The Cycle of Abuse

Last night, I had the privilege of counseling a young woman named Jane (not her real name). Without giving too much away, Jane’s fiance had recently been abusive toward her and she was wondering what to do. They’d been together for several years and this was, she said, only the third time something of this magnitude had happened. We talked for a little over an hour and she asked me several times what I would do in her situation.

I told her that only she could make that decision, but we explored her support networks (friends, family, and so on). She said she doesn’t feel comfortable telling them about what’s been going on because she wants her friends to like her fiance and, in her words, she wants everyone to get along. She wants the abuse to end, not the relationship, which is not an uncommon sentiment.

This got me thinking about my own experiences with relationship abuse and, by extension, the cycle of abuse. My fiance and I spent some time discussing the cycle of abuse after my shift had ended; I don’t often identify strongly with my texters, let alone experience such a visceral reaction to their stories, but my conversation with Jane really got to me.

My fella stated he doesn’t quite understand why victims of abuse stay with their abusers, so this morning we had a follow-up conversation about the cycle of abuse (pictured below).

Source

I explained to him, using my own experiences, how someone can end up so thoroughly entangled in the messy web that is an abusive relationship. The concept was so utterly foreign to him that he’d never given much thought to it, and we had a very productive and healing (for me) dialogue about it.

At the Risk! live show in Milwaukee in November 2015, I spoke about my relationship with “Chad,” which was profoundly abusive in every way and lasted from when I was seventeen to age nineteen, when I had a moment of clarity and decided I was too young to live that way anymore.

In the beginning, there’s the “honeymoon” period. The exact length of this period varies from person to person; in my case, things were dysfunctional from the very start, but I also grew up in a fundamentally dysfunctional family and was already carrying around over a decade of trauma from my childhood. To this day, I believe that those early experiences led me into the relationship.

I’m not blaming my family at all–I was loved and cared for, though there were some serious problems (mostly stemming from witnessing my mother’s own abusive relationships and later, her internment in a state correctional facility). However, early relationship modeling is profoundly important when it comes to developing a lovemap (a person’s view of an ideal relationship or partner), and I simply didn’t witness any functional, respectful romantic relationships when I was growing up.

Back to the story. You can listen to my Risk! story here for a more in-depth description of the abuse–obviously, the content may trigger some people, so please listen at your own discretion.

My “honeymoon” period with Chad–that period where the excitement of a new relationship is especially intense–lasted only a few months before the emotional and verbal abuse began. He never trusted me around other men; even being friendly and occasionally chatting with coworkers was a cause for suspicion and accusations of cheating (which I later learned was him projecting his own behavior onto me).

As this was my first “real” relationship where I actually cared deeply for and trusted my partner, his words were incredibly damaging. Deep down, I knew how wrong this was, but my self esteem had already been so low when I entered the relationship that I didn’t think I deserved better. I remember crying a lot in those days. After a while, I just went numb.

I can’t even remember how many times we broke up and got back together over the course of those two hellish years. Every time, I begged for him to come back. He apologized, albeit in the “I’m sorry, but you made me ____” way that is so typical of abusers.

One time, we were having our reconciliation in the basement of my grandmother’s house, where I grew up and lived until age 20. We were sitting on a couch taken from my great aunt’s house when she moved in with us, and I remember him brushing my hair away from my face as I cried and apologized over and over again. I had no idea why I was even saying “I’m sorry.”

He looked into my face and said, “You have the most beautiful eyes. They’re like glaciers, and when you cry, those glaciers melt.” I will never forget those words. I knew how messed up the whole thing was, but all I felt in that moment was relief–relief that he had taken me back, broken as I was, and relief that I had someone who truly cared about me (although I suspect some part of me knew that this was nothing like “love” was supposed to be).

We went back into the honeymoon period, and then the whole mess repeated itself. Over and over and over.

In May of 2008, when I was nineteen, there was a huge thunderstorm. The power went out and I was sitting on the floor of my bedroom, back propped against my bed, looking into a candle. At that moment, for no particular reason, I decided that I didn’t want to live like this.

I went into my aunt’s bedroom, which was across the hall from mine, sat down on her bed, and said, “I don’t think I want to be with Chad anymore.”

She looked up from her book, patted my hand, and said, “That’s okay.”

