Trauma Sleeps, Survivors Do What It Takes

On Abuse, Seeking Support, and Being a Safe Person for People Just Trying to Survive

On Abuse, Seeking Support, and Being a Safe Person for People Just Trying to Survive

Over the years, several students have trusted me with private details about trauma. I’m not sure how I telegraph to them that I’m a safe person to disclose this shit to, but I know that I do. I know this because they tell me, tearfully in my office or in the hall, that they could not tell their other professors what they’re about to tell me. That they know I’ll understand. And they’re always right. Trauma survivors are good at reading people, and sussing out whether they’re safe or menacing. We might be hyper-sensitive to negativity, but we’re good at knowing when we’ve found a safe person who knows what it’s like. It’s exhilarating to find someone like that, really.

When a student tells me that they are the victim of abuse, stalking, or sexual assault, I often disclose my own experiences. I do it in a veiled way, with minimal details, so as not to re-traumatize or disturb the people I’m setting out to help. The disclosure is not therapeutic for me, but neither is it harmful. I do it if I think the student will benefit from knowing they’re not alone.

Usually, but not always, I am farther along on the path of trauma & coping than my students are. I can tell them which resources have been helpful for me, and which emotional and physical reactions to expect. As a flawed but very candid and increasingly self-accepting person, I can serve as a model of hope. The hope I’m peddling is not saccharine or Dan Savage, It Gets Better-y. Instead, the hope I give is gimlet-eyed and realistic. What happened to you sucks, I often say, but you are a badass even if you don’t feel like it.

Recently, a student told me that they intended to pursue legal action against a peer who’d victimized them. Many months ago, this same student had disclosed their abuse to me, and been adamant that they would not be taking any such steps. I knew the right thing to do was to affirm their feelings and not push legal or administrative action. I told them that they had to do what would best help them survive. And now, almost a year later, they believe that making their abuser pay will help them survive, and help others to survive. And I’m so, so fucking proud of them.

And as I talked with them I realized, five years after my own brush with stalking and abuse, that I could have reported my stalker to our graduate program director, or to our university. I could have ruined his life. It had never occurred to me before. My student (a badass), took one year to realize their abuser deserved recourse, and that recourse was something they had the strength to pursue. I’d been safe for five years and had never reached that point. This made me so, so much more fucking proud of my student.

— — — —

The man who’s had the most uniformly negative impact on my life was my boyfriend when I was in graduate school. We were in the same department, and took many of the same classes. During the relationship, he was verbally abusive and scary. After I dumped him, he turned more obviously menacing. I’m a little stunned to admit that until yesterday, it never occurred to me that his actions were bad enough that I could have done something, administratively or legally, about it.

He broke into my office and read my emails, and I had proof. He broke into my apartment building and banged on the the door and screamed at me until I called a friend and begged her to come and make him go away. He kicked or threw a trash can into a CTA bus and fought the cops who came to arrest him. He punched a hole in the wall of the office building I worked in. I could have brought all of this, along with his frenzied messages, to the program director or the center for student life. I could have had him put on probation. I could have had him kicked out.

It utterly did not occur to me at the time. It also didn’t occur to me, for several of the tortuous months that we were together, that I could actually break up with him. I tried a half dozen times, sure, but he physically would not let me. He just kept showing up. He took the same classes as me. He hung around our mutual friends (to the extent that we had friends), and he haunted the doorways of every library, office, and coffee shop I frequented. When I broke up with him, he was about to go on a two-week trip across the country with his oldest and most stable friend. That was the only reason I felt safe enough to do it. It might have gone on for months or even years longer if I hadn’t been granted that reprieve.

— — — —

Trauma and abuse force you (or forced me, at least) into a survival mentality. I was trying to hedge my bets and minimize the consequences of my actions at every turn. Before I broke up with him, I knew he was violent. I’d seen the injuries he’d given his apartment and himself. He’d made ‘playful’, ’flirty’ attempts to show me how strong he was, and told me jokingly that I was too weak to ever fight him off. He’d hold me down, or choke me, and it was always both real and a joke. The force was real. The threat was a joke, so how could I be mad?

If I expressed fear of him, he’d double back and assert, vociferously, that he would never hit a person, he would never ever do that, how could I think he would do that? And then if I did anything to upset him — like do a shitty job of cleaning the stove top or ask him to stop fucking his ex, he’d scream and stomp around and scare me enough to send me running into the alley at 4am, where I could hear him screaming as I stood numb on the Jarvis El Platform.

