Picking up the past again

“I swept my experiences under the rug. I didn’t let them define me.”

“I’m not one to dwell on the negative.”

I have heard well-meaning women say these things recently as part of the conversation around sexual harassment and assault.

When I heard those comments, I doubted myself for just a moment. Hmm…Am I letting my experiences define me? Am I just dwelling on the negative?

I paused. I truly considered those questions. Then I heard a big “NO”. No. No. No. It’s not a “No” to those women. It’s a “No” to the dichotomy that we push on ourselves, one that keeps us silent. It is the idea that our choice is to be happy and not talk about sad things OR to live a sad life by continuing to bring up sad things that have happened to us. But I reject that.

I can continue to process my experiences and not let them define me.

I can share negative experiences and trauma I’ve endured without “dwelling on the negative”, without getting lost in the murky reeds.

I can keep my scars visible and not live in the wounds.

I can continue to learn from the past without living there.

In those voices I quoted, I hear the culture that allows men to keep hurting. It’s a culture that tells you we should be able to brush off what men have done to us and that we should eventually “move on” after harassment, assault, or rape. 

What is the expiration date on when you can stop talking about your rape or assault? What is that statute of limitations? When do you become the pitiful victim if you keep telling the story? Five years? Ten years? Twenty?

I swept my experiences under the rug for awhile, too. Do you know what happened? My rug got all bunched up in places, and I found myself tripping when I tried to walk through my house. Or I would walk across my rug and feel something sharp underneath, like a jagged rock. Or when I walked over my rug, something would crinkle under my foot, like a dead leaf. Or I would go to straighten my rug when cleaning and find that when I moved my rug, there was a big pile of dust and debris that was now exposed. Or–the worst–I would see my baby putting something in his mouth, and darn it if it wasn’t something I had tried to brush under that rug.  The stuff I brushed under the rug never went away; it always resurfaced.

We hear that moving on is what the strong people do. The weak victims are the ones who talk about it years later. They bring it up time and time again and make people uncomfortable. It’s self-indulgent wallowing. Or they want attention. They’re always going to be unhappy. They’re choosing to continue hurting while the rest of the world gets happier and more successful.

I ask you, when we move on, what are we usually moving on to? When we “move on”, where do we go? Do we move on to a place where we need a drink every night to take the edge off? Do we move to a place where we fill ourselves with food to not feel so empty? Do we move to a place where we numb ourselves a little more with each scroll of the thumb? Do we move to place where we need to keep ourselves constantly busy because we don’t like what happens when we sit still? How do we have to distract ourselves and anesthetize ourselves just to stay at baseline?

This is not just about sexual trauma. It’s a culture where if you’re still processing childhood hurt when you’re 30, you may be considered a sad loser. You’re overly sensitive, too fragile, take things too personally. It’s a cultural expectation that our natural state should be happiness and that something is wrong if we’re not happy and smiling. It’s a fear that if we’re too complicated and “negative”, then people won’t love us or want to be around us.

I used to think, “Who is going to want someone as messed up as me? It’s too much to deal with. I’m too much trouble.”

Then I found someone who said, “Catherine, I don’t have a rubric in my head of what I want you to be. This is not à la carte–take this part of you, leave the rest. I want to know all of you.” 

I’ve lived in love with him for almost eight years, but I still found myself saying in therapy the other day: “It probably sounds like it’s really difficult to be in relationship with me…” Why do we think we need to be easy to be in relationship with? Why are we more worried about inconveniencing the world than we are about living as healthy, whole people–as the people we were born to be?

“Catherine, you should be as concerned about your own reaction and your own feelings as you are about hers,” my therapist said when discussing my fear of how someone may react to a difficult conversation we need to have.

“Do I dare disturb the universe?”

We tell girls: Stay small. Stay quiet. Make yourself pretty. Be agreeable. Accommodate everyone but yourself. Keep smiling.

So talking about sexual assault? Not only is that improper, but it means you are taking up way too much space. No one wants to have to make room for your sad story. And forget about ever getting a job again if you write about it publicly.

There comes a time in most close relationships I form when I want to tell the truth about how my long-term college relationship ended: in violent sexual assault. Eventually if we’re going to be good friends or true family, I think you should know this about me. Because it definitely shaped me and continues to affect my decisions and the person  I am today.

“Tell as many people as you can about what happened to you,” the college professor who helped me out of the abusive relationship told me. I couldn’t go anywhere alone after I escaped that relationship because my ex-boyfriend was stalking me. He showed up on my college campus and waited for me at the coffee shop I frequented. I never knew where he might find me, so I always had another person with me. And he did find me. More than once, despite my very clear directive that I did not want any communication from him and would not respond to any communication. I had the personal cell phone number of the head of campus security on speed dial.

I didn’t tell every person who walked with me from the cafeteria to my dorm that I had been raped. But I did tell many people something like, “I recently broke up with a guy who has been following me. It ended really badly. I’m worried about walking alone. Would you mind walking with me?”

In those days I felt it was a burden on others when I did tell a longer story about what happened. I didn’t want to ruin their day, didn’t want to make them hold that knowledge about me. It felt like a burden to tell the story of the rape. Like, who wants to be going about their day and have a story of a friend’s assault dropped on them? BOOM. Instant day ruiner. I didn’t want to put them in the uncomfortable place of feeling like they needed to say the right thing or make me feel better.

After several months, I started telling other women in private conversation–even women I had recently met–that I had been in an emotionally and sexually abusive relationship. A shocking amount of women responded by sharing that they had similar experiences. “Me, too,” they said. Some told me stories they had never told another person. Some women contacted me later through messages to say: What you were describing reminded me of my relationship. Can we talk? I don’t know what’s right anymore. Nothing makes sense. I don’t know how to get out.

