Part 27

I have thought before about whether or not any of my childhood was good. Before the memories of the sexual abuse, I knew I’d had difficult times, but I also could remember things that made me feel warm and happy.

Once I started remembering all of those really bad things, though, it seemed like all of the happy memories I had attached to my dad were actually bits from larger events in which something horrendous happened. It seemed every positive memory I had was actually connected to him hurting me.

It got to where I would try to remember anything good at all about my dad, and if he ever did anything nice for me. I began to look at all of my memories of him from the perspective that he never loved me and always wanted to hurt me. I don’t know if this was a way to protect myself from more pain or what, but that’s the way it happened.

Seemingly benign events became symbolic of his evil, regardless of whether or not I could concretely connect them to his evil. I can remember him just doing something fun, like taking me to eat breakfast at a diner and sitting at the counter and I would have raisin bran, because the initials of raisin bran were the same as my initials and as his initials.

Even now, I can think back warmly of that diner – I think it was called The Clock or something like that. But then I search my mind for something evil that had to be attached to it. I start to remember actually being there, and what I was feeling.

I remember that other people would talk to me, like the waitress or a cop who was also there more than once at the same time my dad and I were there. I was terribly uncomfortable when other adults tried to initiate any kind of conversation with me – I would freeze up and not say anything.

Sometimes I would manage a smile, and that usually got the grown up to be satisfied with the exchange, and then stop paying attention to me. Other times, though, the grown up would be like, “I asked you a question. Did you think I didn’t want to hear an answer from you? Are you going to answer the question?”

It would absolutely terrify me. Usually when I would come up with an answer, the grown up would laugh at me, probably because I was so cute and serious, but that’s not how I thought of it then. I hated being laughed at, especially when I was just honestly answering a question some person I didn’t even know had asked me.

I mean, how could responding “fine” to the question “how are you” be funny? But people would find that delightfully funny, and I would just shut down.

I didn’t understand when adults would speak to me like I was a baby. I understood adult tones and words and facial expressions, and I was not a baby, so why would adults treat me that way? I remember being at the zoo once, and I was really tired, so my mom let me sit in the stroller that she rented for my baby brother when we entered the place.

A kid holding an adult’s hand waddled by me and looked at me and pointed, and the adult said, “yes, look at the baby,” and I was befuddled and insulted. The kid was younger than I was at the time, and in my mind it was ridiculous that I could be referred to as a baby.

But I was in a stroller. And I fit comfortably – I distinctly remember because I was surprised at how easily my legs slid under the metal lap bar when I got in it. Granted, older kids do fit in strollers, but I would cap that out at around four or five years old.

Four and five year olds actually are, in many, many ways, still babies, and in retrospect, I can see how that person could think of me as baby. But at that time and in my mind, I wasn’t.

Another time I remember being surprised by how juvenile an adult considered me was when I got a Strawberry Shortcake doll for Christmas. I was five. I already knew my parents were Santa, and so I looked at the Strawberry Shortcake, and was like, “what was my mom thinking?”

And then I thought about how I was five years old, and that a Strawberry Shortcake doll probably would be an okay thing to give a five year old girl, so I just let it go. That thing really did smell good, though.

I was probably around the same age when that cop at the diner tried to talk to me, but I again didn’t make the connection that I was young enough to be spoken to that way.

Also, he was a cop. He really made me nervous.

I never did like cops – I was always afraid I would say or do something that would get my dad in trouble. I felt very protective of him, of how different he was than other people. I felt like I had to mediate between him and the general public, which was difficult because I simultaneously had the sense that I didn’t really know what was going on a lot of the time.

Once when I was seven, my dad was letting me drive the golf cart (we drive golf carts around town where I live, just in case you don’t know what I could be talking about). We drove right by City Hall, where there happened to be a cop.

The cop stopped us and said that I had to be at least 12 to drive the golf cart with a parent. My dad was like, “oh, okay, I didn’t know.” Then the cop asked him what his name was, and my dad refused to tell him, even though the cop insisted my dad tell him. I was very confused and quickly saw how I could help clear up the situation by telling the cop what my dad’s name was.

I knew the whole thing, first, middle, and last. So I told the cop my dad’s first, middle, and last names. The cop smiled. I felt like I had done a good job helping out my dad, and we were shortly thereafter waved along to go about our business.

Once we were out of earshot of the cop, my dad explained to me that he did not want the cop to know what his name was, and I was again very confused. I could not comprehend why he would not be okay telling a cop what his name was when he hadn’t done anything wrong, and he eventually just dropped it.

That was probably the only time during my childhood that I freely offered information to a cop, and that was only because I distinctly felt I was helping my dad out. That cop at the diner was not getting a word out of me. I instinctively felt that it would be bad to say things to him, because I might get in trouble, or my dad might get in trouble, so I just zipped it tight.

Another thing I distinctly remember not liking about that diner was that I really didn’t like raisin bran. They had an entire array of tiny boxes of sugary goodness that my mom would not even think of letting cross through the front door into our house. Then here I was in this diner with this grand opportunity to experience gloriously unhealthy cereal, and I was stuck with raisin bran.

How that happened was that the first time I was going to order something there, I was having a hard time choosing. They had all of the little boxes stacked on a shelf above the prep area, and all I could see were the initials of each type of cereal stamped in red on the bottom.

I was working my way through the boxes, working out what each different set of initials could mean, when my dad pointed out that the raisin bran boxes had capital red “RB”s stamped on each of them. He made a connection between the two of us and applied it to something in the real world.

How could I not have anything but raisin bran? So that’s what I had, and I didn’t want to disappoint my dad, so I kept having that each time we went there. Eventually, my mom started buying it because my dad told her my favorite cereal was raisin bran.

And so that is how the process works – I can find some warm, companionable memory in my mind about my dad, and then when I examine it more closely, it was not so good after all.

