Blog Post 3: Why Should You Trust Me?
Content Advisory
This blog contains details (not many, and none explicit) about the author’s history of sexual assault, abuse and trauma.
This blog is a suite of love letters to you, my fellow survivors of extreme trauma.
But what authority do I have to speak to you? And why should you care?
I am not a therapist
To be blunt, I am not a therapist or a doctor. I cannot help you heal. I am a fellow survivor.
My experience in the field of trauma
From a professional perspective, most of my authority comes from my past career. See the About Me page on my website and my second blog to learn more about my professional authority and publications. See if they speak to you.
There are other reasons to consider trusting me. I’ve spent years of my volunteer life working with and for survivors of sexual violence, torture, war trauma, domestic violence and other extreme trauma. I’ve written about trauma issues in textbooks, training manuals, newspapers and professional publications.
I will never take advertising or money for this blog or project. I do this work in a spirit of giving back.
Perhaps my greatest credential is healing deeply from tremendous trauma and coming to a place of happiness and peace.
But in order for you to trust me, I feel I have tell you a little of my story (if you care to read it). To be open and transparent with you.
The fact is that for many years I ached to die. To end my suffering. I had no idea that my darkness stemmed from trauma, far less how to end it. I thought the only way to end the darkness was to end my life.
I was wrong. This is my story.
Childhood
I was born in 1955 and grew up in Ottawa. My childhood was calm and peaceful.
One day when I was eleven, a neighbor boy of fifteen came over to babysit my little brothers and me. After my parents left for a party, Adrian came to my bed and lay down beside me in the dark.
While I pretended to be asleep, for several minutes Adrian fondled the place between my legs.
I lay petrified with terror. Adrian went away but came back. He began all over. Again he went away. Again he came back and molested me.
Each time I pretended to sleep, but his going away and coming back did damage too. For every time he left me, my body and mind began flooding with relief—perhaps from endorphins—but then he returned. Somehow this coming-and-going played havoc with my brain and body.
When my parents came home that night, I confronted them in the kitchen, agitated and anxious, but I wouldn’t tell them what had happened—only that I never wanted that boy to babysit again.
For more than a quarter century, I never told anyone about this “little” incident. I thought it hadn’t affected me at all.
I was mistaken.
I still feel his hand.
Adolescence
Less than a year later, my family moved to Victoria, British Columbia on the northwest coast. I was twelve. In this upheaval, losing my roots and friends depressed me. It took years to rebuild my life. My parents divorced. I grew depressed.
One day when I was fifteen and walking home from school, a man of about forty offered me a ride. He parked near my house and pawed me feverishly in his car. I was too shocked and afraid to move. At last I came to my wits, opened the passenger door and ran.
Again, I told no one.
We lived two blocks from the ocean. A few months later, still fifteen, I was walking alone along the beach at night when a tall thin stranger accosted me with a barrage of obscenities. I froze. He used sexual terms I didn’t know. He begged me again and again to let him lick my pussy.
I listened helplessly. At last, fearing a physical assault, I turned and ran.
About a year later, a man tore my life to tatters. He was nearly thirty. His wife was pregnant. I won’t dignify him with a name. He raped, abused and tortured me in more ways than you can imagine.
I was a virgin.
I was vulnerable, too, a girl with no defenses. The day that man brutally raped me, I left my body and was transported to the sky in perhaps the most beautiful, transcendent experience of my life.
Over the next months, my “lover” nearly destroyed me. I couldn’t escape him, or the relationship. I spiraled into anorexia, depression, suicidal longing and states of near-madness. I heard voices.
At the height of the darkness, I decided the only way out was to kill myself.
That night I experienced what some psychiatrists call a “spiritual emergency,” a crisis where the ego collapses and reality as you know it falls apart. It hits hard, a lightning strike. But you transcend yourself.
In this crisis of identity and being, you are suddenly and irrevocably transformed. Mysteries are made clear. You see your life with blinding lucidity and force. In some cases you become one with the universe and the life force we call God.
Of course, these are generalities across many studies. Here’s how my spiritual emergencies felt to me. For I have known three.
The first came on the afternoon I was raped as a virgin. Almost a year later, it happened again at night, while I planned my suicide. Years later, the third spiritual emergency followed another powerful sexual trauma.
All three times I escaped my body and merged with a pure, joyful Consciousness that encompassed everything that ever was and will be. This presence lifted me from my body into a place of light. A world of peace and beauty.
During my second spiritual emergency, when I was seventeen, I was left (or rather, part of me was left) inside that world of light for my protection. (That odd message was communicated to me wordlessly by God through what I call a “language of the heart.”)
Although I couldn’t see God, I felt a divine presence offering me protection if I chose to stay safely hidden in that lovely world. “My” God in no way resembled the old man with a white beard of my Christian childhood, or the irascible God of the Old Testament. This presence was conscious and made of loving warmth.
