Rape and Identity

 44. RAPE AND IDENTITY 

Hello and welcome back to Raped 25 Years. At this time, I invite you to join me in my journey of healing from sexual abuse and sexual assault. Don’t forget to stay to the end so that you may enjoy my gem of positivity.

I have the trauma of losing my virginity at the age of three by a group of paedophiles. Bewildering, I was later raped by three school teachers, and then a horrendous work experience of being gang raped and physically abused on the job. Further I was forced to live with the man I call Alex. During this time he brutally beat me, horribly raped me, and traumatically used me as an enslaved sex worker to support his drugs and alcohol addictions.

Many people only see me as a victim of sexual violence. I’m “the rape victim”.  That is the identity that they have labeled on me. But, how do I see myself?

I’m not a “rape victim” in my eyes. There are underlying qualities that make me who I am. I’ve been told by one of my therapists that I have a wicked sense of humour, and I do. I even tell Dr H jokes during therapy sessions. It’s a great way to relax after a particularly difficult and painful session.

I have a passion caring for animals. In fact I’ve kept just about every species of domesticated animal there is as a pet. And yes, that does include sheep and cows, too. I love bottle feeding young lambs, and excited seeing them grow from birth through to having offspring of their own.

I love to write. I even enter writing competitions. My journals are overflowing with ideas, observations, and poems I write myself. It’s not unheard of for me to fill a 400-page notebook in just 6 weeks. I get twitchy and have a physical ache if I can’t write each day.

I love to sing, but usually only when I’m at home and all alone. I don’t have any voice training, as it were, I simply sing for myself and to myself. I find it very freeing. I don’t always hit the right notes, but even that makes me happy and laugh.

I’m also a bit artistic. I usually draw with just a black ink pen on white paper or even canvas. I keep a stack of colouring in projects, as a change from drawing. I’m also keen on diamond dot art painting. I don’t always make time to indulge in this creative identity, but when I do it’s always relaxing and I lose myself in the process.

I enjoy aqua aerobics. I can spend even 2 hours just in the pool, either jogging on the spot or doing “weightlifting”. It’s lovely while I’m in the pool, but gosh, I don’t half feel exhausted when I get out.

As you can see, these are all characteristics that make me the person I am. The inner me. And none of them have anything to do with whether or not I’ve been raped or sexually abused. They are what I see of as my identity, not the sexual traumas. But it has taken me years of therapy to understand that.

And what about you? How do you see yourself? Do you think of yourself in terms of you being a “victim”? You are not. You still have all the same lovable traits as you did before the sexual trauma. Your qualities are still there. Your sexual abuse and assault is not the whole of who you are. It will take time for you to shed that label, and start believing in that again. But when you do, you’ll be just like me. You will be on the journey of healing.

This time the gem of positivity is an affirmation:

I am not defined by the opinion of others.

This is a key part of healing. I am not defined by what those perpetrators did to me. I am not rape nor molestation. I still love humour. I am still care for animals. I am still creative. Those attributes have never left me. They were overshadowed for a time. The further I travel on my path of healing, the greater my attributes shine through the darkness. And yours will too.

Thank you for joining me on this short walk in my journey of healing. Don’t forget to leave a comment on what different parts make up your identity. And until next time, just breathe and believe. 

With love and care, Ruby.

Rape and Muriel

 43. RAPE AND MURIEL 

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

Rape can result in unplanned pregnancy. You might feel a range of strong emotions. Horror, despair, resentment, and of course, anger. I know I did when I found out I was pregnant due to yet another traumatic brutal rape in the workplace. I had been hit on the back of the head when going down steps at work.

 

The blow knocked me unconscious. I came back to consciousness I  found my boss had undone my overalls, and was viciously raping me. I don’t know whether you would call it a positive or negative, but the result of that rape was my first pregnancy as an adult. But this time it was more than “just” a pregnancy. It was my daughter, Muriel.

When I first found out I was pregnant with Muriel, I felt like my body had let me down. That, in some way, my body was adding to the abusive attack already perpetrated against me. I even did everything I could physically do on my own to lose my baby.

