Trigger warning: incest / rape
I haven’t known how to put this experience into words but recently read another woman’s account and it is so accurate to mine that I’ll begin with her words then expand with my own.
“Maggie told us during her EMDR session she had vividly remembered
her father’s rape when she was seven – remembered it from inside her
child’s body. She could feel physically how small she was; she could feel
her father’s huge body on top of her and could smell the alcohol on his
breath. And yet, she told us, even as she relived the incident she was
able to observe it from the point of view of her twenty-nine-year-old
self.” The Body Keeps the Score, chapter 15, Learning About EMDR.
And that’s how it is for me. I both experience it from the perspective of it still happening but also from outside it as myself now. I was so little. And naked. And immobile. And he was big and naked, smelling of alcohol and silently terrifying. And it was so overpowering to my toddler self that I repressed that memory for decades. It came back in a combination of flashes of memory and by specific past behaviors making sense if that piece were there. I was terrified of being alone with him specifically afraid of him raping me, to the point that if I were in his truck I rode with my hand on the handle and my body squished against the door for an immediate albeit dangerous exit. When my husband makes sweet advances but his breath is sour with alcohol it revolts me and sends me into spins of fear of rape and always has. Or how at seven years old when my father commented on how I swing my hips when I walk and scolded me for being too sexy, which made me want to hide my body and never be mistaken for sexy again in my life (which would be quite the overreaction if there weren’t a solid reason to fear being seen as sexual). Some of my earliest memories include waking up as my father is carrying me out of my bed with a hand over my mouth, then someone else waking up and me being silently placed back in my bed with never an explanation for where we were going or why it had to be a secret. Similarly my oldest sister shared with me one late night in our twenties that her earliest memories include being still and silent in the back corner of her bunkbed in the dark of the night because the tall thin man (an apt description of our father) couldn’t reach her to take her from that spot. And then our little sister as a toddler in his house began going to the ER with constant vaginal issues that they kept chalking up to UTIs and my therapist told me to stay out of and let ER doctors assess. Then at 35 years old and a few months out from having finally cut off all ties and communication with my biological family, the flashbacks began. It was like my brain knew I was finally away from him and safe to process what I just could not before. For the next year the flashback memories continued, getting longer and more detailed until they plateaued where they remain today. Circus trials in my youth taught us that repressed memories are lies despite modern psychology soundly standing by repressed memories, and for myself my own personal experience which I know to be true.
The problem is it’s still a problem. Not only because new studies are finding direct correlation of major adult health problems, chief of which is autoimmune disorders, with childhood incest but also because flashbacks affect my marriage and my sanity. I don’t know how to get past it. How do I make the flashbacks stop? How do I make the memory not touch the present? How do I heal?
thebadgerspath.com 