I don’t know why this happens, or why I do this to my good memories. Sometimes I think it is because there really were never any good experiences with my dad. Other times I think it is because it is harder for me to think of my dad in any good way, and so completely villainize him in my mind.

When I was growing up and would get to a point with my dad that I just couldn’t stand anything about him, I would think back about the memories I had categorized as good. The good and loving father I had associated with those memories always won out over the bad father.

For some reason, the only way I could accept that my dad could hurt me was to prove to myself that he was a completely bad person, through and through. I was consistently able to prove that he was not completely bad based on those memories I had assigned to “good.”

No matter what he did to me or to other people, I would cling to the goodness I could see in him.

The memories I had catalogued as “good” were the memories I first started to actively analyze once I again became aware of the sexual abuse. This was years after I’d had any contact with my dad, and it seems that allowed me to not only feel safer, but to be more objective about who he was as a person.

My standard cache of “good” memories ended up being whatever went on before and after something really, really bad. It was like I had extricated those moments of terror in order to make the moment as a whole be ok.

I don’t know – it just really fucking sucks. I had worked so hard to keep and maintain some way that my dad could have loved me, and now I can’t even find a single scrap in my past that would indicate there was any truth to it.

It amazes me the extremes I have gone through in order to hold on to the idea that someone loves me. It seems as long as there is some way to connect a person with love and acceptance, no matter how twisted, there is some innate need to overlook all of the bad things and continue to seek that love and acceptance.

For me, once it came down to looking beyond that façade, all of the things I had overlooked and had tried to cover with pleasantries became unbearably painful to lose. The longer I tried to keep that façade up, the harder it was to let it come down.

If my dad really didn’t love me, and really did hurt me just for his own sick and selfish reasons, then where the fuck does that leave me? After defining myself for my entire life based on how this man treated me, what does it mean when I finally accept that he most likely never saw anything good in me? Never saw anything worth fighting his bad compulsions to protect and to love?

I think back on all of the things I have done to hurt myself and to hurt people who love me, and conclude that’s where it left me. That is where what my dad did and how I reacted to it and adapted to it left me.

It is pretty fucking shitty.

But it is not who I have to be today. As long as I can keep sight of that, I know I will be just fine.

Part 26

I have written before about the fact that I still am remembering new things that I had blocked out, or forgotten, or whatever you want to call it.

When I initially began having the memories about the sexual abuse, I felt strongly that I wanted to confront my dad about it. I even tried contacting him, though I never heard anything back. I don’t even know if my attempt to contact him ever reached him, as it had been years since we had last spoken and neither of us had made any attempt to remain connected in any way.

As I traveled through this nightmare and remembered events of escalating horror, my dad became more of an abstract monster in my mind. The more I remembered, the more abstract he became, the bigger he became, the easier it was for him to hurt me, and the easier it was for him to fill up my every waking moment.

It became more and more difficult for me to remember things like what it felt like when he held my hand. And then I think about how he never did actually hold my hand, he just stuck out a finger from his fist for me to grab onto.

And then that is one more thing that separates the man I thought I knew from the man I was beginning to become aware of.

I had assumed certain things about my childhood. For example, I had assumed my dad wanted to keep me safe from harm, but when I try to remember specific events in which he acted directly to protect me, physically or otherwise, I have a really hard time coming up with anything at all.

I look at the scars on my hands and remember that one is from almost accidentally cutting my finger off with a hack saw when I was about 7. Why would my dad encourage me to do things like play with a hack saw when I was 7? The reason I did things like play with a hack saw was because I could tell it made him happy to see me as a kid who would like to play with a hack saw.

I wouldn’t even consider letting a kid, mine or anyone else’s, of any age, get anywhere near a hack saw, because they could, you know, accidentally cut their fingers off.

My dad played racquetball and one of the “together” things we would do is go to the health club and I would watch him play, or I would just run around or whatever. One time – I think I was about 12 – he asked me if I wanted to play against him.

Of course I wanted to play against him. I had an expectation of him teaching me how to play and showing me how he could hit the ball so hard you could hardly keep track of it with your eyes. He was a real badass at racquetball, or that is what I thought anyway.

So there we were – I was in the back left corner and he was serving. He hit the ball as hard as he could, and before I could even blink felt a deep pain in my chest. The serve had nailed me. I tried to blink back tears as I struggled to breathe through the pain.

I felt like an idiot, like a weak baby – like a girl.

The pain radiated across my chest and down my left arm and up into my neck. My dad thought it was funny, and asked me if I still wanted to be a professional baseball player. He told me that the hit I had received with the spongy, blue racquetball was nothing compared to what it felt like to be hit with a baseball

I told him, “no,” and then didn’t want to play with him anymore.

I was angry that he had said that about being a baseball player. The only reason I had ever even wanted to be a professional baseball player was because he thought it was awesome that I wanted to do that.

I do not recall having much of my own thoughts about what I would be when I grew up. I do remember reading a James Herriot book and thinking about being a veterinarian, but then someone told me I would have to stick my hands up cows’ asses, so that dream fizzled out pretty quickly.

Other than that, who I wanted to be when I grew up was my dad. He was invincible and amazing. He could do things no one else could do, although I cannot recall any of the amazing things he could do, just that he could do them. He was very mysterious about it all.

He was very mysterious about a lot of things. Even into my adulthood, I viewed that as a sign of his greatness. It was also one of the most maddening things about him. He would not say a word if he did not want to, and most of the times I wanted him to say something involved his acknowledgement of hurting me in some way, and he never, EVER, did that.

When I was about 22, I was at my parents’ house and I was about to open the door that led onto the back porch. My dad was on the other side and opened it at the same time, resulting in the door hitting me kind of hard.

It wasn’t a big deal, it didn’t even hurt. But this is what he said: “Oh, sorry.”

I was blown away, stunned. I told him that it was the only time I had ever heard him tell me (or anyone else) that he was sorry about anything.

