Lingering Doubts

I recently turned nineteen and having now spent as many years away from my primary molester as I did with him abusing me, I still have some lingering doubts.

I feel them every time my family talks about rape victims "asking for it". They resurface after every article about the possibility of rehabilitating sex offenders and each time a man looks at me when I walk down the street. I can see them in my own eyes when I wash up after crying.

I doubt my worth, my ability to navigate this world, my ability to have normal relationships with others, my judgement of character. I doubt that he meant to do what he did. I doubt that it even happened.

The rational part of me knows that my doubts are groundless, the irrational part seeks to find a less horrific answer to everything. It would be easier in the short term to write everything off as a series of vivid nightmares or a childish misunderstanding. In the long term, it would destroy me. Some of us have succeeded in pushing down emotions, memories and physical responses to our abuse. I succeeded at it for quite awhile. I thought I was over it. I wasn't. When the memories started coming back, I was utterly unable to handle them. I cut myself. I slept alot. I had nightmares nightly and flashbacks several times a day, every one painfully detailed. I didn't know there was a term for it or any chance of it stopping, so I tried again to push everything down and again it worked for awhile.

And then things fell apart. I was in my second year of high school and started having flashbacks there or zoning out and wandering around in my own head, perusing the memories there, in hopes of seeing it all at once and having it simply stop. The one thing I can say for sure about flashbacks is that they never just stop. They may stop after significant emotional work and alot of talking about them, but they never just stop on their own because it's how your mind makes you remember.

I felt like I was going insane when I was really the sanest I'd been in a long time. I had equated sanity with calmness, fortitude, the ability to say that things didn't hurt anymore when they hadn't really stopped hurting. In hiding my depression, confusion, terror, anger and sense of violation for so long to hide the abuse and placate my abuser, I'd forgotten how to process things. If you put everything under your bed when you clean your room, eventually you'll run out of space and some will stay halfway out of hiding or everything will spill from underneath entirely. Memory is like that. Your mind will let you get away with not handling things, but it builds up. Each incident, each off handed comment that cuts you, each moment of fear all gets pushed under your bed. Once the room runs out, things spill over. First in the form of physical ailments-insomnia, headaches, stomach aches, unexplainable pains; then in the form of nightmares and flashbacks. By then, there's almost no chance of doing anything but dealing with it or going mad.

So I dealt with it. I told the generally jackass-y boys I dated, I told my later female partners, I told friends, I joined message boards and forums and read articles and nothing seemed to help. I was still remembering new things weekly, sometimes daily, everything I'd repressed came up either mentally or physically. I didn't know what body memories were then either, I called it phantom abuse when I admitted it to myself, much like amputee's phantom limb syndrome, because it felt like I was being abused all over again by something that wasn't there.

The more I remembered, the more things about my jumpiness and other issues (nearly everything in the PTSD diagnosis) made sense. They got worse, but they made sense and suddenly, I realized I wasn't nuts after all. I wasn't crazy because I hated men standing behind me or for cringing when people said baby doll or called me miss. I wasn't insane for being petrified of giving oral sex.

And even knowing all this, I still doubt myself and people have asked me before why I don't just follow them and write everything off. It's because I can't. The nightmares, the flashbacks, the jumpiness, the terror I feel at certain things, those things aren't going away. I can box the memories up, but the physical and mental responses stay the same. I can face them straight on and understand why I have issues with something or I can endure the fallout without handling the source.

That's why I don't let the doubts I still have win. Not because I'm any braver than anyone else, but because I'd had enough of pushing the source under the bed. If I don't face it now, this will do more than haunt me for the rest of my life, it'll come back as a zombie and eat every good thing I have in my life now. I'm not going to let that happen.