These are short essays about survival, trauma, recovery, and the ongoing work of making sense of it all. Each piece is first posted within a survivor community, where it is read and discussed, before being shared here.
Essays From The Shadows
Volume One
Many of us working our trauma recovery are not trying to get back to some pre-trauma state. We may not even remember a ‘before’ time.
We’re building, not rebuilding, who we are, and we need to remember: it takes patience, courage, and compassion to become someone we’ve never been.
@drdoylesays
A friend pointed me towards Dr Doyle’s instagram full of pithy comments around PTSD and trauma recovery — Oh and a lot of pictures of his cat. This one really hit home.
Abuse had kicked in so early that I have no before. I am sure my therapist has made this point to me many times but the phrase ’i have no before’ just echoed around my head for days.
From a young age a violent father eradicates personality and removes choices and makes you obedient and compliant. If it starts as young as it did with me, then it replaces all the nurture and love and teaching and care that is supposed to be occurring.
Sexual abuse that starts on the cusp of puberty completes the process and erases any spark of yourself. Ensures that I have no before at all. There are no reference points. No normality. Nothing to remember or inform me or allow me some foundations, no matter how ruined. The absence of something really leaves an echo in your soul.
As is the way of these things, it is often the right comment at the right time that embeds and sticks. It added to the texture of understanding around the whole question of who I was and who I could have been.
How could I ever solve the mystery of what I might have been if I had never been abused, if I had no reference point whatsoever? If it was blank then there were no clues or information to base anything on.
Building instead of rebuilding means there are no rules and nobody to tell me what I should or shouldn’t be. Which also means that all the conditioning and controlling and manipulating me into his version of a sex toy is no longer valid. Has no use. Has no purpose. Has no reason to be adhered to.
Male survivors of abuse circle things. During the process of understanding we revisit and question and turn things inside out in our efforts to understand and grasp what has happened to us. It is an odd thing but true. We need to discuss it and look it over and over in an effort to solve it.
It’s not that we don’t believe what is being told to us. It is more that we were so sure about our truth — why would we believe this one? How do we know what truth is anymore.
I was once told that the reason we listen to a new song over and over, is because we are trying to solve it. It is like a puzzle, to understand it we learn it, know where the key change is, when the oohs and aahs come in, cue the middle eight. Once we solve it we move onto the next one.
That is a little bit like what we do with our abuse, keep worrying away at some little part of the trauma until we understand it. See how it fits, can put it in place.
Personally, I am finding it useful to start with basics like being allowed. I am allowed to have difficult days. I don’t have to be fixed or able to cope or have it all sorted. I am allowed not to understand why I do something, or even find I thought I knew something but actually, no, it is more complicated than I first thought.
I am allowed to be turned on by something that he taught me. I would probably have learnt it somewhere along the way anyway, so what’s the difference how I came across it? but more importantly, what I don’t need is shame attached to it. This thing feels good to me, let’s just allow that and enjoy the sensation and what it does to my body. Allowing pleasure is a bonus.
‘I have no before’ can also allow for the vacuum that we feel but have no idea why we feel it. There are so many aspects of recovery that include confusion, grief, loss and sadness. It is not always clear why you might be suddenly engulfed in emotions that don’t always make sense, but I think the reality is that sometimes your body is aware of something before you have really finished processing it.
I have started to understand body memory a little and its impact on me. The idea that my body responds to stimulus, or remembered pleasure before conscious thought can intervene. If things were learnt pre-speech, or sexual things learnt pre-puberty how could we possibly make sense of them? Our bodies had to work out what it liked and have recall of it, it knows what it knows. That felt good last time, here we go again!
Understanding something is not a requirement for feeling things about it. That might be why we sometimes struggle with things like therapy. Ask us as many times as you like how it makes us feel — we probably don’t know yet. Or at least we don’t have words to describe how we feel because the feelings might be new and we don’t know the words for them.