He was on his way home from his cousin’s graduation when I called him. I broke it off and actually told him verbatim that he’d been abusive to me. He freaked out and accused me of being the abusive one. Other words were exchanged, but the point of the story is that I finally broke it off.

In the weeks and months that followed, he blew up my phone with apologies, claimed that he was going to hurt himself, and eventually threatened suicide a few times. I responded by calling his parents and telling them what was up. He never bothered me again.

But I still feel those effects like an aftershock to this day. They don’t come knocking often, but when they do, I instantly feel like that sad teenage girl who was so lost and frightened and desperate for love that she stayed with a profoundly abusive man for two years. Two years.

I don’t view that period of time as a “waste” or anything similar. I learned a lot about myself and after it ended, I found a level of freedom and, for lack of a better word, lightness that I had never before experienced.

I plunged headlong into a less abusive but highly dysfunctional relationship only a few months later which culminated in a desperately unhappy marriage. My divorce was finalized in October 2015 after nearly two years of emotional estrangement (we were, for all intents and purposes, broken up but were stuck living together for financial reasons).

I still say that the divorce was the best thing that ever happened to me.

I met a great guy, got into my first relationship that was truly loving and respectful, and got into graduate school. I am now a student at Johns Hopkins and am engaged to said fella–we’re going to get hitched next November!

The point is, readers, that it can take a while. As depressing as it sounds, your first abusive relationship may not be your last. The patterns we learn from being abused “stick,” often in insidious ways. It’s not uncommon to be totally unaware of the lasting effects of the abuse. If anyone has a statistic for this, I would love to see it–for some reason, I’m unable to find the actual percentage of abuse survivors who end up with another abuser.

In my case, I thought I was totally fine–a newly single, empowered woman who had survived something terrible. In reality, I had not given myself enough time to process and heal, which led me into another unhealthy relationship because I was afraid of being alone.

LoveIsRespect.org is one of my all-time favorite resources for abusive relationships. The website provides a chat, warning signs that your relationship may be abusive, and a quiz, among other information that can help you (or a loved one) escape an abusive relationship.

Until next time, readers, stay safe and lovely. And most importantly, remember to be kind to yourselves.

News Day Tuesday: Local Mental Health Resources

Good afternoon, readers! This time, let’s talk local resources for mental health care.

I saw a wonderful counselor through the Johns Hopkins Student Assistance Program (which I’m eligible for because my significant other is currently a student). I’ll share more of the personal details in a post later this week, but the counselor I met with gave me some information about local resources I had no idea existed, and I’d like to pass those on to you. I feel they’ll be particularly useful to anyone in the Baltimore area, but I’m sure there are similar programs throughout the country.

First is Sheppard Pratt. Being new to the area, I was unfamiliar with this hospital, but they have a program specifically designed to help people dealing with all sorts of trauma.

The Trauma Disorders program at Sheppard Pratt specializes in dissociative disorders and CPTSD, which is exciting because I had no idea these types of programs existed anywhere. They certainly weren’t a thing in the Midwest, where I’m from. It’s an inpatient program, which isn’t a good fit for me for a number of reasons, but I plan to reach out to see if they know of any good outpatient therapists who are well-versed in these issues.

It’s comforting to know that there are facilities that offer support specifically tailored to complex post-traumatic stress disorder, which can present challenges to many therapists. I found one therapist during my time in Madison who seemed to know quite a bit about PTSD, including my dissociative symptoms, but she went on maternity leave shortly after I began seeing her. My subsequent searches for therapists was largely unsuccessful, which is not a negative reflection on any particular counselor–as I said, it can be a tricky affliction to effectively treat. I’ve been told that because of the depth of my dissociative symptoms, I’m not a great candidate for EMDR, which eliminates one of the most widely-used techniques for treating PTSD.

The second resource I learned about last Friday is the Baltimore County Crisis Response, which offers not only crisis intervention (as the name suggests), but also a 24-hour hotline and–this is the most exciting part–one-time psychologist and psychiatrist consults, which are particularly useful for people who are in a transitional period and looking for providers in the area but need refills of medication or therapy. That’s right, readers; there’s actually a place you can go for those all-important refills you can’t get anywhere else, which means no more rationing of medication to make it through.

