Dissociating Doesn't Have to be Forever. Hope is Real.

I have some goals I'd like to meet, and counseling is helping me move towards those goals.  One fairly simple sounding one is to be able to read the Bible without being triggered, having flashbacks or dissociating.  That's not an easy thing for me.  I can't just turn all that off.  The ways I have to turn it off are to shut emotions down again and go into robot mode, or to not read the Bible.   I can listen to it being read in church, and it's now only occasionally a problem.  When I read it or someone reads it to me personally then it becomes some sort of a weapon aimed at me.  (And it's not the sword of the spirit bringing much needed conviction to my life.) 

My pastor read Matthew 15:10-20 to me in our last counseling session.  He thought it would be a comfort to me; instead it was a major trigger and I zoned in and out and had flashbacks too.  It was really weird to have so much going on in my mind and yet a kind of nothingness going on at the same time.  I was able to listen and hear what he was saying pretty well, considering.  I learned something surprising, the flashbacks and all the other involuntary things are not "my" evil coming out of me or a lack of applying Philippians 4:8 properly(think on those things that are lovely etc).  It is a result of evil done TO me.  Along with this idea that I think has finally sunk in, came the statement.  "You can't separate your body from the rest of yourself."  That surprised me.  For the last two years I have been reconnecting and it has been a rough transition.  I have kept separated for most of my life, but I know it's not a good long term solution.

From the time I was young I would go into a dark little room in the corner of my mind until it was safe to come out.  Most of the time the room was dark and my "inside me" would just curl up there for a while.  Other times it was a whole nother beautiful world where I was the hero and I was surrounded by friends who were family to me.  I didn't dare go there too often because I think it made me smile or something that made things worse for the "outside me", and when that happened I would be jolted back to the outside.

As a child, Spock was my favorite Star Trek character.  I studied him nightly with every episode.  I practiced in the mirror complete facial control of emotions and ultimately successfully suppressed involuntary emotional responses.  It took practice, but I was motivated.  This complete emotion control was necessary to shorten the beatings and lectures at home.  A lecture doesn't sound bad, but it is when you have to stand perfectly still, but not too still, and have the correct facial expression at all times for 45 minutes or more.  If my stance shifted or my expression wasn't correct; then I would get another spanking for the "offence" I was being lectured for.  If I was lucky I would only get three sets of "spankings".  You would think I would be quite good at standing still by the end of 6th grade, since that was one of his favorite tortures.  Making me stand facing the wall for the 45 minute recess while he told me what I had to do to get off the wall.  Talk about controlling my facial expressions and just leaving my body.  I was good at it.

As a teen I added in Data from The Next Generation to my studies.  I didn't do so well with modeling Data.  He wasn't inconsistent enough, but it was still helpful.  For most of my life I've done this thing called dissociation, but didn't know the name for it until this past year.  Dissociating is what allowed me to stay sane and function.  This separation is my default and that's why I dissociate so easily, it removes me from what causes me pain.  It separates "me" from my body and mind.  At this point it is no longer a help.  It has become a hindrance and gets in the way of comprehending truth, dealing with current events in life, or being able to read the Bible.  Increasingly I am gaining hope that I can relearn everything, and be whole again.  Someday the old tapes will be completely destroyed and new ones in place.  Right now the old ones are being overwritten, but they still leak through pretty strongly.  What's awesome is that I recognize when garbage leaks through, or someone else recognizes it; and I am in a place where God is busy writing over the old tapes through friends, sacraments at church, Psalm singing and my pastors.  

Psalm 121:1

I lift up my eyes to the hills. 

From where does my help come from?

My help comes from the Lord, who made heaven and earth.

The Lord has sent help and a whole lot of it.  I may not be able to look at v7 right now without problems, but someday maybe I can.

Writing In Order To Do Battle

I can't find the answer to this, but I've been wondering about it for the last several days.  Wondering to the point of almost panicly worrying.  Does PTSD come and go?  For me that has been my experience, but I can't find anyone else saying the same thing.  I've wondered about this for years now, ever since a doctor gave me a word for what was happening to me.  I'm a bit funny with the way I describe things not realizing its something "real" and enough other people have had the same thing going on that they gave it a name.  Just this past year I discovered the word dissociate and what it was, and lo and behold it's what I've been calling "zoning", "being gone somewhere" or "losing time".  I have a great fear of re-entering the battle and once again ending up in those dark places where I lose my way.  I stopped writing when I got to a comfortable place.  God is held at arms length, but I can catch glimpses of Him in church on Sunday and through the overwhelming kindness of my church family.  It's a safe place in my journey, but I'm being nudged along to go farther.