But Muriel didn’t go away. If anything, she grew stronger and more resilient than most “normal” pregnancies. Until the man I refer to as Alex found out. He literally held my struggling body down, so a doctor could perform an abortion.

I could feel the doctor as he scraped Muriel off my uterus. But I had been pregnant for six months. So what started as an abortion, became a premature birth.

I remember the expletives from both the doctor and Alex. Muriel was born alive. I know. I saw her breathing. 

My dear little girl, Muriel Ashlynne, was born with slight dark hair. Her little face screwed up, as if to cry. But she never did cry. She breathed exactly six times. And she was gone.

The ultimate shame was I had tried to get rid of her by my own actions. And yet now she was gone, I still felt betrayed. I felt that my body had betrayed me in the first place, by conceiving little Muriel. Now, despite my inability to stop the brutal traumatic forced removal of her, I felt betrayed that my body couldn’t keep her.

Muriel would be in her twenties now, had she lived. Currently, I have a photograph of a “Muriel” rose by my bed. I see it when I go to sleep, and when I wake up again. And despite all the trauma, that photo makes me smile. It reminds me that Muriel was alive and real. Muriel was, and will always be, my little girl.

Have you had a similar experience? Have you fallen pregnant from a rape? Is that baby now lost to you? Do you carry the burdens of guilt and regret? There is something you can do to celebrate the life you lost, through no fault of your own. You can do what I’m doing. You can heal.

The gem I’ve chosen this time is a quote from an unknown source: 

“Life is a song — sing it. Life is a game — play it. Life is a challenge — meet it”.

That is what healing is all about. To face every challenge that life sends. And when that challenge comes as a special life lost to you, sing the beauty of the life that was. And when you, and I, can learn to do that, we will be on the path of healing.

Thank you for joining me on this short walk through my journey to heal. And thank you for joining me in the celebration of Muriel. Don’t forget to leave a comment on what you do to celebrate a life lost. And until next time, just breathe and believe.

With love and care, Ruby

Rape and Apathy

 42. RAPE AND APATHY 

Hello and welcome back to my blog, Raped 25 Years. At this time, I invite you to join me in my journey of healing from sexual abuse and sexual assault. Don’t forget to stay to the end so that you may enjoy my gem of positivity.

Apathy has become a very common fixture in my life. It is a result of the heinously brutal and traumatically cruel treatment that I have been subjected to over the years. It is complete and utter involuntary indifference to everything — and everyone. I don’t really seem to be able to connect with anyone, not even my nearest and dearest. It’s when my most common reaction is to shrug my shoulders and say, “Whatever”. My apathy leaves me feeling isolated and alone. 

When someone around me has good and positive news to share, I pretend to be happy, or excited about what has made them so joyful. And yet, I feel nothing. No joy, no happiness, no excitement. It’s the same with bad news. I try to say all the right words of comfort to them. But I feel nothing really. Are you the same?

If I had to give my apathy a colour, it would be beige. Totally plain. Utterly bland. Completely lifeless. The beige even tends towards a greyish colour, it really is such a devoid nonentity. What colour is your apathy?

The picture that comes to mind, is that of a desolate wasteland. It’s like a broad acre crop field in the middle of summer, yet after harvest. There is barren nothingness as far as the eye can see. The only movement is when the wind kicks up a “dust devil” in the open expanse. It even sounds empty and hollow. What about you? What image comes to your mind when you think about your apathy?

Then there is the sound. Or rather lack of sound. Apathy for me is an emptiness. Totally dead. There may as well be no such thing as sound. The silence of my apathy is actually quite deafening. Strange but true. Nothing moves, not even rustling from the wind. What does your apathy sound like?

I know that my apathy is a result of my sexual trauma. But that doesn’t make it any easier for those around me to understand. If anything, in my case, it has lead to further trauma for me. They misunderstand and misinterpret my inability to empathise with them. I am thought to be cold, uncaring. At times I am even told that I come across as being selfish and totally self-centred. All because of my post traumatic apathy.

