Maybe This Time My Therapist Won’t Yawn
“Yes, we’ll have to discuss those at some point,” my novice therapist said with a feigned, pained face. She was putting off a discussion of the three rapes I had experienced in my teens.
“Let’s talk about your relationship with your husband which seems to be causing you the most difficulty in the present.”
All I could think is, “Well, this is circular and pointless, because my relationship with my husband is being affected by these sexual assaults that occurred 25 to 30 years ago.”
Still, I kept to her topic and said,
“My husband wants to watch porn, and sometimes they show women being choked or roughly treated, and it just shuts me down. It seems to happen randomly, so I can’t prepare for it.”
She responded, “Do you want to watch porn? Do you like it?”
It took me a long time to answer her. Sometimes, I liked watching the men, but I had to avert my eyes from the women. There were so many reasons. I couldn’t know if the women were in the business because they were coerced or as a result of past sexual abuse. I feel inferior to the women when comparing myself to them physically. I questioned whether porn could ever not be exploitative of women. It was not an arrangement that consistently put me in the mood.
Finally, I said, “I guess, sometimes.” I was frustrated, though, because we were far adrift from discussing what I felt was most salient to my distress — three teen boys who didn’t take no for an answer.
“Do you have flashbacks to your rape experiences while watching porn?” She asked. Finally, we were getting somewhere.
This question was hard to answer, too, though. I frequently recoiled from what I saw on the screen, grabbing blankets, and burying myself in them. My mind would race. Sometimes, my face would grimace in response to the memory of my mistake in agreeing to see the murals in my best friend’s brother’s room, but I didn’t even see Archie’s face.
No, I wouldn’t see my new boyfriend Tony’s face as he pushed me onto my aunt’s sofa, the friction causing burns to the dry skin of my vagina, as I kept pushing him off to no avail. Nor would I see James’s face after I foolishly agreed to get into the back seat of his car to “make out” on a first date that was supposed to be a movie, not a trip to an isolated park.
I answered the therapist as best I could,
“I have flashes of flashbacks. It’s like a seconds long snapshot of something that happened. Then, my mind just shuts it down. Then, there’s a rush of feelings. Diffuse anxiety and disgust. I feel ashamed of myself. Then, I just seem to go out of my mind. I don’t mean crazy. I guess I mean dissociating.”
The therapist says what the professional types always say in situations like these, “Since you had done nothing wrong, what do you think was the source of your shame?”
Another therapist had said these words to me, 20 years ago, back in college. It was a male therapist though. He was handsome, an MSW (Masters of Social Work) who wasn’t that much older than the college students he counseled. Just hearing him reassure me I had done nothing wrong to cause those three rapes was enough to cause confusing feelings for me. I developed a crush on him, which I admitted to him, and we ended the therapeutic relationship.
A few months later, I learned he was being sued by a former college student who had been gang raped her freshman year in a van outside the local bar known for a lot of hookups. He had been complicit in protecting the college, and even the perpetrators. He had discouraged her from reporting what happened. At least that’s what the newspaper said. I was sick to my stomach. I had trusted, and even sort of loved, this man. Obviously, you can’t trust men was all I could conclude. Not even men sensitive enough to become therapists.
Back in the now of the overly warm therapist’s office, I brought myself back to her question, and answered what I thought was the source of my shame:
“I can never shake the belief I was complicit in each of these attacks, wasn’t I? I told them to stop, but I knew all of these boys, even dating two of them. I never actually felt my life was in danger any of the three times. I felt overpowered and out of options, but no one had a weapon. I told other people about the first rape, and that went horribly. I told my best friend what her brother had done. She refused to believe it, and I lost my friend.
The few other friends I told at school were typical 8th graders with a love for gossip most often circulated through passed notes in class. Somehow, the attack led to labels of slut and whore for me. One of my friends who knew said the word around school was I had been raped as revenge, because a girl had given Archie crabs. This made some sense, because he gave them to me. I didn’t tell anyone about that, and I won’t go into how I took care of the problem. There were never any adults brought into the circle of awareness of what happened.”
My semi-skilled therapist pasted a concerned look on her face. I thought it looked like she was stifling a yawn. It was mid-afternoon. I can’t really blame a person for being tired that time of day. It felt like my rape stories weren’t very sensational. This woman spent all of her time listening to women talk about all of their hurts and traumas, and my stories just weren’t that bad. There wasn’t really anything to embellish it and make it more horrifying. I wasn’t a virgin before the attacks, so they didn’t take that precious status away from me.
All that happened was I had not wanted to have sex with three boys who disagreed with that decision. When they pushed me back and pinned me down, I acquiesced to their strength without even a scream. I expected and expect other women to dismiss the experiences as barely traumatic, because I don’t seem to have or show any emotion when talking about them. If I can’t even muster a crack in my voice, what’s their cue to be concerned?
Thank you to Todd Hannula
