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?”