Victim...Confessions

I didn’t ask for this today.

I didn’t ask for the magic light moment.

Tell me where you feel it?  This therapist, bless her… 

I feel my hand involuntarily rub against my face and then threw my hair.  “I feel it all over,” I mumble. 

A soft light hearted smile touches her cheeks.

I want to hate her.  I don’t want to sit with this shit any more than I have to.  But I’ll entertain her for now. “It feels like my chest is restricted, like I can’t breathe.  My shoulders are so tense and tight, I could break down walls.”

“What do you want to break?”

“I want to break his face!” The words spill out.  “Every fucking word he said was a lie.”  My fists clench and unclench.

“Why do his words carry weight?”

“Because I loved him,” the tears pool.  God how I hate this…I don’t want to cry again, damn it.  “Because he promised me…” FUCK!  The words choke in my throat.  Loving him had felt perfect, at first.  Everything had been what I wanted, what I needed to survive.  I had spent eighteen years loving a narcissist, just to conclude that one day I didn’t matter.  I had wanted to die.  I even tried. Two years after that, I met this wonderful guy.  He took my breath away, filled me with a pleasure and drive that I thought I had lost.  “I didn’t fucking need him.” I muttered.  “I was healing.” 

“You’re still healing, why do you think you’re not?”

I hadn’t said that.  Hell, I didn’t even think I had thought it, but maybe it was written on my face.  “I don’t need him to survive.”  I stated.  I was NOT a victim, or at least that’s how I continued to lie to myself.  The word burned pure revolt within me. 

“No one said you’re not surviving.” She could see the conflict running behind my eyes.  She could see the tension owning my shoulders as my body fought off the fight, flight, freeze, fawn mode.  “What do you want to say to him?”

A smirk crossed me; a small chuckle escaped, “I want you to hurt, just like you hurt me.  I want you to feel like you’re not enough; like you’re the piece of shit; like you’re the problem.  I want to tell him how I love him, how I miss him.” Fucking feelings and tears.  “I don’t want him to get away with all his broken promises or the to be able to walk away from the fear and pain he caused me.”  I furiously grabbed at a tissue from the tissue box on the table in front of me.  “He promised me, we’d have a family.  We wanted to name our daughter Emily/Emma Rose.” The knife twisted in my heart, choked the air out of my lungs.  “Fuck,” the word shuttered out of me. 

“Why’s that name so important?” She was trying to divert my pain, but it wasn’t helping.

I had shared my heart with the man I thought I was going to marry; to the man I thought I would finally have a family with.  “When I was a teen, I knew a girl named Emily.  She was a cutter, the first I met.  I wanted to take her pain away.  I wanted to be her safety, and then one day she told me about her plan to die.  The next morning, she wasn’t on the school bus, she didn’t go to school.  I got so damn worried that I contacted the school counselor and,” I tried to take a deep breath.  I tried to remember, “she hated me after that, barely ever talked to me, but I tried to let it go because I had saved her life.”  I pushed the tissue against the end of my nose, feeling the confusion creep in.  “I don’t know if I loved her, or what the connection was, but something inside me knew she was screaming for help.”

“What happened to her?”

I looked down at my hands and then through blurry eyes to my therapist.  “She lived.”  I half smiled, but it still felt forced.  “She’s well now, married, and has a great career.  She actually accepted my friend request not too long ago.”

“That had to feel good.  Why does remembering her and wanting to honor her name feel so much like a burden?”

 “It doesn’t.”  The burden was because I’d never taken the chance to ask him why that name for a daughter?  What was his story behind his choice?  “I chose Rose after my best friend who was killed by a drunk driver.  Two young girls with two separate stories, but I loved them equally.”  God, ADHD brain!  What had she asked? 

“Tell me why the word bothers you,” she stated.

I flinched.  She hadn’t even said the word, and it hurt.  “He called me a whore, a bitch, a piece of shit.  He said I was stupid, worthless, and never going to be good enough.”  That day was burned into my brain.  How we had argued until we were both blue in the face.  He’d call me names, he’d argue why he was right, why I was wrong.  He’d love me in one minute and hate me the next.  “He’d been drunk, you know.” I dropped my gaze to the floor.  “He’d been drinking the vodka, that he manipulated me to buy.  But it was all my fault.”  I ran my tongue over my dry lips.  I felt my brow scrunch in thought and frustration.  “I don’t remember how many times I said no to the alcohol, but every time I did, it got a little worse.”  My fingers twisted against each other.  “He shoved the cat off until she hit the coffee table with her body.  He got in my face, threatened my life, and I knew I had to leave the house, so I did.  He love bombed me and tried to convince me to come home.”  My exhale shuttered as my lip trembled.  “I did leave, but I’d forgotten my meds, so I had to go back.”  I crossed my arms, gripped my forearms pretty hard trying to shake the memory.  “The word bothers me, because it’s a statement, a label, a reminder that I’m broken and not good enough.”  Fucking A. D. H. D. Brain! 

“What did he do?”

