This post is probably one of the most powerful I’ve ever shared, but it’s horrifying and triggering . Please read with caution, patience, understanding. This is my reality!!!
These past few weeks I’ve been in quite a raging rapids of memories. However, I try to remain hopeful as friends speak out to me; “Time heals all wounds” REALLY????
Survivors of Child Sexual Abuse, Adult Survivors of Rape; even our returning war vets and others who have gone through some form of life threatening trauma never forget.
Do we learn how to cope? Yes; this is quite possible with the help of a support system and tools of a trained trauma recovery therapist. We can remain hopeful and live in the present at most times.
My life has been truly safe these past seven years. I’ve got one of the most loving and protective men I’ve ever known. He has held me as I’ve curled up and cried like an infant. He walks each step along recovery with me. It’s a life I have imagined finally coming true!!
However; still I am plagued with haunting memories and sensations of fear. There are still moments, days, even weeks when I am taken to the darkness of my past and each breath is a struggle to get through.
This has been one of those months!!! This blog is filled with the paralyzing fear that I have to get out of my system. Hopefully it will, in some strange way, help others understand the impact of this reality as being a survivor of evil so horrific most cannot even imagine.
Lately I feel trapped by his presence. It’s difficult to breathe or even think. I can feel his heavy breath and panting over my shoulder. My skin actually crawls at the sense of his touch grasping at me. As I do dishes the weight of his body creates a pressure caging me against the sink. When stepping out of the shower his hands fill the bathroom air with the stench of black coal.
He is back again!!! He is all around me!!!
He’s in my car when I’m driving; sitting there in the passenger side with the devil’s grin and his thick coal stained hand rubs on my thigh. I can feel it groping at my shirt, clenching on my breast. He is hovering around me as I climb into bed next to the one I love so dearly. I scooch over and curl into a ball as close to safety as I can, wanting to climb inside so that I will be protected from the blackness around me. Even as I write this now he is here; everywhere; completely surrounding, taunting, almost as if he’s laughing and then I hear his grueling whisper, “I will always be here. You will never escape me.”
MY GOD WHEN DOES IT END? Perhaps when I am dead or will he be there waiting for me, taking me down to hell with him, keeping me there to torture all over again!!!
This is the reality for those of us who have survived through evil that other’s can’t even touch, their minds cannot circle around the days, nights, years of continuous torture we have endured.
To be raped or molested as a child is brutal enough. Even those who have been raped as adults have a difficult task of moving past it. When your childhood days are filled with sadistic torture, so brutal that your soul is murdered; TELL ME HOW WE ARE TO GET PAST THIS. TELL ME HOW WE ARE TO “JUST FORGET ABOUT IT”!!!
When you are six and held by a fist full of hair as someone probes you so viciously it bruises you and hurts for days. When you are nine and cannot even bathe or do dishes without being trapped and touched. When you are twelve and you are forced to strip with a shotgun barrel rubbing along your body. When you are threatened with death as you’re told to lie down on the bed. When you feel the barrel of the gun ripping apart at your guts as its repeatedly jammed inside you. When you lie there knowing there is no escape, no rescue, no sense of help. You hear the television downstairs, you know your brother and sister are there enjoying a show, but you are here. You’re forced to hold back the screams of pain; forced to hold back the tears of madness. You hear the voice of terror as it threatens to blow your head off from the inside of your vagina. Then suddenly it feels as if your insides are shredded and scraped out with a searing knife. You feel the barrel as it’s ripped out so quickly you think it’s tearing out your soul.
Your existence is gone now. The young child you were is no longer there. It’s only blackness around you and in you. There is no laughter, no play time, no smile, no shine in your eyes; only a blank empty shell laying on the royal blue quilted bedspread.
He brings the barrel up to your face. You try to focus and you hear his words, “You will die if you say a word to anyone again!!!”
You see the blood and tissue of your soul clinging to the end of the gun. You know it is over now. There will never be joy in your spirit again because the devil has taken it and erased the child who lived inside.
Where is the comfort of death when I need it so desperately? Why has God allowed my purity to be taken in such an act of terror? Why has He covered my life in darkness?
Tell me please – “How do you erase these fears? How do you -“Just get over it?” How in the hell am I supposed to move past and forget this evil when it feels as if his spirit is here waiting for me to die???!!!
Could you do it? Could you pretend it never happened? Could you go through life trying to hide this black that crawls inside of you? Could you still function, be a wife, be a mother, try to guide your own children through life with joy and the tenderness of childhood?
I’m breathing; I’m telling myself I’m safe; I’m loved; the birds are singing outside; the rainbow in shining in the clouds; dear God I am trying!!! Breathing and Praying!!! Destroy him!!!
The child I was; the broken soul of a woman; the spirit of a mother; now the strength and determination of a SURVIVOR!!!
(c)Patricia A. McKnight
“My Justice” has been written, has been spoken, but have you really heard that voice of the girl who held back the tears; the voice that wanted to scream out in fear for help; the child that hid her way through life and covered up the rot of her skin; the disregard of her mother; the infection of black from the devil who still haunts my world.