I haven't been writing, anywhere, and that concerns me a bit, in the sense that it should concern me, but it doesn't--not really.  I write when I'm actively dealing with things and I haven't written in months.  I've been asked to make a list of fears and concerns to work through in counselling.
I would say "challenged", but that just sounds too baptist to me.  Of course to me it's not just a list, it's the contents of the boxes I've been dragging around all these years.  In some ways its the monsters in my closets that have come so close to destroying me in the past.  I use the word past in a way that includes not only my personal ancient past, but my recent past too.  Just yesterday I read two bloggers who posted on the topic of writing either directly or indirectly.  One of them sounds like he is fairly close to where I am in my own journey while the other one is in a place that often seems unattainable to me.  Both of them are writers that speak to me in the deep places of my soul.  http://redemptionpictures.com/2014/09/12/when-writing-is-an-act-of-hope/
http://messytheology.wordpress.com/2014/09/10/when-there-are-no-words/

Writing for me has always been cathartic.  I started my first little diary in third grade.  I still had it, up until almost four years ago when our house burned down.  As an adult, reading that first diary I ever kept, brought back memories, good and bad.  Almost all the good things in there involved going to my grandma's house, the food she made, the stories she told and helping her hang out laundry, pick apples and watch her work in her garden.  When I was old enough to not pull plants instead of weeds, I was actually allowed to go in the garden.  Other events I wrote about I remember writing carefully in case my diary was ever stolen and read.  My careful writing at age 9 wasn't careful enough and I got in trouble for what I wrote.  I didn't keep a diary again until 5th grade.  I learned my lesson and wrote carefully and left out the most ugly parts.  Yet years later reading my diary from elementary I again saw those events I so carefully edited in my writing, and the memories invoked were not edited.
The power of the written word is incredible.  And those were just my own childish writings, yet they held the key to my memory, to my own story.

By 7th grade I was writing furiously and unedited, except for the terrible secret I carried that I couldn't write about even in my own journal.  The raw anger flowed from my pen and filled spiral notebooks.  Anger, hurt, and betrayal, along with the pettiness of junior high drama, were my themes. I wrote for me and only me.  I wrote to keep my sanity and a place to siphon off the anger and rage that threatened to tear me apart.  My anger grew as my understanding of what had happened to me grew.  I never gave it a word until 2003.  I couldn't name it.  I was too afraid.  The anger was too powerful and I barely kept it in check through my writing.  By 9th grade I was learning to control the anger through other means and harness it.  I made good use of it and the abuse at home finally stopped, for me.  Still I wrote.  My survival depended upon it.

I wrote all through high school and into college at Bob Jones University, where I again looked for help and thought I found it.  I would have been better off to have kept writing and skipped the counselling.  The times I stopped writing were the times I was being successful at locking down all my boxes and shutting off emotions.  But of course anger was a main component of all the boxes and anger can only be contained for so long.  Thus the cycle of writing while depressed, angry and trying to close back the boxes that another counseling attempt had opened began.  I haven't written anywhere for a few months.  It's been different this time though.  At least one of my monsters has been destroyed and not all emotion has been cut off.  I think I've been experiencing life the way that other people do, to a point.  Real emotions have still been in play.  I've cried and didn't shut it off with anger.  I can't remember doing that before.  It's been incredible to smile and cry and not have to do my usual routine in order to "be normal".  I like it.  The problem is that this is only a plateau and there is a long journey still ahead.  I've been content here for long enough.  It was a nice break from the battle, but it's time to re-engage.  Once again, I write.

Forgiveness Without Coercion: What does it look like?

If anyone would have told me 6 months ago that I would be in contact with a former counselor and forgiveness would be brought up, and the end result would be a good one; I never would have believed it.  For the first time in my life someone asked for my forgiveness and didn't try to avoid responsibility or turn it back on me and make it out to be my fault in any way.  I am still in shock.  I've never experienced anything like this in my life. (There has been one other person, but that happened outside of the IFB/BJU world and the whole process was much simpler.)

