Rape and My Body

 35. RAPE AND MY BODY 

Hello and welcome back to Raped 25 Years. At this time I invite you to take a short walk with me through my journey of healing. Don’t forget to stay to the end in order for you to enjoy my gem of positivity.

I’ve never had a particularly good relationship with my body. But then, the sexual abuse started when I was just eighteen months of age. You could say that all the sexual abuse and sexual assaults have left me with a warped sense of my physical self.

There are, however, parts of my body that I am actually quite happy with. Like my hair. I’m starting to love the length of it. I’ve kept it short since I left the workplace where I was getting gang raped on a daily basis. Now, after over 20 years, I’ve decided to let it grow again. My hair is also the healthiest it’s been since I worked. My most favourite part of liking my hair, is the fresh clean silky smoothness of it right after my hairdresser has washed and straightened it. Straight hair is just so much easier to take care of than curly hair — my hairdresser and I are in total agreement on that.

There is another part of me that I love. Since starting to lose weight from morbid obesity, I have developed a flap of loose skin around my lower tummy, referred to officially as an “apron”. I even have my own affectionate name for it. Surprisingly enough, I love this apron of mine. When I’m feeling a little bit sad, I can always jiggle the apron to make it wobble. Funnily enough, that actually makes me feel better. The more weight I lose, the bigger my apron gets….and the more fun it is to play with.

I am slowly coming to like my breasts. Not quite love….yet. But I’m actually hopeful that as I heal, I will come to love having my breasts as a normal part of me. I’ve hated them long enough. More than 30 years, to be honest. After so much sexual abuse, I had wanted my breasts cut off. But now they even have their own names, Dolly and Daisy.

There is however, a part of me that’s going to take a whole lot of healing before I can even start to accept it, let alone like or love it. That part is, of course, my vagina. In fact, to be totally frank, every time I go out in public, I feel like I’m simply a walking vagina. That seems to be the only part of me that men have any interest in. Not exactly an edifying picture, is it? But now, I even talk about my vagina with my therapist. There are even days now that I don’t want my vagina to be cut out of me.

Many survivors of sexual abuse and rape, will turn on themselves and their appearance as being at fault. They blame, and so hate, their body in all sorts of ways. It may be their fingers, the length, or conversely, the  stubbiness. It can be something like the teeth. The teeth are either too big, or too small, or slightly crooked. It could even be the colour or length of their hair.

This is because of the false traumatic belief that it was their physical appearance that sparked such violation. I know, because I thought that about myself, too. That it was the length and colour of my hair that continues the appalling abusive behaviour by other people. It has been so much easier to say “it was how I appeared that was at fault”.

As you and I travel our journeys towards healing, we can come to love our bodies as they are, instead of hating them for what they are not. As you can see, I’m already starting to see and feel that my physical body may actually be loveable by me. And as you heal, you can too.

This time, the gem of positivity I have chosen is a quote that is attributed to Amy Bloom:

“You are imperfect, permanently and inevitably flawed. And you are beautiful”.

Despite how I might feel about my appearance, I am starting to learn that this quote is true. As I heal, I am finding that there are increasingly more positives to my body than I first ever thought could possibly be. That despite all the faults, flaws and imperfections I see of my appearance, I’m still beautiful, just as I am. And you will find this, too.

Thank you for joining me on this short walk through my journey of healing. Don’t forget to leave a comment on what you love about your physical body. And until next time, just breathe and believe.

With love and care, Ruby

Rape and Pain

 34. RAPE AND PAIN

Hello and welcome to Raped 25 Years. At this time I invite you to join me on a short walk through my journey to heal from sexual abuse and sexual assault. Don’t forget to stay to the end, so that you can enjoy my gem of positivity.

The pain I’m talking about specifically in this post is both emotional and psychological pain. Yes, in a rape there is no doubt we suffer physical pain. That’s a given. However society does not realise how sexual violence affects us emotionally and psychologically (a fancy word for mentally).

To me, the emotional trauma of the assaults I have experienced, is blood red. But not a gush arterial blood, which would mean the pain ending soonest. No, I’m talking the slow and relentless drops of venous blood. Insidious slow, without any sign of ceasing.

 I see it this way because I also associate this type of pain with suicide. I’ve tried to end it myself so many times. The pain literally screams inside my head and I think I can’t  cope with the pain any more.

I have to say, I’m being brutally honest about this pain for me. And I’m sure that if I feel like this, there are others, like you the reader, who experience this same kind of pain. It really does mess with the mind.

Emotional and mental pain cannot always be seen, except in suicide, and attempted suicide. There is self harm, like cutting, burning or purging, to show the outside world the pain and suffering inside.

Society is crass enough, even now, to believe that these outward signs of mental and emotional agony are merely “attention seeking behaviour”. Yes, I have actually had that said to me on more than one occasion, and by multiple people. That’s because since the cuts and bruises of my rapes have healed, I am all better now. That there is no residual effect in the body because the world can’t see the physical signs anymore.

