A Sad Day

This posting contains a very large TRIGGER WARNING because it describes in some detail the experience of someone attacking me many years ago.  I was with individuals who tried to rape me and it was only recently, through EMDR therapy, that I was truly able to process the experience. I’ve long wanted it out of my head, to have it before me so I could examine it, process it, and move on from it.  This posting is about getting those connections together.

So if you are able and willing to do so, read on to hear my story. It does contain depictions of violence (physical and sexual assault) and may be upsetting to some readers. Please take care of yourselves.

STORY BEGINS HERE * TRIGGER WARNING*

Bear hugs might as well be bear traps, for all the comfort they generally provide.

I’m not a terribly cuddly person and my physical distancing has led to many varied frustrations with friends, family, coworkers, and strangers. They feel hurt and shirked by my dislike for well-intentioned touching. They don’t understand why I don’t share their desire for physical closeness. What gets lost is the fact that I’m also frustrated by my discomfort. Wouldn’t it be so much easier if I could just accept an embrace or a back pat? If I could let hands linger on my shoulders, maybe it would lead to happiness for both me and the others.

But I can’t relax into it.

Human skin has a mild sensitivity to pressure. Fingertips on forearms, head on shoulders, torso pressed to torso; they’re all simple, everyday actions that force an elevated pulse and pounding heart. I’m not excited; I’m anxious. I’m afraid of being trapped, concerned that I will be stuck beneath oppressive limbs. Of course I want to be close to others but my physiological response forges a distance I often believe to be inescapable. I’m bad, I’m different, I’m a hopeless case. I can’t bond.

Naturally, there are reasons why touching is difficult. One of them is the erudite understanding that I am simply not as physically welcoming as the average human being. Another is experiencing abuse that likely hammered my natural tendencies into phobias. From childhood I was physically, verbally, emotionally, and sexually attacked. Degradation and humiliation fostered coldness and muteness. Being frozen meant that I could divorce myself from the hurt that followed. Feet were no longer there. I couldn’t run but I couldn’t feel the depth of my wounds.

As I grew into adulthood I found my arms-length approach morphing into a mile-wide berth. I suspect this change was born from further abuse suffered in adulthood, though the connection that allowed me to understand this deepening has arisen only in the last few years. With a protective bubble of elapsed time and supportive friends I have been able to articulate more and more of the damage.

Yet, until recently I had never told anyone the story of the attempted rape.

Back in 2002, between feeling sorry for myself and suffering a seemingly endless string of losses, I found friends who were willing to spend time with me despite my less-than-happy outlook on life. They liked me and were happy to talk with me and engage in general waywardness. I believed they supported me and were looking out for me in my darker times. Yet, as I grew closer to this new social circle, I began having trouble with this one particular individual. The things he said and did have long been locked in my mind as part of the brick wall of self-imposed exile.

He grew interested in me because I was sad. I called it compassion but my retcon term would be creepy obsession. My self-loathing and lack of self-esteem were as obvious as the marks I had carved into my arms would have been if my sleeves had ever been rolled up. I let him hug me, console me, take me out for walks, and force me to eat. We were friends.

Over a few months, his romantic relationship (with a girl who was also a friend of mine) deteriorated and he began telling me how much he liked my body, how he was attracted to me and wanted to sleep with me. Even as I pushed these suggestions aside and did my best to ignore his advances, I knew our friendship had started to wind into dangerous territory. Still, I spent time with him. Sometimes it was in a group; sometimes it was just the two of us alone.

We even drank together when alone. I had no qualms about my ability to handle alcohol, having always had a good sense of when to drink and when to stop. I’d also never experienced a blackout or found myself doing anything while drinking that I wouldn’t do sober.

But there’s missing time from that night, that stupid, awful night eleven years ago when I suddenly went from being mildly buzzed to feeling extremely drunk. I was sloshy, confused, lethargic and dizzy. I’d had very little to drink and yet my body thought it was the victim of a good seven or eight shots. In my friend’s darkened apartment, I sank back onto the couch, tired and lost. He had another friend visiting. (I shall henceforth call him “S”) They were talking, and I grew agitated, trying to get up from the sofa, turning out the contents of my pockets to the ground, reminding them that I was severely depressed at the time. Scared, unhappy, I really wanted to go home, so I stumbled around the room for a moment, looking for a safe space because S and my friend had both begun to frighten me. Other people had been there earlier in the evening, but they had departed, leaving the three of us in the apartment by ourselves.

Together they closed in on me, blocking my path, telling me I couldn’t leave. With my purse tucked under my arm, I staggered to the door and found that it was a double cylinder bolt, locked from both sides. I pounded on it but neither of them would slip the key in. Similarly, the back door had a bolted lock that required a second twist of metal to undo. With the realization that I was trapped in a third-floor locked apartment with non-opening windows, I felt myself bang on the heavy door, screaming for someone to let me out. I can’t imagine exactly where I would have gone, but I knew I was not safe.

