Carrie

Her Story

Carrie looked like the all-American girl. That was my first thought when I saw her in the waiting room. But she seemed frozen to the chair. I took her hand and led her to my office. She sat like a robot. Neither of us spoke. She was a deer in the headlights.

“Start wherever you want to, Carrie. Tell me whatever comes to mind.”

“I decided to take a vacation with a friend, a guy, Mark. We kinda met and dated a year and a half ago. He’d randomly text me and just say, ‘Hello.’

I had just ended a long-term relationship with Patrick. I so badly wanted to book a vacation to go to Atlanta and see my best girlhood friend, Amanda. She and this other friend of ours, Jess, lived and worked there.

Mark said he’d go with me.

We arrived on a Saturday afternoon and all had lunch together. We had a great time. Mark and I went back to our hotel room and showered and got ready for dinner.

We went to this cool new country and western place. My friends and their boyfriends and two other couples and Mark and me. We met a couple friends of one of the guys. One was a guy named Pete. Within the first two seconds this kid creeped me out, but I was friendly and made small talk. I can remember him trying to ask me to impress me if he should get a Ferrari or a Lamborghini. I asked him what he did for a living.

He told me he worked for a phone company.

We walked to two other bars. Amanda and Jess and I laughed together and danced together all night. We were all too intoxicated to drive, so we decided to take a cab back to Amanda’s apartment complex where she and Jess and their boyfriends all lived.

I remember partly falling asleep in the cab and waking up to fight about who was going to pay for it. At that point I was uncomfortable with dealing with Mark and his ‘allegations’ about going back to the hotel room together. So Amanda took me to her apartment where I fell asleep on her couch.

Mark threw a fit like a baby and wanted me to feel bad that he was taking a cab back to our otel room. Thinking he was throwing a good temper tantrum, he took a cab and left me there.

Amanda came back to check on me and put clean sheets on her bed and had her boyfriend pick me up and carry me to her room. They left and went to his apartment across the hall.

Next thing I knew, I half woke up and someone was taking my clothes off. I couldn’t move. I couldn’t open my eyes. I knew I had to do something, but I couldn’t. It was like my body was in shock. I drifted out, and when I came back, it was because I felt someone inside me.

I told him to get the fuck off me. How dare he take advantage of me? I remember sobbing and thinking I had to do something, but where was I? Where were my clothes? Where was my purse with my phone? Who would I call? I was too embarrassed and too drunk. Who would believe me? I had to wait.

A couple of hours later I woke up, immediately crying. I started to panic.

I started to remember what happened. But what did happen? Was I hurt? Did I hurt? Where were my clothes with my purse and my cell phone?

Who actually did this to me?

There was a door closed which was Jess’s bedroom. I had to suck up my embarrassment and ask them for clothes and for help.

I knocked softly on the door. I waited for an answer as I stood there with a down comforter wrapped around me and tears streaming down my face.

To my astonishment, Pete answered the door. He asked me if I was crying and I ignored him, asking him what the fuck happened last night. He stared with a blank face at me. I spotted my clothes and purse, dressed in two seconds and ran across the hall, calling Amanda. I don’t remember what I said to her. I know I said in a panicky voice‘I’m not sure what happened.’

I have a flashback of two things. One, waking up to find someone taking off my clothes and thinking I had nothing to worry about. Someone was taking off my clothes but there was no way anything would happen. I was not in control of my body and no one would take advantage of that. Two, feeling someone inside me. This was very uncomfortable and I knew I needed someone to stop. How could they do this to me? It felt like I couldn’t move. I couldn’t believe that someone would believe that I wanted this. But it hurt. And I couldn’t move. I finally got the strength to say, ‘What the fuck. Get off me!’

Telling Amanda that, I couldn’t believe this. I think my mind and my body were in shock.

Amanda got her boyfriend and we tried to piece what we could together.

I said Mark went back to the hotel in a cab. I remembered feeling too uncomfortable going back to the hotel with him. I knew I had too many drinks and didn’t want to put myself in a bad situation.

Raging, pissed, Amanda walked over to her apartment to Pete and said something like ‘What did you do to her?’ Pete didn’t know. Amanda asked if he had sex with me and he said, ‘If she said I did, then I did.’

Amanda told Pete we were going to the hospital and the truth would come out.

Amanda held my hand and we cried the whole way to the hospital.

While we were waiting at the hospital, Amanda called Mark. She told him something bad happened to me and he asked, ‘With Pete?’ She wanted to know why he’d say that. He said I told him last night that Pete was creepy and then when I fell asleep in the car, Pete was rubbing my leg. Mark told him to stop, but Pete actually did it twice.

