Progress
Of late, I've had an opportunity to meet with some other women who have also had sexual assault experiences. I have found doing this to be helpful, because survivors of rape often share some similar struggles that others don't really understand. You often feel so alone after experiencing an assault, and you don't realize there are others out there going through and feeling the same things you do. Discovering others have similar struggles, fears, and challenges and hearing how they are dealing with them can be very soothing and sometimes instructive.
So overall this has been a great help to me. But of late, every time one of these meetings happens, after I've shared some innocuous, entirely impersonal thought or perspective, someone starts verbally attacking me in this very aggressive, personal, and angry way. I've only just started to learn how to feel safe asserting my own feelings and not being crushed by others' judgmental statements about them. And I've also only just started to learn how to feel safe and stay calm while confronting anger directed straight at me. (Both these things are difficult for many rape survivors to do). I am getting better at it, but it's still a very scary thing for me to experience and manage.
When it's happened in the above context, I have been able--for possibly the first time in my life--to calmly separate myself from the other person's rage and realize it wasn't about me at all, and then diffuse the situation by just being true to myself and my feelings while at the same down not allowing myself to be intimidated or silenced. And I've been pretty proud of that; it's not something I was ever taught to do naturally. But even so, the regular need to have to do it of late, and particularly with people I expected constant supportive sisterhood from, has left me feeling pretty shaky and somewhat scared to go back in case it keeps happening again.
Then, a few days ago, I was talking one-on-one to a woman who had witnessed what had happened. I commented that people seemed to be getting especially rough on me lately, and she agreed. I said didn't know why that was happening--what was I doing? She thought for a minute and then said she didn't think I was doing or saying anything, technically, that should cause such reactions. She said, "I think you stick up for yourself more--you aren't afraid to express how you're feeling, even if it's not something everyone wants to hear. You seem to believe in yourself more--you seem...self-confident. I think maybe a lot of other people are still really far away from feeling that and maybe that makes them angry, because maybe they're jealous. I think maybe they want to be where you are, because you seem...healthier...and they're mad that you're there and they're not and maybe they want to make you feel like them, because they can't feel like you."
My first reaction was to want to laugh at her saying that I'm being perceived by other survivors as someone who can stick up for myself and believe in myself, and who is markedly self-confident by comparison. I feel I am slowly developing these skills, but I still feel like a tiny gosling who's just pecked my way out of the egg and my feathers are still wet. Each effort to be this way is still exhausting to me. It takes so much work to not fall back on bad, self-critical habits or just cave to other people's feelings or needs or anger. But looked at carefully, as hard as it may be, I realized (with shock) the woman actually wasn't wrong--at least about the first half. However much further I still have to go, compared to where I've come from, and compared to many others of similar experience to me, I am more self-confident, and I am asserting my needs and feelings out into the world.
And realizing this led me to another shocking realization: Unlike what the woman above was supposing, it wasn't that these women are angry or jealous that I'm self-confident. Not really. The anger and aggression being directed at me isn't about ME at all.
It's that they are using me as a guinea pig to see if it's safe for THEM to be self-confident.
I know this because I used to be them. When you've been raped, unless you've been well supported from the start, the most tender and vulnerable parts of your personality tend to burrow deep down into some very dark, presumably safe place (though it's not, really) deep inside of you. And that vulnerable self peeks up from time to time, and says hoarsely in a voice raw from lack of use, "Is it safe to come out?" Usually the test fails and the vulnerable self burrows back down and puts the lid over it's little dugout hiding place.
The way this "is it safe" behavior displays itself is not immediately obvious, though. You see, when you're a rape survivor, you begin to tell yourself, based on people's responses to you and your assault, "I can't do that. I can't say that. I can't feel that. Because if I do, I'll get hurt. Again. And I can't bear more hurt." You think about what people will do or say that might potentially hurt you. You gage people's responses, trying to read into them if the shame and disgust you expect is possibly there. You usually believe it is or will be. So you keep quiet, and you keep up that "I can't" mantra.
And then, suddenly you see someone--particularly someone who might have had an experience like yours--doing something, feeling something, saying something that you've been afraid to do or feel or say. And you are so afraid for YOURSELF, that you respond with the fear of a cornered animal. You lash out. You do the behavior or you say the thing that you are afraid others will do or say to you if you were to do what that stronger person did.
You act disgusted or judgmental or weirded out or angry and dismissive. You ask the person (sometimes verbally, sometimes just mentally) the horrible, destructive, blaming questions you're afraid others might ask you, or that you may even ask yourself. You tell the person to shut up, to keep it to themselves, just like your assaulter told you (either verbally or by implication). Or you try to FORCE her to shut up and not say anything, with angry, hurtful, aggressive behavior, just like your assaulter did to you.
You do this quite unconsciously, but you do it. You don't think when you're afraid, you just react. It isn't really about the person displaying the behavior. It's about the behavior itself and how afraid you are to do it, even as you want to do it very badly.
I know this because in the 20 years in which I was in denial about my assault, I did all of that, sad as I am to admit it. And I even still did it sometimes in the first few months of learning to confront it head on. But from having been that person, I also know this: it's not that the person wants to attack you or hurt you. It's that person's vulnerable self testing to see if it's safe to come out. It's that the person needs to know, to see, that someone can manage to stay steady--can manage to NOT be hurt--even when the imagined worst is thrown at her. When you feel so alone, you sometimes simply can't imagine the life and strength and confidence you wish for deep down in your little dark place is possible. You need to see someone else can do it. And then it takes lots of time to accept and process what you saw. And sometimes it doesn't ever get all the way through. But sometimes, it does allow someone else to see that yes, it IS safe to come outside.
And so, despite it arriving through a challenging experience, this is a momentus thing for me. And entirely astonishing to recognize. I've been working so hard, plowing forward with my line of sight doggedly set on some far horizon, I didn't even realize something amazing had happened right in front of me.
I am no longer that buried, vulnerable half-person, peeking out from the hole asking if it's safe, testing others on the outside who seem stronger. I am the person on the outside, getting tested.
Wet gosling or not, I am out of the egg.
I did it. I did it.
Words can not describe the sense of accomplishment and pride I feel.
