StEreotYpicAl

Turn on your television. I know, most are telling you to turn it off, unless you are watching some news program of which that particular person approves. And maybe on some level they are right, but I am not here to argue the pros and cons of television. Go ahead, turn it on. I’ll wait.

Now, flip channels until you find something about a girl or woman who has been raped. Yeah, yeah, there might be something on one of the afore-mentioned news channels, or Law & Order SVU, or maybe the Lifetime channel. If that isn’t working, look on the movie channels or a music channel.

The chances are you will find something. And, the odds are pretty good that if it is a drama you have found, and the victim is now some distance-in-time past the act itself, she is being portrayed as a whimpering puddle of ‘why me’, or a drug infested prostitute, or a weapon wielding woman out for revenge, or even a plain-Jane who is living her life in nun-like celibacy, desperately trying to regain what was lost.

Television has pigeon-holed rape victims into generally accepted stereotypes. No, virtually EVERYONE has pigeon-holed rape victims. The general public has been given the impression that if a girl is raped, even once, especially as a child, and is not put into therapy immediately, she will grow up to abuse drugs, alcohol or both, be promiscuous (at least) and probably a prostitute, or have "gone-round the bend" in a mental-health sort of way.

There are other options!

Television, and the general public have it wrong.

Maybe they need to believe that someone who lived though such a violent invasion of their body and their being cannot then thrive. Maybe they cannot imagine recovering and coming out stronger.

Maybe they can’t, but I know it is possible. I don’t have to imagine it. I have been through it. I know.

I know and I am pissed.

I am angry that the media and the general public seem to want to pound into survivors heads that they must remain in a victim like state. That the only options are some mythical ‘complete healing’ or abject victim-hood.

I am pissed at the people who believe that if I am not in some militant stance against all who have committed such crimes, that I must not be ‘fully healed’.

I am especially angry that anyone has given victims (can we say Survivors? Yes we can!!) the impression that there is some ‘fully healed’ state that is their duty to reach. Find me one person on the face of this earth who does not have some mental health issue. At least one point in your life, you will. I would argue that it is not one pinpointed time, but that some sort of something is carried by each of us throughout our lives.

First, let’s get this very straight right now, there is no such state as "fully healed". Fully healed in most peoples eyes is where the act no longer matters to the victim, where she (or he, I do not mean to leave males out - but if the legal community can use ‘he’ to mean ‘he, she or they’, then I can use ‘she’ to mean a survivor of rape damn it!) can live her life with no ‘stain’ of the act on her life. You will never reach a point in your life where this thing that happened to you will not matter. It isn’t going to happen. It will stay with her in the same way the joy of winning first place in Drama Club in high school will. Or her first date with the love of her life. But it doesn’t have to be a ‘stain’. I used that word in an effort to convey what some others seem to believe.
As fully healed as anyone can be, in my mind, is the ability to get out of bed every morning and keep plugging away at life, without drugs, without alcohol, without any addiction to anything illegal, and reaching for an actual goal.

Second, her "duty" is resoundingly not to heal to someone else’s satisfaction. Or on that person’s time table. Or to some degree that makes that other person feel comfortable.

Fuck the people with agendas and time tables. Fuck the media. Fuck the general public. And fuck those people who talk down to you when they find out your past, pretending they are ‘being gentle with you’, when in reality they are being condescending. As if you are going to explode into a million tiny pieces if they don’t treat you differently than they would any co-worker or friend.

Well, not literally fuck them, but don’t let them make their agendas and their time tables or their attitudes part of YOUR healing process.

And do not EVER let anyone make you feel wrong for using the tools you have at hand to deal with this. But look, don’t use tools that will harm you further. Be smart about it and know that you not only got through it, survived it, you can now thrive. You don’t have to use drugs or alcohol to forget. You aren’t going to forget. And you don’t have to say yes every time someone wants your body. You also don’t have to be abrasive or eat too little or too much to keep another from wanting you physically. You can just say no.

One of my tools, the biggie really, has been school. Has always been school. School has been my haven, and remains my haven. Well, for the most part, but we’ll get to that some other time.

I could talk about tools all day. But I won’t. Let’s just mention a few here, you should write down the ones you know you use, and add to them as you go along - I am still realizing mine. I have used silence. I also sometimes close off. Push situations away so that I have some distance and can observe rather than fully participate. That was a good one to use during the actual acts.

There were times, growing up in a sexually abusive home, when I pushed hard enough to get away from a situation, to get some distance, that I went somewhere else mentally and was not present during the act. That was a very useful tool for me at those particular moments, but really doesn’t work so well in your life.

What else? Well I have learned to write a great deal when I need some clarification. When I was going through the process of winding up law school, applying to take the bar exam and things, I kept crying. I could not quite pinpoint why I was crying. Oh part of it was that my mother passed a few years ago and would not be there to see me get my J.D. But she had been gone for several years before I even began law school, so that didn’t seem to be the problem. I wrote. I wrote until I figured out why it was bothering me so. And then I stopped crying.
Writing and tears. They’re both good. So is a really good counselor. The one I see is a licensed clinical social worker.

Crying is good. Like I said, I have the ability to be completely absent in a situation. It isn’t always ‘pleasant’ but I like being present in situations now. And sometimes that means tears. It is so much better than not feeling. I’ll take being present in a situation and crying because of it over being somewhere else mentally any day of the week.

I just have to say one thing about law school. I was forty-four years old when I graduated. Not exactly young. It took me a long, long time to get there. There was no ‘look she’s healed’ movie-inspired happy ending for me at 20 or 22. School is my haven, and believe me I’ve used it. I have spent 20 years going to college and then law school, at night, here and there, sometimes with big breaks between one semester and the next. So the thing I want to say is this . . . the little girl in me, the one who used to hide in her closet and try really, really hard to be invisible, has been dancing with joy since about half-way through the last semester, when she realized she really had made it through the stress-filled years of law school. She is still shaking it.
:-)