The counselor at JHSAP was also kind enough to email me a long list of references for therapists in the area. Admittedly, I’ve been procrastinating a bit and haven’t gotten around to checking them out, but it’s on the list for this week.

Are you aware of resources and programs in your area, readers? Are they easy to locate, or do they require a bit of digging?

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Risk!

On November 14, I had the honor of participating in the Risk! podcast live show in Milwaukee. In my story, I talked about the abusive relationship I was in from ages 17 to 19 (tw: there are some kind-of graphic descriptions of rape and abuse). You can check it out here!

I’m not really the most social person and am still pretty shy, so I was extremely nervous about the show. I mean, I didn’t even know I’d been raped until years later, when I learned that rape isn’t just when you scream “No” at a stranger in a dark alley and they force you to have sex with them anyway. It takes so many different forms, and all of them are very real, very legitimate, and very damaging.

But knowing something and believing it are two very different things. I was worried that people would come up to me and go, “That wasn’t rape,” or “That wasn’t even that bad!” Instead, I got an outpouring of support and spent about an hour after the show greeting and connecting with a lovely group of people.

All in all, it was a super-positive experience and it kind of lit a fire for storytelling in me that I didn’t even know I had. One of the women who approached me after the show mentioned a Madison storytelling group, and I might look into that once I get situated in my new job and finish the last of my boring, soul-sucking post-divorce adult stuff.

Have you ever told your story publicly, readers? I’d love to hear from you!

Pain.

My last pain doctor suggested that my history of abuse (especially sexual abuse) might be the main source of my pelvic pain, along with neuropathy. I have muscular trigger points that cause low pelvic pain, despite having had two injections and a nerve block. It’s true that my endometriosis has progressed from stage one to stage two, after essentially being “reset” by a laparoscopy in March 2011, but I’m taking two forms of birth control to at least slow the progress, if not completely stop it.

I have no more options for controlling or reversing the endometriosis. Lupron didn’t work—all it did was leave me with horrible acne scars on my left cheek and $2,000 poorer. Another surgery is out of the question, mostly because of finances but also because there’s a very good chance it could cause more scarring and adhesions and actually make things worse. All this has led me to reconsider my stance on the mind-body connection, which I’d previously scoffed at.

I was looking up information on pelvic pain related to a history of abuse and found a study on the topic from 2000 (http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/11084180). Some highlights:

• 22% of patients with chronic pelvic pain were sexually abused before their 15th birthdays
• 25% of women with chronic pelvic pain were exposed to emotional neglect, especially during childhood
• 38% were exposed to physical violence

I haven’t written as much about sexual abuse as the other forms I’ve suffered, and I think that’s probably because I still haven’t connected with any of it emotionally. Now that I’m in a functional relationship with a good person who makes me feel safe, appreciated, and generally cared-for, I’m beginning to feel better about myself and more secure and confident in my self-worth.

In short, I think I’m finally ready to talk about it, though in the interest of protecting their privacy, I’m going to avoid all but the vaguest references to abuse within my family.

I’m still not completely sure whether or not I was molested as a child, although more therapists and psychiatrists than you can shake a stick at have all told me that my partial memories, repression, sexual precocity, and general attitudes toward my body and sex are strongly suggestive (no pun intended) of early abuse. I was terrified of men until I was fifteen—I stopped crying and completely losing it around them around age seven or so, but I kept my eyes down, or at least averted, and would cross my arms over my chest and hunch over—anything to keep them from seeing me or even noticing that I was there.

My mother had a boyfriend who made me profoundly uncomfortable from the time I was five until she went to prison a year later.

I remember crying whenever she left me alone with him. They both drank, but I was especially frightened of him. He was tall and overtly masculine in a swarthy sort of way with dark eyes and hairy arms. I will never forget those arms, which I think explains my penchant for mostly hairless men with less testosterone-loaded features.

I have a memory from when I was about five-and-a-half of lying in bed in the room he’d set up for me in his house. (We frequently stayed overnight, and I’d always cry when she insisted I had to go with her.) They’d gone out on a date and had left me alone with his son, who was fifteen at the time and very kind and protective of me. He used to read me books before bed, but because he was pretty severely dyslexic and I was way ahead of the curve in terms of language and reading ability, I usually took over and read him to sleep on the living room floor before putting a blanket over him and tucking myself into bed.