Being in therapy is helping me to start to reconnect with my deeper emotions. So while I still have indifference and apathy to a certain degree, I am slowly starting to feel more balanced. That in turn then means I am now starting to connect with the emotions of others, and share in their joyous moments. It also means I can be more understanding of their sorrows.

Apathy may be where you are now, but you don’t have to remain wallowing in nothingness. There is hope that you can reconnect with your emotions and feel again. It takes time. It requires patience. That is what healing is all about.

This time the gem of positivity is a quote that I believe sum up what I am saying. It is one that I don’t know who it’s attributed: 

“It is often when night looks darkest, it is often before the fever breaks that one senses the gathering momentum for change, when one feels that resurrection of hope in the midst of despair and apathy”.

And that is only too true. In the middle of my apathy, when I think I’ll never be able to share in the moments of triumphs and disappointments with others, there is the resurrection of the hope that one day I truly will. Because I am healing, and you can too.

Thank you for joining me on this short walk in my journey of healing. Don’t forget to leave a comment on how you are healing from your apathy. It could be the help someone else needs in their journey to heal. And until next time, just breathe and believe.

With love and care, Ruby

Rape and Intimate Relationships

 41. RAPE AND INTIMATE RELATIONSHIPS 

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

Rape, by its very nature crosses the intimacy boundaries. It is a violation of the physical body but also a key factor in any intimate relationship, a violation of trust. So after the violence of sexual trauma, what is it like to form an intimate relationship with someone else?

The first obvious answer is it’s highly distressing for a rape survivor to form any sort of relationship, and even harder to form an intimate relationship. Intimacy for me requires a strong connection between the man and me. It also requires a higher level of trust than I am feeling.

Until recently, the only relationships I had with men were based on rape. Particularly when forced to live with the man I refer to as Alex. I was traumatised by the brutal treatment of rape many times. Alex had said he wanted to marry me, which I now know was simply to trick me into trusting him.

The first time he raped me, I was stunned. Disbelief flooded my brain. Why would he do such a vicious act against me? What did I say or do for him to treat me in such an aggressive and appalling way? But notice how I started. It was the first time he raped me.

Each time Alex violated my body, it broke a piece out of the trust I felt with him. However, when he started to collect money for allowing other men to rape me too, that trust totally shattered. There was nothing genuine in his weasel words of apology, nor anything meaningful about his false declarations of love he claimed to feel towards me.

Since then I haven’t been in any relationship with a man. For the last twenty years I could not trust enough to form a relationship of intimacy. In fact it was only two years ago that I met someone. It was a major triumph for me to trust this man (I’ll call him Percy) enough to simply hold hands. Our first kiss came several months later. 

Even then, the very first kiss, I hid my lips. To use my lips, seemed to me as a level of intimacy that I wasn’t comfortable enough with. But after lots of talking about our feelings and needs in the relationship, we now kiss lip to lip. But the trauma wrought by Alex’s brutality and cruelty, still interferes. If I am held or touched on some areas of the body, I still flinch and pull back.

It is very much an uphill battle of trusting the intimacy will not turn into another relationship of traumatising abuse. Thankfully, Percy is very understanding and patient. We spend a lot of our time in simply being together, just enjoying each other’s company. And slowly but surely, I am trusting in the intimacy Percy and I are building together.

What about you? Do you find it an uphill battle to form a relationship of intimacy between yourself and another person? Trusting takes time, especially after the violation of rape. But, as I’m finding, forming an intimate relationship can be done. There is hope; there is healing.

The gem I chose this time, is a quote attributed to Robert Sternberg:

“Passion is the quickest to develop, and the quickest to fade. Intimacy develops more slowly, and commitment more gradually still”.

This quote really says what an intimate relationship is about. It’s more than just the sex and fireworks. As I am doing with Percy, our intimacy is based on communication and the ability to work on companionship first. And as I heal, I am able to move further on into the intimacy. And you can heal into an intimate relationship too.

Thank you for joining me on this short walk in my journey. Don’t forget to leave a comment on what intimacy means to you. And until next time, just breathe and believe.

With love and care, Ruby