That type of thinking of the people around me, makes the pain even more real than before. It pushes my pain ever deeper, making it that much harder to heal. And I want to heal. I don’t want to always feel like I’m on a rubbish heap, thrown out with the rest of the trash. I don’t want to feel like I’m not even human, because of this pain inside me.

I have had people who hear my experiences that they never thought another human being could treat a fellow human like that. In the tortuous pain inside, I take it then that I must not be human at all, since those were the ways I’ve been treated. That pain on the inside grows, engulfing me entirely. Those are the times I most try to end this emotional and mental pain for good.

Pain of any sort is hard to live with. I won’t argue with that. Society refuses to recognise the emotional and mental longer lasting effects of rape. We who have survived the initial traumatic violations of our bodies are placated with pats on the head and a “there, there, dear”.

I want to heal from this pain. I sincerely do. But I can’t do it without the support of the people around me. So I need to educate these supporters at the same time as trying to heal. Some days are better than others now. I’m not drowning in a tide of blood all day every day.

So healing is possible. Just not as fast as the horrors that induced the pain to begin with. But it is possible. And if it’s possible for me, it’s possible for you too.

This time my suitable gem of positivity is a quote by Jon Kabat-Zinn:

“You can’t stop the waves, but you can learn to surf”.

And how true this is of internal pain. I can’t stop the waves of mental and emotional pain from washing over me. But I can still learn to heal so that these waves don’t dunk me under each and every time. I want to learn to surf those waves of pain. Don’t you?

Thank you for taking this painful short walk with me. Don’t forget to leave a comment on your vision of healing from your pain. And until next time, just breathe and believe.

With love and care, Ruby

Rape and Weight Manipulation

 33. RAPE AND WEIGHT MANIPULATION

Hello and welcome to Raped 25 Years. At this time, I invite you to take a short walk in my journey of healing. Don’t forget to stay for the gem of positivity.

One of the varied trauma related responses I have shown, is weight manipulation. In this post, I’m going to talk about the way in which I manipulated my weight as a pre-teen and teenager.

I was in Grade Six at school, and by then I had size 36 B (14 B metric) breasts. My teacher had a habit of looking down my top when he was leaning over my desk. I was uncomfortable with this, but said nothing. 

In the second term, just two weeks in, I walked into the girls’ bathrooms to wash my hands. My teacher was in there with another girl in my class. He was raping her. When he saw me, he grabbed hold of me, and cruelly raped me too. Both I and this girl told no one what had happened or what he had done. 

After that rape, I stopped eating. How could I eat when I already felt so dirty? When I did eat, I couldn’t keep the food down. I started to lose a bit of weight, then more and more. The more weight I lost, the cleaner I felt. So I tried to lose more. The only “problem” was, I ended up being so weak that I couldn’t go to school. How wonderful! I didn’t have to face the teacher.

I moved on at the end of the year to junior high school (Grade Seven). I felt able to start eating my dinners at home, but I allowed myself nothing else. You see, the fear of another rape attack was always high on my mind. I became  hyper vigilant; always fearfully aware of all males, teachers and students alike. 

And so I survived ….. Until the next year, when my Grade Eight English class teacher raped me at the end of term two. My first thought was, “I’m too fat. If I’d been thinner, I’d have been invisible. Then the rape would never have happened”.

As you can see, even as a preteen and young teenager, my thoughts automatically went to weight and my body size  being my problem. That  weight was somehow to blame for the sexual assaults, not the actual perpetrators. Although I wasn’t actually diagnosed with an eating disorder, it opened up the path for my later weight manipulation too.

As an adult, working at my supposed “dream job”, my thinking went the same way as with the teachers’ abuse in the painful violation of my body. But unlike my school days, in my job I was actually diagnosed anorexic. My thought processes had gone to my weight being the problem.

Even to this very day, my thoughts automatically link any trauma issue with my weight. “If I were thinner, it wouldn’t have happened” or “I need to be invisible”. Sound familiar to you, the reader?

Weight manipulation is a common coping behaviour of sexual abuse and assaults. Rape can result in an unhealthy relationship with food. There are those survivors who lose weight in an act of trying to be invisible, to prevent the cruel violation of their body happening ever again. 

There are also those sexual assault survivors who gain weight to the point of morbid obesity. This is in the vain hope that, by making themselves less sexually attractive, they will not have to fear further rape. In both cases, neither method worked for me. All it has done is trapped me in the pain and suffering of my traumatic past.

Are you like me? Are you caught in a seemingly endless cycle of weight manipulation methods? I believe that there is hope,  that hope is in self healing, and I’m willing to fight for it. Nobody else can do the healing for me. It’s my right to be rid of the vicious trauma cycle of weight manipulation. And it’s your right too.

This time, the gem of positivity is a quote from Racquell Wallen: 

“At the end of your life, people don’t remember your weight but what you were like as a person”.