And it was – still to this day I can think of no circumstances under which he has ever conceded any wrongdoing, intentional or not, in his lifetime of hurting others.

He didn’t say sorry about hitting me so hard with the racquetball, he didn’t say sorry when he burned my hand as a joke, he didn’t say sorry when he rolled up the car window onto my neck and almost crushed my esophagus, he didn’t say he was sorry about anything.

He found it ALL quite hilarious. My dad never laughed like he did when I got hurt. It delighted him to see my face contort into a startled look of pain, regardless of whether it was emotional or physical, and especially when he was the one to cause it.

He was always very indignant of it all, and I learned that if I was going to cry, I was going to get laughed at or dismissed or called irrational.

I started to become angry instead of hurt. He thought that it was really funny when I got angry with him, too, but only when I was little. As I got older, it began to really irritate him, which he expressed by literally turning his back to me and refusing to even acknowledge my presence.

Sometimes I would ask him for money to buy new shoes, or a bag, or whatever. Sometimes, he would say, “okay,” and pull out his wallet and give me a hundred dollar bill. Then I would feel like a princess.

Well, I guess I would want to feel like a princess, but really what I felt was that it was the least he could do to make up for being so horrible to me, and I spent his money happily.

All of these things I have been talking about in this post are things that I have never blocked out or forgotten. These were all things that comprised my conscious relationship with my dad, and always had.

I had always known he was a bastard. No one really did anything about it though, but as I got older, people would comment on his bazaar punishments and rules. I would then defend him, saying that he was just really strict, and even taking a bit of pride at being in a family that had such high standards for each other.

As my memories become more solid and concrete, and I have more and more outside affirmation of the factual nature of my memories, my dad becomes less and less abstract in my mind.

He is no longer this unknown monster capable of horrendous atrocities against me and against others. He no longer frightens me to the core as some sort of wraithlike demon that haunts and tortures my blood and my mind and my soul.

As my memory becomes more concrete, so does my sense of self. And so does my sense of, my knowledge of, and my familiarity with my dad.

I mean… he’s my dad.

Part 25

I have been amazed at the blessings that have come from writing this blog. I cannot describe how much it means to me when I hear from someone who has been affected by what I have written, especially when it is another survivor who says reading my stuff helps make them not feel so alone.

I have often wrestled with the idea that there must be some point to all of this. How could I have any faith in the world or other people or myself if people could do what my dad did to me and there be no point to it?

I mean, I don’t really think of their being any point from my dad’s perspective. At this time, I don’t really give a shit what his perspective is. From what I know of his childhood and his past, I can definitely see how he suffered, too, and how he could have gotten so fucked up. That might help me to not take what he did so personally, but it certainly in no way makes it okay.

I took a philosophy class a few years ago – it was called “Great Questions.” One of the great questions was whether or not god was real. Another was whether there was any such thing as pure benevolence. I can’t remember what the third one was, but it was a good one, too.

Anyway, from the midst of this class came the debate about why a purely loving and benevolent god would allow pain and suffering. The argument was made that if there was no suffering, there could be no joy. How could you know what happiness is if you have never known what it was like to be sad?

How can you know what good is if you have never known what evil is? One of the foundations of this theory is that in order for happiness and joy to actually be happiness and joy, it has to be experienced comparatively to pain and sadness. Self-awareness of a state of happiness is inherent in the meaning of “happiness.”

Following, self-awareness of pain is the only way to experience the self-awareness of happiness and joy. The height of joy realized can only be the opposite of the amount of pain previously realized. Basically, the more pain you feel, the more happiness you will also be able to feel.

You can’t know how wonderful and beautiful and incredible life is if you never know how hellish and hateful and painful it is, too.

When I ask the insidious question, “why,” I am satisfied by this explanation. I could not experience and comprehend pure joy and pure love if I had not also experienced and comprehended pure evil and pure hate and pure pain. But then I ask myself whether the residual ability to experience such heights of joy worth the necessity of having to experience such depths of pain.

Is ignorance really bliss? Would it be better for me if I had not experienced any pain, and in return, never really been able to know what happiness is?

This is where I come to a draw: if I had never felt all of this pain, I would not even be able to comprehend what all of this happiness could be like. I would not even be aware of what I was missing. So does that mean that there can be no such thing as a truly benevolent god, because there is the option to keep me ignorant of pain, even though it would also mean I was ignorant of joy?

Here is my conclusion, which has taken a very long time to accept: it doesn’t really matter.

What is the point in wondering whether or not I would have been better off not feeling anything than feeling such extremes of everything when I obviously have no power to change what has already happened and what I have already felt and experienced?

Why stew in the idea that whatever god this is could have prevented me from experiencing all of these horrible things to begin with? I suppose it would be a good reason to be mad at that god. But I still couldn’t do anything to change it, and being mad at an omnipotent and abstract entity would just get in the way of being able to feel any happiness – or at least the full extent of happiness I have the potential to feel.

Another explanation I have found for experiencing all of this pain is that others who have also experienced this pain can be comforted by me, and I in turn can be comforted by them and by my ability to comfort.

But that just brings me right back to the question of why there would have to be pain to begin with. It is maddening, and that is why I have accepted that whatever answer there may be to that question has nothing to do with me.

I cannot do anything about changing what pain I have and have not experienced in the past, but I can do my best to appreciate the joy and happiness I am able to experience in return.

But pulling that happiness from that pain is incredibly difficult. It takes a lot of hard work, and the process is, in and of itself, painful.

So is it worth it?

I’m just going to go with yes, because I have experienced heights of joy I had never experienced before I allowed myself to feel all of this pain.

But is the amount of happiness I have experienced in direct proportion to the amount of pain? To be perfectly honest, I do not think it is. However, I have come to the conclusion that I will be eventually rewarded with the proportionate amount of happiness in relation to the amount of pain I have felt, and in the meantime, at least I am not doing all of those shitty things to add to the pain anymore.

