I Need To Be Better Than This.....

It was very difficult for me to start this blog, and even more difficult for me to maintain it, primarily because writing about all of this is so painful.  I still can't even write the complete story of exactly what happened to me.  I give generics.  I say I was raped.  I say I was beaten.  I don't give details.  I don't express how I feel.  Most people can't handle it, and if I try to explain anything, they can't absorb what I need to say.  It amazes me how people are so upset listening to me say anything, but yet, I'm supposed to just absorb what happened to me and have "consideration" for "those around me" who are feeling "uncomfortable" about what I want to "say".  Why is that.

I remember I went to a psychologist who was supposed to be a specialist in this sort of thing, and I said to her before I even started speaking, I said, "I don't think you will be able to handle what I need to say..." and she said to me, "Go ahead and tell me what's on your mind.  It will be fine."  She was all wide-eyed and innocent and it was obvious there was no way in hell she was going to be able to handle a session with me.  She was going to just fall apart like a dandelion in the wind.  So, I started to talk, and she couldn't handle it.  She sat there frozen with a deer in the headlights look on her face.  So, I was like, "okay, well, never mind.  I'll find someone else.  Thanks for trying...." and I left.

There was one time when I had a session with a psychologist that was better.  He was able to listen actively and not freak out.  He said to me that I was a "mismatch", in a good way.  He said that with everything that I had been through, my condition of PTSD was so severe that I should be incoherent, on medications, in a psychiatric hospital somewhere, or on suicide watch.  However, I was a mismatch.  I was very highly functional for what I have been through, and he thought that I was exceeding the curve by "millions of miles" and should be proud of that.  That made me feel better.  I have been told that my condition has a 96% suicide rate.  What I like about Tony Robbins is he trained my brain to think bigger and better beyond the box that was being defined for me.  I mean, is it really a mismatch?  Maybe the "mismatch" is the refusal to stay in the box that was built for me by society that says, "you belong in this box - stay there -and don't think you can do better or deserve better."  Why.  Why does that make sense.  It doesn't.  It doesn't make any sense at all.

I need to be better than this. 

No Guilt and No Shame

Anything wrong having to do with sex has been "blamed" on women since Moses wrote the books of the Bible, and this "blame game" just exacerbates the issue.  One out of every three women has been or will be attacked on a college campus.  That's a staggering number.  Sexual assault and domestic violence have been on the rise for decades, and nothing has been done.  The sexual assaulters in college are told by the leaders on campus that it is okay and there are no consequences for their attacks against women.

These men leave college to become the sexual harassers of women in management positions and the wife beaters in their families.  We have a society that says all of it is okay, except, talking about it.  Sweep it under the rug and pretend nothing happened.

We have to change the culture.  We have to have a new attitude.  We have to speak up and put a stop to the insanity.

I really believe that the New Testament and Christ addressed the problem of the treatment of women in the Old Testament.  Christ brought a revolutionary message for women to be treated with dignity, respect, and a pathway for healing from guilt and shame regardless of sins of the past, whether they were sins that were put upon women or sins that were committed by women themselves, or both.  There is a lot of depth behind the phrase of Jesus, which says, "He who is without sin, cast the first stone."  Christ recognized that sins about sex that were put 100% on the women for the blame did not happen in a vacuum without men.  When Christ was approached by men, who threw Mary Magdalene in front of Christ and said that she was a prostitute who had sex with married men for money, Christ said to those men, "he who is without sin, cast the first stone."  Nobody cast the first stone.  They dropped their stones and left.  Christ then said to Mary Magdalene, ".....I do not condemn you...."  Christ also cast out the seven demons of Mary Magdalene.  I believe that the "seven demons" is what we call post-traumatic stress disorder and rape trauma syndrome today.  Language 2000 years ago, I suspect, could not communicate these ideas like we do today.  Mary Magdalene was Christ's closest disciple.  For me, the key to salvation is through Christ's message, and the Bible doesn't give us the complete message if we only look at the Old Testament and we forget about the message of Christ with Mary Magdalene.  Christ heals.

The Pain Gets Worse......

There are days when I feel like this blog doesn't make the pain better, even though that is the point of why I started it in the first place.  Sometimes, I feel like it makes the pain worse.

