Seeing him does NOT sabotage your recovery

Seeing Him Does Not Sabotage Your Power To my knowledge, and according to accounts from the hundreds of clients I have served in rape recovery therapy, there is no single trigger more powerful than this. Of all the possible reminders and anxiety-producers you will encounter—sights, sounds, smells, anniversaries, etc.—actually seeing him is the whopper of all triggers.              I have seen client after client, woman after woman, “stumble” in their recovery after the unexpected trigger of seeing their rapist in public. They may have done fantastically and gathered all sorts of strength and power back to themselves, and then this one incident seems to demolish it all. But the important word here is “seems.” I want you to remember that if you happen to see your perpetrator in public (including in court, if you are prosecuting), you may experience setbacks and struggles that seem to strip you of all your earned strength and power.              My client Shannon, who has collaborated on this book and whose remarkable recovery work is referenced throughout, had this experience. After seeing her rapist at a party—he saw her, smirked at her, and went back to pouring drinks down the throat of his new girlfriend—Shannon lapsed into days of heavy drinking, dissociation, and suicidal thoughts. “I felt ruined, like he was making all the decisions for me again,” she said after returning to counseling sessions with me. “I wanted to have all the strength I had worked for, and in the end it was like I had no strength at all. I said if I ever saw him again I would crumble, and that’s exactly what I did.”              Shannon talked about this moment extensively in therapy, and was able to realize that she felt anger not only at him for being there, having a party life, and seeming unaffected and even smug about what he had done to her, but she was also angry at herself. She had worked so hard and had built up so much strength that she wanted to pass any test in her recovery. When she had a nervous breakdown after seeing him, her conclusion was, “I have failed, I am not strong, I accomplished nothing. I’m right back where I started, and he has all the power—all he had to do was smirk, and down I go.”             In one session, I asked Shannon to list all of the ways he still had any sort of power or strength that exceeded her own. Thinking for a moment, she said “physical strength.” We talked about how physical strength is simply a matter of biology, not a virtue or character trait, yet for her entire life Shannon had been taught that physical strength gave men the ultimate power to be unquestioned, sovereign, and privileged. She had been socialized to evaluate physical strength as superior to any of her own strengths, and although she did not intellectually believe in that hierarchy her 19-year-old beliefs kicked in at the sight of her rapist. When I asked Shannon to describe the ways she was stronger than her rapist, she stammered, bounced her leg nervously, and went blank. “I…I don’t know.”              What Shannon and I had to work on, then, was not a complete rebuilding of her strength and power, but a self-reminding of the power that still existed within her. She had taken on the issue of rape, and beaten it. She hadn’t merely squeaked by; she had nailed it with flying colors. It wasn’t that her rapist actually had power over her, it was that her self-talk lapsed back into its former script: “I can’t do this; if I struggle, then I’m failing; I have no survivors as allies with me in this process; I’m alone in this agony…”              But because this is the biggest trigger of them all, the monster at the end of the maze, the final showdown between the hero and the villain, it is perfectly normal to struggle and stumble at first. For Shannon—or you—to expect yourself to sail through it and cope perfectly the first time is to hold yourself to an unreasonable standard that has failure and self-blame built right into it. What any rape survivor must be able to do in this experience is to simply forgive herself for how difficult it is to work through this trigger. It will not be easy, it will send you spiraling at first, and you may begin to doubt yourself because of it.  So if you do see your perpetrator, and if the sight of him triggers an avalanche of distress and horror and regression, this is what you must remember:      It’s not a failure on your part that this is tough for you. There is no bigger trigger than this. Give yourself permission to have an imperfect response, without assuming it means you have totally failed.     Nobody—nobody!—copes flawlessly with this the first time. Every woman in this situation later wishes afterward that she had responded differently. Not reacting the way you hoped you would is perfectly normal. If you are waiting for a time when things happen perfectly in your recovery, it will never happen.     Hitting a wall because of this trigger does not mean you are defeated, your strength is an illusion, or that you cannot recover.     If your distress has led back to a lapse in alcohol use, self-injury, or other harmful behaviors, do not wait passively for them to subside; retake control over yourself again as quickly as possible. Panicking and feeling distressed when you see him does not drain your strength and power; but these behaviors will drain your strength.     The victory will mean more to you the more you have to struggle to win it. That’s not very consoling at this moment, but it’s absolutely true. It’s one of those struggles that will scare you to death, yet is ultimately worth it.     This is the final battle, the last stuck point, the biggest challenge, to overcome. Don’t flee it, literally or symbolically. This is the last locked door before total freedom. Hate it, fear it, struggle through it—and do it anyway. Once you have overcome this, what is left?