Pain Cracks the Rock: Healing from Childhood Sexual Abuse at Age 58
Thank You, Mr. Trump?
I am the fifth and youngest child born to an Irish Catholic/French Canadian family in Wisconsin. Life is always chaotic. As a toddler I remember craving fat — and getting caught for stealing butter and raw bacon from the refrigerator. I guess I needed comfort.
When I am 18 my father sits me down and says, “Theresa, don’t drink Gin, drink Vodka, Gin will kill you.” His mother died from gin. She used to have a 1-gallon “tipper” next to her favorite chair. Little does he know that I’ve been drinking since age 11.
My brother Mike is 4 years my senior, and an altar boy. My three older sisters have their own rooms but Mike and I share one until I am 10. He’s my best friend and I adore him. During the day he acts like he doesn’t know me in front of his friends, and taunts and teases me. But at night he is sweet to me: telling me about the new games he learned at recess, or what junior high is like.
I love these talks because it makes our physical affection more meaningful. We have bunk beds and he drapes his blankets from the top to make a fort for hiding. Behind those blankets we have a world to ourselves where the unthinkable occurs. I desperately want to be loved because love is a commodity in our home, dished out sparingly, and mostly by my father. I figure this is what all brothers and sisters do. He makes sure that what happens in our bunk beds at night remains our secret.
I’m 10 years old and I’m riding my blue stingray bike to the pool in my red and white one-piece bathing suit. I’m still a happy, boisterous kid.
As I pass by the home of my brother’s friend, Carl, he comes out and stops me to invite me in. He says, “Wanna see my pet monkey?” I am suspicious at first. Why would a 14-year-old boy be so nice to a 10-year-old girl? But the prospect of seeing a real, live monkey is too enticing.
Once I’m in his house he takes me to his room where his monkey is in a cage. I start to walk toward it — I have never seen one outside of a zoo before — but Carl grabs me and throws me on his bed and tears off my bathing suit. At 10-years-old I didn’t know what sex or rape is, just that it is familiar and frenzied.
Afterwards, I hear a noise coming from the closet. I run to open it, but Carl bars the door. “Get out of here!” he shouts. But I know who is in the closet. It’s my brother, Mike. He watched the whole thing. It was his idea.
I ride to the pool, jump in and stay there until I have to get out. The water holds me like a hug. I am terrified, and shaken with the reality of this betrayal.
Life gets harder after that. I never tell anybody what happened, but Carl does. The girls say I’m a “slut.” Other boys start asking, “How’s Carl?” And pressure me for sex. Many times I relent and give in. I remember asking a friend, “Can I get pregnant if I’ve never gotten my period?” I hide under my covers, lonely, confused and afraid.
At 11 I discover that drugs and alcohol numbs the pain. The drugs are what save me.
One day when I am 15 and my brother is 19, I find a suicide note that he has written and torn up in the bathroom wastebasket. I tell the school guidance counselor, but he says he can’t help because Mike has already dropped out of school. I never tell my parents. A few weeks later, he kills himself. I am the one who finds him.
After Mike’s death we move to Ohio. I leave the girl I was back in Wisconsin — the girl who was molested, raped. The one who found her brother dead. But I take the drugs and alcohol with me. They are part of the bubble I create to protect me from those memories.
I go on to college, study dance and art, move to NYC and perform off, off, off Broadway. But it’s in graduate school that I find my calling as a creative arts therapist. I start a successful practice and for the last 26 years I have been happily married to my beautiful bride.
But in 2016, when Trump is elected, the world is filled with uncertainty, and persistent fear. I stop walking country roads alone and start locking the doors for the first time. I close my private practice because the triggers are too much. Being “other” — a woman and a lesbian — makes me a target. People make comments like, “It’s open season on people like you.” There aren’t enough martinis or pot in the world to hold back the terror. The bubble I have created is slowly losing air. It’s as if I can feel the earth tremble, like when elephants know to run for higher ground from an impending tsunami.
My wife knows about my past but not the details, I’ve spared her from most of it. Day and night I sit, stoned, dying from the grief that holds my body tight.
On September 27, 2018, the tsunami is here.
Christine Blasey Ford, a psychology professor, testifies about Brett Kavanaugh in front of the United States Senate. So many details match my own: It was summer; She had been swimming; She was wearing a one-piece bathing suit.
“Indelible in the hippocampus is the laughter.” she says, explaining the trauma that haunts her.
The monkey in the cage, my one piece bathing suit, my brother, watching. The frenzy, the terror. The day everything changed forever.
My soul is vanishing. I need help.
A friend refers me to a therapist who practices CRM or Comprehensive Resource Model, a neuro-biologically based trauma treatment that allows individuals to safely re-experience intolerable moments and heal through guided resources and ancient spiritual practices. This therapist is different. I feel uplifted in his presence. He’s smart, intuitive and compassionate. I grow to trust him.
Discovering CRM is like finding a hope chest filled with a dowry of divine intelligence. One by one, in the safety of my therapist’s office, I re-experience the worst moments of my life, in order to finally put them aside. I am 4 again, and confused, curious. I am 10, and hiding under my covers. I am 15, 22, 25.
The day I revisit my brother’s suicide is the 42 anniversary of his death. I sit on my therapist’s couch breathing and listening to music on headphones until I can feel my body relax. He guides me to envision power animals to support me — I choose my mountain lion and an elephant. I’m asked to locate energy points in my body to form a sacred grid and anchor it with an eye position, like a Wonder Woman shield to make me feel omnipotent for the battle ahead.
When I am ready, my therapist invites me to return to that ominous day in my minds eye and walk up to the house where our two dogs, Candy and Bucky, are standing outside. I know something is wrong.
The house is filled with noxious fumes and I choke, my eyes water. In my mind I run to my brother who is lying in the doorway to the attached garage, with the car running. His eyes are like glass. Terror fills my body. I shake him, plea with him to wake up.
I cry out, but my therapist is there, assuring me it’s just neurons firing.
“Theresa, you have already survived this trauma. You are strong. You can do this.”
He encourages me to go back to the memory. I open the windows for air. Nuns, police, and ambulance workers scurry around me, “Please, you’ve got to save him!” I plead. But they can’t save him. I can’t save him. He is dead.
I feel a release and my body begins to calm. I stay there for a while, allowing the neurons to clear away this memory, the shame, the grief and guilt that has been locked away inside, driving my life all these years.
Then my therapist says, “Theresa, ask your body, not your brain. What is your new truth?”
It comes to me immediately. “I can stop chasing his love.”
Rumi, the 13th century Persian poet wrote, “When inward tenderness finds the secret hurt, pain itself will crack the rock and, ah! Let the soul emerge.”
Today I continue to recover from the traumas, addictions, and the truth of my life. I still have a ways to go, but I am certain that self-love and compassion are around the corner. They’re helping me search for my true Self, the Self that was before this story began.
This story was created in a TMI Project workshop. To learn more and donate to this amazing storytelling project visit: www.tmiproject.org.
