Quite the injunction, that.
I know that one ingredient in that jello/cement mix had to do with who “I” am, what is “MY” voice. I knew inside that mine was getting mixed up with others, more and more others as the days were going, and I didn’t quite know what to do about or with that. There is the cold hard fact that perspective changes from different angles, so step away and walk around it a bit, Tina…see what you see from someplace else.
Speak the truth, even if your voice shakes.
When you grow up without a voice, when you live as an adult without a voice, you forget you can even have one. When you’ve been told you’re not thinking/saying/meaning what you are thinking/saying/meaning, you learn you can’t trust your own thoughts/feelings/actions, because you apparently don’t even know what’s going on inside your own head or in your own life, you worthless waste of air you.
And when if, by some miracle, you find those who told you what you were thinking/saying/meaning/feeling/doing are no longer there to inform you of that…..it feels like a huge abyss. A void that you are lost in. And depending on the moment, depending on who you are in places you don’t even know you can be, you either stumble around looking for the light switch, or you freeze in place and pray someone turns it on. Sometimes you do both by turns.
And people wonder why the abused stay in their situations. It’s survival instinct, raw and base. You don’t know jack about living “out there”, in “the real world”, where people interact and every moment must be called into question, because every moment, every intent of your life has been, and you’ve been told ad nauseum that nothing you know or think is real or right or true or even vaguely accurate. You cannot trust yourself because all you’ve thought about anything is wrong and the only one who knows what is real, what is fact or truth or accurate, is the abuser.
Having been out five years now, I am convinced it is a big part of why most victims go back. Why they literally cannot stay away. When he/she is helped out they are (hopefully) hugged and helped with provisions and some counselling, but all too soon you had better be ready to enter society and They Don’t Know How. They might not even know how to grocery shop without being told what to do, because that’s how it’s always worked.
My first grocery shopping experience 4.5 yrs ago triggered a PTSD episode I couldn’t snap out of in the middle of the cereal aisle in HEB. Thankfully one of my rescuers had gone with me, and had gone to a different aisle to ‘speed things up’.
Don’t hurry a survivor. Not in the healing process, and not in the grocery aisle. We process things differently, when we can process at all. Sometimes all you can do is stand there and stare at the Lucky Charms like they are going to eat you instead of the other way around.
It took me at least a week to snap out of that.
It’s taken me 5 years to realize, to REALLY REALIZE, that it’s OK for me to have a voice that is all my own. That I am actually supposed to. That I’m not going to be eaten alive for doing so (being eaten alive would be mild compared to what one actually fears because they’ve been there). That I don’t have to mimic someone else, anyone and everyone else. That I can trust myself to mean what I say, and that I know what I mean. That if I say “the sky is blue”, I am saying it because it actually is.
And if I say, “You, too, have a voice, can trust your voice, and that is right and good” to my fellow victim/survivors out there…I mean that too. Be safe, if you are still there, in that awful place. And know it doesn’t have to be that way.
There is life after.
The Healing Homestead 
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