For some reason, I was still awake that night when they came home, albeit in a drowsy twilight state. I remember them opening the door to check on me and seeing the dim, watery yellow light flooding in through the crack in the door. She walked away and he lingered there for a moment. I remember seeing him hesitate, then approach my bed. I remember his dark silhouette against the thin light from the hallway. I remember that hairy arm stretched over my chest, and then everything fades to black. The memory ends there.

It bothers me, not because of the implications but because I pride myself on being annoyingly self-aware and don’t like the idea that my brain, which I know so well, is still hiding things from me. I want to know. I don’t want to know. I’m curious, but I know there’s probably a good reason my brain is blocking that memory. What good would it do, anyway, knowing for sure whether or not anything had happened? I know that he was abusive toward both of us in other ways, and I feel like that should be enough.

But sometimes it’s not.

I’ve written about the other abusers—all four of them, for a grand total of five—in other posts and may revisit the topic later. But for now, I wanted to finally speak out about the one incident from when I was a child that’s still bothering me, that I still haven’t been able to untangle, in hopes that it might strike a chord in one of my readers. I don’t like to think about other people being abused, but I know it’s one of those horrible realities I have no choice but to face, especially since I want to specialize in trauma therapy.

It feels wrong to hope that someone will be able to relate, that they will reach out and that maybe we can have a dialogue and reach some sort of insight together (or at least achieve catharsis), but I feel like it would be incredibly helpful right now. I’ve learned that we need to lean on each other, because no matter how good the intentions of our friends, partners, and families might be, there is no substitute for being able to talk to someone who’s experienced what you’ve been through.

I am here for you, readers. If you need help, I will help as best I can. And if you need to howl into the void, I will be your void.

Anniversary.

Today is a happy day.

Seven years ago today, at about 9:00 PM, I told my abusive ex that I was leaving him, that I didn’t want to do it anymore, that I didn’t want to live in violent cycles of rejection and acceptance. I told him, for the first time, that his behavior was abusive.

It was terrifying. I had just completed my first year of college and was living at home with my auntmom and grandmother. There had been a huge thunderstorm and the power was out, and I was sitting in my bedroom, back against my bed, staring into the flame of a candle.

I started to feel restless. My aunt-mom was reading in bed, so I wandered into her room and sat down. “I don’t think I want to be with — anymore,” I said slowly, unable to meet her gaze. She nodded and patted my hand. I left and made the phone call.

He threatened suicide several times but some weird strength had possessed me and I called his bluff. The next few weeks were miserable—he blew up my phone, told me he had started smoking and drinking because I’d hurt him so badly, and made comments that made our mutual friends uneasy.

But it passed. It always passes. And today, I am celebrating my freedom and thanking the universe for that out-of-the-blue ferocity I needed to finally make a clean break after two years of hell.

The persistence of memory.

The atmosphere at my job is refreshingly relaxed—they don’t care what we wear as long as we’re presentable, I have ample downtime (for writing and working on my latest Stupid Human Trick, which is teaching myself Russian), and we listen to the radio all day.

A few days ago, “Tequila” by The Champs came on and I was hit by a massive wave of nostalgia. I’ve heard the song dozens, if not hundreds, of times since this memory was formed, but what sprang to mind with the opening notes was vivid and visceral. It’s one of the few memories I have of the period between ages four and seven that’s genuinely pleasant, untainted by the constant conflict that lived with us in my grandmother’s house. Given how many of its contemporaries have been emerging lately, I’m glad it decided to come back when it did.

I first heard the song when I was five years old. My mother and I were driving from my hometown of Dubuque, Iowa to Oshkosh, Wisconsin with her rich boyfriend (who possibly sexually abused me as a child and certainly dealt out some heavy-handed emotional and physical abuse, pun most definitely intended) to visit the Public Museum—specifically, to see the Apostle Clock.

We had taken his red Corvette—he had a thing for classic cars, along with drinking too much and throwing his girlfriends down flights of stairs—and stopped at a gas station. “Tequila” was playing softly in the background as we rolled up to the pump. I was sleepy and tilted my head back against the silky cream-colored leather of the seat to stare up at the sky. It was dark; few stars were out, and I remember feeling carefree as I let the muggy night air, cut with a cool breeze, fill my smoke-worn lungs.

