I’ve worked through my rape memories in therapy, layer by layer, yet there was one detail of this ugly story I wanted to stay locked away, hidden in the dark because I could not stomach its truth: I returned to the man who raped me. The very next day I approached him sexually. How do I make sense of that?
Years later I heard the word resilience in reference to sexual trauma recovery and it gave me a rush of new shame. I felt sinful. Dirty. Different. Disgusting. Weak. Broken. But never resilient. This shameful piece of the story must never be known. Resilience must look different than what I did by returning to him.
I was 20
…a sophomore in college on an academic scholarship. As a high school valedictorian I was offered a full ride to numerous universities, but my parents never took me to visit a single college. I simply chose one randomly from a catalog at the public library. I was offered no advice when I left home to navigate life away from our little country farm. I was dirt poor, working two minimum-wage jobs to pay for rent and groceries. I took the city bus to classes, lived on one meal a day, and stole the extra rolls of toilet paper from the Barnes & Noble bathroom when it was my turn to supply it for the dingy apartment that I shared with 3 roommates.
He was sexy and mysterious, with dark curls, a foreign accent, smooth Mediterranean skin, and a muscular body in jeans and a leather jacket. Bubbly girls playfully bumped into him, as they walked to classes. I was the nerd who worked in the computer lab where he often studied. I tutored my fellow students in their computer programming while I watched girls pull up their chairs next to him to chat about assignments. He’d flash his charming smile while adoring their attention. They laughed and teased, leaving behind phone numbers and cute messages scrawled on his study pages.
I found him attractive but was intimidated each time we made eye contact. He hung around the computer lab more often to ask me for help with his homework.
Some nights I found him waiting in the hallways after I shut down the lab. I was nervous but excited when he walked me to my bus. After 2 weeks of refusing his requests for a date his persistence and intensity wore me down. I told myself I should be honored that he even noticed me. I called my mom telling her how shocked I was that he wanted to date me.
We dated for two months, but never labeled each other as a “boyfriend” or “girlfriend”. It was intoxicating, confusing, and overwhelming. He pushed for sex incessantly and sulked when I refused. I explained that I wanted to wait – I had strong religious values and waiting was important to me. After heated moments of kissing after dates and pushing for more, he always left in an explosion of anger when I told him I insisted he stop. Still he found ways to push the sexual limits further and further. My black and white boundaries were becoming barely gray and I was exhausted.
I felt disoriented after our dates and no longer saw myself as intelligent or good. I stopped talking about him to my roommates because I couldn’t make sense of why I was with him…why I couldn’t leave.
The next day he was always eager to love me, and talked of his deep respect for my Catholic values. He told me my beliefs aligned with his Muslim values and this was what he loved about me. Again and again, these conversations made me drop my defenses and trust him. I gave him one more chance…one more chance…choosing to be kind and forgiving, ignoring the urges inside me to break free.
Rape
One evening we watched TV with my roommates until it got late and they headed to bed. I longed for sleep also, an 8 AM accounting class loomed ahead. Instead, I kept smiling at him and listening to him talk about himself…and then receiving his aggressive kisses and groping when none of it felt good.
It was after midnight and I knew my roommates were asleep. He grabbed a blanket and pulled me down onto the floor in front of the TV. My body tensed, anticipating the fight I was always up against. He continued to explore my body and I squirmed, but stayed quiet feeling guilty for being part of this and also guilty for not satisfying his desires. I reminded myself that I was silly and naive, that there was something weird about me that I did not know how to enjoy being sexual.
Suddenly he was on top of me, unzipping my jeans and holding down my arms. I felt consumed with desperation yet no screams came out of my mouth. My voice was quiet as I repeated the words, “no” and “we can’t”. Over and over I said those words with no control over the volume of my frustratingly meek voice as if it belonged to a child. There was no “we” in any of this, but my brain could not grasp what was happening to me.
My hips twisted from side to side resisting him entering my body. My quiet voice continued begging. My arms pushed hard but I could not get him off me and then just like that – my arms stopped pushing. My words died in my throat.
I felt him inside of me and my whole body went limp, like I didn’t possess it any longer.
My voice never screamed for help although my roommates were behind the thin living room wall. My hands dropped to the floor and my fingers played with the worn shag carpeting next to my face. I thought about how old and dirty this apartment was and how I couldn’t afford anything better. I stared at the gray couch. It was piled with pillows to make up for the broken springs under the cushions. I hoped I could make it last one more semester. It was a freezing cold night in January and I stared at the ice along the bottom edges of the window and wondered how frozen my face would feel waiting at the bus stop in the morning.
I don’t remember any more of the night.
The Next Day I Returned To Him
I did everything normally the next day. I ate breakfast. I went to all my classes. I showed up to work. And then I did something I never did before. I took a bus near his apartment, walked in the dark through the most dangerous section of town to get to him.
Once inside his apartment, I pulled him to the bedroom and cuddled up next to him. Caressing his face and arms I started kissing him. My body began to move in a sexual way that I didn’t know was me. My fingers moved under his shirt and I felt his smooth skin. I didn’t care anymore about my beliefs or my values. I wanted sex.
