Spiraling Downward, Climbing Upward

*****Trigger Warning*****

(Admin note: contains graphic, sexually explicit content with regards to minors and child sexual abuse.)

I’ve tried to write this a few times. I succeeded with the version that is filtered through a fictionalized account to help it maintain a safe distance, or I’d have never gotten through it. Even the writing of it hurt, triggering me repeatedly and relentlessly over the past five years I’ve spent rewriting it so I can publish it. Even the nightmares came back, taunting me. Still, I kept going, pushed through the worst of it, determined to finish, which I have. It’s currently in the hands of my proof reader, and getting fitted for cover art, and coming out (hopefully) before the end of 2015.

But that’s not the whole story. This version has no filters. I’m sharing it raw, thus the trigger warning.

I grew up poor. Poor white trash. Single mother. Two-bedroom apartment. Parents divorced after my father’s tour in Vietnam left him reeling from PTSD so bad he tore his marriage and family apart with his bare hands. No one supported his recovery, so he didn’t. Recover.

My mother remarried, unknowingly choosing my abuser, thinking herself lucky to find a man who would so readily accept another man’s children. She had no clue. She was young and naïve, and ended up hospitalized during much of the time he spent grooming, gaslighting, and laying the groundwork for his intentions.

At first he scared me. His belt had a thousand names. Bowling balls and spikes, whips and chains, whatever he thought might ping a chord of fear shooting up my spine as I stood between my sister and brother, shuddering at the slap of leather across his hands, his words keeping the staccato beat of each lash, and what they meant.

He’d pace back and forth, panther-like, eyes beaded hard on each one of our sniveling forms. We hadn’t cleaned our rooms. Or, we had, but we didn’t do it “right.” We were five, four, and three years old.

I didn’t know this at the time, but he had already started sexually abusing my sister since she was two. Back then, it had been going on for three years. Then, he decided I was next.

He took me to his parent’s house. A farmhouse in the middle of nowhere. There were horses, and I stood at the edge of the cornfield, watching them while he mowed the whole yard. Hours went by. I got bored. I went inside, and waited in the dark formal living room. At least it seemed formal to me with lace doilies on every piece of furniture.

He came in to shower, and after a while, he called to me from one of the back rooms. I felt strange. Something didn’t fit, but I couldn’t make any sense of it. He called me a second time and I went down the hall, calling out until I found where he was and what he was doing.

He was naked, and he reached up, and pulled me toward him, reaching impossibly far across the room, hooking me by the back of my head and forcing me toward him. Then he tugged me down onto him, as he thrust, thrust, thrust, and then I was gagging and choking and spitting him out, spit the phlegm out, but I couldn't get his taste out of my mouth.

I was four the first time it happened. Three. Two. One. Numbers. None of it mattered. I’ve replayed the dozen or so other encounters that spanned a six month period (or so), hundreds, if not thousands of times since then. This was all before I told. Before my sister and I realized he had played us against each other.

One of the ways he kept me compliant is he used the same grooming script he had used with my sister. He told me I had to keep doing it or he’d choose my sister or my brother next. He sodomized me every way there was to do so, and shamed me when my body responded. He told me I must like it, which made it seem like it would never stop. I thought I was taking a bullet for my brother and sister, and it turned out to be a lie. When I heard her say something in particular one day, a phrase he used with me, I knew he had already started. The terms of our agreement crumbled, and after we told each other, we went to our mother.

I was one of the fortunate ones. I was believed. My sister was believed. We got out and we got help, and we put the bastard in jail. But in the aftermath, the true horror surfaced. A more accurate way of explaining it, is it tugged me in the opposite direction. It’s more like a spiral staircase down to the basement, or a tomb, where a demon waits to chase after me, hunt me down, and invent new ways to kill me in my dreams, where I couldn’t even escape from him.

I had years of recurring nightmares, a swollen colon, which required me to take mineral oil (it made me gag every time I swallowed it) to help my colon return to normal size, and I felt the pain every time I went to the bathroom for years afterward. I won’t go into details, but I recently had a connecting situation happen while I was at work, and while I was mortified in that moment, what bothered me worse, was the fact that what he did by sodomizing me as a four-year-old still affects me almost forty years later.

This has affected so many personal areas of my life. I’ve struggled with being sexually aware since a small child, the fact that my abuser was male made me question my sexual identity for years, and I felt an added shame for failing to live up to what society says a man should do: protect himself.

I have good days and bad days. Sometimes a smell, a sound, a touch in a certain place (like my thigh) will trigger me. If something starts to tug me downward, I find myself walking down the spiral staircase, and I know where it leads. In my nightmares, it was a set of stone stairs, with torches ensconced on either side as I went down, down, down. I knew what was around the corner, but there was a kind of inevitability to it all. There was a script, and I had to deliver my part.

It took years of counseling, and moving to get past the worst of it. Even though I moved more than fifty times before I turned eighteen, even though I’ve seen foulness from the inside of a homeless shelter, even though I learned how to be an expert packer, I somehow managed to graduate college. I’m the first in my family to do so.

I’ve been married for fifteen years, and my wife and I have the blessing of four amazing and beautiful boys, one with extra special abilities. He can walk using crutches, despite not having a cerebellum. He speaks, writes, and still remembers the sign language we taught him to use when he remained preverbal for longer than most. He continues to defy the limits of his condition, and he teaches us, along with his brothers, so many truths about life and what is important. He reminds me to laugh in the face of struggles, so I do.

Recently, I began a master’s degree. I am a state certified English teacher, but I did not succeed with finding a teaching position. So, my master’s degree is ironically clinical mental health counseling. I’m becoming what I hate: a counselor. Still, I love helping others find pathways to healing, hope, and recovery.

In a recent training at work, a colleague gave us what he described as a "fun activity." We completed a 10 question survey, asking questions about the kind of home we lived in, what our parents were like, and what risk factors we were exposed to. He then went through the sheets after collecting them from us, and sorted them all by how many times we answered "yes," to these risk factors (alcohol, abuse, violence, etc.) He then told us our scores were typical to what was found in one of the largest studies in the U.S. What he didn't know is that I kept my sheet, since I had already added up my score, and once I realized what came next, I refused to turn it in. I had scored a 10/10. This colleague of mine told the entire room, NO ONE could survive, remain functional, or not be a drug user, suicidal, or someone in prison if they had even scored as high as four or more. Um… I was sitting right there, and I could hear him just fine. Needless to say, that was a very triggering experience.

Something I’ve learned over the years: Stairwells and stair cases don’t just go down. They can also go back up. So, while I’ve found myself unraveling, spiraling downward, tugged by some invisible thread many, many times over the years, I’ve also found that once I’m at the bottom, I can come back up, I can take one step after another, and keep moving forward. So, that’s what I've learned to do. I move forward, I get back up, and I refuse to give up.

The pain is still there. Believe me. It comes and goes. Even when I think I’ve finally made a way through it all and I’m finally free, I find myself pulled back down and I’m right back there, again. I’ve had fits of rage (I tore up a wall with my fists), and I’ve raised my voice at my boys and my wife. I don’t have it all together. I’m far from perfect, but I am determined to survive.

Something else I’ve learned: I’m not content, just to survive. So, I keep moving. Climbing back up from each and every one of those staircases, until I find the pathway to overcomer.