What I remember most is what happened after.
I’m sitting in my car, staring out the windshield. It’s raining, and it’s late, maybe three or four in the morning. The wipers are on, but the car is not. I watch them spread the rain across the windshield (badly on the right side, that wiper has been broken for years). I listen to the rhythmic squee for a while, staring, not quite able to turn the car on and drive myself home. My thoughts don’t seem to want to take an order. I’m not physically hurt, I’m fine. I’m fine. I think I’m fine. But I left my best friend’s house at three or four in the morning in the rain because I needed to get the hell out of there. And now I’m sitting here across from his apartment, listening to a broken windshield wiper, not getting the hell out.
I don’t know how long I sat there before I finally figured out I could turn the car on and go home. Sometimes I try to remember, really get the details in order, sort out what happened, go back to the beginning and think it through till the end, but it’s difficult, like trying to get ants to walk in a straight line. It gets mixed up with other memories—the other times he’d tried to touch me when I didn’t want him to. Or when he pushed me into his room and locked the door behind him. Or trying to leave earlier that same night, sitting on the stairs, my coat half on, him pleading with me to stay, me making him promise nothing would happen. I remember enough, anyway.
When a bad thing happens, you have to survive twice. First, you have to survive the thing itself. You have to be physically alive after the thing has happened. That’s certainly key to the whole process. But then you have to survive again, to get through the consequences of the thing that didn’t kill you. You have to figure out how to be a person in a world where your trust in people or your faith in what you think the world is has been shattered. Survival is a gift, but not always the kind you want. Sometimes it’s like the worst of grandma’s Christmas sweaters, because still existing after a terrible thing happened is confusing and painful and sometimes itchy and definitely comes back every Christmas.
If something like this has ever happened to you, congratulations! If you’re reading this, you are a survivor. But then, of course, there’s everything after. You have to cope. Then you have to forgive yourself for whatever devastation the coping caused in your life. You have to survive your own survival.
How to Use This Book
Surviving the Moment
I hate thinking about what happened to me. I still feel shame burning the back of my throat when I think about how long it took me to realize that what happened was a violation. I wish I’d resisted more, fought, run away. The guy wasn’t even that much stronger than me—he was one of those nerdy beanpole types who wouldn’t raise a hand (but knew how to whittle your self-esteem down to a husk). I wish I’d been able to sit with my feelings and trust my gut and tell that guy to die in a fire. I apologized to him when I told him we couldn’t see each other anymore. I didn’t understand why I felt so repulsed by this nice guy who had violated me. It was confusing. It felt like my fault. Sometimes it still does. Maybe it was. I don’t know.
Writing this book is hard, partly because of how certain I am that you, as you read my story, will judge me for being so stupid and weak. When I sat down to start writing this chapter in the bright new coffee shop in my neighborhood with the sleek counters and gourmet glass coffee bean smelling dome thingies, I opened my computer and promptly burst into tears. The barista very sweetly came by to wipe the table and quietly ask, “You okay, honey?”
It’s just that I don’t know that I have the right to tell this story when so many more horrible violent traumas have happened to so many others. Do I even have the right to my own reaction? Do I deserve to heal from something that someone else may not have found so devastating? How can I claim to know anything about healing when I was so stupid in the first place? (I did not say any of this to the barista. To the barista, I smiled effusively and told her yes and thank you for asking.)
Honestly, I don’t know the answers to these questions. If you want to judge me for what happened, there’s not a damn thing I can do about that. But one thing I do know is that I am far from the only woman to experience one of these creepy nonconsensual sexual experiences that may not have been especially physically violent but that broke something in me anyway. Every woman I know has experienced some level of sexual violation. I know a few of the guys have, too, along with many transgender and nonbinary individuals. Some of us were groped as children and didn’t know what it meant at the time. Some of us have woken up with a date, a friend, or an ex-boyfriend already inside us. Some of us were too drunk to really know what we were consenting to or said yes when we really meant no. Some of us have been verbally abused and manipulated into doing things we didn’t want to do. We’ve been stalked, catcalled, followed home, and felt up at work. Some of us were abducted by strangers and raped in an alley at gunpoint, that happens too. But a lot of our experiences happened at the hands of someone we trusted. However gently we were violated, we were still violated. It changed us for the rest of our lives.
