8 and Transcending the Trauma
November 18, 2008
It is night in Barcelona and I have taken three or four unexpected naps before dinner -- JetLag, I suppose, despite the homeopathic remedies. I do a few light pirouettes on the luminous cherrywood floor in the hotel - and I recall that my most recent dance teacher, Heather, and a couple of other dancers - out of the blue - commented that I danced very well -- I am doubting them - do they mean 'for my age' or that they are surprised - why do they say this - and why is it not possible for me to gratefully swallow the compliment whole.
I am reading 8: ALL TRUE: UNBELIEVABLE by Amy Fusselman - finally - I have had the book around for months, but could not crack it for fear that it might crack me - but I've already cracked the wall inside me, and memories come pouring out - I don't even need the protective hypnotic lights on the EMDR bar - they just come.
Amy writes like I do here - in chunks of memories that blend into everyday Day Things - and she explains how time is now even when it was decades ago - some things are frozen in time. So I begin reading 8 on the 737 as I head from JFK to Espana. Words meanwhile pop into my head in Spanish now that I am in Barcelona, and ask the hotel staff to ayudame. I want to pull up my high school Spanish and to speak well finally - and then, as I write, I am amused to see that I must translate the Spanish in my head back to English.
She was four, Amy was, when her pedophile - a man in his sixties - raped her - while her parents were away and entrusted the man and his wife to babysit her for a week. I was four-and-a-half when my pedophile raped me - I had on a lacy white blouse and a wool boxpleat skirt and what I called my "frilly pants" -- lacy underpants, which I tucked in the bottom of the hamper after they got all gloppy wet. During this event, I disappeared into the shirt button he was opening - and I went out of my body - I retain a yukky, tummy-turning, deeply upsetting sense any time I accidentally touch buttons. I still don't wear buttons -- not the ones with holes on top - OMG I can't tolerate those senses of deep revulsion and desperation and tears dredged down so profoundly, they are threaded in with the abused organs of my body.
On the plane, I am doing small exercises, pulling my abs in for example, and every time I pull in my abs, something inside, has to roll out of the way, first. And I wonder, asking the question out loud in my head as if for someone else to answer, "does everyone have to do this -- wait for another organ to move out of the way before their abs can tighten?" And I suddenly see another piece of the puzzle.
A few years back, after my two sons were in grade school, I had a tubal pregnancy. I had several imaging sessions and no one could see anything wrong, or even confirm the pregnancy, but tears just spontaneously rolled down my face, from the pain my body felt but I could not acknowledge - must soldier on, you know. Finally, I was refered to an expert, Dr Bair - he noticed that which no one else could -- that the tubes were completely out of normal position, and one was wrapped behind the other. This was some of the physical damage done by my pedophile - his physical presence in my body forced organs out of their natural places. It wasn't until today that I connected the dots between his evil penetration and my organs. As for the tubal pregnancy - by now, the tubes had ruptured, and my body cavity was filled with blood, so Dr Bair planned surgery for that day.
Amy finds proof in her body -- as talk therapy gives way to touch therapy.
The body does not lie - it is a sarcophagus for everything that occurs to us.
I think what happens is the walls between age four and now get knocked out, and the imagination we are allowed to have as children pops back into adulthood as a survival tool - not in making things up, but in allowing unreal things to be true.
Like - how could a grown man have sex with a four-year old girl and think that was all right - maybe he says to himself "I am teaching her to be sexy, so that she will be hot for all the men who might become her husband." That's what my pedophile said to me, believing it. And it came true - I love sex. I am a coming machine. But, I don't know love. Not yet. I will.
Amy, too, has two sons and a husband when she begins to uncover this horror in her life. Why did God not give us girls, I wonder? Would that have been too horribly difficult for us to face -- her-and-us in the same moment, both of us at four, for example.
Amy loves figure-skating - and finds joy in her body. It is the same for me when I dance. And now I think when I was a teen and won Junior Miss Western Union County - and the Poise & Appearance award - and the prize for the P&A section was figure-skating lessons, but I was so afraid - I was being raped then by several men in their late twenties and early thirties, one a lawyer. I want to skate again - to learn to figure-skate. Amy talks of the bliss in skating - that the music lets in your body - and your body explains everything. Not thinking in words. She thanks her pedophile for making her think so much that she had to be a writer - I know that awkward blessing, too! But my dance and her skating give us joy - and reading her words about her pedophile when she was four, kicks off memories - then healing - for me for when I was four and a half until I was just turned eighteen, and I left home for college. But "home" never left me - and now it is a story-without-painful-charge and it is joy and it is praying other girls - now women -and boys - now men -read my words, and open to healing, so the bloodied child is calmed of all wounds, and lives without fear - in Love.