I felt my face shift.  I was wearing the pain in the contorts of my face.  “He threatened to kill me and my family.  He had begged me to come back home, and then when I did, he threatened everyone.  I sat across the room from him, and he asked me once more for more alcohol.  So, I said no for what felt like the hundredth time.  He got up, walked past me into the kitchen, grabbed the largest kitchen knife he could find, and stopped for the longest moment of my life in front of me.”  My heart was pounding thinking about it all.  “’This is my knife,’ he had muttered.  I knew if I moved or spoke, I’d be in danger.  So, I sat still.  There was so much darkness lingering in his eyes.”  The flood gates opened in my eyes.  “I thought he was going to kill me, but he walked out the front door.  Shouldn’t that count for something?”

“What do you think?” She’d sat so still, carefully listening to me babble on about the day he threatened me and my family. 

He had wanted to get a shot gun.  He had wanted to kill everyone, starting with me or ending with me.  “I…” what could I say?  “The dispatcher could hear him banging on the front door, trying to get back in.”

“Say it,” her voice was barely audible.

“What do you want me to say?”  I felt the anger surfacing; felt the pain breaking me again.

“Say it.” She instructed.

Domestic abuse, “victim,” I whispered.  Pain sliced as if the knife had been shoved into my ribs.  What would have happened?  What if I had said one more word? 

“Who’s in control, right now?” She leaned forward.  Would she get up and hold me?  Would she do anything? 

“Me,” but the word was barely recognizable.

“You,” that soft smile touched her again.  “He has no space here anymore.  He’s not in control of you.  He can’t tell you what to do, how to act, where to go, who to trust.  HE HAS NO POWER,” the words were firm.

“But I can’t turn off his voice.” I sobbed.  “I still hear the words he used.”  I could still see his black eyes.  I wanted to argue that hadn’t been the man I fell in love with.  That had been the monster who had emerged. 

“Then stop giving him your power,” her eyes were soft, but there was that commanding tone, that instruction as if I were her child coming to her for help and comfort.  “Silence the words, replace them with words of your own that are positive.  Don’t cross back over the bridge, especially not while he’s burning it to ashes.  Walk away but hold your head up.  Be the Queen that I know is in there.” 

It wouldn’t be easy.  I knew that.  It had barely been two months and I still hurt.  The hypervigilance was horribly present every day.  I feared the Sheriff and his clean-up crew of men on the side of the road, each morning when I went to work.  The fear was stifling.  The pain was horrific.  I’d have to be across town before the panic attack would subside. 

“Say it, repeat after me.”  She instructed again.  “He has no control over me.” 

I hated this part.  I hated being coddled despite how bad I wanted it too.  “He has no control over me.”

“I am safe.” 

“I am safe.”  I took a deep breath.  I tried so desperately to believe it.  I still felt like I was trying to hold onto sand. 

“Where is he now?”  She sat back again, taking on the relaxed therapist look.

Not supposed to have phones in therapy, I thought, even as I picked up my phone.  I clicked on the Vinelink app, logged in, and confirmed his details.  “He’s still in the jail.”

“What does that mean?” 

I pinched my lips shut, dropped my phone down in my right hand, as my left hand swiped at the tears on my cheeks.  I wanted to hate her, “that means he can’t hurt me.” 

“Exactly.” She set pen down and held her head up with her thumb under her chin and her index finger touching her cheek.  “Now look at the details…” her eyes begged me to believe her.  “You are not the victim.”  I looked up feeling confused.  “You are a victim, but you can’t let the word define you.  Reframe it.  You are a survivor of domestic abuse.”  She dropped her hand until both were beneath her notepad holding the edges.  “You survived, and no one can take that away from you.  You’re not trapped anymore.  You’re safe because you chose to protect what matters to you.”

“But he matters to me.”

“You can love him and not trust him.”  She spoke matter-of-factly.

That hurt.

“Take a deep breath in your nose, and a long exhale out of your mouth.” 

I tried to lean back and follow her instructions.  The breath was choppy both ways, but the trembling subsided. 

“Think about your safe space, describe it for me.”

 I felt the swallow threatening to choke.  I closed my eyes for a moment; I envisioned the large boulder of a stone a few feet into the bay at my best friend’s childhood home.  The stone had moved over time from grandpa’s property line over to her mom and dad’s property.  Or someone had intentionally moved it.  But I remembered the slanted ruggedly smooth surface.  I remembered sitting on it after I had received the call that Rose had been killed.  I thought about the sound of the waves softly hitting the rock wall and the big boulder.  “It’s peaceful.  It’s part of the Michigan bay in my best friend’s back yard.”  I even had a recording of the water while I stood there taking in the depth of the peaceful setting.

“Good, who’s there with you?”

A touch of a smile crept into the edges of my lips.  “My best friend.”  Even when it had been me cursing God for Rose’s death, it had been my best friend, my safe person, to come and sit with me quietly.  She’d never speak.  She would simply sit with me and wait patiently. 

“What’s your best friend got to say to you?”

I opened my eyes and stared at her with a tired broken look.  “Nothing.”  She didn’t know at least not yet.  “She just sits with me.”  I hadn’t meant for the words to sound so mean.  I’d tell my bestie eventually.  Just not today. 

I glanced over to the desk, checking the clock.  I was ready to walk away from this.  I wanted to run and hide for a while.

My therapist followed my eyes, checking the time herself.  “I’m going to challenge you.”

I wasn’t going to roll my eyes.

“Tell her what happened.” She instructed.  “Give her the chance to be there for you, to remind you that you are stronger than this pain.  Give her the chance to sit with you and be there for you.”

I couldn’t even speak.  I just nodded and choked on a sob and more tears.