Tend and Befriend
I’m sure I’m not the only survivor who suspected that the fact that we complied with what was happening meant we caused the assault in some way, that we have no right to be angry, or that it was our fault. Well, let me clear that one up once and for all: honey, it was not your fault (nor mine, either). And I’m not just saying that: it’s science!
When we’re stressed, we react with what’s called the fight-or-flight response. When faced with a predator, our bodies flood with stress hormones like adrenaline and norepinephrine and our blood rushes out of our sexual and digestive organs and heads to the limbs, where we can throw some ‘bows or get the F out of the way. As it turns out, though, this type of stress response has mostly only been studied in male animals. Females—that is, mammals with vaginas—were often left out of the research on stress, along with a whole lot of other things that have been studied in labs, too. Guess why? Yup, it’s periods! Female animals tend to have periods, so the hormone fluctuations make our bodies harder to study in clinical trials of anything. Thanks for including only half the population, medical science!
In 2000, Dr. Shelley Taylor et al. published a paper on a type of stress response that seems to affect female animals (humans, rats, sheep, and some primates) disproportionately.1 Taylor doesn’t get into the specifics for how this might affect a transgender individual, but the gender variation in stress responses does seem to be related to hormonal patterns (as opposed to specifically one’s genitals, though pregnancy plays a role). The paper does, however, clarify that it’s not a completely consistent variation across gender lines. We should always be careful when we point to strong differences between the sexes from an evolutionary standpoint. It’s easy enough to be biased, even in scientific research, and, in general, all humans are more similar than they are different. Nevertheless, Taylor’s theory makes a lot of confusing things suddenly start to make sense. In addition to fight-or-flight, female animals can generally display a whole other stress response called “tend and befriend.”
The idea is that female animals are less likely to survive by fighting or fleeing. They may be smaller and/or slower than their attackers, but they also might be pregnant or carrying helpless young. So rather than a rush of adrenaline, some of us get a squirt of oxytocin, a bonding hormone, instead. Oxytocin tends to be inhibited by testosterone and boosted by estrogen, so tend and befriend disproportionately affects women, girls, and other people with female-like hormonal patterns. The “tend” part makes sure we don’t abandon our babies when shit goes down, and the “befriend” part helps us find allies to protect us when we know we can’t protect ourselves. Surely a huge part of why naked humans with their soft nails and rounded teeth have made it this far is because we know how to rely on each other.
Female animals will often turn to each other in times of stress and try to develop networks to protect one another. This is pretty cool, especially considering how our culture tends to pit women against each other in competition (see: any reality TV show), but consider what can happen when someone you already see as an ally attacks you. Your first response may not be to fight and scream. Your instincts might urge you to connect instead—to placate. Appeal. Please. Try to calm him down. Shut up and give him whatever he wants so that he doesn’t kill you. Sound familiar?
For a long time, I believed I had lost my power. Then I believed that asshole stole my power. But maybe neither is true. Maybe my power didn’t go anywhere. Power doesn’t always look like standing up, screaming, or running away. Maybe it’s powerful that I let what was happening play itself out until the moment when I could safely slip out without causing a scene or further aggravating his anger. I always saw it as a weakness that I dissociated and went passive while it was happening, but perhaps it was a very old and actually quite effective survival instinct called tend and befriend that allowed me to get the hell out of there—still alive.
We live in a culture that tends to value men and masculine qualities more than women and feminine qualities. We are used to seeing medicine and evolution through the male gaze, and perhaps we see power that way, too. We need our male and female superheroes to be strong, and most of them can also literally fly—they’ve got fight or flight on lockdown. We tend to assign a wage to labor that is physical or intellectual, but emotional labor like caring for children, cleaning the house, and making plans for the family generally goes unpaid or underpaid. We don’t respect “chick flicks” that depict female characters in the process of learning to connect. We restrict films that show sex and award Oscars to whichever films have the most disturbing violence. We don’t mind pretty frilly things on super thin fashion models but get very uncomfortable with men who want to wear flowy garments or bright colors. Our culture has a problem with honoring and respecting the feminine, whether it comes in a male or female body. So perhaps you and I are conditioned to see tend and befriend as less powerful than fight or flight, even though it is just as powerful. You know how I know that? Because we survived.
