A year ago today I was groped while walking alone on a mountain trail.  I don’t want to dwell on the specifics of what happened that day.  It takes too long and is really depressing.  And I don’t want to share my story to say, “Hear about this horrible thing that happened to me!”  I want to share what I’ve learned since that fateful day about trauma and healing.

I do need to go a little into detail to set the stage.  I was out in nature, seeking some peaceful solitude.  I feel closer to God out there than I do in almost any place, second only to my yoga mat.  And while I was out there seeking God and the sunshine on my back, a faceless man grabbed my breast suddenly and forcefully and ran away.  Another man saw it happen and did nothing to help me.  And though my mind yelled at me to chase my attacker and show him that I am a person, that I have power and strength and a soul inside of the body he violated, what actually happened was that I stood there frozen, hearing him run away, while I was engulfed in fear, disbelief, shock, humiliation, and anger.

The Aftermath

When I finally got home that day I felt numb and far away, like I was in a long, dark tunnel.  I trudged up the stairs past my family, laid down on my bed, and curled up in a ball.  I stayed there all night long.  I didn’t feel much, but the physical sensation of pain in my breast and the shadow of a foreign hand there.  Even though I felt nothing, tears leaked out of my eyes for hours, until I finally fell asleep.

The next day when I woke up, I checked in with my body.  Everything felt normal, except I could not sense my left breast from the inside.  I could feel every other part of my body, but that part was just . . . gone.  Nothing.  A blank screen.  A black hole.

Now, because I’d gone through hard and upsetting things before, I tried to do all the things that had worked in the past.  I wanted to get over what had happened to me as quickly as possible.  I knew immediately that it wasn’t my fault.  I knew that what that man had done to me was wrong.  I knew it didn’t take anything away from my worth.  I talked about it openly (read the poem I wrote and shared with this picture here).  I wanted to get the pain out of me as quickly as possible.

Now, I want to be clear right here that I have a realistic perspective on what happened to me.  I know it’s not the worst thing that has ever happened to anyone.  I personally know women who have been stalked, attacked, and raped.  I told myself that being groped is upsetting, but not life-shattering.  It is common.  What happened took a split second and left no visible marks on my body.  I didn’t even have a small bruise or scrape.

Which is why the depth of my pain was so confusing.  Like it or not, over the next few months as I went on with my life, I was not okay.  I had symptoms of PTSD, but didn’t realize it because I didn’t want to make a big deal over what had happened.  I didn’t want to let that dirty man’s actions affect me that much.

When I look back, I see me starting last year off with a bang.  I was getting my work out to the world.  My story was being shared on social media and seen by thousands.  I was invited to speak to women in recovery.  I was interviewed for podcasts.  I got invited to teach at UVU and to be a contributing writer on other blogs.  I developed and began teaching my first online course.  Finally, after years of struggle and working through many issues that had kept me wanting to stay small and unseen ever since I was a child, I was stepping out and being brave.  I was letting myself be seen and starting to find my voice.  All of that screeched to a halt because one man chose to pursue one moment of selfish gratification that sent me reeling.

I’ve hesitated to share my story of sexual assault because I feared it’s not big enough to really matter.  But this is the exact part of our culture that is so toxic to women.  When women feel unable to express being hurt over “small” things, when we all just try to sweep these things under the rug, we do no one any favors.  There is a big problem in our world if we are not shocked enough at the small atrocities that others suffer.  It simply perpetuates the problem that leads to worse crimes.  All of this makes it harder for victims of these smaller crimes to heal.  When I went to therapy because I finally realized that I was suffering from PTSD, I expressed the shame I felt for even hurting over this when I know worse things happen.  I was reminded that if a biker gets hit by a car, no one says, “Well, get up!  It’s not like you got hit by a semi.”  We recognize and validate that it is still dangerous and scary and that it still injured the biker.