Forgive  It's one of those major trigger words that can easily lead to full blown flashbacks.  Except this time it didn't.  I'm not say it wasn't triggering and that I didn't have flashbacks, but because of the other persons response to me the flashbacks didn't become debilitating.  I did lose some time( the name I've used to describe dissociation for 20 years, before I knew there was a name for it) but overall it was just a beautiful demonstration of what the process of forgiveness and reconciliation can look like.  This may not sound like a positive experience, but it was and is.   It was hard work and took the better part of three days.  At the beginning of this renewed contact  I had no inkling where it would go.  At first I received a somewhat generic request for my forgiveness without the other person really comprehending what it was they were asking my forgiveness for.  Back and forth we went until I was concise and specific enough that the only option left would be to dodge it, turn it back on me, or accept responsibility.  Amazingly, the responsibility was accepted and forgiveness still asked for and then granted.  By the end, I actually wanted to forgive and I wasn't guilted into it.

Wow!  If this were to happen for everyone; what a different world we would be in.  Granted, this is only one person and not even my original abuser, but the effect this persons counsel had on me was far reaching and life threatening.  For this person to acknowledge the harm, is such a huge deal for me.  I never thought it possible.  Maybe, just maybe, others will follow suit for me and for others.  And maybe the hurt, and the fear, and the never ending guilt can begin to be assuaged, for all of us.  As to the teacher that abused me in elementary school, I doubt he would know genuine repentance if it ran over him, but that is a topic for another post.

Maybe someday I will be at a point where I can read the Bible without being severely triggered and spiraling into either dissociation or flashbacks.  For now I'm ok with enjoying the good things in life and being thankful to God for the beauty I see.  The GRACE investigation set off a chain of events in my life that is truly life changing.  I have to face the past or be crushed by it. It's a slow road to healing and agonizing at times, but I think I have hope that it is possible.

Bob Jones University Can't Rewrite History

Yesterday was such an emotionally charged day with the news that BJU had re-hired GRACE that

 

I had a hard time processing it enough to write. I already had a counseling meeting scheduled with

 

my pastor, and of course that was one of the topics we discussed.

 

 

 

As soon as I found out I felt a huge weight lift and a lot of tension in my body released. Rejoicing and

 

skepticism fought for dominance in my thinking and emotions all day. I'm still not sure where the

 

pendulum is going to settle. I do know, in a practical sort of way, that Bob Jones University is only

 

going to do what they are forced to, and if they had been able to find any other way around this

 

backpedaling and re-hiring of GRACE without any changes to the original contract, they certainly

 

would have done so. This is good news, yet it should never have even been an issue. BJU should

 

never have terminated GRACE. They didn't suspend them or the investigation no matter how they

 

try to lie about it and change the wording now, after the fact. I won't forget. We won't forget. They

 

can't rewrite this bit of history. Survivors have been silenced and told what the “truth” is no matter

 

what is remembered for many years. There are now too many writing the truth for a successful BJU

 

history re-write to occur. I know in my own life it's all been rewritten and how things were, is ignored

 

or forgotten. I'm not a child anymore and I am far enough removed in time that I can stand my

 

ground on what is true regarding my past. Therefore there is no way that BJU can wield that

 

institutional amnesia over me and other survivors, and have us succumb to their version of the events

 

by trying to alter the facts of their wording. No, they really did say

 

 

And here is the link for the termination letter

 

Bob Jones University's Termination Letter to G.R.A.C.E. 

 

If the link ever goes bad or gets deleted for some reason, I have a copy of the letter as a PDF on my

 

computer that I will put here in place of the link.

 

Last night a former high school classmate and fellow BJU grad asked me to briefly explain what the

 

BJU and GRACE thing was all about that she has been seeing and hearing about everywhere. I was

 

more than happy to fill her in, knowing that my explanation of recent events and the GRACE

 

investigation in general will spread farther. I can't fix what is wrong, but I can help carry the load; I

 

can give that hug and weep with those that weep and even rejoice with those who rejoice. I hope for

 

justice someday, but for now I can only do the things I am able in order to make my sphere of

 

influence a little brighter and a better reflection of how things will look when the world is set right

 

once again.

Bob Jones University's Termination Letter to G.R.A.C.E.