I think tend and befriend might help explain a lot of our confusion around sexual violence. If part of our stress-response wiring is to placate and please, it makes sense that some perpetrators might actually think we are consenting, even if we manage to get a “no” out of our mouths at some point during the experience. I know (at least) one woman who avoided having sex with someone by bargaining for a blow job instead. She didn’t exactly come out ahead (pun intended), but the girl survived. We get through these experiences and avoid more explicit violence by pretending it’s okay with us. When we speak up later and say we didn’t want to do what we did, these perpetrators might be surprised because they were looking for and expecting a yes, and placating seemed close enough. No wonder we’re all so lost about what consent means.
I suspect many of us are using this strategy more than we know, not only in sexual situations, but also at home, with our families, with our partners, and even in boardrooms. We know we should probably lean in and talk back and get mad when men interrupt to mansplain back to us what we were just saying, but we often don’t because in a really old place in our tiny little reptilian brains, we know we should be nice because we don’t want to get murdered.
As irrational as this might sound—and, guys, believe me, I know most of you are not out here trying to murder anyone—a lot of women have a very deep fear of our intimate male others, whether this comes from experience, generational violence handed down to us from our great-grandparents, or the ambient information we get from our news and entertainment. Men’s roles are generally limited in our blockbuster films to savior/protector or villain/rapist, so a lot of us have these simplistic roles stuck in our unconscious minds. We never want to consciously believe our loved ones would hurt us, but the truth is, they do—a lot. An overwhelming amount of rape and nonconsensual sex happens with the men we know and trust. Over half of all the murders of women in the US are at the hands of a current or former male partner.2 Congratulations on your recent nuptials! You just gained a life partner, the opportunity to share your Netflix subscription, and a significant increase in your chances of death!
Of course, sexual violence, trauma, and survival responses don’t only happen to women at the hands of men. If anything, we are conditioned to expect women to be victims and to silence men who experience violation. The truth is, all humans have the capacity to be violent and the capacity to be afraid. It’s not only men and women who have to figure out how to survive each other. We live in a world where certain groups have been oppressed and treated with violence by other groups, both historically and currently. Being a person of color, transgender, visibly gay, differently abled, or even just being a smaller-sized man could be reasons to have a range of survival responses ready to go in your pocket. Tend and befriend might be one of them. What if we considered this response normal, effective, and even powerful? We play nice with our attackers and our oppressors because we are trying to survive. It’s not enough and it doesn’t have to be the end of the story, but there can be no healing if we don’t survive to fight (or flee or befriend) another day.
Seeing Your Survival as Powerful
Trauma and the Brain
Trauma is a strange animal. It’s not always big and dramatic; sometimes it’s small and subtle. The definition of trauma has shifted and widened in recent years. Traumatic stress tends to be triggered by witnessing or experiencing actual or threatened violence, according to the International Society for Traumatic Stress Studies.3 What “violence” means isn’t as clear as we might think, either: the World Health Organization defines violence as “the intentional use of physical force or power, threatened or actual, against oneself, another person, or against a group or community, that either results in or has a high likelihood of resulting in injury, death, psychological harm, maldevelopment, or deprivation.”4 Violence can be physical or psychological, and can manifest as injury, threat, or even neglect. Some people are traumatized indirectly or vicariously when a loved one is going through something. For some people, emotional losses like divorce or custody battles aren’t necessarily marked by violence but are traumatic anyway. This can make trauma a little hard to spot and a lot more common than most of us think.
Traumatic stress or PTSD also doesn’t necessarily follow any of these kinds of experiences. If a plane were to crash leaving a number of survivors, only some of them would be traumatized. Some would have traumatic stress reactions that would resolve in a few weeks, others would have the longer-lasting and more serious post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), and still others would be just fine. The classic symptoms of traumatic stress include trouble sleeping, mood swings, nightmares, an enhanced startle response, anxiety, depression, and social withdrawal. It’s common for trauma survivors to have a hard time remembering the traumatic event itself, despite the sudden unbidden flashbacks that happen for some of us. Trauma is triggered by an external event, but ultimately it’s something that happens inside of us.
Trauma shuts down our ability to see the world as safe and predictable. Kids who grow up in an unpredictable environment can have a tough time figuring out how the world is supposed to work in the first place. Being traumatized as an adult can mean losing some of our most precious illusions about the world, like that we’re safe most of the time, that people are trustworthy, or that God is on our side. These comforting perceptions aren’t exact truths about the world, but they are handy: it’s hard to relax when the sky could fall at any moment. I mean—it could. Reading the news makes you feel like the sky is falling right now. The sky is falling for real people all over the world all the time. The world is not only immoral, it’s barely comprehensible. Even physicists don’t totally understand the fundamental principles of how the universe was born and continues to be a thing. But you can’t walk around feeling like you have absolutely no control over anything (even though—and I hate to break it to you—it’s true!). You still need to get to work in the morning, you know?