What did my PTSD look like?  For a long time after I was assaulted, I couldn’t go outside by myself.  Being in public places, even church, was terrifying.  I felt too exposed, like a gazelle standing in a field, not able to see lions, but surrounded by them nonetheless.  That intense fear eventually went away, and I was able to go places once again, but some problems still lingered.  I felt isolated from others and from God.  Even after several months, if someone touched me from behind, my body would reel into a panic.  Even when I’d turn and see it was just a friend saying hello and I knew I was safe, I’d be filled with a physical terror.  I’d turn and smile though, talking and acting as if everything was okay while I waited for my body to settle down.  At home I wouldn’t pretend.  I startled easily and then would simply breakdown in tears.  My husband would hold me while I cried and cursed that faceless man.

What Trauma Does to Your Brain

Here’s the thing, trauma (even a small trauma) changes the brain and nervous system.  When people who have experienced trauma remember what happened, the logical part of the brain (the left side, which makes sense of an experience and allows you to put it into words and integrate it into your life’s story) shuts down.  No matter how much insight you gain, or how much you talk about it, you cannot simply move on from the experience.  The survival and emotional part of the brain is stuck on what happened and cannot be talked out of it.  When triggered, it causes the body to respond as if the trauma is happening in the moment.  The trauma is, in essence, stuck in that survival part of the brain and literally cannot be resolved until you can move it along.

So if you are suffering from the after affects of trauma, what do you do?

Tuning in to your body can be powerful.  Yoga, or other somatic practices (somatic is simply tuning into your body’s knowledge by paying attention to bodily sensation) are so powerful and doing these practices helped me in a lot of ways.  When I hadn’t cried about it really after the first few days, I did a movement practice and it opened the flood gates.  And after that crying session I felt strong enough to report my assault to the police.

(The movement practice that finally allowed me to cry.  You can read what I wrote about it here.)

 

For eight months I tried get that piece of my body back and really move on.  But it wasn’t working.  I was almost constantly aware of that big, gaping black hole in my body.  My inability to fix it brought me to tears many times.  I felt weak and powerless.  I couldn’t feel whole.  It was like that dirty man had stolen a piece of me.  No matter what I did, I had no way of getting it back myself.

I had my suspicions as to why I couldn’t fix it.  One being that I was trying to heal alone and I was already feeling very isolated from God and others because of my trauma.  And two, I speculated that my brain had shut off that part of my body because of how upsetting the ordeal was.  It wasn’t a body awareness issue (which can be a problem after trauma because victims shut off body sensations in order to cope with what happened), but a brain issue.

When I finally got sick enough of panicking every time someone tapped my shoulder in the hallway at church, and admitted defeat on finding the missing piece of my body on my own, I decided I had to get help.

Now, this wasn’t my first time going to therapy.  I’ve found myself in therapist’s office many times in my adult life.  But this was the first time I ever got to experience EMDR.  I will never be able to sing enough praises to EMDR for the profound healing I have found because of it.

EMDR Changes Everything

Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing (EMDR) uses eye movement or other stimulation that goes from one side of the body to the other (such as small paddles held in each hand that take turns vibrating).  It’s one of those treatments that they are still learning a lot about.  They are not exactly sure why it works, but they do know that it works.

For me, an EMDR session involved allowing my brain to bring images to mind (some may not seem related to the issue at hand and many are unrealistic) and noticing where in my body I felt emotions.  I’d be encouraged to amplify my sense of that emotion and through imagery allow that emotion to drain out of my body.  I still talked about feelings and how the experience that came to mind had affected me, but in a very different way than traditional talk therapy.  EMDR was kind of like being guided through a dream-land.  I wasn’t guided in what images to bring to mind, nor did I consciously decide on those images.  I went with whatever my mind brought forth.  Unlike other therapy that I’ve gone to, where I have never really felt to have come to any actual finishing point, my experience with EMDR had been a very real sense of actually being done with an experience I’ve processed.