My friend and S pulled me back to the couch, telling me to calm down. In a dissociative fit, my arms and legs struggled without my knowledge. They said they had something to help. Whatever it was, I didn’t want it and lashed out, flailing as I tried to again free myself from the couch. It was a big fluffy piece of furniture, one of those whose cushions cause you to fall into a pit of fabric when you lean back. A knee went over my thighs, pushing me down. Hands smacked into my chest, slamming me against the back of the couch. One of them leaned in, pushing against my forehead, pulling at my chin, forcing my mouth open.

Cursing and admonitions to calm down and shut up ensued as they tipped what I think was their leftover bong water down my throat. I’d never smoked. Not even a cigarette. My heaviest drug use were the few beers I’d had in the six months since turning 21. I choked, trying to expel whatever it was from inside, but instead was pushed back, liquid running down the inside of my throat, and down the outside of my face. They said I’d be fine, but neither one of them released their grip on me. One of them was stroking my skin while the other held me back with the hand flattened to my breastbone. I think, but can’t honestly recall if this is a real detail, that someone started loosening my clothing. I do know that this perception is what caused me to go berserk with screaming and crying.

There were hints of coming sexual assault. Thigh stroking even as I tried to force them off, fingering the skin near my cleavage, above my collar, talk about my attractiveness and interest in fucking me. Someone tried to cover my mouth, to muffle the angry sounds I was making. I took advantage of a moment when hands were readjusted to push my way upward. In 2002 I had not been eating, and I had become sickly thin, my bones so weak that lying down at night hurt me. The fact that I could muster any amount of strength to fight back, particularly in a drugged state, still amazes and bewilders me.

But I did, and this time I managed to snake my cell phone and get a fervent call out to another friend, who agreed to come pick me up. Still, I know that he was at least thirty minutes away and my last memory of that room before his arrival is of the phone call. Whatever happened thereafter, I don’t know. To the best of my knowledge, there was no completed rape, only the attempted one I’ve alluded to already. Though with a distressing thirty minutes of missing memory, I cannot help but feel weak and shake at the black hole of time.

I left the place in a panicked, shaking state. My other friend (we shall refer to him as “B”) lectured me about being alone with those guys, about drinking with them, etc. I had small wounds on my arms and legs, things that I may have done to myself or may have been the natural result of warding off someone else’s attack. I believe I had to put my outer shirt on as I left, which has always led me to wonder why I didn’t have it on. I wasn’t naked, and it’s important to note that I can’t quite remember if this was real or just the product of my later analysis trying to make sense of things. B spent the drive home fixated on that lecture, but when he helped me out of his car and up to my apartment, he tried to kiss me, leaving me further wounded and vulnerable.

After that, I didn’t leave my apartment for several days. I was numb, extremely, extremely turned inward. I showered a lot. I didn’t eat. I didn’t speak to anybody. Very shortly thereafter I tried to kill myself, believing that I was dirty and ruined. Other bad life circumstances factored in but that incident was prominent in my mind. The self-talk script kept echoing, It’s your fault and a wide variety of stereotypical victim-blaming stanzas suggesting that I was wrong for going out drinking with a friend, that I had made a mistake in what I wore, that I had somehow led them on and egged them into harming me because I was being sad and mopey. Those melodies of absurd self-hatred lingered for many, many years, telling me repeatedly that I was a bad, bad person.

Sense memory runs deep as a result. A light touch, even an unintentional one, near my chest, can still sometimes set me off into a crushing panic. It might be subtle, all of the symptoms tucked on the inside, save my quiet wide-eyed face, but it’s still present. Whenever a hand comes at me and lands on the skin, I don’t exist anymore. The panic has already caused me to freeze and disassociate. I’ve gone somewhere else, to a place where I’m debating fighting and fleeing, but where I also can’t feel my legs. I can be lost for seconds, for minutes, for hours. Even if I’m still going, I’m not always really there.

When friends lean in for the hug and I reject them, I know it makes them sad. I don’t like casting that protective wall. Much as most people do I ultimately want to be loved. I long for the ability to rest against another human being, snuggled up, feeling protected and warm. Unfortunately, it’s so very, very hard to dismiss the memory in my skin.

Touchy Issues

The rest of my life will involve thinking about touch. This suspicion isn’t a purely pessimistic outlook; I’m hurt by my past and even with serious progress in healing I can’t blot out things that have happened.

Recently I lamented the fact that I always think before hugging someone. There is no automatic physical response, no reaching out for a back pat or embrace, and certainly no easy path to cuddling with another human being. I always, always, always experience a process before I’m able to put my hands out and touch somebody. Do I have their consent? Am I okay with it? What will be the ramifications? How long should the touching last? What kind of touching should I do? Should it be a hug, a pat, a stroke? It sounds complicated and perhaps it is overly convoluted but in my head it lasts about 10-30 seconds most of the time. (There are periods when this number goes up but it never really gets any smaller.) I wasn’t always like this, either, and I think that’s what makes me feel sad. At the very least I’m wistful for a time when I could hug a friend in a moment of crisis without debating it first.

