Forgetfulness and the God who remembers

     Many days, I live a relatively normal life.  The work that I'm doing, that God is doing, in facing and healing my past goes on but doesn't dictate my daily activities.  I still wake up and keep up with all that I am responsible for in my house with my family.  It's always there, but life moves along okay.

     Other days, trauma takes over.  I don't always know what triggers it, but the past comes too close to the present.  Memories mingle with reality.  It takes all the effort I can expend to breathe and stay as much in the present as I can.

     On those days, the ones where what's been done looms over me like a threat, I struggle to remember anything.  I try so hard, but my mind is so busy trying to keep the past in the past and my lungs remembering to breathe that it just doesn't have the capacity to remember much else.

     I can't keep up a conversation.  I will be focusing as hard as I can, but when it's my turn to speak, my mind goes blank.  The words spoken just moments ago escape me, and I must ask the other person to repeat themselves.  I'll be asked if I can get something nearby for someone, but as soon as I walk across the room, I no longer can remember what I was getting.

     On trauma days, it takes so much work just to breathe, just to stay in today, that my mind cannot keep up with anything else.  The daily to do list goes undone, and by bed time, I've accomplished nothing more than being alive.  In fact, I can't even remember what I did that day at all.  It's frustrating and disheartening.  When I forget everything, I feel forgotten myself.

     Yet Psalm 56:8 says

"You have taken account of my wanderings; put my tears in Your bottle.  Are they not in Your book?" (NASB)

     I came across that verse while studying something else, completely unrelated actually.  However, when I read C. H. Spurgeon's notes on this verse, it brought to mind trauma days, and yet it brought comfort too.  When speaking of this verse, of God taking account of David's wanderings, Spurgeon noted this,

"We perhaps are so confused after a long course of trouble, that we hardly know where we have or where we have not been; but the omniscient and considerate Father of our spirits remembers all in detail."

     Yes, those trauma days leave me hardly knowing where I have or have not been, yet my Abba Father remembers in detail everything I forget.  Though in days of forgetfulness I feel forgotten, I am anything but.  I am still known, deeply, and I am loved all the more.  What great comfort to know that when I forget, God remembers.

     Dear one, you well acquainted with trauma days and forgetfulness, you are not forgotten.  Every step trauma steals, every moment trauma misplaces, every conversation trauma conceals, He remembers them all.  His care and compassion see everything trauma takes.  He remembers, and He loves.

Glimpses of redemption

     As a culture, I think we tend to romanticize redemption.  It's painted for us as laughter and smiles, sunshine and rainbows.  It's a happy ending that eclipses any hint of hard during the journey.  I find this view of redemption to be quite shallow and short sighted though.  I am not saying redemption doesn't have a happy ending or laughter and smiles or sunshine and rainbows.  Those beautiful expressions have a place in redemption for sure, but if that is all you look for to spot redemption, you are going to miss most of it.

     You see, redemption is surrounded by what's broken and painful and dark.  In fact, redemption is born out of what is broken and painful and dark.  Before the laughter and smiles, there are tears and downcast faces.  Before the sunshine and rainbows, there is darkness and rain.  And if I'm being really honest, redemption doesn't always have a happy ending regardless.  

     So if redemption is more than the happy ending, where do you look to see it?  There is hope in redemption after all, even when redemption is happening in the hard places.  

--in the rain that falls as tears from my eyes that at one time forgot how to cry

--in the shelter of a hug that doesn't leave my skin screaming in pain while the storm rages on around me

--in the brief flash of eye contact with someone who knows too much yet still cares for me deeply

--in speaking, for the first time, a word that exposes cuts so deep it sucks the breath out of my lungs

--in emotions I once only read about but find myself feeling and experiencing, often times confused and scared by the unfamiliarity of them but making the hard choice to keep feeling anyways

     Sometimes, redemption can only be seen in the rear view mirror.  I caught a glimpse of redemption this way recently.  As I looked back on my disclosure three years ago to a pastor who put together a conference for churches dealing with child sexual abuse, something I could not wrap my mind around.  I had so many questions for him, mainly looking for ulterior motives.  I disclosed, and he responded in a way I never even considered an option.  He believed me.  He repeatedly assured me it wasn't my fault, and I would not get in trouble for what happened and how it impacted me.  At the time, I struggled to believe anything he said.  I kept asking him the same questions over and over, and he patiently continued to assure me the answers had not changed.  It was a hard season.  It was messy and full of doubt, hesitation, push back.  