The way I reached this conclusion was through recognizing the joy and light and love I have in my life right now. I know I did not recognize the extent of it before I was able to feel all of the pain of my past.

I also know, though, that this is just me. I did not have a choice about what happened to me, but I do have a choice about what to do about it now. I choose to face it and work through it and get my reward of peace and happiness.

This doesn’t mean that everyone else who has experienced pain should or would or even could make that same choice. I can’t say that it is the “right” thing to do. I just know how much pain I have experienced, and continue to experience on a regular basis. Maybe it will leave me one day, but as of right now, I don’t see that happening.

The pain is big, and deep, and an innate part of the person I am. And I am pissed about it. I am really fucking pissed that my dad took so much from me – including my opportunity to have a loving and kind dad.

It has motivated me to get what I can out of life that is good. I could very, very easily be continuing the harm done that my dad started. Continuing to hurt myself would be a fantastic way to carry out that bastard’s legacy. And I am just not willing to do that.

And if that means going to therapy and not drinking and not smoking and not doing drugs and not eating tons of unhealthy food and not having sex with every willing guy I come across, then so be it.

When I read that list of self-harming behavior, it seems silly that I would choose any of them over my happiness. Happiness is not easy, though, and doing all of those bad things to myself IS easy.

But like I said, I am pissed at what has been taken from me, and if I my perfect revenge is to bust my ass to become healthy and happy, then so be it.

part 24

The longest crying jag of my life started the day before I went into the hospital. My plan was to just go there for a couple of days, maybe the weekend, and then be back at school on Monday, which is when the fall semester was starting.

Yeah. No.

I don’t really remember much about when I first got to the hospital except crying. Jonny had taken me, and after I checked in, they wouldn’t let him go any further. I felt like I died, like my sternum turned into lead and crushed my insides. Then they took me to the place where I was staying.

It was nice there. The first thing I noticed, though, was the resemblance to the set of “Girl Interrupted,” starring Winona Rider, Angelina Jolie and the late Brittany Murphy. The nurse’s station was in the center of the ‘unit,’ and there was a little kitchen place, and then a very pretty courtyard.


There was also a long hallway, where the bedrooms were, down one end away from the nurse’s station, and a large living room/TV room and a smaller den-type room on the other.

All I wanted to do was find where my bed was and melt into it and just feel safe so that I could finally sob uncontrollably. I was utterly and completely exhausted with holding it back, and I was also very tired of holding it back. I was really glad I got my room alone for the first couple of nights so that I could weep over my broken heart in private.

I cried nonstop for three days. I’m not exaggerating. Actually, it might have even been four. I saved my gut-wrenching bouts for whenever I could be alone, but I had become a calmly and consistently flowing fountain the rest of the time. I carried around a box of Kleenex to soak up my tears and my snot. It was really horrible, but at the same time very, very freeing.

I thought I would write more about the hospital – I mean, it was a pretty interesting place, and I went through a lot there. Now I feel like I’m just invading my own privacy, and I don’t want to write any more details about the hospital. So I won’t. Because it’s my blog. And I can write whatever I want.

Actually, I really do not “want” to write all of this. It’s difficult to get it out of my brain, difficult to find words that can describe the experiences, and difficult to see what happened to me in words typed so concretely on a computer screen.

I do “want” to continue to recover and live my life, and writing has been fantastic for that, especially because people read it. Thank you readers!!!

So anyway, back to the mental hospital.

As I mentioned before, I had planned on staying only a few days (you know, to cry), and then going about my life. I ended up staying longer than that, and continued all kinds of therapeutic stuff after I was done there.

The hospital taught me some very important things. Probably the number one thing it taught me was that I could compartmentalize the shit raging in my brain in order to function on a basic level. There was so much very distressing imagery going through my mind, and so it was appropriate and effective to imagine that all of the bad stuff was a video playing on a TV in my head, and I could watch when I felt ok doing so, and I could hit the eject button at any time.

One of the most overwhelming and frightening things about the flashbacks – really, just about being consciously aware of what had happened to me as a child – is that I felt like it was in charge of what I was thinking. I was not able to think much about anything else, and that really scared me. One reason it scared me was because I was vividly recalling my pain and suffering almost continuously, and I didn’t think my brain could handle it.

Another reason it was so scary was because it was difficult to remember that I was not a little girl anymore, but a grown up with a beautiful family and home and dog and all of that other normal stuff that comprised my life.

I don’t mean that I would actually think I was no longer where I was – that I was in the past or anything. It was more like while being aware of what was around me, some part of my mind and body was back there in the past reliving horror. I was terrified pretty constantly.

Even when I learned how to “eject” the “tape” in my mind so that I could keep from getting too upset, my body was still remembering things. I started to twitch, mostly in my face and arms and legs, almost all the time and I didn’t have much control over that.

It was very strange having my body react so separately from my mind. I had never really even considered that this could be so. But it was – and that scared me, too. It helped to learn that it was ok for my body to have its own experiences independently of my conscious mind. I would notice that I would be violently shaking, or that my limbs ached terribly, or that I had hives, and I could just be like, “ok, the body is going through some stuff,” and not have to immediately figure out something specific as to why it was freaking out, and then attach it to something I could consciously comprehend.

For the first few months after going into the hospital (this was where I quit drinking, too), I would get really, really bad tension headaches. I had previously experienced the same headaches about 24 to 48 hours after I had decided not to drink anymore. They went away about an hour after I started drinking again, so I called them my “sober headaches.”

Since I was no longer drinking, these headaches were free to start in the morning, and then by the time I went to bed, they would be migraine-size. Ibuprofen and Tylenol couldn’t even touch them, and I wasn’t interested in even trying to get some oxycodone or Xanax – what would be the point of going through the pain of detoxing and getting used to life if I just used another addictive substance to cover it up?

So what happened was, I just had to get through the headaches. At this point in time, everything was something I just had to get through.

