Healing Narrative
It is a peculiar thing how one event can change the trajectory of your life. One singular moment in time can leave you hurling in a different direction. I was always a sheltered child. I was raised in a homeschool family who never skipped church on Sunday. My mother dressed me in floral and frills and warned me to never be alone with the boys when I went outside to play. As I grew a bit older, I would be filled with resentment any time I was told I couldn’t stay the night at a friend’s house my mother didn’t know. I felt suffocated and I felt I was like a small dog kept on a tight leash. I envied the other kids that got to attend sleepovers every other weekend with no care in the world. I imagined what that freedom would feel like, and I yearned for it. I didn’t yet know my mother was trying so hard to desperately shield us from a world I didn’t yet know. A world she knew very well.
It is strange to look back on a moment and wonder what life would have been like if you didn’t make one decision. August 26th, 2011 was the event that changed my life. There will always be a small part of me that wishes I could talk to that fourteen-year-old version of myself and beg her not to push my mom into letting me go stay with a friend I knew I would only get into trouble with. At times, I feel like I am beating bloody fists on a one-sided mirror. I can see everything, and she can’t yet see anything. I knew I wasn’t doing anything I should be doing at the time, but how can you predict the unthinkable? I remember the moment he grabbed me, hand placed over my mouth before I could think before I could scream. He placed a gun to my head, and I lay there motionless. IAs a young girl, my faith was not my own, it was inherited from my parents. But in those moments of complete and utter desperation, I began to pray to the only God I knew. In an instant, this scary man full of anger with a gun became a scared coward.
I remember the look in his eye and the shake of his voice. He suddenly wanted nothing to do with me and hastily wanted me out. He held his gun to me with shaky hands as I put my clothes back on. I could tell he was scared, but his words were so cruel and vile. He let me go, but not without making his threats. It is not the physical abuse I experienced that haunts my dreams these days. It was the words that were spoken over me that did the most intense damage. It was the words that have impacted almost every crevice of my life. It was the words that are what truly changed the trajectory of my life. The last words he spoke to me were “nobody will love you after what I have done to you.”
I bought my first bottle of high-coverage concealer to hide the marks he made on my skin. I was so fearful of anyone knowing. I carried such a fear that he would follow through on his threats. I now understand this was a tactic to fear me into silence, and that he was the one afraid. But for a long time, I felt eyes on the back of my head. Everywhere I went I felt his suffocating presence lingering near and watching my every move like a lion ready to devour me whole. I became a shattered shell of the child I once was. I became quieter and more reserved, and I never dared to look anyone in the eye. I remember feeling like my memories were foggy and I became detached from it. I now understand this was severe dissociation and that my brain was trying to protect me. But at the time, I felt like I was crazy, and I started questioning my reality.
Even as some of the details faded, my anger and my shame grew like weeds. I went from being a sheltered young girl who was probably a little bit delayed in my understanding of sex to being hypersexual at a young age and doing things many of my friends were not. This was the start of a shame cycle that would affect me for years. I would take long showers and imagine I am washing these feelings away. I sat down on the floor of my cold porcelain tub and cried hot tears begging God to make me clean. I wished I could be like a snake and shed the skin I was in.
My mother saw the darkness take hold of me as I transformed from a child to a woman overnight. I still remember the time she practically pulled the information out of me. I came to her like a wounded animal and sat beside her on the couch of our old porch. I couldn’t look at her because I felt responsible for the pain I was about to deliver her. I could not tell her all of the details; it took years for me to fully confess the fullness of it. But it was on this day on this porch that I define as the start of my healing journey.
Roughly one year later I was diagnosed with PTSD. I wasn’t going to school because I had become a prisoner to my fear. Nightmares began to plague my mind and I refused to leave the safety of my home. Because of this, I began to fail my classes. I can still remember feeling like I was looking at the world from the inside out. My mother was desperate to get me help, and she came across Dr. William Tollefson, a trauma life coach. I was exhausted and was sick of going to different therapists to only get worse, but I went anyway. I never believed in miracles, but he felt like one. He was a trauma survivor himself and had done years of research on trauma survivors. He uses Rapid Reduction Therapy (RRT). I remember it sounding too good to be true. However, PTSD is the result of the brain’s inability to process and file a traumatic memory. RRT is simple in that it is to help file away that memory. My PTSD symptoms dissipated overnight. I can’t take away what happened fully, and it will always affect me in different ways, but I am able to live more successfully. I had to attend night school and summer school to catch up, but I graduated high school on the honor roll. I remember walking across the auditorium stage and glancing over at the faculty member that told me I wouldn’t graduate and implied I was lazy.
I once believed I never received justice for what happened to me. But here is the thing, my justice didn’t come from a courtroom or a judge, but I decided it comes from me. My justice came in healing and finding Dr. William Tollefson. My justice is enrolling in college to excel in a career I love. Justice for me is jumping into the cold, Baltic Sea, with my mother and my sister. They have helped me fight this battle and at that moment we all felt free. It was this night that I connected with my current partner. The same partner who I get to call my husband. Justice to me is wandering ancient castles and wandering the oldest cities in Europe. I remember being so thankful for life and the gift of living. Justice to me is getting lost in the desert with mountains that stand like cathedrals on a road trip with a friend. Justice to me is sleeping under a sea of stars next to my favorite lake and feeling the deepest peace that nobody can ever take away. Justice to me looks like a faith stronger than ever before and the belief that what is broken, can be restored. Justice looks like sitting around bonfires with new friends and laughing until my stomach hurts and realizing love is so abundant in my life and it always was. Justice looks like painting my kitchen my favorite shade of green. Justice looks like wandering my neighborhood with my dog and my partner on a crisp Autumn Day. To me, justice comes in the way I live my life to the fullest. This is the freedom I have always yearned for.
No matter what happens, I believe you can create a better life and forge your own path. I thought for a long time that my trauma was my story. Now I understand I am so much more than what happened, and my story is still being written.