Being sexually assaulted by my best friend was, to put it mildly, confusing. I denied it for a long time because I didn’t want to face the scary realities it brought up. If my best friend had assaulted me, then how could I ever trust my instincts with men again? How could I trust anyone anymore? If my “no” didn’t matter, then how could I ever stop anyone from doing whatever they wanted to my body? How do you walk around in the world without an intact “no”? The experience broke several core beliefs I didn’t even know I had. In order to heal, I had to look at what had been broken, see if I could glue any of the pieces back together, throw some of them out, and start building a whole new worldview from scratch. This was not easy. I survived the assault, of course, but first, the sky had to fall.
Libido as Life Force
When you’re stressed all the time, whether from trauma or for other reasons, your physical body doesn’t function well. Stress hormones keep telling your body to evacuate the blood and energy in your organs and send it to the limbs so you can fight, run, or freeze. Your rational mind goes into hiding, and your fear brain takes over. Your intestines aren’t able to manufacture your mood hormones properly, and your sexual organs shrink up inside of you like terrified raisins. You might get that tend-and-befriend oxytocin boost, which makes you want to cling to certain people or, I don’t know, get into a relationship with some boring dude you don’t really like because he seems safe and probably won’t rape you. You almost certainly lose your desire for sex. Yes, I said it! it’s a thing. Loss of sexual desire is a normal reaction to being sexually assaulted. Surprising, right?
We are a culture that is obsessed with sex but that doesn’t value libido. We love objectifying people and their body parts, usually in the service of selling something, but we don’t often think about how libido drives us in our day-to-day lives. Libido isn’t just about sex. Libido is about power, passion, intensity, connection, and the sort of life desire that makes you want to take risks and try new things. When St. Augustine first wrote about libido in 426 CE, he used the phrase libido dominandi, which means “will to power” or “dominating lust.”5 In Sanskrit, the word iccha means both desire and will, the representation of what we want and our ability to go for it.6 Iccha-shakti is a phrase that’s sometimes used to mean life force, and it’s related to the energy of the goddess named Shakti, the feminine form of power. People who are genuinely connected to their own sexual energy tend to be powerful—and not in a power-over kind of way, but in the sense that they know who they are and what they want. They are not afraid to try things, to invent, to show up, to make a mess. That freaks us out, so we try to corral libido into the realm of sex alone, where we can contain it and put rules around it and close it away, preferably into heterosexual married middle-class bedrooms.
Feminist critic Audre Lorde writes about the erotic as a “power which rises from our deepest and nonrational knowledge,” a power that is often cut off and silenced in an oppressive society.7 This is an energy of being connected to ourselves, of being unafraid to feel our most intense emotions. Lorde finds this energy in herself within
the open and fearless underlining of my capacity for joy, in the way my body stretches to music and opens into response, harkening to its deepest rhythms so every level upon which I sense also opens to the erotically satisfying experience, whether it is dancing, building a bookcase, writing a poem, or examining an idea.8
When we’re connected to our erotic energy, we have access to our deepest desires and feelings. We’re connected to our own flow, and we’re not trying to stop ourselves from feeling anything. Some of us use sex as a strategy to shut down our feelings, but this isn’t true libido, that’s a craving that comes from a place that wants to avoid feeling. If we’re having sex because we want power over someone or because we’re trading for something else, like intimacy or security, we’re paradoxically shutting down our own libido, our genuine connectedness to who we are and what we want. Sexual energy can be channeled into work, friendships, art, and, sure, building bookcases. Celibate monks and nuns can be deeply connected to this erotic drive and channel it into their spirituality. It’s sexual energy that doesn’t have to be about sex with another person.
After the assault, I lost this energy. It wasn’t just that I didn’t feel like having sex, but I also didn’t really feel plugged into anything. I didn’t have any joy. I felt that I was going through the motions of life, letting other people make my decisions for me. My erotic drive was shut down, pleasure was a great distance away, and I didn’t have the motivation to change anything about my life. This was what I now think of as the fog of trauma. You don’t usually even know you’re in it until you wake up. It took me four years to wake up.