Naturally my problems with touching are trauma-induced. I understand that. What I don’t always understand is why I can’t just rewind to a self that existed prior to the trauma. Logically I know I shouldn’t push myself. My therapy is to work through the difficulties in safety and not to punish myself for being unable to get to a point that is arbitrarily defined.

Last year I read Wendy Maltz’s Sexual Healing Journey. If you’re looking for a guide to dealing with touching and physical intimacy in relationships, it’s a very helpful book. Unfortunately, there seems to be a paucity of material out there for those of us who are concerned with a more general repair of our ability to be physical creatures. I’ll jump if someone touches me on the shoulder, which isn’t abnormal, but if someone reaches out to hug me, I can feel my pulse through my skull. My hands ball up. My stomach turns. I start to feel completely ill and trapped. I have to have a lot of warning to be okay with touching and even with trusted friends I sometimes have difficulty with their hugging me.

My PTSD symptoms have lessened in this arena in the last two years but I still need to keep going through it. So my current work involves the following:

• Trusting my own good judgment. Sometimes I don’t want to hug or to be hugged. And it’s okay that this is the case. I’m allowed to say that I don’t want a hug right now.
• “Practicing” hugging in safe spaces with friends who consent to it and who respect my own boundaries.
• Writing down/journaling about any severe reactions that are negative and trying to pinpoint what the issue is. Also noting any times when I find myself feeling particularly good afterward.

The Discussion of “Everyday Sexual Assault”

I live in an aggressively “touchy-feely” culture. It iinvades my personal space and comfort zone by its incessant insistence on hugging and patting and tapping. Strangers think it’s okay to touch my arm or clasp their hands to my back. Colleagues in the office are convinced they’re in the right when they randomly hug me or throw their arms over my shoulders. Even friends sometimes forget and go too far, hugging for too long. I don’t like it. By nature I’m not terribly physically affectionate. With trauma tacked on I’m especially reluctant to get close to others.

Because many (if not most) human beings are somewhat physical creatures it can be hard to accept that we have to keep our hands off others. I recognize that and usually make pretty solid allowances for others who touch me. On the first go-around I try to kindly accept a hug or pat on the back. Then I like to quickly establish boundaries, such as “Please don’t touch me,” or “Please ask before you touch me.” It’s my concession to a world that likes physical touch, even though I often believe on a personal (and professional) level that others should have to ask me for permission rather than wait for my denial of their access. Hands off, okay? Nonetheless I do what I can to hold myself in control when touched unawares. (File under: practice at dealing with reactions.)

Touching is so confusingly accepted as a natural norm in society. Or it falls under the jurisdiction of “I’m okay with it so you should be also.” (A highly unfair proposition.) I stumbled upon a discussion of “everyday sexual assault” and though the conversation originates in a country that is not my own I think there is a universal quality of understanding in the kinds of things being reported back. The people talking talk about an ongoing, routine violation of their bodily space that they would never previously have referred to as anything beyond “annoyance” or “upsetting.” The classification of “everyday sexual assault” in and of itself brings to light new terminology that seems to have aided many of those in discussion.

Note that the conversation still centers around this being the domain of women, though. We talk about advancement and equality and liberating ourselves from unwanted touch and still we frame the issue as being a woman’s problem, brought on by men. What about women who are touched by other women? (This happens to me routinely, actually. Women think because it’s “just us girls” they’re allowed to place hands or hug or nuzzle or run their hands up and down the fabric of my clothing.) What about men who are hurt by women? (Women grab asses, they pinch and tweak and grope as well.) Or men who are touched by men when they don’t want to be touched? (To put this in cultural normative terms, we could talk about back slaps or hand shakes but there is absolutely nothing to make this conversation end there.) I know I harp on it a lot but unwanted touch is unwanted touch. Gender and sexual orientation don’t matter if someone touches you when you don’t want to be touched. The issue is a social one.

Many people have a hard time referring to an ass grab as a sexual assault. I think I understand why. It’s the same mentality that tells you that a hug that feels wrong somehow is something to just be ignored. The truth is, though, you shouldn’t ignore acts which invade your personal space against your will. While we might not generally put a  rape on the same plane as a repeated caress of the back or arm, those two acts are nonetheless examples of bodies and boundaries being disrespected and people being hurt. I want to see more inclusive language as a result but I think the push to show that “small” acts of assaultive behavior are wrong is a good one.

As for me, I suffer from PTSD symptoms (as is discussed in this blog) so being touched from behind when not expecting it can be enough to make me jump up on the defensive, ready to run and take cover. I know that I don’t like to feel (as I term it) pressed in by certain kinds of touching and the act of someone laying hands on my shoulders can make me shake in an otherwise safe setting. I think about those feelings and think about other unwanted touch, such as people insisting on hugs or sliding hands over my chest in public places. That horrible feeling of uncontrollable shaking (born of trauma) is something I don’t want anyone else to experience. So hands off.