Blog de Sarah: El lenguaje de ser creído

Twenty years ago, I sat next to my husband on our bed, the bright zinnias on our duvet cover helping steel me for what I had to say.

Several months before, I’d begun having flashbacks to being sexually abused by my father when I was a child. The flashbacks were at once crystal clear and opaque. In one, I could feel the short, shag carpet on my parents’ bedroom floor scratching my cheek and the weight of a body on top of me. I knew with absolute certainty the weight belonged to my father, but I couldn’t see him in the memory, and I worried this apparent contradiction would make me less credible if I chose to tell anyone about it.

For several weeks, I kept it to myself and then mustered up the courage to tell my new therapist. I’d recently changed therapists after a psychic told me I should fire any therapist who didn’t tell me to go to Al-Anon within twelve minutes of talking to me. The imprint of growing up in an alcoholic home was apparent to her in a way it hadn’t been to me. Despite copious evidence—including an arrest for drunk driving in which his blood alcohol was .34, more than four times the legal limit—I didn’t believe my father was an alcoholic because I didn’t want it to be true.

Neither did I want it to be true that my father sexually abused me when I was a kid. So my brain would use that little bit of doubt created by not being able to see his face in the flashback to try to tell me it hadn’t happened. Despite copious evidence—hypervigilance, an inability to be touched intimately while sober, dissociating during sex, revulsion afterward, feeling like sex was a duty and it didn’t matter whether I desired it—I didn’t want it to be true. I know now hanging onto this doubt is a survival mechanism: until I knew I could survive without my father’s love and approval, I couldn’t risk fully acknowledging something that would hurt him or put him at risk—ironic since that’s exactly what his behavior did to me.

But, as Bessel van der Kolk says, the body keeps the score. And my body knew, even in the face of protestations from my brain, what had happened to me. This certainty was what compelled me to tell my husband about the flashback that day in the bedroom of the last house we’d live in together, but I was wholly unprepared for his response.

“I don’t trust recovered memories.”

No words or gestures of comfort or support. Just five words that might as well have been, “I do not believe you.”

~

Two decades later, I moved to Seattle after launching my kids into adulthood. In one sense, I was free to live my own life, but in another, I was still caught up in negative thought and behavioral patterns stemming from the abuse. During a flare-up of the disordered eating I’d had since I was a teenager, I scared myself enough to go to the public health clinic and seek help. A behavioral health therapist referred me to the King County Sexual Assault Resource Center (KCSARC), believing it best to treat the root of my self-harming behavior: sexual trauma.

The intake process was harrowing: old nightmares resurfaced, and even as I began therapy, I felt worse before I felt better. My therapist explained this was a result of lowering my avoidance behaviors—the things people with posttraumatic stress disorder do to keep the memories at bay.

When I told my therapist how my husband had responded when I’d told him about the flashback, she named the experience for me in a way that was liberating. She said it was a negative disclosure experience, which research shows can be harder on a survivor than not disclosing at all. I felt seen, heard, and understood in a way I hadn’t before, even after fourteen years of conventional therapy with a competent and compassionate therapist. Everyone should have access to a program like this! I thought.

But still I found myself repeatedly presenting my therapist with evidence, as if trying to prove the case that I’d been sexually abused—something no one else in my family admits to remembering. My father said we’d have to agree to disagree about whether it happened, as though we were talking about preferring Coke over Pepsi.

And then one day my therapist said something that simultaneously made me burst into tears and flood with relief: “I know you’re used to not being believed, and I want you to know there’s no part of me that doesn’t believe you.”

Now that’s the language of being believed. I didn’t know how badly I needed to hear it.

—

La línea de recursos de KCSARC está disponible las 24 horas, los 7 días de la semana, y cuenta con defensores capacitados listos para escucharlo y brindarle apoyo e información confidenciales y gratuitos para ayudarlo a determinar los próximos pasos. Cuando esté listo, llame al 1.888.998.6423.

La sanación y la recuperación de cada sobreviviente son únicas y personales. Las reflexiones y experiencias compartidas por los miembros de Voces Empoderadas son personales y podrían no reflejar las experiencias ni la trayectoria de cada sobreviviente. Las opiniones expresadas no representan la visión organizacional de KCSARC.