BROWSE
Trauma and Mental Health
He put his hands around my neck, gently pressing his thumbs into a notch of my throat. Demonstrating how someone feels when being choked. He asked me if I felt it. I tried to nod. I froze. He was supposed to be an ally. I came to him for help.
I couldn’t breathe. It didn’t make any sense until my therapist asked me a simple question that made me realize that finding my voice meant losing my breath.
What will truly be the hardest days are yet to come. My weight gain, in part, was a defense mechanism against future sexual assaults. My rational brain knows that rape and sexual assault isn’t about sex, but rather about control, but my irrational brain tells me that if I’m undesirable, I’m safe. This may be why it was so hard to lose three pounds. And, this is why my therapist and I will have a lot of work to do as I start losing the weight. I’m ready to take back control.
I couldn’t sleep.
I had just received a letter in the mail, one that I had been waiting for, for almost 18 months. And, the day had finally arrived.
“But Becky, I got away…”
That’s what I told her.
I had been in therapy with her for years, discussing my childhood molestation and the sexual assault while serving in Pensacola and the and harassment that followed in the aftermath. But this. This I never told her. Because. Well, because, I got away.
Have you ever had something happen to you that was so profound that you knew, just knew, it was God who was intervening? I did. And, no one will ever be able to tell me that it was anything, but God. He was there with me that night. Right there in my room. Not in the sense that He’s always with us, everywhere – the omnipresent God, but in the sense that He was physically with me. God sat at my bedside one night in the early spring of 1986.