     Yet here I am now, three years later, and I see the redemption in that mess.  His response, believing me and assuring me again and again it wasn't my fault and I wasn't in trouble, was God's redeeming grace poured out on all my failed disclosures of the past.  The disclosures met with disbelief and blaming me stole from me what little voice I had and took my disclosure from me.  Then three years ago, I disclosed once more and was met with a radically different response.  I could hardly whisper from the safety of my keyboard over email, but he heard me and listened.  His response gave me back my disclosure and a small part of my voice.  I couldn't see it then.  I didn't make it easy for him, but he was patient.  It took me years to believe what he said was true, but in the struggles of that summer, the doubt, the mess, redemption was being brought about...now clearly visible in the rear view mirror.

     I invite you now to expand your view of redemption, to look into the storm and see redemption happening in the dark places.  The sunshine and rainbows only illuminate the redemption that came to life in the rain and tears and hard road already traveled.  So in the middle of the broken, the hard, the storms, the mess, know that redemption is happening if you'll only take the time to look.  Redemption is messy, because the broken things that need redemption are messy.  Please look beyond the happy ending and the smiles.  You might be surprised how much redemption you find in the tears.

When trauma has no words

     It's likely obvious to you that words are very important to me.  I wouldn't be writing a blog if they weren't.  However, on this journey of healing, words have also been a particularly challenging hang up for me...well certain words at least.  The thoughts I have about words is going to take a few posts to get out, so please bear with me if this feels incomplete.  As a fair warning, these posts will be rather heavy as well.  Please take care of yourself, and decide if it is best to save these posts for later reading or to even skip them altogether.

     When we experience various events in life, we view them through the framework and background we have available to us.  For example, when an adult is in a car accident, the driver uses their knowledge of driving and injuries to assess the wreck.  Then when talking with others later, they have a way to explain their experience such as "oh it was just a fender bender" or "the accident was very serious and I am so grateful to have walked away from it."  The person involved can understand what happened and talk about what happened because they have a prior framework of knowledge to build off of.
     So what happens when a person experiences events but has no framework of prior knowledge to build off of?  To put it simply, the person has no words to put to their experiences, and it is terrifying to be in that position.
     When I was just 13, I was young and oh so naive.  I had no framework to build upon when events began to happen with my coach.  Everything felt wrong, but I had no way to express why.  With the ever present threat of bodily harm or even death looming over me and no words to use to explain why I thought this shouldn't be happening, I tried to find ways around it all in my head.  I shut down in every sense of the word.
     When it was all over and I finally told someone years later, I still had no words to put to those experiences.  I tried to put the experiences in the frameworks I did have and thought I was confessing my own sin.  I had no other way to think of what happened.  I didn't have words for what happened.  I did not even have the word "trauma."  My "confession" was not believed and was dismissed all while I was threatened with getting kicked out of church (my first disclosure took place in the context of church) because of PTSD symptoms.  Of course, I didn't have words for the experience of those symptoms either until a decade later.  As it turns out, all the experiences of coping that I couldn't explain without sounding like I had lost my mind have words too...flashbacks, dissociation, body memories.  It was genuinely healing to even get those words and know there was a reasonable explanation for those experience in light of the trauma that preceded them.
     So for years, I just called my experiences "it" since I had no words.  "God, please make it go away," I would pray.  I could describe "it" in gut wrenching detail (though I didn't).  Describing the details of what happened were the only words I had, but I could not label or categorize my experiences.  "It" was the only word I had, and "it" was a terrible word.  You see, the word "it" is a pronoun.  Every pronoun is used in place of a noun, but I had no noun for my "it."  Having memories that terrorized me and haunted me without having a way to give them voice was like being in a prison.  Words were the key, but I did not have them.

     I want to share two poems that I wrote that were my attempts at describing experiences I had no words for.  The first one I could not even bring myself to write about the experience as being my own.

Nightmare

Her world is empty

Nobody is there

Protecting his secrets

She lives a nightmare

She keeps to herself

She hides in the crowd

Invisibly breaking

With no way out

Then her fingers dance across the keys

The music singing what she cannot speak

A soft melody cries the tears that she hides

A lonely harmony pleads for a hope she can't find

But she's all alone there's no one to hear

No one to listen as she plays all her fears

The music goes quiet her brief respite gone

Now back to real life where she's somebody's pawn

She hangs her head low

To keep hiding her eyes

Afraid someone will see

That she's dead inside

She's just a child

But she's already broken

While the world sleeps in peace

Her nightmare won't end

     Vague and haunting and lacking definition, yet these general ideas were all I had.  Later, I was able to write the experiences without words in reference to me though in order to try and describe experiences for which I had no framework, she still had to be part of it.  I could let the experiences closer, but I still had no way of giving the experiences any kind of defining word.  So, I wrote this.