Our erotic energy lives in our deepest places, in our guts and in our genitals. I thought of this when the pop singer Cardi B was asked how she felt on the red carpet at the 2018 Grammy Awards, and she said in an excited singsong voice, “I feel it all! Butterflies in my stomach and vagina!”9 Truly, what a delightful twist on an old adage. Our stomachs and vaginas are the deepest sources for our “yes” and “no” feelings, around sex of course, but also about which projects we want to take on, which people we feel safe around, how to stay close to our ethical convictions. These are the places where things feel right or wrong to us. These are physical and not always rational places—the stomach and vagina, sources of a very true wisdom for women (though I have no doubt men get this feeling, too, in their stomachs and testicles, perhaps).
As it turns out, vaginas have a “pulse” that is measurable in lab settings, which many women have noticed piping up from time to time. The vaginal pulse shows up in all kinds of situations, sexual and otherwise. Naomi Wolf discovered this vaginal beat in her research for her book Vagina: A New Biography; in the book, she interviews women who report feeling it in all sorts of places: while hiking next to a beautiful view, feeling the thrill of the racetrack, listening to music, and crossing the finish line at a marathon. I’ve been paying attention to this recently, and sure enough, it’s right there: I get a little quiver most often when I come across a really good line of writing that rings true for me, or when I look over a really high balcony, or when I make out with boys. Wolf explains that the existence of this vaginal pulse suggests
that a woman’s relationship to her own mind and body is erotic first; that her existential excitement at being alive and responsible to the world around her is erotic first; and that this eros comes before any erotic awakening triggered
by an “other.”10
So Cardi B was onto something there—when we’re connected, safe, and feeling, for lack of a better term, “right” about the world, we get butterflies drumming a beat in our vaginas. When trauma happens, whether it’s sexual in nature or not, it taxes our sense of safety, the normal functioning of our brains and our organs. The beat goes quiet. We’re cut off from our deepest sense of ourselves, our passion, creativity, love, and joy. It’s like someone has killed the butterflies.
Meditation for Sexuality as Life Force Energy
What to Do When a Wolf Has Peed on Your Home
Tracey Lindberg’s novel Birdie is about a young indigenous woman dealing with the consequences of sexual assault alongside the many generational traumas that attend growing up indigenous in Canada, a country that has colonized and oppressed indigenous people for a very long time. The narrative is woven through with scenes like this one:
When she looks back, that old young owl,
She sees that
her home, her tree, had become
ravaged with wolf urine
and twisted with heat.
Curled and gnarled, she is unable to sleep there.
She begins to travel at nights
because she cannot sleep in her home.
She doesn’t know what
She’s lookin’ for
But she keeps goin’ and goin’.11
When I read this, I felt a hot light run through my heart, and yup, right down into my vagina. It describes so perfectly what it feels like to be sexually assaulted, to feel that someone has broken into your home, defiled it, and then didn’t even stick around to see what would happen next.
Our first and only true homes are our bodies. There are no other true homes. But when we do not feel that our bodies truly belong to us, when we don’t feel safe in them, how can we rest? How can we sleep at night or replenish our resources with our kitchen counters covered in wolf urine? So we flee, we run away from our ruined homes, we try to avoid our own bodies, to get away from the smell and the shame of the violation.
When we can’t go home, we can’t ever turn off the stressed-out sympathetic nervous system state to repair and recover. We don’t want to stop and restore ourselves. It’s too painful to slow down to rest and feel our feelings. Instead we distract ourselves with work and create more anxiety in our lives, so we have something to focus on that isn’t the defilement at the center of our beings. We do not want to sit with our feelings because our feelings are very, very bad. We can’t feel sexual when we don’t feel safe. Neither can we digest. So what happens when we’re traumatized, hypervigilant, and super stressed after a wolf peed all over our homes? Low sexual desire. And sometimes diarrhea.
In order to heal, we have to go home. We have to clean up all the wolf piss and figure out how to get the smell out. It’s infuriating to have to clean up someone else’s mess, but that’s what we have to do. The act of the cleaning doesn’t absolve the wolf. Rather, it’s an act of love for your own home, your body. For me, the process of cleaning and recovery within my body was a more loving practice than I had ever experienced within myself before. My home is more mine than it’s ever been.
