TRIGGER WARNING: expletives, sexual abuse, rape, healing.
Healing is definitely a journey. A journey where the tumultuous weather of past memories, of painful abuse, of humiliations – is stored under my muscles, deep within my soft tissue.
I first discovered this after being forced into a broken chair by a former set of employers. One of them commanded me to sit down, when I expressed my hesitation to sit in a broken chair, the other one pushed my shoulder and growled, “Sit down,” and then she growled my name as she held me down with her hand on my shoulder.
That night, as I cried on the way home from work, I was haunted by my first husband forcing me into a chair in our kitchen, so he could unrelentingly interrogate me for hours about the specifics of what I felt when I was raped in college. His specific questions are too vulgar to put in print on the internet.
Soon after the broken chair incident at my work, my bladder stopped working in a healthy way. Eventually my urologist ran diagnostics, and gently explained that it was entirely probable that my pelvic floor had been damaged by my first husband (and his friends). I eventually started restorative pelvic floor physical therapy…and my journey into the healing world of deep tissue memory.
Essentially, when something or someone triggers a memory of the horrors I have survived, my body tenses up causing pain and other side effects, like organ spasms. (Organ spasms for me can sometimes feel like passing a kidney stone if unchecked). In pelvic floor therapy, I learned different methods for gently relieving the tension in my soft tissue that was damaged, both internal and external.
This week, I took a brave step of courage, and recorded an official statement regarding the hell that I lived through in my first marriage. The next day, my body reminded me that my soft tissue clearly remembers. It was a painful day of simply riding the waves of grief and allowing myself the space and time to acknowledge that I have endured 24 years of intimidation so I wouldn’t speak the truth. 18 years of my OB/GYN office records and my physical therapy records and my counseling sessions being used as another weapon of intimidation.
Recounting the details of sexual abuse and trauma is a terrible healing journey, a necessary one that I trust will be beautiful someday. Eventually, the shit thrown into my life and dumped on me will cure into fertilizer, and then I will grow a Rose Garden. I will contribute time, gentleness, and beauty…and the only contribution of my intimidators will always simply be a load of shit. Today, my soft tissue hurts. I know from experience that if I ignore it, I will be doubled over in pain and in the emergency room. So, I treated it. Despite knowing that there will be a “news article” or a snide remark or an attempt to intimidate me back into cowering silence, I treated it the way I was coached to treat it.
In the past, intimidation worked on me. Today is not that day. This week is not that week, these years are no longer those years. Like a bison, I have learned to face the wind. I guess that means the only thing behind me is a pile of shit.