That quote means a lot to me. It’s not whether I’m fat or thin that people will remember me for. It’s the kind of person that I am. And I want to be remembered for being a rape survivor. Don’t you?

Thank you for joining me on this short walk. Please feel free to leave a comment on how you want to be remembered. And until next time, just breathe and believe.

With love and care, Ruby

Rape and Nightmares

 32. RAPE AND NIGHTMARES 

Hello and welcome back to Raped 25 Years. This is the time I invite you to take a short walk with me through my journey to heal from sexual abuse and sexual assault. Don’t forget to stay to the end in order to enjoy my gem of positivity.

The following nightmares are flashbacks of some of my traumatic experiences.

This is one of the nightmares I have. It always begins the same way. I am eight years old. It is nighttime and I am in bed. The bed is against the wall. I am asleep in the start of the dream. Mum and Dad are hosting friends and they are a few rooms away. The light is on in the room they are in, but there is no direct light in the bedroom.

I am sleeping on my tummy, and I am facing the wall. A slight sound wakes me. With my forearms under my chest, I slightly raise my chest so that I can turn my head towards the source of the noise. The dark man, who I will call Arthur, is in the doorway. All I can make out is his silhouette. He is smiling, because I can see his teeth. 

He moves quickly towards me in the bed. I scream, but it seems that nobody hears me. He gets to the bed and hits me to stop me screaming. I start to cry but only quietly so I don’t get hit again. He gets into the bed with me, and takes my knickers off. He then penetrates my vagina with his penis, and it hurts so much I cry out from the pain. I am fighting him to make him stop and go away. But he doesn’t pay any attention. In fact, he laughs. I am screaming again, but it makes no difference to the pain and hurt.

Another nightmare is that of the man I refer to as Alex, strangling me. Alex is on top of me in my bed. I start kicking and hitting him, because I’m scared. 

I fight so hard, Alex can’t calm me down. So he does the only thing he knows to make me quiet. His hands go around my throat, and then it’s not the nightmare I’m afraid of anymore. He keeps squeezing, but it has the opposite effect he was wanting. I fight harder, trying to break his grip. 

I try screaming, but it comes out as a choked gurgling. I know I can’t be heard. With that realisation, I fight like never before. I try to scratch his face, and then he does it.

Because he can’t calm me down or stop me fighting, he makes one last effort. He turns my face into the pillow to silence me forever.

And these days that’s when I wake up. I still feel his fingers around my throat, and I can’t stop coughing. I can feel the saliva backed up in my throat and I remember my face in the pillow. Even after making sure I’m safely alone in my bed and bedroom, my heart pounds like a jack hammer for another further hour or more. Sometimes I cry lately, because the nightmare is so real and the memory raw. That just makes the choking sensation worse, though.

This is why I don’t use a pillow at night. I use blankets and cushions to lay my head on. When I try to use a pillow, I end up pushing it away. I hate the sensation of my head sinking into it. 

Finally, there is the one of having disobeyed Alex by having a shower without him there to wash me. It starts with him slapping me around the face. Then I dodge him. That’s when he really goes nuts. It’s like he just lets go of his temper entirely. All of a sudden, there’s a hailstorm of blows coming down on my head, chest, back of the neck, and shoulders. One hit on the back of my neck is hard enough for me drop to my knees and hands.

He doesn’t stop. If anything, he gets a second wind. Then the kicking starts. I’m afraid he’ll kick my face, so I protect it with my forearms. Big mistake. His steel capped boots just go repeatedly and relentlessly into my gut and legs. I just repeat, “okay, okay. I promise. I won’t do again. I promise, I promise. Please stop, please stop. I’ll be good, I’ll be good. Alex stop.” Over and over I’m saying the same thing. 

When I wake up now, I’m crying. In fact, when I have that nightmare, I can still feel the pain in my body from the beating, even though it happened all those years ago. I can’t help it now and just cry when I wake up. In fact, I usually find now with any of these nightmares, I can’t 

Such  realistic repetitive nightmares in people who have survived sexual abuse and sexual assault are normal coping responses. It’s not enough that people like me, and you, survive the original traumas. We relive them time and again in sleep. It has been explained to me it’s our brain’s way of working through the horrors of the original insidious evils perpetrated. The good news is that eventually the brain does work through the atrocities. It takes time, and many sleepless nights, but it does happen. And if I will lose these nightmares in time, you will too.

And now for the gem of positivity. This time I have chosen a quote attributed to Jonas Salk:

“I have had dreams and I’ve had nightmares. I overcame the nightmares because of my dreams.”

I do have a dream, and that is to heal. And I truly believe my will to heal will eventually help me conquer my nightmares. I just have to keep holding onto that dream until I can make it a reality. And you can too.

What is your dream? I invite you leave a comment on what dream is helping you to hold on through your nightmares. Thank you for taking this short walk with me. And until next time, just breathe and believe.

With love and care, Ruby