This is challenging work, and we can’t force ourselves to be ready for it. I think it took me so long partly because I didn’t start out with a really strong sense of being at home in my body. Hitting puberty was confusing, not only because of all the hormones, but because of how my body was suddenly out there, being perceived as sexual, commented on, and grabbed. Becoming a sexual being came along with all kinds of scary stuff, like adult men catcalling my eleven-year-old body on the street, grabbing my ass in public places, or preying on high school girls to take them into the park to “practice” kissing. (Guys, I did this! I went into a park with a strange man and kissed him so I would learn to be better at kissing boys! Can you even believe I wasn’t murdered? No one tell my mother.)
Growing up in a world that objectifies and preys on young women isn’t exactly conducive to feeling secure about what belongs to you and what doesn’t. My tend-and-befriend strategy up to that point had been pretty much to say yes to everything so I could seem cool and game and, you know, not get murdered, but I always thought I had a “no” I could use if I needed it, like an ace up my sleeve. But when I finally pulled the ace out, some asshole peed all over it anyway. My body was a place that had never been good, had never been whole, had never really been mine, and might as well have been soaked to the floorboards in wolf pee.
Body as Home
Addiction as a Survival Strategy
So what do we do when home has been colonized by someone else’s choices? How do we handle it when we can’t face cleaning up someone else’s territorial piss? Well, we get out that psychic Febreze, cover up the smell, deny everything, and figure out a way to keep goin’ and goin’.
For a lot of us, this looks like addiction. Addiction doesn’t always mean alcoholism or drug dependency, though of course it can. Addiction often means goin’ and goin’, it means doing whatever we can to avoid feeling our feelings. We drink, we smoke. We gamble. We shop. We exercise too much or work to exhaustion or stay in bed all day. We binge on TV. I had a close relationship with the show Grey’s Anatomy during a stretch of my survival phase—and thankfully all fifteen seasons (and counting) are available on Netflix.
I remember how comforting it was to feel so strongly about these fictional characters, because it felt so much less complicated than being in my own mind, my own body, and my own relationships. Addictive behaviors like these can be a boon in a lot of ways because they can turn the volume down on the painful thing you somehow both can’t remember and can’t stop thinking about.
There’s a lot of shame that comes along with addiction, but I think it’s actually pretty amazing that human beings have the ability to find tools that help us dissociate or numb ourselves. Sometimes our own minds are absolutely unbearable, and we have this almost mystical ability to exit our bodies and exist on some other plane when the plane we’re on sucks too much. It’s an incredible tool for survival.
Of course, the tools we use to numb and dissociate also tend to have some pretty serious consequences, not the least of which is that these tools tend to self-perpetuate at the cost of absolutely everything else. After the assault, I was diagnosed with Generalized Anxiety Disorder, which sounds like a problem of modern life where you just feel anxious all the time for no particular reason—which is exactly what it is. One of the fun consequences of this disorder is that when I get anxious in general, just kind of anxious about life and the fact that I have a vulnerable set of guts, I pick up more work and take on more appointments, which also makes me feel anxious—but in a more familiar way: a way that I chose, that I have control over. Logical, right? It sort of works, but it pins my nervous system into a spin cycle that makes me feel—get this—generally anxious. It’s a short-term solution that exacerbates a long-term problem.
When I do this, my reptilian brain—that is, the very old, primitive, survival-oriented part of my brain that is driven by fear, emotion, and the present moment—is in control. This is the oldest part of the brain structure, which I sometimes affectionately call “Lizard Brain.” It connects directly to our nervous systems and is a basic structure that we share with reptiles. It is much louder and more powerful than my Wise Brain—the newer, more reason-oriented part of the brain including the neocortex, which takes into account the past, the future, and, you know, actual reality. Wise Brain needs things like good food, rest, and a general sense of safety to work properly. Lizard Brain avoids those things so we never have to be in a state where we might feel our feelings. I think it’s vitally important to understand that while Lizard Brain might be messing up our lives in some pretty serious ways, it is also desperately trying to help us.