It was so horrible. It was a nightmare. It was one giant brain-fuck after another, relentlessly. I don’t think words could describe just how intensely crippling it was, especially during those first few months.

Even worse than the flashbacks were the times I would slip back into the mode of thinking and believing and knowing that my dad did not do these things to me, and then suddenly remember that he did.

Disbelief, pain, nausea, tears, terror, betrayal and horror would encompass me every time I re-remembered what my dad had done.

It was like having a wave crash over me, and just when I was finally able to get my face out of the water to breathe in some air, another one would hit me. Over and over and over and over.

A lot (A LOT) of therapy and other recovery work eventually got me to the point where that hardly ever happens, but it has taken years.

When I first started being aware that my dad sexually abused me, I only had little snippets of what had happened. I got to a point with that information that allowed me to feel like I could just breathe in and out again.

And then I would remember something worse, like how he raped me. And when I got a hold on that information, I remembered that he took me to other people so they could rape me, too. And when I got a hold of that information, I remembered that I had become pregnant from him raping me, and had an abortion. Each one of these new components would hit me just as hard as the initial knowledge that he had somehow molested me.

The list of new memories and new atrocities still goes on. I still get new information in this fashion, but it is much less frequent and much less intense. Instead of rocking every part of me, it just punches me in the stomach a little bit.

It was a good two solid years of the jack-in-the-box remembering before I felt like I didn’t always have to be on guard, waiting to get walloped again. I had gradually become aware of my state of mind that preceded new memories and flashbacks. I learned that I could get myself to a safe place and go ahead and let the memories come, and then it would be through.

I also was able to gradually – GRADUALLY – accept that there was going to be more stuff, even worse stuff that I would be remembering at some point in time. At first, I had assumed that one thing was the last, worst thing, and then I would remember another worse thing.

I kept trying to put a bookend on the memories, to encompass these experiences within some realm of my control. I felt that if I could just go ahead and remember everything, then I could go ahead and work through everything, and then I could have a normal life.

I hoped and prayed to remember it all. I was like, “BRING IT, DAMMIT!” in my mind. Someone told me to be careful for what I prayed for, because I would get it. I scoffed at this notion because at that time, I could not imagine anything more painful and frustrating than knowing that there was still more shit to come, but not knowing when or how bad it would be.

I got what I prayed for, although it is still an ongoing process. Now I know there are definitely worse things than knowing there was more shit to come, but not knowing when or how bad it would be.

Now I just let the memories take their time, and allow them to surface when it is time for them to surface, and not try to force it to happen.

When I know I am going to be remembering something else soon, I just try to enjoy whatever peace I have been able to accumulate in my mind while I can, and that is what helps me get through the bad stuff.

Part 23

So I was thinking that the end of my last post would be a fantastic way to wrap it all up and finish my whole “putting it all out there” experience. I have to admit – it was an attractive thought. However, it was not the end of the story…which leads me to wonder: will there ever be an end to the story as long as I’m alive?

I don’t know, but I know this whole healing and recovering thing will be a lifelong process, so probably the wellspring of shit to “put all out there” will not dry up. I can say definitively, though, that the experience described at the end of my last post certainly marked another one of those points in my life that are a “before this happened,” or “after this happened,” kind of thing.

Before the hospital, I was lost and drowning and didn’t know what to do or how to even take a breath in and then let it out again. After the hospital, I was lost and drowning and was figuring out how to take a breath in and then let it out again, and I was also no longer trying to do it all on my own.

Here’s the thing about my own perception of events that have happened to me: they are NEVER as bad in my own mind as they actually are in reality. I can finagle a way out of any situation or experience or thought that can change my perception of what was real into something that was not real.

For example, I could be perfectly aware that someone touching me in a “bad way” was bad and I could tell on the person. However, what my dad did to me was not even in the same realm. What my dad did to me was a lot of different things, but never anything I could tell on him for. I BELIEVED in him – even when I was fully conscious of the fact that what he was doing to me was wrong, I could write it all off as something in my head that I exaggerated and made bigger and lied about so that I could get attention.

Additionally, I had somehow adopted this idea of being able to take the punishment I “deserved” as something I just had to do – I brought it on myself, so don’t try to blame it on anyone else. It’s not that I never tried to get out of trouble, it’s just that after I was already in it, anything I felt that I said or did could only be looked at as attempted retaliation for whoever was punishing me.

The times that I would be angry beyond denial of what my dad did to me were the times that I would get punished. I would try to stand up to him, and he would knock me down. And it wasn’t just him – my mom, siblings, neighbors, relatives, family friends, people at church – they all tried to convince me that I was over-reacting and exaggerating and lying in order to retaliate against my punisher.

All of those people would say things like, “Now, Beck….blah blah blah…you know your dad loves you…blah blah blah…he only wants what is best for you…blah blah blah.” It was just repeated confirmation from people all around me that my dad could do whatever he wanted to do to me, and regardless of how wrong I thought he might be, I was just a child who was upset over being held accountable for yelling or throwing a fit or whatever it was I had done that could be publically called “bad.”

I would have extreme swings in my state of mind that would go from pure fury and indignation about my dad to pure hopelessness and helplessness and defeat about my dad and everything else in the whole world. I feel tired thinking about it. It is a horrible, horrible place to be.

As a result of this kind of thing happening over and over again throughout my childhood, I would constantly question my own judgment. I mean, it was very obvious to me that tying me to a tree naked and pouring gasoline around it and threatening to set it on fire was NOT ok. But then I would do things like tell my mom that my dad had chained me to a tree, when in fact he had merely tied me to the tree with yellow tow rope. My mom would confront my dad, who would reiterate that I was a liar and crazy and bent on messing with their marriage.

She would believe him. Why wouldn’t she? The things I accused my dad of were heinous, outrageous, and unimaginable – and I did alter the stories to make them sound worse. I didn’t think it sounded so bad for him to tie me to a tree, but to chain me to a tree really sounded like something everyone would know was wrong.

