“I feel like I’m dying.”

 

You may be up and walking around, making lunches for the kids, pushing a grocery cart through the store, answering the phone at the office, but inside . . .

 

Inside you’re suffocating. You’re running. You’re screaming. You’re crying. You’re curled up in a ball, sobbing. You’re trapped in a memory you can’t escape.

 

And it’s stuck on replay.

 

This is where some struggling souls reach for the bottle of pills or booze or something sharper and smoother than a bread knife, anything to blur or pull focus from the pain of what’s playing.

 

It’s what sends us to bed to bury our still-breathing selves (at least temporarily), sends us to corners of bathrooms to cry when we can, fuels our nightmares, robs us of our sleep, sends our sanity to slipping. It’s what we fear will send us to the loony-bin.

 

We feel crazy, broken, haunted—desperate for relief that isn’t coming, yet afraid to reach out to let any of the hell out.

 

Maybe this is you right now.

 

Maybe it’s been you.

 

You’re wondering if the nightmares will ever end. If any of this ever gets any better. Cuz you don’t think you can take much more.

 

Can I give you some hope and some hard truths here?

 

No, the nightmares may never completely go away. Sorry. The panic-attacks, the nightmares, the triggers . . . Yeah . . . Those will rear their nasty little heads from time to time, well into your 70s and beyond. A news story will remind you. A touch, a taste, a smell, a song will trigger you. A face, a feeling, may leap from the briary bushes of your present and your past and assault you.

 

That’s PTSD, ya’ll.

 

There are therapies that can help but there is no cure, no promise anyone can give you that the past, trauma-induced, guerrilla-style attacks from your own autonomic nervous system will stop completely. Some part of you will always be on alert for the tiger that chased and chewed on you. We are hard-wired for survival, after all, and our mind and body’s instinctual response to trauma is designed to save us in whatever way it can: fight or flight, dissociation or destruction. That tiger may be long gone, long dead, but we will see the tip of his tail, or think we see it, and our understandably flinchy insides are off to the races.

 

Hear me. It doesn’t mean we’re crazy, and it’s not abnormal. It’s a normal response to abnormal experience. Luring or forcing sex from a child is not normal. Forcing sex on anyone of any age is not normal. And it doesn’t matter if it was a fondling finger or full on intercourse. And it doesn’t matter if they raped your mouth or your nether regions. It’s all rape, and it’s all wrong, and it’s all traumatizing.

 

I’m not sorry if those last couple of sentences shock or offend some of you or make you uncomfortable. It’s rape, folks. There’s nothing comfortable about it. And it’s as much a mind-fuck as it is a violation of your body.

 

Actually, the mind-fuck lasts longer.

 

And I’m not sorry I said that either.

 

Look, I’m as much a Christian as any one of you, but I’m not sanitizing this. Rape is brutal and awful and ugly and dirty and hard to look at — which is precisely why it is so traumatizing. And some words capture the sacrilege, the absolute profanity of that profane hell, better than others. They just do. So, if that one word keeps you from reading further or from sharing this forward to someone who really could benefit from reading it, at the very least so that they don’t feel so freakishly alone, then you clearly don’t get it or don’t want to. The rest of us will nod our knowing heads and keep reading.

 

My point is, fellow survivor friend, it will always be part of your life story, and it will bubble up from time to time. But you’ll learn how to handle it better. And some of the effects will diminish in intensity. It won’t hurt this badly, this acutely, this intensely, forever.

 

“That’s the thing about pain. It demands to be felt.” ~ The Fault in Our Stars by John Green

 

The thing about any trauma, dear ones, is that there is no way around it once it’s happened to you. As my friend, Scarlett Angel said to me just last night,

 

“There is no way over it; the only way is through it. But there are hands to hold along the way.”

 

And if you are very lucky, you find them.

 

I was, and I did. And I’ll forever be grateful to God for them. They’re the folks who can sit with you in your pain and your silence—your insides saying or screaming all the things you can’t bring yourself to say out loud—not fixing, not curing, just present there with you, bearing witness to the struggle you hide from nearly everyone else. They’re the ones you can text “I don’t think I can take much more of this” when the chaos inside doesn’t match the mundanity of your day—the little noses you’re wiping, the notes you’re taking, the laundry you’re folding. They’re the ones you can sound your barbaric yawp to the world to, or anguished yelp of pain, and they’ll assure you that they’re there, they hear you, and that you can. You can take it, and you will make it. And hey, let’s meet for coffee. They’ll pray for you. But they’ll show up and meet with you too. Hug you. Even weep with you. Be Jesus with skin on. Or try to be, anyway.

 

Opening it all up—that Pandora’s Box of memories—can feel like you’re taking seven steps backward. It can. Will look like it too for a while. But it is the way forward. Seven steps forward. I promise.

 

Seek out and reach out for the help you need as you let the tenderest, scaredest parts of you walk through those dark and painful places again, feel the pain that demands to be felt, and process it here in the present. You’re gonna need those helping hands. And you’ll benefit greatly from them. Whether it’s the price of a licensed professional in their well-appointed office or the price of a pitcher of coffee with a friend at IHOP, or both, the healing will be worth it. You will come through that long, dark tunnel and out the other side. I promise.

 

You will learn how to manage your very normal responses, and how to keep living, keep walking, in spite of how abnormal it feels. You’ll learn healthier ways of managing, healthier ways of walking, ways that won’t stuff it all into a box and the back of your closet, won’t slice your skin open, won’t slur your speech or blur your judgment. The kind of help that would have helped you most if you could have had it way back when. But you know the proverb about the best time to plant a tree, don’t you? The best time to plant a tree was 25 years ago. The second best time is now.

 

Dearest fellow survivor friend, the second best time is now.

 

(((Hugs)))

 

Take the helping hands of those reaching out to you. You don’t have to walk through this alone. Let’s walk together.

 

 

Photo Credit: Footbridge – Petr Kovar

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