Silence
Trigger Waring: If you, or anyone you love, has experienced domestic or sexual violence of any kind, this blog post might be hard to read and process. This post also deals with religious trauma.
As we learned last week, I suffered from something called dissociative amnesia for about five years. This is a form of dissociation that our brains can use sometimes to help keep us safe. When the memories of a traumatic event or events are too painful, they get locked away for a time. For me, these traumatic memories unearthed themselves about a year into my marriage - Let’s pick up where we left off:
I’m lying in bed. My back turned toward my husband.
I’m shaking, eyes pinned wide open in horror of the memories that unearthed themselves just hours before. Am I crazy? Did my brain just make up an elaborate, horrific tail? Or worse? Are those memories real?
I knew the answer. The searing hell that I had seen in flashes… it all happened. I wasn’t crazy… or maybe I was.
As a young southern christian woman, I had been raised on Calvinism and Purity. I was an active member of every church I had ever gone to. I worked passionately in youth ministry. I was a model christian.
I met my husband at church while in college. We had the perfect, chased, pure, godly courtship. He checked all the boxes of what a “man of God” should be and I checked all the boxes of what a “woman of God” should be - I was a christian, I was submissive and I was a virgin.
He asked me to merry him shortly after graduation. All was as it should be.
Now here I am. One year into my perfect, godly marriage… and I’m suddenly aware that I was in fact NOT a virgin when I said “I do”.
I’m shaking harder now. What do I say to him? How do I break the news to him that I wasn’t the pure bride that he thought I was? How do I explain this? I can’t possibly explain this! I don’t understand whats happening! How do I tell him that I didn’t know!? That sounds crazy! Oh my god am I crazy!?
Here’s the deal. I understand NOW that the “virginity” I was so concerned with had been taken from me by force. But the version of me that laid in that bed, shaking in fear to revel my new reality to my husband had never even heard the word “consent” at this time. She had no concept or understanding that a woman could be raped in any situation apart from a dark back alley.
So there I was shaking from shock and fear. And finally I sit straight up and I turn on my bedside light. “I have to tell you something”. My husband groggily rolls over. He slowly sits up too, confused and tired.
“Do you remember that guy I dated before you?”
Before I knew it I was doubled over screaming tears into my covers as I unraveled the terrible story and desperately tried to explain that I didn’t know until today. I couldn’t control the volume of my voice. I was screaming through the tears recounting the horrific events of one assault after the next. My shoulders heaved as I raked my hands in shame across my face.
After revealing every despicable detail that had made itself known earlier that day, I painfully asked: “Are you mad at me?”
*silence.
My husband sat there with his head bowed low.
He had nothing to say to me.