Two years after I got out of that relationship, I even heard from a woman who was dating my ex-boyfriend. “He’s told me some things about you that just don’t add up,” she said. “And he’s had some concerning behaviors. Could you tell me what happened between you two?” I did. And I talked her through some difficult times when she was trying to extricate herself from him. She and I are still in touch today.

I started to see helping women escape and recover from stifling, controlling, or abusive men as a calling of mine.

I learned that when I told my story, I often freed a space for other women who may not have even realized they had a story they needed to tell. I started to lead with vulnerability–not as a party trick but as an invitation. It was an invitation to skip past the small talk and dive into the big talk of who we are, what our dreams are, and what needs healing. 

This summer I was at a big Mississippi wedding. That night three women I didn’t know well came up to me to tell me that they had been reading my recently launched blog. They confided in me that they had undergone similar trauma or abuse and that they knew so many other women with stories like ours. They told me that my writing and my courage to tell my story had a big impact on them, feeling like they were finally able to bring awareness to understand feelings that had lacked clarity. They were sharing my posts with friends who had similar responses.

So, in all this, was I letting my experiences define me? Was I “dwelling on the negative”? Hell no. I was processing my experiences in a healthy way. I was helping other women process their stories, too, simply by listening and telling my story first to clear the air and create a safe space. “People start to heal the moment they feel heard,” Cheryl Richardson says. Unfortunately many women are afraid to tell their story for fear of how it will be received.

A friend and I were texting about the #metoo movement and our personal involvement, and she said: “The thing I’m struggling with with all of this stuff is where is the line between raising awareness and wallowing in the past? Like when do we know that we’ve given the bad things that have happened to us in the past enough attention and put them away because to continue to talk about them over and over is to just bring negative feelings into our day when we can focus on the good that’s in our lives now…do you deal with that? Because I’m definitely one who’s prone to broodiness and emotionality and focusing on the negative things in life.”

Yes, I definitely deal with these questions. I get it. At times I can feel like I’m slogging through the same old bog all over again. I can feel like I stepped in my own shit and am tracking it around the house in my new, clean life.

I have wondered before on my journey of sharing my story of healing through this blog, Would I be happier if I didn’t do it? If I just left these stories behind rather than telling them here?

The answer is no. I don’t think I would be happier if I just stopped telling these stories.

If by telling my story I could help someone else who has been similarly wounded, then I feel that the pain I endured was not wasted. While the abuse was horrible and never should have happened, I am able to redeem it into a transformative force. When one woman stands up and shares her story, she paves the way for another woman. I may not need to tell the story of my rape for myself anymore, but I find meaning in telling it for other women who need others to clear the path before her so she can find her way on her own journey.

“…where is the line between raising awareness and wallowing in the past?”

It’s your call if raising awareness is something you feel emotionally available to do. Something is shifting right now as more and more women have found the power within themselves to come forward with a story of harassment or assault or even just with two little words: “Me, too”. Whenever a woman finds that source of strength within herself, it is a gift she gives the world because, as Maya Angelou said, “Each time a woman stands up for herself, without knowing it possibly, without claiming it, she stands up for all women.” For some of us, being brave in this moment has meant standing up and telling our story. You never know who may be listening who will hear something in your specific story or voice that changes everything for them.

For others, being brave means putting one foot in front of the other because the trauma is still so fresh no matter how long ago it happened. I understand. There were months when I had to compartmentalize my life just to LIVE. Just to work and function. I had to put what I experienced aside for awhile because I felt it defining me.

Or maybe you have other emotional heavy lifting you’re doing right now, and picking up this weight at this time would be too much. I understand. 

“When do we know that we’ve given the bad things that have happened to us in the past enough attention and put them away…?”

I don’t have a one-size-fits-all answer. “There have been times when I felt like I forgave him,” I told my counselor. “But then later I felt angry or hurt again.”

“That’s ok,” she said. “Sometimes we put stuff down and find we need to pick up the story again and carry it for awhile to understand something new about it.”

Yes. I put down the stone for awhile and walked without it. Then something told me I needed to pick it up again. It doesn’t make me a victim rather than a survivor. It’s not self-destruction. It’s not wallowing. It’s a normal process. I will put it down again once I’ve learned what I needed to learn.

We all have our own histories and have developed our own coping process.

For me, deep authentic feeling is a higher priority than a need for keeping peace. A key piece of my healing is finding my voice and pushing back on these messages I internalized as a child: Do not rock the boat. Keep it private. Contain the problem. A key piece of my healing is giving myself permission to not pretend like I’m ok when I don’t feel ok. Honoring my feelings as valid and not putting an artificial timeline on when I think they should expire is important.

So, if I bring up my sexual trauma to my husband when we’re sitting on the couch at night relaxing after the baby has gone to bed, believe me: I’d rather not have to talk about this. I’d like to just turn on the TV and laugh together watching Master of None. I don’t bring it up because I’m dwelling on the past. I bring it up because I deserve better than to be controlled by the past. I bring it up because our marriage deserves better. I bring it up because all of a sudden I realize that I am ready to move past what happened to me in a new way. I bring it up to tell him, “Hey, you know how I told you years ago that it made me uncomfortable for you to initiate sex? Well, now I’d like you to try that again, but be prepared for me to say ‘No’.”

I am able to have that conversation with him because I’m not afraid to dive back into the dark story and kick back up to the surface with the feeling that, “You know, exclusively initiating sex was something I needed to do to feel safe for awhile, but I don’t think I need to protect myself in that way anymore.” And so my life continues to be transformed because I am willing to revisit trauma.

And this is normal stuff for us now. So it doesn’t ruin our night. We can talk about difficult things and watch Master of None, too.