We stayed in an apartment in the city. I’m not sure whose it was, but I remember marveling at the deep-pile white carpet; at home, we had slightly worn oak floors, polished and neglected enough times in the house’s thirty-odd-year history to have accumulated a thin, uneven coat of dark residue. The next day, we arrived at the museum. It must have been June or July, because we visited shortly after a fire destroyed most of the third floor. I was charmed by the clock, of course, but what really drew my attention was the small collection of charred, water-damaged items that had been rescued from the fire.

“Come on, you don’t want to look at that,” said my mother’s boyfriend, placing a large and hairy hand on my shoulder in an attempt to draw me away. But I was transfixed by the blackened head of a baby doll, one eye burned away, one eye still open in an eerie nod to the horror movies my mother and I loved to watch. This penchant for the macabre has only intensified as I’ve gotten older, and I enjoy puzzling over what these things mean in relation to who I am today and whether everything really is connected. As a nihilist, I’m inclined to believe that nothing has any inherent meaning, which adds another dimension—if all significance is unique to each person, it should make relating to one another more difficult. I’ve found that to be true more often than not, but I’m not surprised, given my…unusual set of memories and experiences.

It’s strange, isn’t it? Certain memories—in my experience, the ones that seem the least-significant at the time—become indelible, while other, larger ones—being present the night my mother was arrested and having only fringe sensory memories of it is a good example—fade into the background. They slip away so easily that at times, it seems that they were never there at all. Was it a memory or a dream? And in the end, does it make much of a difference?

Nietzsche famously said that ‘The existence of forgetting has never been proved: we only know that some things do not come to our mind when we want them to.”

Readers, what has your experience with memory been like? What’s your earliest memory? Are they sensory and blurred around the edges, or is every aspect perfectly crisp? Have you ever thought about what your memories say about you? 

As always, I’m eager to hear from you!

Some thoughts.

It is physically painful for me when people thank me for writing, or helping them, or tell me I’m brave or a role model. I’m not a role model. I wake up most days hoping to die. I don’t know how or why I’m still alive. D.’s theory is “sheer dumb luck,” and I think he’s right.

I am a junkie. I cold-turkeyed it over a year ago, but not for noble reasons. I stopped because it was no longer taking away the physical and emotional pain in one fell swoop. It simply stopped working, so I quit. That’s all. I still think about it every day and I think I always will. This is one thing I’m proud of, however—that I was able to stop and stay clean despite all the awful things that have happened in the last year.

My therapist told me last night that I’m the toughest woman she’s ever met. She’s in her 60s, so I’m guessing she’s met quite a few people. I’m not tough because I want to be or try to be. I’m tough because of my animalistic survival instinct–in other words, I’m tough because I’ve had to be, not because I want to be.

I vacillate between strong feelings of self-loathing and guilt and equally strong moments of self-esteem where I actually feel good. But those feelings are always tempered by the fear that my meds have stopped working, that I am manic again, that I am going to ruin things and use people up like I have countless times in the past.

Right now, my pride is wounded and I feel terribly alone. I know I have good people in my life who care about me, but none of them can relate to being raped innumerable times and having people blame you for it because you were too afraid to actually say “no,” to trusting someone completely for the first time in your life and having it unravel all at once, to visiting your mother in prison as a child.

On top of it, I’ve been having horrible nightmares again and the partial memory that strongly suggests I was molested by one of my mother’s boyfriends when I was five is beginning to come into focus at a time in my life when rehashing sexual abuse is the last thing I need.

My therapist referred me to a clinic that specializes in sexual abuse and PTSD. I didn’t take it personally—as an aspiring counselor myself, I understood where she was coming from when she said that she didn’t want to risk making things worse because she doesn’t have much experience in sexual abuse or trauma. I’ve been through enough therapists to know that I wasn’t being “fired” as a patient. Therapists, it seems, are the easiest group of people for me to trust. Their motives always seem to be pure, and the confidentiality helps, I think.

