Thank you dearly San and Papa. For believing me, for reminding me it's not my fault, all of what you wrote the salve we need that almost no one beside fellow survivors know how to give.
Papa Coco you are spot on about the purpose of these ruminations. And that's the thing.
Trigger Warnings, rest in white font. I'm sorry this is really long, really repetitive, and really rambling. But it helps me try to explain things to others.
Present me - the one who knows I was gang raped, who knows it was violent, who knows I was drugged, who knows I could not stop it - that spot in my brain where present me lives. She knows no matter what I did it still would have happened.
The problem is the me that went through it - the one who was drugged, the one who does not remember, the one who thinks the only thing that happened was that I agreed to model for some strange men and that I wasn't what they needed me to be and that I misled them and let them down - that one doesn't know the whole thing ended in gang rape.
That part of my brain keeps recreating the scenario especially at work and she has no idea that the whole incident includes gang rape, that the whole thing was a set up, that she did not mislead anyone. So that part of me keeps trying to redo this.
I worked really really hard at work. I really cared about what I did. As a result I did things people would want to hear about. I did things that made people think I was amazing and brilliant. So people would hunt me down asking me to please present this or that project to this or that conference or meeting or senior official.
Cue trauma response: uh oh someone thinks I can do something that I'm not good enough for. I have to convince them I am not what they think (I'm not a model = I'm not a scientist, I don't have the right clothes = I'm not a good speaker. Please find someone else = I know this other really amazing person let me put you in touch she'll be perfect.)
Except these claims at work that I was not really a scientist, not really smart, not really who they needed or were looking for - they were just not something anyone who knew my work could swallow. It made them tell me even more firmly that I was amazing and really the person they wanted. You'll be fine you'll be great please we just need someone. Right there. I would set myself up to repeat exactly what happened on the beach when that man begged me and guilted me into going to the hotel to model for them or else he'd lose his job. What they said is exactly what my colleagues would say.. Just like then I'd end up guilted into doing the thing at work and a sense of doom and needing to die would settle in. I made that whole conversation happen. I recreated it every time.
Then, because I cared about my work and because I definitely don't want a repeat of what happened in the hotel where I go to do the thing but they discover I'm too tense and not a good model, to avoid that I work myself to the bone to do a good job. I end up exhausted and terrified.
And then what happens? I do an ok to great job. I get praised to high heaven. More people ask more things of me. I tell people i really do not like praise, its really hard on me. Please don't. They think I have low self esteem and make an even bigger deal of my talents.
Then I am misleading people EVEN more and the stakes become even higher. All the while it is that 19 year old girl reacting to all this, thinking: if I can just get them to listen to me that I am not right for this job, not capable of what they think I am capable of, if for just once they would say "oh, thanks for letting me know, we'll ask someone else" then I would be safe. I would not be misleading anyone. That's what the 19 year old thinks. And she keeps setting up encounters that recreate this whole thing and they never end with "thanks we'll ask someone else."
I need to stop trying to do this. I need to stop recreating this scenario. I am doing it to myself. But the thing is, the part of me doing it has no idea that it ended in rape. Has no idea no matter what she did it still would have happened. That she did not mislead those men.
I need that up-to-date accurate information to be available to all parts of my brain at all times, otherwise I'm destined to keep recreating this in professional settings, destined to keep feeling like I need to die, destined to not be able to function at work.
Except that part of me that gets triggered, that recreates this scenario over and over has no idea something bad happened and has no idea she didn't mislead anyone. I just need to find ways to get the knowledge of what happened and why to all the little isolated pockets of my brain.
So yeah, the part of me that knows what happened knows it wasn't my fault. But that is not the part that is causing problems for me. I don't know how I do this. Is it EMDR? Parts work, both combined? I don't know because these parts are freaking blown apart all over my brain. It's not just one part that went through that. It shattered into multiple parts and each knows something different. But they are really buried in there I only hear or see what they know rarely and I have no control of when and how the information comes, but it is never ever in therapy. And when I try to talk to parts on my own it is straight chaos.
I hate how crazy this sounds. I don't think of it in a crazy way, it's just these neural connections that operate in discrete groups and don't connect to other groups of neurons. It's not like I think there are a bunch of me in here. But the information is definitely not equally and consistently accessible.