Indeed, it was only Consciousness. It had no face or figure. No substance. Only light. A God of mercy and compassion.
God left me in that world of light to protect myself from predatory men, and for many years I did so assiduously. Being a creative spirit, I used the divine light that surrounded me like a womb to reshape my precious world as I chose. I filled it with an ocean, forests, mountains, rivers and lakes. With my own hands—and pride—I built my world in just the same way birds build nests.
And a strange as this sounds, I lived within that world for twenty years. A world inside my mind.
The trick was this: another girl was left behind. The material part of me still lived inside the “real” world. This girl had to eat. Study. Get an education. Find a job. Build a life.
That “real” girl was suicidally depressed for over a decade. And she was me, or partly me. And I was her, or partly her. Yet we lived apart.
I was happy. She was not. I knew that she existed and read her thoughts. She barely knew who I was and thought of me as an imaginary self, a sort of arrogant princess who didn’t deign to speak to her. (Which sounds cold, but it was somewhat true.)
Furthermore, I was not alone in my magic world. I soon found a little girl—the one that the babysitter boy molested—but I imprisoned her against her will to keep her “safe.”
Later, at eighteen, I created a companion who was my own age.
And buried inside my magic world, unbeknownst to me, was still another girl. One I wouldn’t meet for twenty years.
More men
Meanwhile “I” (the secret girl) was safe in my magic world. The girl in the “real” world was not. It was my job to protect her. Rape and sexual assault were her most common problems.
When I was eighteen, an abusive sociopath tried to force me into sex work. We called it prostitution then. Today we would look at it as human trafficking. I’m afraid I can only call it hell.
Fraud. Force. Coercion. A madman bent on forcing me into paid sex work. The story of my harrowing escape could fill a book.
Yet the secret girl hidden in her world of light again and again rescued the “real-world” girl from abusive relationships. Here are the incidents I racked up.
Adulthood
Age 18: A stage manager took me out, ostensibly to dinner. Instead he drove me to his house and coerced me cruelly into bed despite my tears and pleas. “Don’t play the girl scout,” he taunted me.
Age 20: During a summer job in Victoria, my boss took me to his home on a work-related pretext and pressured me into bed. This happened twice. Each time, I wept and begged him to stop.
Age 21: During a bus strike in Quebec City, an elegant stranger in a trench coat picked me up while I walked home from university. Without asking, he drove me far out of town and parked in a place of utter darkness, where he cordially invited me to have sex with him and his best friend. I agreed out of secret terror he was a serial murderer. To my relief, after sex with both men at a motel he took me home.
Age 21: A psychotherapist molested me in London.
Age 28: I fell in love with a man I was dating. He raped me.
Age 30: An acquaintance raped me in Jordan and threatened my life if I reported him to the police. I’m certain I narrowly escaped being murdered. Three weeks later, he was in jail for raping a 19-year-old girl.
And more… Thirteen traumatic incidents or abusive relationships in all. But surely this list is enough.
In case you wonder how so much sexual trauma is possible for a single woman, the research literature suggests that I got myself into dangerous situations without any idea how to escape them because my natural defenses were numbed by trauma. In particular, children with untreated sexual trauma often grow up to experience repeat sexual assaults. We have decades of statistics on this problem. I am simply an extreme case.
I triumphed in the end. As the woman who lived in her magic world, I directed the rest of me to marry a good man—the husband I still adore after forty years. At that point the abuse ended overnight. No incidents since.
Clearly, I had what we used to call Multiple Personality Disorder (dissociative identity disorder), but I didn’t know it. By the end, I had eight women living within me. At about age forty, my women at last “fused” into a single woman (another long tale).
Flashbacks erupted of my many sexual traumas. I had a nervous breakdown. The flashbacks lasted years. The ensuing depression too. But slowly I healed from my extreme history.
Without my husband’s love, I would be dead. I told him everything. He honored and respected me. His love didn’t change by an iota. He saw past it all.
Love can protect you. Too often, keeping silence about trauma hurts and harms. Tell your story if you can, to someone safe, when you feel ready. You can tell it here as well.
I have shared almost none of this information publicly before, and told only four close friends. But that is precisely why you might choose to trust me. I typically don’t disclose or discuss my trauma history outside therapy, and it was painfully hard to write it down here for a semi-public forum.
It took days to write. I can say it wounded me to expose myself. I would not have chosen this path. (Now I am more accustomed to the idea.)
But I wrote it down for you, so you would know I am one of you. That is God’s truth, and you can take me to the witness stand on every word.
I am here for you in the hope that I can be of humble service. Under the skin we are akin. Siblings of bone and sinew, of the soul.
Be well, my friends. Much love.
Hugs and kisses,
Amira