We walked back into the exam room and a very sweet nurse started asking me a million questions. She asked me if I wanted to press charges and I wasn’t sure. I wanted to think maybe it didn’t happen or maybe it didn’t go really far for a long period of time. I knew I felt him inside me, I just was hoping the nurse would tell me it was all a bad dream. As she examined me, the awakening news was when she told me, ‘Wow. I don’t think we’ve ever collected this much semen.’

I almost threw up. Amanda and I both started bawling. I just kept saying, ‘It’s real. I can’t believe it. I’m a statistic. I can’t believe this happened to me. Intimacy is so special for me. Will I be scarred forever?’

The police officers and the volunteers from rape crisis were all very kind and helpful to Carrie. When she and Amanda got back to the apartment complex, her friends were standing outside waiting for her. The girls got her in the bathtub and the guys got on line to change her flight home. Amanda’s boyfriend took her aside and talked to her. He was helpful, Carrie says, with tips about a therapist. He also told her she wasn’t responsible for any of this. He said no guy, friend or boyfriend, has the right to expect anything from a girl. All her friends told the detective that Carrie was not the kind of girl to have sex with a guy without a long-standing, deep relationship. When Carrie got off the plane at home, her father was waiting for her with flowers, a card and tears in his eyes. Carrie said the only time she’d ever seen him cry was at his mother’s funeral and she didn’t remember him ever buying anyone flowers, not even her mother.

Her Signs

Guilt was Carrie’s major symptom. She knew she made some mistakes. She said she shouldn’t have traveled with someone she didn’t know very well, because it was in preventing something happening with him that she set herself up for something happening later and with someone else. She shouldn’t have had so much to drink. She shouldn’t have put herself in a vulnerable situation.

That’s all true, I agreed. But what happened, rape, is a criminal act. No matter what we do, whether we dance down the street naked at three in the morning or sleep on a park bench, we do not deserve to be the victim of a crime. Just because you carry a purse doesn’t mean you are complicit in having your purse snatched. Just because you own a house doesn’t mean you are agreeable to being broken into and robbed. Just because you’re driving alone in a convertible doesn’t mean you are asking to be car-jacked. Human behavior, from the most cautious to the most foolhardy, has nothing to do with being at the wrong place at the wrong time with the wrong person. Criminals don’t wear badges that say, “Hi, I’m one of the bad guys.”

I remember, in fact, seeing a picture of a man who had abducted and murdered a number of little girls. He was wearing a herringbone blazer, white shirt and tie. He was very nice looking. I stared and stared at his picture because I knew, in the wrong place at the wrong time, I would have talked to him. He looked absolutely normal. He just happened to be a sociopath.

People often blame themselves and each other for being victimized as well as for accidents. “Weren’t you looking? Were you going too fast? Were you fiddling with the radio?” Now why on earth do you suppose they’re called “accidents”? Because they are accidental, not intended or premeditated. No one says, “I think I’ll skid into that nice big, red stop sign over there and bash up my car and maybe break my nose.” As accidental as accidents are, so, too, is it accidental who becomes a crime victim and who, through nothing but dumb luck, doesn’t.

Carrie was afraid. She felt absolutely paranoid about leaving her apartment and walking to her car. She hated leaving her job in the dark. She couldn’t go to the mall or to the grocery store alone. And she definitely couldn’t sleep. Every sound woke her and then she lay awake shaking and terrified that “something bad” was going to happen.

She didn’t have bad dreams or flashbacks. She battled the unknown. What else happened? How did he get my jeans off? Why couldn’t I move?

The hospital doctor had ordered blood work. He wanted to check for drugs which might have immobilized Carrie. Had someone, Pete or somebody else, put something in one of Carrie’s drinks? Adding to Carrie’s fear was the inexplicable fact that the hospital lost her blood work. It simply disappeared. Had Pete gotten into the hospital and destroyed it? That seemed ludicrous, but so did the fact that her results vanished.

Carrie withdrew from life other than her family commitments and work. She continued going to church every Sunday, having dinner at her grandparents’ house, and shopping with her mom, but she didn’t date and didn’t drink at all for almost a year. When she did start dating again, she would meet someone somewhere, arriving in her own car and driving herself home.

Carrie pressed charges and that caused her a lot of anxiety and a lot of second guessing. Was it the right thing to do? What if Pete hadn’t really meant it or if he was truly sorry and her pressing charges would ruin his life? Maybe he’d lose his job and be labeled a sexual predator? What if the case went to trial and she had to tell her story in front of a jury? They’d all sit there judging her and deciding that she was a bad girl who had “asked for it.” Every time a new part of the criminal process came around, Carrie’s anxiety rose.