Perceptions

The world disappears until it is just me and him

Rage burning in his eyes I hesitantly enter in

My inside and outside disconnect as I lose hold of time

Then comes the invasion of the body that is no longer mine

Without thought he steals her while lifelessly she lays there

And even though she is breathing she cannot find air

Again and again he takes what she would not give

Now I bear the weight of deep shame that should be his

Ruthlessly violating in her what was treasured and pure

He shamefully strips me of all dignity and worth

Fearing his threats I must leave her desecrated there

In order to keep up perceptions as the world reappears

     For a long time, that poem, "Perceptions," was the best way I could describe what happened, but it doesn't fully make sense unless someone shares the experience for which I am attempting to describe.  There were words missing and having those memories trapped in my head with no words I could use to call them by nearly cost me my life during my absolute darkest days.

When it's time to stop surviving

     Survive.  Survival.  Survivor.  That family of words, and any additional you may be able to think of, makes me very uncomfortable.  They have connotations I'd rather not associate with.  There is nothing wrong with surviving something, but by using those words, it means I experienced something that required survival in the first place.  That is where those words begin to make me squirm.  So I do what I'm good at.  I scoff, dismiss the idea, make the words meaningless and unimportant.  When I hear those words, my mind instantly switches into survival mode.  Ironic, isn't it?

     I did a number of things to survive.  I never knew I was doing them.  I just did.  Then when it all stopped, I kept surviving.  I continued to cope in all the ways that kept me alive during those times I wasn't sure I would make it.  I didn't know I was employing survival strategies.  I just did.  One of them is not feeling anything.
     Somewhere along the way, I stopped feeling things.  It happened pretty early on when the abuse started.  It wasn't a conscious decision.  My mind did it for me.  It allowed me to survive circumstances that were well beyond the point of overwhelming.
     As I grew up, I observed people a lot.  I took notice of how people interacted with the world and with each other.  So while I felt nothing, I used all the feeling words in all the ways I had noticed were socially acceptable.  I felt nothing, but I looked normal because I talked like everyone else.  My ability to live hinged on that coping mechanism for a lot of years.  And it worked.

     As I continued to survive by feeling nothing, I wound up putting the whole of my relationship with emotions into the phrase "I don't do feelings."  For many years, that was absolutely a true statement, but in recent months, that has changed.  I started feeling feelings last summer when life exploded too many times in rapid succession.  Still I clung to "I don't do feelings."  After all, that is how I survived so many years.
     Then a couple months ago, I was talking with someone very dear to me.  She spoke words that brought instant tears to my eyes.  It took everything in me to contain those tears.  In that moment, I realized I do do feelings.  I don't want to, but somehow they are happening in me.
     Recently a day approached that is hard because of the memories associated with it, and I found myself fighting with myself to not push down the heavy feelings that were flooding my body and mind.  My instinct is to make myself numb, but I had learned enough recently to know that wasn't right.  Then it hit me that not feeling is how I survived, but I don't have to survive anymore.  The danger is over.  I already survived.  That part is over.  Now, it's time to stop surviving.  Now it's time to learn how to live.
     Numb survives.  Feelings live.  Learning this whole feelings thing is a big task.  It's going to take time.  It's hard.  The process is going to be work.  In fact, it already is, and I just started.  I fight daily to remember that feelings are normal and part of how God made me.  I fight to stop surviving.  I fight to feel, and sometimes I fight to want to fight to feel.  But I'm still fighting, and I have a God who fights for me and with me.

     To my fellow survivors, we don't have to survive anymore.  We did that part, and we succeeded.  Now this whole not surviving anymore is not easy.  I don't say it lightly, but little by little, day by day, we can stop surviving and learn how to live.  We will have to fight for it, and it will be hard, exhausting work sometimes.  Let us remember together that we have a God who is fight with us and for us.  He has not left us to fight this battle alone.  He sees and knows the struggle it is to let go of what kept us alive for so long.  He is with us in the struggle to learn to live.  So you and me and God together, we will fight, and we, who already survived, will live again.