How to Heal in the Last of Us
"If I were attacked again, I don't think I could survive it," I admitted to Bray and Ponder. Bray ran her hand through her hair, paused and looked at me with clear, blue eyes. "It happened to me again," she said quietly. "The thing is, after my first rape, I was in complete denial even though I was so wounded. I was stuck. I was filled with self-loathing and didn't place enough value on myself to demand that others treat me well. I may have unwittingly put myself in the position of being attacked again. My second rape forced me to start healing. It was life or death. I know it sounds strange, but it was actually a blessing."
Less than a year before we met, Bray was unable to go to sleep at night, dress herself, make a meal or eat without purging afterward. A former competitive athlete, she would overexercise to the point of exhaustion. "I don't [make myself] throw up five times a day now, so I'm doing well—I throw up once or twice a week," she joked ruefully to me a few months after the retreat. Now she is working full-time, writing grants for a domestic violence shelter. Instead of overexercising, she has taken up gardening. "I replanted the whole lawn. I'm engaged to be married. I have a house I love," she says. "It's not a linear progression, and I fall back sometimes. But it's huge for me to say this is what I've accomplished, this is my life."
Listening to other women's stories in this positive, healing setting proved to be perhaps the most powerful tool of all against the shame and fear that cause us to remain silent. Hearing them had helped me tell my story in public for the first time, as we sat in that circle the first night of the retreat. Layers of pain frozen within me—pain I couldn't access on my own—melted away as I felt awe for these women, for their determination to reclaim their happiness. The more admiration and compassion I felt for them, the more I felt for myself. Many of SOAR SPA's participants, I discovered, felt the same way. Their transformation was evident.
On our final day, I passed a knot of women holding each other in the hotel hallway. A hand grabbed me and pulled me in. It was Jill VanderKam. At the center stood Terry Ponder, the woman I had chatted with that morning over coffee. "I'm so mad," she said, over and over again, her knees buckling. "Why did he do this to me? Why, why?"
"Thank God, you are feeling your anger, finally," said VanderKam, who belonged to Ponder's support group in Tampa. "You've held it in for so long."
"I hate him," Ponder cried. "I'm so afraid I'm going to go to hell because I want him to die."
I kept quiet as we held her in our arms and gave her encouragement. Finally, I found the words for what was running through my mind. "Hate must be felt in order for it to be released, but the hate isn't you," I told Ponder. "It's just passing through you." I knew I was talking to myself. My anger (described as "thermonuclear" by a former therapist) wasn't aimed at my rapist. It was aimed at anyone I allowed to instill that old bad feeling in me all over again. It had taken me a long time to realize I wasn't bad and I wasn't my anger. I was learning how to identify the emotions that set me off, so I could better master them. Feelings come and go. Pain and struggle come and go. Love, too, can find us in an instant.
That afternoon, we moved into a circle to close the retreat, the same way we had begun it. As a final gesture, each of us said a word to describe what we were feeling. I don't remember them all, but one woman said unity, and others added power and inspired. Someone said elated. The word I chose was free.
Photo Credit: Daniela Stallinger
Source: https://www.self.com/story/how-we-healed
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