There’s something for me about smoking cigarettes when I’m feeling really low. I once heard that we carry grief in our lungs, and that feels so true for me—it’s like I want to fill a certain void with horrible toxic smoke when I’m in my lagoon of sadness. I remember going through a heartbroken phase where I would take my dog out, cigarette and lighter hidden carefully in one hand, and go to the farthest end of my neighborhood where I could be sure no one would notice me, peer around for any onlookers, sit down on the pavement in the rain, and light up, my dog looking at me like I was crazy. I’d puff away at my shameful habit, stoppering the tears with nicotine and tar, hiding from everyone, as pathetic as possible—and inevitably a neighbor would notice my dog (an implacably chipper Pomeranian mix) and cheerfully say hello, interrupting my high-drama reverie. Smoking seems to pull me down to earth, returning me to my heavy body, letting me settle fully into my feet. I’m also quite sure no one in my life would ever tell me to light up, so I can be 100 percent sure I’m making a choice about my body that is completely mine. It’s terrible for me, and I usually regret it immediately, but for a moment, it makes me feel better.
It’s not just the cigarettes, either. I’ve gotten drunk because the spins and then the next day’s brutal hangover gave me something other than my feelings to focus on for a while. I’ve had a string of one-night stands with people I didn’t really like because it made me feel powerful, like I was in control of my body, even if it didn’t feel good. Even if it hurt. When the high wore off enough for Wise Brain to wake back up, I’d feel a bolt of shame, and that was all Lizard Brain needed to get back in charge and take me through the cycle all over again. I’d work on it, try to do better, fail, and then say, “Fuck it” and find some other way to avoid myself.
For me, the key to getting out of the cycle was targeting the shame. Lizard Brain is not my enemy. Lizard Brain is trying to help me survive. When I can see my addictive behaviors as the desperate attempts to avoid pain that they are, I can thank my Lizard Brain for helping to protect me and then try to figure out a way to address the pain, be brave, and face myself anyway. We need to understand that if we have addictive tendencies, that’s because we are still trying to fucking survive, even if the thing we’re surviving happened years ago. We have to see and appreciate and forgive that in order to move on.
Feeling Safer When You’re Freaking Out
When the Butterflies Call You Home
The good news is, no one, not even your self-sabotaging habits, can completely kill the butterflies in your vagina (or testicles, or wherever they live). Sometimes it takes years or even decades to get through the survival phase, but eventually the body will rebel against our coping mechanisms in some way or another in an attempt to get us to face ourselves. The butterflies will stage a revolt.
A system that is constantly stressed is suffering, and it will make that suffering known. Denial is a subtle form of constant stress that taxes the immune system over time and can literally make us sick. Denial is not a great long-term strategy. I often think of those first four years after the trauma as a kind of sleepwalking, a total avoidance of my feelings, but it wasn’t really that simple. My nervous system was fighting me all the way. I would have terrifying recurring dreams of being chased by a man I had to kill before he killed me, or about huge hulking killer whales swimming just beneath the surface of a deep body of water, about to rise up and consume me. I startled a lot, and while I never quite had a panic attack, it felt like my heart was always beating just a little too fast. I would get stress hives and long flus that would force me to lie down for weeks. I am a yoga teacher in my thirties who got pneumonia twice. Pneumonia! It was kind of embarrassing. I’m in the wellness industry, guys. My body would find some highly dramatic way to make me sit down and feel my feelings. I’d just have to lie there, ill on my couch, with the memories coming back and my stomach cramping, and cry.
There were two triggers that helped me start to clue in that maybe I should pay attention to all these physical reactions. The first was a pamphlet created by the poets Mindy Nettifee and Rachel McKibbens that was being passed around within a community with which I was involved. It had been discovered that one of our prominent male members was repeatedly raping young women in the community. Everyone was so shocked (as if that never happens). The pamphlet had an image of a woman shooting rainbows out of her eyes on it, and it listed different ways you could be assaulted: when you’re unconscious, when you’re drunk, when you’ve said no, when you’ve been coerced or manipulated, when there’s a power dynamic between the two people that confuses consent. I remember reading and rereading this pamphlet. It seemed to speak to some deep place of truth in my body, asking me to pay attention. The butterflies were flapping their little wings as hard as they could. The pamphlet challenged my idea that rape only happened at gunpoint. It suggested that what had happened to me was not, in fact, okay, and that I’d been struggling to swallow something that was as toxic as it tasted.