Going to EMDR for my assault taught me a lot about how I usually deal with things.  I kept on dwelling on exactly what happened, getting stuck on the details that I was unsure about because I really wanted to piece the whole thing together.  I kept on asking questions, trying to make sense of it all, and wanting an explanation for it right away (which is processing that occurs on the left side of the brain, and as I stated earlier, the area not active in the reliving of trauma).  But that way of dealing with things was skipping the step of just allowing myself to feel and own my experience.  I’d avoid this place because there are no answers and resolution here, just sensation and discomfort.

But in this place of “knowing what [you] know and feeling what [you] feel” is where you also find the door to freedom (p.27 The Body Keeps the Score by Bessel van der Folk– I highly recommend reading).  By letting those painful experiences live in you and have their full expression, they finally stop haunting you.  The trauma can move from the sensate part of the brain to the other side.  It is only then that you can gain the more logical perspective on it all.

From the Ashes

Through my therapist’s gentle guidance, I was encouraged to try something new.  She had me stick with the feelings, with my lived, sensate experience of what happened (which was tuning in to my right side of the brain, the part that was stuck in the trauma).  Not only did she have me tune in to the feeling-ful part of what happened and amplify it all, but she had me fill in the gaps in my story the way I wanted to.  I did this for weeks and weeks.  Each week I’d leave feeling lighter and more peaceful inside.  In between sessions the PTSD symptoms that had been disrupting my life were subsiding.  Each time I went to therapy and into that sensate memory-land my mind took me through many other painful memories of me feeling powerless, and through a lot of the anger I felt towards God.

EMDR took me to a place where I had to really experience the anger, powerlessness, and humiliation I felt when I was assaulted.  As I zeroed in on that moment that changed me, I sat there, feeling in to my experience and realized how strong my anger was.  Even the very day it happened, I had described that anger as setting fire to my bones, like my marrow was lava.  As I allowed this emotion to amplify, I saw in my mind’s eye my body standing on that trail.  My rage set my body on fire and it consumed me.  As this happened, I turned into a bird with fire dripping from my wings, shrieking with rage and indignation.  A phoenix.  After that transformation, and only after that, did I see myself running and catching the man, knocking him down with all my strength.  I am not one to advocate violence in any way, but I will say that yelling at that man and breaking his arm with my bare hands in my mind’s eye was just what I needed.  Because I finally felt powerful.

After six weeks of hard work in EMDR, I got that stolen piece of my body back.  My wholeness was hiding behind my rage, enveloped in the dripping-fire wings of a phoenix.

Three Lessons for You

If you find yourself stuck because of an experience, whether it be real trauma or something else that continues to hurt you, I want you to know these three things:

1. Healing is possible.  Never, never give up hope.  It’s okay to ask for help.  One of the great things about being human is that we are designed to have some burdens we cannot shoulder and some mountains we cannot climb on our own.  This is nothing to be ashamed of, for it teaches us humility and allows us to connect with our fellow humans (who also have problems they cannot conquer on their own) and ultimately, to connect with God.
2. It can be scary to let go of pain.  When I began my first session of EMDR and heard how quickly it could work, I shocked myself to find that I was upset about that.  I wasn’t quite sure if I was ready to actually let it go.  After all, what happened to me was an actual crime, which can send perpetrators to jail and put them on the sex offender registry for life.  No one paid the price for this crime, and so all I had left was my pain.  Letting go didn’t mean that I was okay with what happened.  But it did mean that I could enjoy my life more.
3. One of the amazing things that God does with His infinite power is that He can take your pain, and turn the results of it into something that will bless your life.  That may not happen right away, but trust me, it will happen.  This can manifest in countless ways.  That may look like being able to offer comfort to someone because of what you’ve been through, it may mean having a softer heart with more compassion, it may mean more wisdom, and it may even alter the course of your life and take you on a new path with your work or relationships.  The point is that you may also feel like you are engulfed in that painful fire and it may seem like the end for you.  But, someday, somewhere on the other side of your fire is a phoenix.