But then something inside me suddenly switched and I felt my insides shutting down, like I wanted to cry and run and crumble into nothing and disappear into the earth all at the same time. He was already on top of me tearing my clothes off as I begged him to slow down. I was now frozen in terror but he didn’t care. My words did not seem to reach his ears.
The entire experience of the night before began to play out again as I begged him to stop with my quiet “no, we can’t” over and over, words that didn’t seem to make sense anymore. My arms pushed hard again but he was strong. I was not. I wriggled my hips in every direction but I could not find a way out. I inched my body upward until my head was pinned against the wall. He raped me again while I stared at the black sky in the window above my head.
There was no one left to blame but me.
How Do I Make Sense of Returning to Him?!?
What had I done? There was no making sense of this night other than I was at fault and there was something very wrong with me. I couldn’t let my mind touch on it but everything in me knew to keep my shame secret.
Judith Herman (Trauma and Recovery) states that trauma is “any event that overwhelm(s) the ordinary human adaptations to life”. Rape is an experience so dehumanizing, it is nearly impossible to mentally, emotionally, and physically process this life experience at the time – even if you have support from others.
I Returned with a Desperation to Make This Story About Love and Connection
More than any other reason, I returned on a mission to ensure he loved me and wanted me, even if that must happen through sex. Somehow in my mind, this would reverse what was done to me. If love existed, then it could not be rape and my brain could make sense of what happened …as if it was all just a misunderstanding.
Without logic or conscious decisions, I returned for sex, because I ached for love and connection to be part of this story.
Returning to him, and seeking his attention, was a trauma strategy. My need for him to show he loved me drove me with an intensity I didn’t recognize. It felt like life or death that he connected with me, even if through the sex I had refused for months! Then my brain could turn this into something acceptable. If he loved me and cared for me…even if I had to make this happen through sex…it would be worthwhile.
The trauma was not as much about the assault…it was about the betrayal of someone I believed cared for me and would protect me. It was confirmation that those who seemed to care did not care for me. And this deep-rooted sense inside me started very young with my own complex history.
Twisted as it feels to put words to it, returning to him was an attempt to delete the assault from my history. It was so critical in fact for my brain to make this happen, that after being raped a 2nd time I continued to stay with him….still fawning, trying to please him in every way I knew so that he would love me.
I can listen to that answer now. I can honor it now, even if it feels like nobody could understand.
#2 I Returned Because I Was Dissociated
My mind had not yet labeled it as rape. If it was rape I could not possibly keep functioning as a college kid in a rigorous honors academic program working 2 jobs 500 miles away from my family. The choice to return to him that next day was not a conscious choice. My mind knew how to survive.
I continued my college life as if everything was normal. On the surface, I functioned successfully, graduating top of my class. Inside I was numb, disconnected from the world. It was 8 years later before the images of that first night began to piece together in my head and I came to the shocking realization that I had been raped.
Rape is a terrifying experience, whether we come to that full understanding in the moment or years later after holding the terror in our bodies until life crumbles. I now understand that my brain took me out of my body to get through it. Dissociation. To this day, most of my memory of the rapes are as if I was floating on the ceiling at the farthest corner of the rooms.
The decisions made or behavior engaged in while dissociated cannot be in tune with who we truly are. Dissociation occurs because the experiences are too overwhelming to the nervous system. So although we are left with the shame of our choices … we were not totally in control of them. This is our neurobiology – it is how our nervous systems are designed for survival.
#3 I Returned to Reclaim My Autonomy Through Power and Choice
Understanding dissociation now helps me to find compassion for my choices. But the battle in my head often still rages. Why did I not speak up, report him to the police, fight back, or at the very least cut him out of my life!? I often hate myself that I returned. Where was my anger and rage at this man?!?
One element of why I returned to the man who raped me, may have been to reclaim even a fraction of the power he took from me. I needed it to be my choice. Sexual assault sends powerful messages to our minds and bodies that our voices, our choices, our beliefs, and our bodies do not matter. My mind grasped onto an action (returning to him sexually) that felt as if it may reverse these painful messages.
Bessel van der Kolk describes being traumatized as “continuing to organize your life as if the trauma were still going on – unchanged and immutable – as every new encounter or event is contaminated by the past.”.
It doesn’t mean you are not aware that the trauma is over. It means your body feels it is still happening. To the body, which never got to complete what it wanted to do during the trauma, IT IS STILL HAPPENING! This helps me understand not only why I went back once, but why I stayed with him for years, grasping onto the slightest hope of “reversing” what was done to me by making it “my choice”.
Seeing the Resilience Within My Shame
I have spent decades filled with shame for the choices I made…but now I am finding compassion for all the messy ways my mind and body kept me surviving. What I used to see as shameful life decisions and intense regrets…the choices I worked all my life to keep hidden from the world through isolation, depression, and suicidal thoughts…these were my coping and survival strategies.
It may be messy and complicated… and quite impossible to put into language sometimes…but RESILIENCE simply means we found ways to adapt to something really damn hard.