It is night in Barcelona and I have taken three or four unexpected naps before dinner -- JetLag, I suppose, despite the homeopathic remedies. I do a few light pirouettes on the luminous cherrywood floor in the hotel - and I recall that my most recent dance teacher, Heather, and a couple of other dancers - out of the blue - commented that I danced very well -- I am doubting them - do they mean 'for my age' or that they are surprised - why do they say this - and why is it not possible for me to gratefully swallow the compliment whole.
I am reading 8: ALL TRUE: UNBELIEVABLE by Amy Fusselman - finally - I have had the book around for months, but could not crack it for fear that it might crack me - but I've already cracked the wall inside me, and memories come pouring out - I don't even need the protective hypnotic lights on the EMDR bar - they just come.
Amy writes like I do here - in chunks of memories that blend into everyday Day Things - and she explains how time is now even when it was decades ago - some things are frozen in time. So I begin reading 8 on the 737 as I head from JFK to Espana. Words meanwhile pop into my head in Spanish now that I am in Barcelona, and ask the hotel staff to ayudame. I want to pull up my high school Spanish and to speak well finally - and then, as I write, I am amused to see that I must translate the Spanish in my head back to English.
She was four, Amy was, when her pedophile - a man in his sixties - raped her - while her parents were away and entrusted the man and his wife to babysit her for a week. I was four-and-a-half when my pedophile raped me - I had on a lacy white blouse and a wool boxpleat skirt and what I called my "frilly pants" -- lacy underpants, which I tucked in the bottom of the hamper after they got all gloppy wet. During this event, I disappeared into the shirt button he was opening - and I went out of my body - I retain a yukky, tummy-turning, deeply upsetting sense any time I accidentally touch buttons. I still don't wear buttons -- not the ones with holes on top - OMG I can't tolerate those senses of deep revulsion and desperation and tears dredged down so profoundly, they are threaded in with the abused organs of my body.
On the plane, I am doing small exercises, pulling my abs in for example, and every time I pull in my abs, something inside, has to roll out of the way, first. And I wonder, asking the question out loud in my head as if for someone else to answer, "does everyone have to do this -- wait for another organ to move out of the way before their abs can tighten?" And I suddenly see another piece of the puzzle.
A few years back, after my two sons were in grade school, I had a tubal pregnancy. I had several imaging sessions and no one could see anything wrong, or even confirm the pregnancy, but tears just spontaneously rolled down my face, from the pain my body felt but I could not acknowledge - must soldier on, you know. Finally, I was refered to an expert, Dr Bair - he noticed that which no one else could -- that the tubes were completely out of normal position, and one was wrapped behind the other. This was some of the physical damage done by my pedophile - his physical presence in my body forced organs out of their natural places. It wasn't until today that I connected the dots between his evil penetration and my organs. As for the tubal pregnancy - by now, the tubes had ruptured, and my body cavity was filled with blood, so Dr Bair planned surgery for that day.
Amy finds proof in her body -- as talk therapy gives way to touch therapy.
The body does not lie - it is a sarcophagus for everything that occurs to us.
I think what happens is the walls between age four and now get knocked out, and the imagination we are allowed to have as children pops back into adulthood as a survival tool - not in making things up, but in allowing unreal things to be true.
Like - how could a grown man have sex with a four-year old girl and think that was all right - maybe he says to himself "I am teaching her to be sexy, so that she will be hot for all the men who might become her husband." That's what my pedophile said to me, believing it. And it came true - I love sex. I am a coming machine. But, I don't know love. Not yet. I will.
Amy, too, has two sons and a husband when she begins to uncover this horror in her life. Why did God not give us girls, I wonder? Would that have been too horribly difficult for us to face -- her-and-us in the same moment, both of us at four, for example.
Amy loves figure-skating - and finds joy in her body. It is the same for me when I dance. And now I think when I was a teen and won Junior Miss Western Union County - and the Poise & Appearance award - and the prize for the P&A section was figure-skating lessons, but I was so afraid - I was being raped then by several men in their late twenties and early thirties, one a lawyer. I want to skate again - to learn to figure-skate. Amy talks of the bliss in skating - that the music lets in your body - and your body explains everything. Not thinking in words. She thanks her pedophile for making her think so much that she had to be a writer - I know that awkward blessing, too! But my dance and her skating give us joy - and reading her words about her pedophile when she was four, kicks off memories - then healing - for me for when I was four and a half until I was just turned eighteen, and I left home for college. But "home" never left me - and now it is a story-without-painful-charge and it is joy and it is praying other girls - now women -and boys - now men -read my words, and open to healing, so the bloodied child is calmed of all wounds, and lives without fear - in Love.
Labels: 8 ALL TRUE UNBELIEVABLE, Amy Fusselman, Barcelona, book review, child sex abuse, children, dance, EMDR, figure-skating, the body tells the truth, therapy, transcending the trauma
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