I’m thankful for all the support I’ve been getting, both for the blog and in my personal life. Words cannot express how much I appreciate each message and each person who reaches out, whether it’s to reassure me or tell me how I’ve helped them. That’s what keeps me going—fighting the good fight. I want to feel strong. I want to beat this thing. I want to help people. If I can make things even a little lbetter for everyone living with a mental, I’ve accomplished more than I could have ever hoped for or imagined. If you’d told me what I’d be doing now when I was a motherless, lonely child being bullied and dealing with the prodromal phase of bipolar, I wouldn’t have believed you for a second.

My family, for all their dysfunctions and refusal to discuss the dark side (the way bipolar disorder has spread like wildfire down through the generations), has been immensely supportive. While there was a rough period when I first started my column in my hometown’s newspaper at age 19, they quickly warmed to it and realized that I was doing something most nineteen-year-olds wouldn’t be capable of and that I was taking all the pain and trying to turn it into something positive.

Some of my earliest memories are of my grandmother and beloved great-aunt and other aunts telling me that I was talented, that I had something special that I needed to hold onto. It’s difficult to believe some days—as we all know, knowing something and believing it to be true are two entirely different things.

But I’m trying. I do what I need to do in order to get through the day. Some days are easier than others. Some feel impossible. I’m a big believer in the “fake it ’til you make it” mindset; while it doesn’t work for everyone, it’s served me well over the years. At the very least, it allows me to save face and present as “normal,” even if I’m completely falling apart on the inside.

It’s another bad weather day in my head, which I guess is my reason for writing this. I also wanted to reach out to all of you and say that I’m here for you, too. I’ll always listen if you need to talk—all you need to do is reach out and I’ll be there. It’s the least I can do.

Last night, I felt dirty.

I felt weird for most of the day yesterday, and the actual “dirty” feelings set in sometime late that afternoon. I’ve felt this way before, but not in a long time, and I’m still not sure what triggered it.

I spent an hour or so lying in bed last night feeling as though my skin was too tight for my body. I couldn’t relax and the feeling kept getting worse. This is what rape does to you.

I still have no idea whether or not I was molested as a child. As I’ve explained in previous posts, every therapist and psychiatrist I’ve seen, as well as quite a few of the people in my life, think that it’s extremely likely that something happened (based on my attitudes toward sex, my body, relationships, and my general well-being, as well as my sexual precocity and early sexual behavior).

I don’t know. I have flashes of memory, thirty-second clips of film that play inside my head at all-too-frequent intervals, but there’s nothing conclusive. I’ve recovered a few memories of my mother’s arrest, but that’s all. With that in mind, I don’t think it’s at all unreasonable to assume that there’s more lying dormant inside my head that I can’t access. I pride myself on being incredibly self-aware, which makes my inability to grasp at these memories all the more frustrating.

Sometimes, I wonder if I’ll ever feel clean again. Ages 17 to 19 were particularly horrible, and though I know that everyone makes mistakes, the abuse and my subsequent promiscuity take more of a toll on me than I’d like. I keep most of this discomfort from others and only confide in a select few people. As always, I’m extremely comfortable telling pretty much everyone about what happened, but I always conveniently neglect to discuss my feelings in the narrative. No one asks, and frankly, it’s a relief. As long as I don’t let emotion sneak into the equation, I can remain detached and objective, which is pretty much my default state anyway thanks to the dissociation.

I try very hard not to let myself get lost in my own head, but I find it happening more and more frequently these days. I know it’s my mind finally processing the sexual abuse, but I’m a little lost as to what to actually do about it. 

Rape is the ugliest word in the English language.

I remember.

I remember the way the cold March wind felt against my pale blue spring jacket as I stood alone on the playground, looking up at the dead trees creating a black labyrinth against the white sky.

I remember that wind, warmer now, ruffling my hair on an overcast day.

I remember rainy early-summer days where it was so dark outside, the lights in the living room were on and cast a soft glow on the miniature city I’d constructed with my figurines.

I remember painting the room overlooking the garden at my friend’s house. It was, again, overcast, and the coolness of the dark hardwood floors beneath my feet, spattered with seafoam paint, was the most wonderful thing I’d ever felt.

I remember riding my bike around the neighborhood at sunset after a thunderstorm, inhaling the heavy air and taking time to admire the myriad of colors in the oil spots on the wet pavement as if committing each one to memory.