But he would call me a liar, and I would stomp off to cry alone in my room because I did lie. I could feel the injustice of it all, but the fact that I lied about those details removed any credibility of my own judgment. If I lied, then what I was saying was not true. It was an all-or-nothing type of thing – if I lied about any part of it at all, that meant other people would not trust that any of the other things I said as real.

And then I would question whether these things were real or not, and I could always – ALWAYS – convince myself that what had happened to me didn’t happen, at least not in the way I remembered it happening. I believed there was something wrong with me, with my brain or even with my soul. And then I would be mad at the world for a little bit and all of my anger would instantly vanish once that man said something nice to me or looked at me and smiled or said, “hello daughter.”

I could not bear to think of my dad – and all of the nice things he did for me – being accused by me of these horrible other things. If I did that, I would not have the part of my dad I believed loved me. He would take it away at the drop of a hat, and then I would be back to the perpetual self-hatred and worthlessness, because the part of my dad I believed love me was the only thing I believed I could be loved by.

I was utterly incapable of defining myself as anything at all independently of his influence. As I got older, though, I began taking parts of myself from him and declaring them my own. Those parts were the things that he would hate, that god would hate, and that I would go to hell – or juvenile hall – for. For example, smoking cigarettes, or being promiscuous, or steeling his meds, or acting out in school. All of that felt like I could own it and he couldn’t stop me.

And he couldn’t. Once I figured out that my own self destruction was better than him destroying me, I was off to those bad-girl races.

But then, here I was, twenty years later, in a mental hospital.

I could not deny the reality of that. What he did must have been really, really bad, not just in my mind, but in everybody’s minds. I was in a mental hospital and he was connected to everything in my brain that got me there.

And so the bits and pieces of acceptance and remembering and hurting and suffering and healing began to tumble around me and fly out at me and hit me like hailstones in a storm.

But at least I knew I was finally somewhere safe enough to survive it.

part 22

Sometimes people tell me that I should be careful about what I write on my blog, that I should take my future into consideration, and think about whether or not what I write here may have any negative impact on my desired career choices. I mean, it’s a good point – on the one hand, I’m putting all of my crazy out there for the whole world to see and judge.

But on the other hand, I’m not crazy. I am someone who has experienced a lot of really bad shit that was not in any way my fault, and I have to wonder – would I even want to have a career that judged me negatively based on the fact that I was abused as a child? At this point in time, I really don’t see that happening.

One of the things that really bothers me about mental health issues in the United States is the negative stigma attached to them. Here’s the thing though: everybody is fucked up. There is no such thing as “normal,” but there is such a thing as “healthy.” “Healthy” takes a lot of work, though, especially considering negative life experiences.

Everybody has negative life experiences: some experiences are worse and cause more damage than others, and some people are more resilient and can continue to independently function on a healthy level despite the negative experiences. But a lot of people can’t do that – because we’re people, and that is just how it goes.

Which brings me back to the negative stigma attached to mental health issues: I have come across a lot of people who will not consider going to therapy because they cannot conceive of the very notion that they may in some way be someone who could benefit from therapy. I’m really glad I’m not one of those people.

Yeah, going to therapy sucks. Having to acknowledge that the experiences I have had are real sucks. Getting diagnosed with something listed in the DSM (the “official” book of mental health issues and disorders) sucks. Carrying around the knowledge that, according to society – and for a long time according to myself - that I am somehow broken and unworthy really, really sucks.

I mean, what am I supposed to do with that? How can I put all of my experiences out into the world and not expect to be treated negatively and as somehow mentally deficient in return?

At this point, I don’t really give that much of shit about how society or future employers might negatively view me because of my past experiences. At this point, I give a shit about living my life. I’ve been told to shut up since the day I was born, and that I was crazy and bad and wrong and unworthy of love or acceptance.

And I am still told that today – it is not wise to “advertise” the state of my mind, the past, present, and possibly future ways I cannot fit into this world.

But I’ve never fit into this world anyway, and by sharing my experiences and my pain with others, I am at least able to fit into my own skin.

Who knows? Maybe one day I will seriously regret putting all of this out there, but for now I am definitely okay with not shutting up and not sitting down. Putting it all out there has so far been immensely empowering, and so I’m going to keep doing it for now.

Having said that, back to my story…

So arrangements were made for me to go into the mental hospital as an in-patient for an undetermined amount of time. The idea of not knowing how long I would be there or how long it would be before I could see my kids again was terrifying. I knew Jonny could visit me, but the kids were not old enough and it ripped me up to leave them. I was very concerned with missing school, as well. I was also very concerned with the cost of this type of treatment.

But none of that could counteract the pain I was experiencing. It was pain I had been experiencing for my entire life, and it was finally – FINALLY – going to be safe to let it out.

I had this analogy in my head that everything my dad had done to me, and what the conscious acknowledgement of all that encompassed, would crush me. It was a big wave – a GIANT wave – that I had so far been able to hold off from crashing on top of me.

I could have times when I would not be thinking or feeling what that huge wave meant to me, but it was always there. As time went on, it just got bigger and bigger, and by the time I went into the hospital, it was a tsunami.

And I was tired. I was so, so tired of trying to hold it up. I was terrified of what would happen once that wave came crashing down. I didn’t really have any idea what might happen, just the absolute and complete terror of whatever it was that would happen.

I was very aware, though, that I had been waiting for someone to cart me off to the loony bin for as long as I could remember. But no one ever had. That was hurtful – I felt that there should have been at least one person in my life who loved me enough to do what needed to be done in order to allow me to get better. I had been waiting – literally – for my entire life for someone to step in and say, “enough,” and to scoop me up and put me somewhere safe.