The second thing that happened was that one of my best friends was raped—yep, by her ex-boyfriend, a friend at the time, whom she trusted. I found myself obsessing about it, feeling much more upset than was appropriate to the situation. Don’t get me wrong—it’s appropriate to be fucking upset when a friend is raped. It’s appropriate to be angry, vengeful, and sorrowful. But I was more like shaking all day and couldn’t sleep or exactly breathe. I was breaking out into hives and couldn’t stop crying. I was reacting more than my friend was, as if something was happening to me, not to her. I was shaken enough that I called the sexual assault crisis line and found myself explaining that something similar had happened to me. I had to see it happen to someone else before I could acknowledge that it was my story, too. Apparently, it’s easier to keep our eyes open with the ones we love than with our own selves.
It certainly didn’t feel like it at the time, but I’ve come to understand that my pneumonias, my anxiety, my startle response, and my nightmares were in a sense my erotic energy trying to bust up against all my doors and duct tape trying to keep them trapped in the basement. It was the butterflies, tired of sleeping, wanting to wake up and speak to me through my vagina. It was the energy of life, insisting on finding a way to live.
Listening to the Nervous System
The Change Process
Now, years and a lot of healing work later, my butterflies are pretty healthy and hale. They respond very well to being listened to, honored, and allowed to fly freely (but they also make me cry all the time). They have a healthy home where they can rest and regenerate. They survived, too.
I needed to let the butterflies rest for a while. I needed to be in denial and to smoke cigarettes and watch hours and hours of strong female surgeons having their hearts broken on TV. I even needed those wrong relationships I kept getting into: they weren’t the right people for me, but they helped me feel secure enough in my life that I could start thinking about getting that mop out and cleaning up what had been defiled. None of it was wasted time. It took exactly as long as it took.
I’m an impatient person, and I always want everything to be better right now, but it’s taken me a long time to realize that sometimes it takes me a long time to realize things. Everything has its own pace. The stages of change theory (or the transtheoretical model of change12) lays out the process that anyone has to go through before they can make any real change in their lives. This theory comes up often in recovery programs where people are addressing an addictive behavior, but it applies to everything from opening up to love to getting your butt to the gym more often. It consists of five steps: precontemplation, contemplation, preparation, action, and maintenance.
In the precontemplation stage, you’re living your life with no idea you have a problem. In the contemplation stage, you start to consider that you might maybe possibly have a problem. In the preparation stage, you set yourself up with whatever you’ll need to make the change, like buying gym clothes or researching counselors. In the action stage, you’re doing it, you’re making the change in real time. The maintenance stage is when you keep it going sustainably, when it becomes a new habit you don’t have to think about too much. Notice that there are three whole steps before you actually start doing anything differently. That’s more than half of the steps! No wonder our New Year’s resolutions never work: we don’t even start thinking about them until December 31. We need a lot of time to integrate and process the possibility of changing something before anything can actually happen.
Some people include relapse as a stage of change. Inevitably, when we start doing something differently in our lives, we stumble. Our strategies for survival are old and powerful, and we use them because they work. When things are extra stressful, it’s natural to fall back on what we know makes us feel better immediately. It’s tough if this happens, but relapse can be a valuable stage of change, because once we’ve laid the groundwork and seen what it feels like to live differently, the relapse can illuminate how far we’ve come and remind us of why we don’t want to go back.
The other night I was talking to my friend who had also been raped about how she felt in the years after her experience. For her, too, there was a long drought of denial and avoidance. I didn’t know what was happening for her during that time, but I do remember she was withdrawn and our friendship was very distant for a long time. She knows the trauma fog well. She said, “I think back on that time sometimes, and you know, it was easier. It was less stressful, less confusing, less complicated. But it’s better now, even though it’s harder. At least now I can feel.” I know it’s been hard for her, and it still is, but when she started to admit what had happened and what it meant, her desire started to come back. I’ve seen her joy and her sense of humor returning as she cackles at TV shows or at baseball games. I know she cries and struggles and panics sometimes, but she also laughs now. She laughs all the time. She survived. Her butterflies are alive and well.
So survive we must. However long it takes, we need to create a container of safety before we can start dealing with the devastation of sexual assault. We need to see that whatever we had to do to survive at the time was what we had to do, and we survived, goddammit. It doesn’t matter if we smoked ten thousand cigarettes or dated all the wrong people or pushed away everyone we cared about or drank ourselves to the bottom of the ocean. Our desire, our power, our creativity, our ability to love, connect, fuck, and feel don’t completely die unless we completely die. Whatever happened, if we’re still alive, we can heal.