Ch. 17 Take Care of You, Too
How a Loved One’s Tragedy Can Be Just As Traumatic for Those Closest to Them
Finding out a loved one has been the victim of sexual assault or abuse takes a toll on you, too. And that’s okay. It’s completely understandable to feel your own pain. Hearing what they went through is a punch in the gut, a dagger to the heart, and you can’t save someone else while letting yourself bleed out. Therefore, it’s imperative that you be mindful of how you are dealing with everything that’s happening as well. Talk to friends and family, see a counselor or therapist, do your research and educate yourself with as many books and articles as you can find. You are also a victim in this, and you need to process it just as they do.
The last thing you want to do is rely on the victim to talk through your own feelings. When you two are talking about what happened, it should only be in the context of how they feel, not how their situation has affected you or your life. This will only make them feel worse for how bad they are making you feel. Survivors don’t need this added guilt, especially not from those who are supposed to be their strongest support. Although you don’t mean it, you are instilling in them responsibility for your pain, which settles in the psyche as the very dangerous thought of “I am hurting my family, I need to make it stop”.
I know it’s hard not to be candid, and depending on your relationship to the victim, it may be easy to slip up. My mother, on numerous occasions, informed me, in laymen’s terms, of the great pleasure she would take in sharply removing the reproductive organs of each of the men who assaulted me. And while I understood her sentiment, that is a thought she should have shared with others. And here’s why: Immediately, it makes me think of her painstakingly imagining the situation to the extent that she would commit that kind of violence. Knowing she is a woman who never would have thought herself capable of hurting anyone, the sincerity in her voice was startling. In those moments, I know she is serious. I am concerned she may actually seek them out to do something like this, and therefore am picturing her going to prison, which in turn, both scares me and breaks my heart. At the same time, it brings to mind their actual genitals, which suddenly swirl and surround me, and I see them being mutilated before my eyes, the images becoming even worse as they’re soaked in blood. Having been through that kind of trauma and violence, conjuring images of more violence, albeit against the perpetrators, doesn’t help or hinder, but simply floods the mind with darkness.
You may see sharing this kind of information with the victim as a kind of support, empathizing with what they must want to do to the person or people who hurt them. But that isn’t necessarily what they feel. You have to understand that we are trying not to think about who hurt us at all. Even picturing their faces can be an instant trigger, and instead of us wishing them harm, the only emotions we have are fear and shame. At the very mention of them, we don’t want to do anything but find a dark corner where we can curl up, hide away and be left alone forever. The anger you feel, the eye for an eye instinct that has you seeing red, we most likely don’t share the sentiment. When I think of the men who assaulted me, I don’t wish them harm or death, I simply wish they didn’t exist on the same earth that I do.
Now that I’ve been through therapy and can finally talk about my assault in an unequivocal way, I’ve found myself having to ask those close to me for details that are too fuzzy for me to fully recollect. My friends have been very helpful, and have actually made positive comments about how much I’ve grown, how proud they were that I was finally dealing with it and discussing it. But when it comes to speaking with someone like my mom, it’s a different story. Whenever I bring it up, I can hear her chest cave in, even over the phone. The immediate lump in her throat, her voice wavering, caught somewhere between sobbing and heaving. It would always hurt me, because she would often say, “I can’t even think about it,” while she closed her eyes and looked away. But I came to realize, she was never looking away from me, it wasn’t me that was upsetting her, it was it. She just couldn’t think about any of it, talk about any of it, without first internally, then outwardly, falling to shattered pieces.
Mom is broken, too.
It’s taken me years of dealing with the reality of what happened to me, session upon session of intensive therapy to process the severe trauma I experienced and could no longer ignore. I had accepted that I was broken and only then could I begin to put myself back together. My mom hadn’t done that, and every single time I brought up what happened to me, I was triggering her. She was right back in it the way I had been before the EMDR therapy, except she was right back in that hospital room. Watching her only daughter covered in bruises and matted hair, her black eyes matching the cloud she carried over her head. The daughter she couldn’t protect. Feeling her hand squeezed tightly as doctors stuck a tube up her daughter’s nose and into her throat, wiping away the slow tears dripping down her child’s cheek. She was back in the interrogation room listening to the horrific details of what happened to her baby in a room of stone-faced, cynical strangers. All at once and without warning. I know how that feels.
It wasn’t my mom’s fault that she couldn’t talk about what happened to me, that she would forget the anniversary and always wonder why I now lived life like there was no tomorrow. It’s not that she didn’t want to think about it, she couldn’t think about it. The same way I couldn’t for so long. But that doesn’t make it go away. And without addressing what she also went through, her own trauma, she was doing a disservice to both of us. If you find yourself having these feelings while supporting your loved one, I implore you to consider exploring EMDR and other therapeutic methods for yourself. Like I said, you are a victim, too. This was traumatic for you as well. If you can deal with it, work on yourself and begin processing how this has affected you, you can fully be there for your loved one in a way that will be invaluable to the both of you.