As long as I tried to keep it all together myself, though, there was no way anyone could possibly even get close enough to me to be able to see how much pain I was in, how much my mind was torturing me, how much I hurt from knowing that my dad – the one person I had always wanted to love me and accept me – had done these things to me.

I mean, my DAD. Dads are supposed to keep their little girls safe, and to love them and to adore them and to make them feel like they can get through life without all of their skin being peeled off in the process.

But my dad didn’t do that. He didn’t even have the decency to abandon me – he stuck around. Instead of keeping me safe, he was the one who hurt me, and who allowed others to hurt me. It was all I meant to him – a toy, a device for his own amusement.

My god, that just HURTS! It is devastating, debilitating, CRUSHING. There is no room for any concrete thought or logic or anything else because that pain just consumes every single part of me and shuts me down.

I really thought it would kill me. But it didn’t.

The thing about the mental hospital that gave me some hope was that I knew they had straightjackets and syringes full of sedatives. Well, I never really saw a straightjacket – or a syringe, but I knew that if I came all undone, there would be people there to hold me down and dope me up before I could die or go permanently insane.

Additionally, it was a MENTAL hospital. People expected things like that from patients in a MENTAL hospital. I just couldn’t imagine a better place to finally, FINALLY, let it all go that would be more appropriate than a mental hospital.

So as terrifying and heart-wrenching as it was to go there (voluntarily – something I am truly amazed at and for some reason proud of), I knew that it would be safe. It was the safe place I had been waiting for someone to take me to. I was a little surprised, and as I mentioned before, hurt that I ended up having to pretty much instigate the process myself, but it was not so hard for me to get over that.

As much as I had wanted someone to scoop me up and take care of me – as much as I longed for someone to do that – I ended up being okay figuring out it had to be me who got the ball rolling. I guess I had to become willing to be that vulnerable, to allow someone else to help me.

And by that point I hurt so badly it was easy to take apart my pride and do just that.

And that wave came crashing down hard – and I was very surprised to find that it hadn’t even knocked me over. I mean, it really knocked me off balance, but I was still standing.

And after that, I believed that I could survive this. And that’s what I have been busy doing ever since then.

part 21

***TRIGGER WARNING***

So, I have re-read my last post in order to establish the mindset I need before delving into this – I actually do not believe I have made much of any attempt at all to describe what it was like to first remember that my dad sexually abused me.

It was a pretty intense time, and it was over three years ago, but I will do my best to recall the order and description of events as accurately as possible.

Right after I had the flashback of my dad (that first one, in 2006), I started to put a few things together – dreams I had had, specific events I had very clear memories of even though they happened when I was very young, and little flashes in my mind of this nightgown I had when I was little.

None of these events specifically included my dad directly molesting me, except for that dream I had years earlier when I did dream about him abusing me. I woke up in utter terror, made a conscious decision to change my dad from being the abuser to my grandfather being the abuser, and for some reason this helped me to be less bothered about it.

After that first flashback, I unlocked that dream from how I had amended it and re-examined it from the point of view that my dad could have actually in real life molested me.

It was horrifying.

I got really, really drunk and called a friend of mine. I told (blubbered to) her about the flashback and the dream and these other instances that were somehow connected to my dad in a really scary way, and I asked her if it was possible that I could have been molested by him and not known it. By “not known it” I mean that I could have somehow blocked these things from happening to the extent that I certainly and utterly knew I was a person this had never happened to.

She assured me that it was probably nothing, and I believed her. She had experience in working with kids who had been abused, so I made the decision to believe her. I also wanted so badly for it to not be true, and so I believed her.

I had also googled some information about memory around that time, and came up with a lot of stuff concerning “False Memory Syndrome.” According to this theory, it is possible that memories of abuse in my past could have been somehow created by my subconscious psyche as a result of something I had seen on television, or had read about. I thought that maybe I might be having these fears and flashbacks associated with my dad because I had been so hurt by him throughout my life (I had always been consciously aware of that, even without memories of sexual abuse), and maybe I subconsciously wanted to attribute something more concrete and horrible to the pain he had inflicted upon me.

I don’t really know what to say about that logic now, except that it gave me the get-out-of-jail-free card I had been looking for as to whether or not I would or could find any truth to the idea that my dad sexually abused me. Based on my friend’s conclusion and the information I had found about “false memories,” I decided that he had not, after all, sexually molested me, and was so relieved! I had been so absolutely frozen with terror, completely consumed with the possibility that he molested me, that when I found this way to provide an alternative to what I feared happened, I gladly accepted it.

At that time, I also made the decision to put my dad on hold and deal with the rape, as described in my blog about 2006, The Year of the Rape. As horrible and hellish and horrendous as it was to experience the process of healing concerning that rape, it was all preferable to even considering that my dad had maybe molested me.

So, back to 2007: it was summer time, I was taking summer classes, I was drinking like a fish, and I was back in counseling through Georgia State University’s program.

Before stopping my first bout of counseling at GSU, I promised my therapist that I would go to this group therapy program about substance abuse. I told her I would, so that’s what I did. The whole mantra of the group was: “You don’t have to quit to commit,” so it wasn’t all that hard for me to commit. It was once a week, and there were only about two or three other people in the group with me.

The facilitator of the group was a therapist at Georgia State who specialized in addiction and trauma (huh, how about that?). It was really my first time being exposed to the idea that in many cases, addiction and trauma are inextricably intertwined. That was not something that was addressed in the group, but I could see similarities in the other people in the group – we had all gone through really horrible shit at some time in our lives.

So anyway, I continued drinking and continued going to the group therapy, and then the department decided to disband the group sessions because of the low attendance rate at the meetings.

I was nervous about that – I didn’t necessarily like being there, but it was something I had to hold my feet down. I didn’t think I would do so well without some sort of professional support. The facilitator of the group also did individual counseling, and as much as I did not want to get into individual counseling again, the idea of doing so made me feel less anxious.

