When I first met with my therapist, she described what was happening to me as a repression lapse. When someone keeps a traumatic past past hidden for a long period of time, eventually they can no longer repress the memories and they surface. Apparently this is common.
While it took me until March 2010 to get into therapy, I’m pretty sure my lapse began in the summer of 2009. At the time, I was having a lot of raw feelings surface – mainly related to my parents. Every time we would visit or talk on the phone, I would be agitated. As time went on, I had a shorter and shorter fuse with them and also with my wife. Something wasn’t right, but I had no idea what. My wife was frustrated. I was frustrated. I was hating myself.
One night in July, after returning from a trip to see my parents, I broke down in the kitchen while talking to my wife. I couldn’t figure out why I was so unhappy and I couldn’t contain my emotions – it was surreal. Sure enough, the next time we saw them, it happened again. After some conversations with my wife I started to realize that my emotions were somehow related to the abuse. To that point, my wife knew that I had been abused – in fact, I first told her not a few months after we started dating, but I kept the details vague. After thinking for a few weeks I realized that I needed to talk to my parents about the abuse - I had to do something that I had been trained not to do.
I drove to their house one weekday evening. I was in the middle of raising money to start a small beer brewing company, and my parents had decided to invest, so the visit wasn’t a surprise to them. I went there to talk business, but in the back of my head I knew I needed to cover the abuse. After we ate dinner, I raised the subject. My heart was racing. My mom quickly acknowledged what I said, but changed the subject. I went back to it. This went on for a few minutes – they were clearly not comfortable discussing “him”. After a few attempts I started to increase my level of commitment to the subject and they had no choice to but to talk with me about it. By this time, my heart was in my throat, and I could feel myself getting emotional. For the next hour or so, I became unglued. I told them there was more to the abuse than a “close call”. I went into a few details, but mainly spent my time explaining how much it was haunting me. From the size of the snot bubbles formed on my face, it wouldn’t take much to realize that I had an issue. Overall, they were good to talk with – and we hugged it out as I left around 10pm for my two hour drive back to Richmond.
On that drive, my mind raced. I starting recalling memories that I didn’t know existed. This was the scary part. I remembered sexual things he would make me do. Things he said. Specific details that I had never, ever thought about. I started to get worried. I called my sister to get out of my own head for a while. I spent a lot of time talking with her, she knew a little more than my parents did at that point so I felt like I had an ally, besides my wife. When I got home, my wife was asleep. I crawled into bed and tried to fall asleep. No luck. I got about an hour sleep that night – my mind wandering in and out of memories. I felt like my body was being invaded – like my brain had turned on me.
The next day, Friday, I needed to work on my Jeep. It was having some ignition problems. I worked on it well into the mid afternoon. My mind was elsewhere. I was trying as hard as I could to wrap the memories and feelings back up – like I always had done before. It was starting to work, actually. Suddenly, I had a major problem. Not thinking about what I was doing, I loosened a radiator hose to get better access to the engine block. Not something I would normally do, but it seemed ok at the time. The pressure in the hose was too much, and the hose separated, shooting scalding antifreeze up my left arm. I just barely moved my head out of the way in time, but my arm and hand were badly burned. I jumped back and shook the antifreeze off. When I looked down, the skin on my left arm and hand drooped. Then it started to slide. Oh shit.
An hour later my wife and I were in the emergency room. They doped me up on pain killers and sent me to the burn unit at another hospital. I had 2nd and 3rd degree burns on a good portion of my wrist and hand. Luckily, the Director of the burn unit was on duty, and I was in good hands as they removed the excess skin and bandaged the burns. They were worried about Compartment Syndrome, so I was admitted for the night so they could watch the swelling. I visited many far away places that night – most had rainbows and ponies and little people with big smiles. The amazing thing was that I was very calm when I thought about the abuse. I thought about it coherently and rationally. Instead of burying the memories like I always had, I was thinking freely about everything, not worried about containing them. I was ok facing the memories for the first time in my life.
From that day forward, I have been moving in the right direction. What I thought was a terrible accident, actually gave me the time (and opiates) I needed to contemplate how to handle my memories. The real tipping point for me wasn’t until December 2009, but looking back, that day in early August was critical. I have never been someone to look up and say thanks, because I’ve always thought that I was 100% responsible for everything that happened in my life. I feel that changing.
