to say. All eyes in the room were on her as she stood there, mute. 

In our memories, these events can seem so insignificant that we are tempted to damage ourselves further by telling ourselves – you’re just being stupid, get over it.  People face so much worse. 

The body remembers these rushes of fear, embarrassment, humiliation, helplessness.  Push them down, attempt to shame them out.  It doesn’t work.  It lives on inside you. 

I am unlovable. I disappoint everyone. I can’t do anything right. I am inherently a bad person. I am gullible. I am disposable. I am replaceable. It’s okay to hurt me. 

How does a child with all the confidence in the world become a grown woman who believes these things?  Because of single incidents which were then layered and layered and layered upon over decades.  Why do we suffer from chronic anxiety, why does our depression get triggered, why do we lie awake at night in fear of being alone or being left or something happening to our children?  Why do we have those knee-jerk reactions to certain stimulus in such a disproportionate way?  Trauma.  The body remembers. 

It is like a sliver of glass in our foot – (but did you die, though??)  It causes pain. You favor that foot. Shortly, it is affecting your walk.  In time, your knee will becomes involved, followed by your hip.  Eventually, you have a bad leg,  entirely.  You take pain meds, maybe your doctor gives you the good stuff. Your mood declines because you are limited, you start to believe things will never improve.  You get up every day and try to have a better attitude but the reality is that you are in pain and you can’t accomplish the things you want to do in life. 

Trauma is like a sliver of glass in our foot.  Given enough time, it will hamper every part of our beings. 

I have had days where I have truly mourned the young girl I once was, the confident one.   The me who tore around the school playground in dresses with shorts underneath, legs full of bruises.  She could beat you at tether ball, she could run faster than any boy, she believed she could do anything she wanted.  I have had days where it causes me a great deal of pain to reflect on how life changed me.  How I began believing horrible things about myself.  How I fell in love with men who were destined to hurt me, because I believed that it was okay to hurt me.  How I always came back for more hurt, because I believed that was okay too.  That I over-volunteered myself trying to prove to everyone that I was actually a good person, when I believed the opposite of myself.  That I’ve cried tears of disappointment in myself every Christmas morning since I became a mother. But I’d tried so hard! That every time I thought of my parents, I could only imagine how disappointed they were in me. How much pain I had caused others, just by being me.  The social anxiety I compiled, trying to maintain a facade to others.  A false-better me.  The me they expected, of me.  How I believed I was truly broken, insidious even, on the inside.  How I came to believe that everyone who saw my soul would leave me.   And, if someone hadn’t left me yet, it was only because I hadn’t let them see my soul.  I have had these days.

I have also had days in which I am too amazed that I am walking without pain to be sad for myself about the rest.  That all along, it was just these slivers of glass in my feet.  That I have the rest of my life to be more authentic, to be kinder, to be myself.  That my love has grown much stronger, because I no longer rely on others to care for me.  I’m no longer always emotionally on red.  I’m not always giving, giving, giving to my detriment.  That I’m not always in overdrive trying to get love, trying to keep love, trying to hold love that should no longer be there.  My life, gradually, has become less a feeling of peddling uphill and more a feeling of peddling on a smooth, flat road. 

In a recent therapy appointment, I saw a future version of me on the empty playground of my Elementary School, holding hands with bad-ass little 7 year old me.  It brought me more comfort than words can describe.  The me, before I formed those negative beliefs about myself, and the me, after I discarded them.  My therapist asked me, how far in the future is this version of yourself that you see with your younger self?  I said a few weeks.  A few months, at the most.  I’m so close.  I’m so amazingly close.

Symptoms of trauma:

–Anxiety or fear of danger to self or loved ones, being alone, being in a frightening situation, fear of a similar event happening again.

–Avoidance of situations or thoughts that remind you of a traumatic event.

–Being easily startled by loud noises or sudden movements.

–Flashbacks for no apparent reason.

–Physical symptoms such as tense muscles, trembling or shaking, nausea, headaches, sweating, tiredness.

–Lack of interest in usual activities.

–Sadness, feelings of loss, or aloneness.

–Sleep problems, including getting to sleep, waking in the middle of the night, dreams or nightmares about a traumatic event.

–Problems with thinking, concentration, or remembering things (especially aspects of a trauma event.)

–Preoccupation with thinking about the trauma.

–Guilt and self-doubt for not having acted in some other way, or for being better off than others, or feeling responsible for the trauma.

–Anger or irritability at what has happened, or what caused the event to happen, asking Why Me?

Information on EMDR Therapy (my current therapy model) and how to find an EMDR Therapist (Getting Past Your Past: The brain science, why we get stuck in various ways and what to do about it.  Don’t let yourself be run by unconscious and automatic reactions):  http://www.emdr.com/