Her Steps

I had been to a Belleruth Naparstek workshop two weeks before Carrie came in my door. The name of the workshop was “Reversing Panic Attacks, Acute Stress and PTSD.” As they say in comedy, timing is everything.

Belleruth Naparstek believes that guided imagery is a powerful tool in healing PTSD. She suggests from her massive research that trauma is stored in the body as an undiluted mass. Trauma is not something that happens to us cognitively, and therefore talk therapy, cognitive therapy, is not completely effective. (I have not found this to be so, but I will admit it is a slow process.)

Symbol and metaphor, she recommends, are a safer, kinder more efficient method for working with PTSD survivors. We need to use immersive right-brained techniques, not the logical, rational tools of the left brain. Imagery takes us to an altered state beyond clock time and gives us a multi-sensory approach which is body based. We have long known that PTSD symptoms are stored in the senses as the smell of his after shave, the sound of a fire truck that went by in the midst of the trauma, the feel of something scratchy like whiskers, just to name some examples. If trauma is stored in the senses, then trauma will be dislodged through the senses, too.

Naparstek is a Jungian. It was Carl Jung who said that we humans process information in terms of archetypal themes and figures. Jung proposed that story, fairy tale and prayer constitute the ground for healing. Clarissa Pinkola Estes wrote her beautiful Women Who Run With the Wolves based on these same ideas. She and Naparstek agree with the Jungian concept that we need a non-ordinary, sacred space, some magical or mystical or divine energy, and a ritual of transformation so we can shed the old trauma memories stuffed inside us, and create and integrate anew.

As we’ve said before, there is scientific, neurophysiological and biophysical research and data explaining what happens in the brain and in the body. I encourage you to read about this and learn about it if it interests you. For many of us, it is sufficient to know that things actually change in our brains and bodies when we’re traumatized. We have to reverse those physical and biological rushes and create new pathways to understanding life and our ability to deal with it.

Fascinating new studies are finding that some medications, beta-blockers for one, when given to a trauma victim in the emergency room, can halt the brain from storing trauma as trauma. We can medically interrupt the trauma response. These developments will be fascinating to watch.

Because I was newly acquainted with Belleruth Naparstek’s ideas and Carrie seemed such a likely candidate, I asked her if she would be willing to try some guided imagery. I explained my understanding of why it might be helpful for her. Guided imagery, then, became the first step Carrie and I took in helping her heal from her trauma.

At each appointment she talked about where she was in her process, what she was feeling, what she was fearing, what she had tried in terms of self-care and self-talk. In the last fifteen minutes or so, I put on some relaxation music and I read to her from Belleruth Naparstek’s texts of guided imagery exercises. Carrie was, indeed, transported to another plane, definitely out of clock time and real space and she reported she found an unprecedented place for relaxation and safety. (Invisible Heroes is the Naparstek book that I use. There are also tapes of her exercises, but she recommends that the individual therapist’s voice might be more effective for some clients.)

Carrie, as you have read, also immediately began a journal. “I’m writing and starting a journal because my therapist that I met with yesterday said it would be helpful for me” was her first entry. I did and I do. I suggested to Carrie that she write down everything that happened in as much detail as she could remember, not judging what she was writing or editing it, but simply writing it out of her body and onto paper. That way, weeks or months later, she wouldn’t have to try to recollect the bits and pieces, nor would she need to store them in her memory. “Write it down and don’t look at it unless you need it for something” was what I suggested to her. It was Carrie’s word for word journal entries which became the basis of her story here. Indeed, after she wrote the trauma down, she never looked at it again. She handed me her journal without ever needing to revisit the sequence of events.

Carrie did a number of things to feel safer in her apartment. She got a roommate. A male. A friend of a friend who was well-known to her family and who had a girlfriend. This was strictly a business acquaintance. Because she wasn’t allowed to have a dog, she got a cat. Feeling the attack cat might be a bit ineffectual, she also had a security system installed. This really helped her sleep, since it guaranteed that she would not be surprised in the middle of the night. In addition, her dad put a good, heavy lock on her bedroom door. Don’t even ask if all these things aren’t just crutches. When you break a leg, there’s a reason why you use crutches for a while. So it is in other cases, as well.

Carrie became much more cognizant of her surroundings and now walks out of work or a store only in the daylight or with someone else. She was given a pepper spray keychain by a friend, and she holds it and her car keys in her hands at all times. She is prepared to hit the panic button on her keychain or spray anyone who surprises her. Carrie will ask questions later. Where previously embarrassment was a deterrent to good security practices, she is now willing to risk embarrassment if it means keeping herself safe.