I remember waking up in my mother’s boyfriend’s house in the spare bedroom he’d made just for me. They had just returned from a date. I remember seeing the door open, his frame silhouetted against the yellow light of the hall, and then nothing.

I remember my very first mixed episode. I was fourteen and stressing over what outfit to wear to a “graduation from middle school” party a wealthy friend was throwing. In my frustration, I grabbed a coat hanger, desperate and aching and crying and full of rage, and slashed up my upper arms. I wore a sweater in May.

I remember waking up before dawn and walking to my aunt’s station wagon in the frigid air. I piled blankets and my chapter books into the back in preparation for the two-hour ride to the penitentiary where my mother was being held.

I remember the twelve years during which my mother and I communicated only by phone and letters.

I remember going up to see her at age 19 with my new boyfriend, who later became my husband. She was already drunk when we picked her up, but I think we had a pretty good time.

I remember when my great-aunt died. She was like a mother to me. I got the news early in the morning on the day I planned to visit her in the nursing home, then promptly sat down and churned out a 20-page psychoanalysis of Dorian Gray. Then, I spent the next two weeks crying. We sent out our wedding invitations the day before her funeral.

I remember the first time a boy ever hit me. I was seventeen. It was my boyfriend.

I remember the first time a boy ever told me I was worthless. I was seventeen. It was my boyfriend.

I remember the first time a boy raped me. I was seventeen. It was my boyfriend.

I remember the last day I cut myself: December 16, 2013.

I remember the first time I felt stable and glad to be alive in years; it was three weeks ago.

 

Baby steps, readers. Don’t let anyone tell you your past doesn’t matter; it is your story and has made you who you are. Just don’t let it repeat itself.

Stay safe and lovely, readers.

– J

Remission?

 

Also pictured: Beast-baby Dorian T. Catsby on his king-of-the-house perch

I can’t remember the last time I was sad. Granted, my memory’s not great, and there was a lot of crying last week because of all the trauma that was suddenly dragged to the surface, but now that I’ve made my peace with that—or at least, beaten the beast back into its cage, tucked safely away deep underground—I feel good. Not hypomanic- or manic-good, but balanced, settled. Things aren’t going the greatest right now, but at least I have the concrete knowledge that they’re going to get better sooner rather than later.

Current medications:

• 200 mg lamotrigine (Lamictal) taken twice a day, once in the morning and once in the afternoon/at night (usually around 6:00 or so).
• 1 mg tabs of lorazepam (Ativan), as needed. Since the myoclonic jerks I began experiencing when my Effexor dose was too high have begun to subside, I’m finding that I don’t need this as often.
• 300 mg lithium taken three times a day, two in the morning and one at night
• 125 mg venlafaxine (Effexor), taken in the morning
• 50 mg hydroxizine for sleep, one to two capsules as needed

This regimen seems to be working well for me. I’m sort of scared that it’ll just stop working, which is what I’ve experienced in the past with psych meds as well as endometriosis treatments, but I’m trying to stay positive.

Speaking of endometriosis, I met my new pain doctor on Thursday; he and his PA are both excellent. She spent some time asking about the nature of my PTSD and then informed him, and he actually asked if it was okay if he examined me before inviting me to hop up on the table. That was a whole new experience for me, and while I don’t really like being treated that gingerly, it was obvious that he was making an effort to make me feel comfortable, and I appreciated that.

I had some trigger point injections done yesterday morning; the knot of muscle was located very low, well below the bikini line in my general pubic area, but I didn’t feel nervous about him touching the spot or doing the injections. Because of my initial impression of him, I found it very easy to trust him implicitly. First impressions matter.

Right now, I’m in quite a bit of pain…about a level 7, which isn’t fun but is something I can tough out. As D. has told me, I’m “a tough old broad, a bad motherfucker.” Several people have suggested I buy the Pulp Fiction wallet and after everything I’ve been through with the pain in the last few years, I just might. It feels like a cautery knife is running back and forth through my lower abdomen, but my mother assures me that this will subside in a few days.

In the meantime, I’m keeping busy—cross-stitching, reading Ruth Reichel’s food/bipolar mother memoirs, and bothering the beast-babies, as usual.

Readers, what do you use to distract yourselves?