So she became my second individual therapist at Georgia State. I don’t know how my writing this may inadvertently (or advertantly –ha ha) affect her professionally, so I am going to call her Jane, which is one of my favorite girl names and is also not really my second Georgia State therapist’s name.

So I started seeing Jane once a week. She had described some techniques concerning the processing of trauma that sounded really interesting to me (though I was applying those ideas to processing the trauma of the rape, not whatever my dad had done), so I had gone into my therapy sessions with “Jane” having the idea that I would be doing some of the processing techniques. I had not, at that time, begun to make a clear and conscious connection between my first flashback and my dad molesting me.

I knew there was something with my dad – I had always known this, and I had always thought of it and phrased it like that: “something with my dad.” I spent a great majority of my time with Jane dealing with my everyday problems of living, and intermittently asking her about how memory works, and how trauma affects people, and if flashbacks could be an effect of psychological abuse without physical or sexual abuse having also occurred.

Jane assured me over and over again that it was possible to be traumatized enough by psychological abuse to have resultant flashbacks. There were a few reasons I wanted this to be true in my case: one was that I already was more than well-aware of the ways my father had psychologically abused me, and had become attuned to dealing with that particular pain; the other was that if all I had to deal with was the psychological abuse, then this experience would not be nearly as horrifying as I feared it might be.

But I had started thinking again about the fright I had right after that first flashback, when I totally freaked out and talked to my friend about it and she told me it probably wasn’t real, and also that I had found that information about “False Memory Syndrome,” and that it was plausible the creepy things I had previously connected to my dad that could have led to the idea that he molested me were based in the external “cues” of television and whatnot (I had never actually seen a child or read a graphic account of an actual child actually being sexually abused – that just now occurred to me).

I brought up “False Memory Syndrome” to Jane: I told her that I had thought maybe my dad had sexually abused me, but that I had concluded my memories could be “false.”

Jane let me know that “False Memory Syndrome” was a theory developed by the parents of a kid who accused them of sexually molesting him – his evidence against them was his recovered memories; the theory was largely supported by other people who had been accused of sexual abuse; and it was not even founded in any legitimate psychological research.

So I thought about that for a while, did some more research on “False Memory Syndrome” and trauma and repressed memories, and at some point during all of that began to question the legitimacy of the prior connections I had made to my dad.

Let me explain these connections a bit further – I actually used the word “connection” to describe a lot of my experiences with recovering memories. The way that dream and a couple of seemingly benign events and pictures of my nightgown in my head had upset me so much the previous year were all things that I had always been consciously aware of. However, when considering the flashback and those events together, they were all “connected” to my dad in a sense that they could support the idea that my dad molested me.

This processing of events and theories and therapy and all of that happened over the course of a few months. Finally I told Jane that I had this one picture in my head that kept re-appearing over and over. It was that same nightgown I had been seeing in my mind for a while, but I didn’t see myself – just the pattern and texture of the nightgown. The picture also included my dad in a sexually aroused state. (FYI, that was a tremendously difficult sentence to put out there.)

For some reason, the nightgown and my dad were connected, but I could not figure out how. I asked Jane if it was possible that the connection might be that my dad molested me. She said, yes, it was possible. I asked her about whether or not my mind could just come up with these pictures on its own, and she said that it probably did not – that’s not how memory works.

Up to this point I had not mentioned to Jane anything explicitly sexual about my dad. When I brought up the recurring mind-pictures in that particular session, it was the first time I had even really seriously addressed the notion with her that my dad may have sexually abused me.

I left that session with the things I had learned about memory and the mind-pictures and the possibility of my dad sexually abusing me tumbling around in my head. I went to my car and started my commute home from school (and therapy). I was in the left lane of I-85 south on the curve following the separation of I-85 from I-75. I was going about 80 miles an hour. I don’t remember if I was listening to music or not, but I usually did have the radio blasting in my car.

I was driving, and the pictures were tumbling and the possibility that the pictures were of things that really happened was just sinking in. The connection happened in a split second – I inhaled and I was a person who had NOT been sexually abused as a child, and then I exhaled and I was a person who HAD been sexually abused as a child.

I remember thinking that I needed to get out of the left lane, and I made my way into the very right lane. From there, I was pretty much on auto-pilot. I was aware that I was driving about 35 miles an hour, and every now and then I would hear someone honking their horn as they drove by me, but for the most part I was just completely and utterly stunned.

When I am having a hard time in my head and need some reassurance that all of this work I have been doing has actually been transforming into progress, I think about that exact moment in the left lane on that curve driving about 80 miles per hour. Then I think about that drive home at 35 miles per hour (I have no idea how long it actually took me to get home) in the right lane with people honking at me and not giving one iota of a shit but just thinking that all I needed to do was get home safely, and thinking about just being in the same physical space as the knowledge of the exact nature of my dad’s abuse.

My dad molested me. The knowledge in my brain and in the air around me and around my car and all over the planet felt so heavy that it actually felt lighter. I don’t know if that description makes any sense, but that’s what it felt like.

Thinking back about that and comparing it to where I am now assures me that great lengths of progress have definitely been made as a result of all of this work I have been doing to recover and heal.

And as close as that moment in my car felt like it certainly must be exactly how it feels to be in hell, I knew that the real hell was when it all actually happened. The remembering was just the residual hell.

In the days that followed, the remembering started flying at me like bats coming screeching out of a cave on Scooby Doo. It took all of my energy and being to keep those last few tattered scraps of my mind together long enough to get back to therapy the next week.

I told Jane what my dad had done to me.

The week after that, I told her that I did not want this – I wanted to be someone it had not happened to again, someone who knew my dad was a real piece of shit and that I was pretty fucked up as a result of it, but not someone who he had done these things to.

Jane said she felt it was time I get some more … I can’t remember what she said. Something like it was time I got some more intense treatment, or moved my therapy up a notch, or something like that. I just nodded at her.

So she called the mental hospital.

All I could think was, “what the fuck took so long?”