Carrie is determined to use her experience to help others. It is with her permission and encouragement that I have used her journal verbatim. She is hoping to give speeches to young girls about their own safety and crime prevention. This bright, resilient, young woman is doing what it takes to transition from victim to survivor. She is going to make this trauma count for something by doing everything in her power to save others from her own nightmare.

My Story

Would that all trauma stories had an ending like this. But, then, not many had a beginning like this. Carrie was predisposed to recover from her trauma. She had no early childhood trauma. She came from a strong, loving, intergenerational family. She had a firm and helpful (read: non-guilt inducing) faith background and she had a great deal of healthy self-esteem. This college graduate was working two jobs, dressed to the nines, had a ton of friends and felt good about herself physically, mentally and socially.

When the trauma occurred, Carrie had supportive friends who rallied around her. The hospital personnel, the police officers, and the rape crisis staff all treated her with dignity and lack of judgment. She was never blamed for being a victim. Finally, this trauma was out of the realm of her entire life’s experiences. The later the trauma and the stronger the psychic house one has built when the trauma happens, the greater the likelihood of full and complete recovery.

At this writing, Carrie has a new boyfriend. They dated for a while and slid easily into love. They spent the night together and had sex before she had gotten up the nerve to tell him about her trauma. She cried afterward, silently, trying not to let him know, and in the middle of the night, she woke him to tell him she had to go home. He was puzzled, but walked her to the car and kissed her goodnight and told her how enchanted he was. They spent the next night together, and this time there was no trauma and no need to escape. They’ve been together ever since.

She told him about the rape and the fact that someone named Pete had been sent to prison for what he had done to her. Her boyfriend, of course, immediately offered to do Pete bodily harm. Testosterone is so predictable. She described Pete and asked her boyfriend to never question her if she says she has to leave a restaurant or a bar or a play or a baseball game because Pete, or more likely, someone with similar physical characteristics appears. Of course, he would honor her need to be safe and he would protect her in every way possible. For the second time since the trauma, she saw a guy who doesn’t usually cry, cry with her and for her.

She is feeling stable and strong. She is happy and healthy. I wish all case studies ended this way. But, again I stress, they are much more likely to end this way if they begin this way.

Carrie says she will always stay in therapy. She loves the safe place to say anything and be accepted. She never realized how important it was to have an objective ear and heart to listen to her fears and woes and dreams and silliness. She is looking for and applying for a job which is more suited to her strengths. If asked seriously, I believe Carrie would say she does not regret her trauma because it taught her so much and helped her to believe in herself and her resiliency. I know this new knowledge and the additional coping skills she acquired will always be an asset to her. She was an amazing girl when she came into therapy, and she is an amazing woman now. Trauma demands that we grow up and grow into who we have become. Carrie did. It will serve her well all her life.

One additional comment about Carrie as an example of a survivor of rape or incest or any kind of sexual abuse. The body has what is called “tissue memory.” This means that the body itself stores sensations of pain and pleasure. The body can’t tell the difference between the touch of a rapist and the touch of a devoted lover. The body simply knows what feels good and what feels bad. This is an essential issue to any man or woman who is with any woman or man who has been sexually abused.

I will frequently ask a significant other to come in and let me talk to him or her about some precautions that could be taken to keep flashbacks from occurring. These precautions center around making sure your lover knows it’s you. Talk to him or her. Do not surprise him or her. No sudden moves, no coming up from behind, and no jumping out. The survivor of abuse must have a chance to know who is doing the touching. Use soft lights and keeping engaged through conversation and eye contact. These things reassure the survivor that he or she is safe now. This is absolutely essential.

Carrie and I spent a great deal of time talking about what it might be like to have sex again. We talked about tissue memory and the possibilities of flashbacks, and

I suggested to her that she keep her mind engaged, keep present, and keep her eyes open.

I also talked to her about something which plagues many survivors of sexual assault:

Sometimes there are aspects of the sexual contact which were pleasant. The guilt of this is often overwhelming. “How could I have possibly enjoyed any part of that? What’s wrong with me?” Nothing is wrong with you. Your body can’t tell the difference.

Your body acted in the only way it knows how--physically. Your body didn’t make an emotional or a moral decision to enjoy some portion of a brutal, despicable event. Your body reacted physically.

These two areas of awareness, precautions for significant others and the possibility of remembering some pleasure from something awful, are incredibly helpful for survivors since they may prevent problems which could grow and fester if left unacknowledged.