Honestly, I don't think the rapes or the beatings are nearly as bad as dealing with the emotional pain of how people react to what happened to me.  I think the most painful emotions happen when I am met with complete indifference to what has happened to me.  If I try to explain that I was raped or I was beaten, I get a response of indifference like I just said I went to the store or I just watered my plants.  If I don't get indifference, then the other reaction will be that either I deserved it, or, that I'm just being a drama queen looking for attention - that I'm exaggerating - or that I'm just outright lying.

The worst part is that sometimes I think that not only is there indifference to what I say happened to me, I feel like I'm not supposed to even talk about it.  Forget about emotions.  I can't be angry, or hurt, or cry, or scream, or yell, or express anything about what happened at all.  How can I even get to emotions when I can't even talk about it.  I mean, even now, I can't even bring myself to write about what happened to me in my own anonymous blog.  I've written some things, but not everything, because the emotional pain is so unbearable it's too much for me.  Just the events are painful enough, but I can't get past the social barriers of rejection and finger-pointing and blame game.  It's horrible.  Even now, just talking about the subject of talking about what happened, without even getting to what happened, is creating alot of emotional hell for me.

What is also frustrating is that the car accident is on the inside.  If someone breaks a leg, or an arm, or has some physical disfigurement on the outside that people can see, then the reaction of horror and anger and sympathy comes from others because it is tangible.  They can see it.  Even if its a biological virus on the inside, still, its tangible with science.  But, when someone like me is talking about emotional pain, it just doesn't get the same response, or reaction, at all.

I can explain a broken leg, or a broken arm, but how do I explain a broken soul.  How do I explain a broken mind.  How do I explain a permanent hell that exists in me that no matter how much I pray, or meditate, or focus on other things, to wipe that hell away, it never goes away.  It's always there.  The most I am able to do is to just get the volume down to level 1 or 2 instead of level 9 or 10.

Once in a great while, and I mean ONCE in a GREAT WHILE, as in VERY RARELY, I have had a break from that hell and had moments of normalcy recently.  They are very few, and very fleeting.  They don't stay, but, it is nice that at least, I can see them.  So, that gives me hope.

I remember those moments of internal normalcy with such vividness.  Nothing special was going on, but I can remember I was standing in my living room and it was there, and it was so nice.  It would be good if I could somehow repair myself 100% to be at that place all the time.  I don't know if I will get there.  I keep trying, and I don't give up.

What's the Point.....

I ask myself this question on many occasions about what has happened in the past, how does it affect the present, and what is the purpose for the future.  Sometimes I feel like there has to be some higher purpose for everything I went through.  I often fall back on the test of Job - we keep our faith when things go wrong and don't make sense.  Instead of moving away from God, we move closer to God, because that is the best remedy for getting the demons out of our world, and if we can keep our faith and trust in God through difficult times, and move closer to Him instead of away from Him, then when the thunderstorm in our lives are over, we come out better, stronger, and now we can help others.

All of this sounds good in theory, but quite frankly, there are times when I just get depressed.  PTSD cost me my relationships with my family and friends.  I live and work alone because of it.  I have a great deal of difficulty meeting people and making new friends because of it.  Even though I have overcome most of the original grip PTSD had on my psyche and soul for so many years, it still has left an aftermath of broken relationships with family friends, loss of my home, my possessions, my career, my education, essentially, so many things I had worked for that if I didn't have PTSD gripping my soul and my brain, what would my life have been like in that case.  What would have been different.  I am going to be 50 in a couple of weeks and I look back at the damage that PTSD did to my life and the life of everybody around me that was close to me, and it's damage that can't be undone. All of that is very depressing for me.

My mother was playing Chinese Checkers with me one day and she always beat me at that game.  I couldn't figure out why, but she always won whenever we played.  It was a fun game and an excuse for us to bond when I was a kid.  I remember one day when we were playing I asked her how it is that she always wins, and she didn't answer right away.  However, there was a point in the game a few minutes later when I moved one of my pieces one step backwards.  When I did that, she said to me, "don't do that."  I said, "what do you mean?"  She said, "don't move backwards.  Always move forward.  Every step you take, you always move forward, you never look back.  Not just here, in life.  Always look forward, and never look back."  So then, I changed my move.  I moved a piece forward.  She said to me, "good.  That's right. That's how you win."

I take that advice to heart and I apply it to my life when I think about the past and trying to make sense of it all.  I fall back on the advice of my mother in the game of Chinese Checkers and in life.  "Never look back.  Always move forward."  I didn't realize it at that time, but she was giving me a life lesson.  She was, and still is, a great mom.