What Trauma Does to Us

 Here is a blog article from someone who has had sexual abuse:  This is reprinted with permission. 

If you are similarly suffering, it is time for God to heal you!  Please contact me. See the contact information at the bottom of this blog article.

"Missing June
For those of you abused, what has your abuser(s) taken from you recently? For me, it was my June.

I wait all year for June. It is the equivalent of a kid waiting for Christmas. There are so few precious Junes in our lifetime. Each needs to be properly celebrated and experienced with the June-only traditions like strawberry picking, garden hose frolicking, first-time outdoor swimming, planting of the state-fair zinnias and wayyyyy… too many trips to the ice cream stand. Ah, and kids’ softball. Warm nights watching the games with the evenings played under the lights being a special treat.

Junes come too fast and furious following the craziness of May. May is filled with new spring events, awards ceremonies and end-of-school-year chaos. Then suddenly, one morning we wake-up and June is here in all it’s warm-but-not-too-hot and sometimes-thunderstorms-but-not-gray-skies-glory.

I am always the happiest in June. Last year at the end of this month, I made my husband and our daughters sit in a circle on the living room floor for a special good-bye to June ceremony. We held hands and I sang “Amazing June how sweet the sound, that saved a SAD (seasonal affective disorder) like me. I was once blue but now I’m not, because of vitamin D.” We then went around the circle and shared our favorite thing about June. The rest of the participants weren’t nearly as excited as I, but no matter. I had a glorious moment sitting with my loves reminiscing about the baby animals we had rescued in the past 4 weeks.

This year I started talking about June early. Maybe all the way back in March when we were on our 6th month of dark sky misery. I speculated what June day the bunnies would greet us by the neighbor’s evergreens and debated over if we would try to grow another vegetable garden. And I could not wait to have my three girls all to myself, all day every day.

But this June sucked. Today is already June 13 and the past two weeks are a sucky suckish suck filled fog. I vaguely remember standing at a podium in an elementary school cafeteria asking our school board president to resign after learning of character letters he and a local priest had written for a convicted pedophile. The priest went as far as stating he didn’t feel this dangerous predator deserved any jail time! This injustice triggered the dreaded storm to brew in my every pore. I had certain knowledge a door I rarely even peek through, and then, only when I absolutely have to, was about to fly off its’ hinges and pin me under. But I knew someone had to remind these men who so callously protected a man who enjoyed child rape that there just happens to be tiny victims that you are forgetting.

And fly open that door did. First the anger overtook me. Anger for these nameless and faceless kids used and thrown away that this priest and school board president just seemed to be forgetting as they stood tall with a dangerous pedophile. And then the anger of the past came roaring-in which morphed into two weeks lost to PTSD so debilitating I slept only a few fitful hours a night and jumped so violently at every little startle I had bruises from banging into things. My abusers’ huge adult faces loomed over my smaller child’s and I could see the wrongness in their eyes and feel the scratchiness of faces. I would wake up choking and try a cool shower to calm me but then the sound of the shower would take me back to a bathroom I hid in as a 13-year-old, naked and vulnerable. And it all just kept coming and coming. It was relentless. The sounds and smells. The voices. The hands. And all I wanted was to reach-out and comfort the other girls that I knew these monsters also had tried to ruin. The ones that like me, had no voices.

This third week has been sheer exhaustion just trying to cope. Coping meaning getting out of bed. And off the floor. For the first time this summer, I walked through my yard and performed one of my all-time favorite June activities- cutting flowers. Bob did a particularity good job on the gardens this year and I was just now observing the roses, daylilies, red-hot poker and dozen other beauties. Inside, as I looked at my collection in a vase, a sudden grief over swept me so fierce it took my breath away. Bob could only hold me and repeat “I’m sorry” as I bawled over and over “I lost my June. I have no June. Because someone took something from me merely because he wanted it, I have lost my June.”

And this is how it goes when surviving sex abuse. Things were stolen from you and no matter how many times you feel that you have made peace with this knowledge, there comes those times you just want them back. There are always the befores and only-ifs. People who love you will prompt you to go through your gratitude list and heal and stay in the present and yes, eventually you do. But damn, when it comes up it is brutal. And different everytime. This time was more anger. Last time it was darkness and depression after one of my abusers, a priest, was removed from a church due to a young girl’s allegations of abuse. I remember thinking My God Yes! Finally Justice!  Finally people will see him for the monster he really is and not his clever facade of the holiest of all men. But in a matter of months he was back out among a new flock of voiceless children.

And here in my hometown, this is what is happening all over again. A pedophile is removed and another man steps-in to defend him. And neither this man the priest, nor the other man the school board president, penned a letter of defense for the kids. The kids that very well today may be dead. And the predator that greatly contributed to their demise gets released from prison in half the time because these men decided it was a swell idea to present the court with letters containing all the selfless things he has done like contributing large sums of money to the church.

Today, and probably forever, the survivor guilt in me agonizes over the amount of victims my abusers had in their lifetimes: those who came before me and those who went after.. I want nothing more at this moment than to tell them that I am paying attention. And I will not forget them.

And I wonder what these men took from them today…"

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Always remember to take complete responsibility for your own health and well-being.