But that trauma put me in a survival mentality. I had to do whatever it took to stay physically safe while also maintaining enough mental health to work and go to school. Sometimes that meant getting quiet and sustaining verbal abuse, or assenting to sex I didn’t want or that he knew was reminiscent of prior trauma. Often it involved fixing his problems for him — helping him edit his thesis, listening to him rail against his unfairly prejudiced advisers (of which he had many — he kept losing advisers, none of the losses his fault, naturlich). It almost always entailed enduring his screams and rants and reflecting back at him a mien of calm reassurance and love.

When I was away from him, I had to do whatever I could to maintain my emotional and psychological resources. I would sleep all day or zone out in front of a movie on my laptop, or else I’d take long walks until my heels cracked and bled. I took up smoking because I thought it might disgust him enough to dump me (and also because I wanted to hurt myself). I went on dates with other people hoping it would make him lose interest. When I went home to visit my family, I got a facial piercing that I loved, but which I was sure he would find trashy and unattractive. It was my hope that he’d dump me over it. He didn’t.

Even after I finally had the resources and safety to break up with him, I had to maintain that survival mentality, and manage his fury and the negative impact it could have on my life. He was still, after all, a colleague, with many professors in common and a ton of overlapping friends. He would show up at my work with gifts and apologies at first. If I turned him down, I quickly learned he would rage or cry or linger, sometimes hidden in the shadows behind my door.

So I tried to oblige him just enough to keep him calm. We’d take short walks at lunchtime. He’d send me feverish, nonsensical emails with short stories attached. One of the short stories was about my death, and him lovingly mourning me. In one, I was a teenager and he was my debate coach. Some of these emails I ignored and some I answered with simple apologies and reminders that we were over. I had to experiment with reactions, find what would keep him placated without encouraging further contact.

Of course, none of that worked. Stalking victims are always told to ignore their stalkers utterly, and with good reason. Every meager attempt at pacification just incensed him, fed his false hope. He escalated his behavior, as so many stalkers often do. He broke into my building and threatened me. He held me down once and pressed his groin to my body and rubbed his hands over me. He sent long, lie-filled messages to the guy I was seeing (my current boyfriend). He sat in the parking lot outside my window and sobbed, clutching his knees.

Eventually, I had to snap and cut him off entirely, which partially worked. The other thing that worked was that he was put in jail, and then on house arrest. The charges had nothing to do with me or how he’d treated me, and I didn’t find out about it for quite some time. So I lived those few weeks in terror of his silence, wondering what he was going to do to me next.

And it was only yesterday, as I spoke to a student about her plan to press charges against her own rapist, that I realized I could have done something more proactive. The person who hurt me was a classmate and a professional peer. We shared professors and advisors, and the department we were situated in was probably feminist enough to take my side. At the very least, everyone in the department already knew he was erratic and sometimes behaved inappropriately. They would have taken my side. I could have been safe a lot soon, with the added emotional relish of having ruined him.

— — — —

But I didn’t ruin him. I kept completely silent. When I defended my thesis, I begged him not to come. I told him that I would do whatever he wanted to keep him from attending and ruining things for me — I would come to his thesis defense if he wanted, or not go, or whatever. When he left town for a new job, he begged to meet with me for coffee, and I agreed, because I thought it would keep him calm. He made moony faces at me and welled his eyes up with tears. He tried to reach out and hold my hand, and to kiss me, but I found a way to artfully resist without provoking. I had a cold and a big blemish on my lip, which helped.

And then, finally, he was gone. But my way of thinking did not change. I knew, for years afterwards, that it was vital I do whatever would keep me safe. I blocked him on all social media and eluded to his actions only obliquely. I did not tell any mutual friends about his abuse. I didn’t even tell my boyfriend or myself about it, really, for years. All he knew was that I cried and wanted to hide if I ever heard him raise his voice (which only ever happened when a videogame frustrated him). I’m sure he had an idea of how screwed up things had been, but he didn’t want to push it. He was trying to help me survive, too.

— — — —

That trauma survivors only being to show the scars of their abuse years after the fact is such a common experience it has become a cliché. But like so many clichés, it exists with good reason. Many victims of abuse only begin to show psychological symptoms years after escaping the toxic environment, particularly only once they are in a situation that’s nourishing and safe. While in an abusive environment, I lacked the psychological resources to face the bald-faced wrongness of what he was doing to me. I couldn’t handle rage and indignation on top of the fearful sadness and self-loathing I was marinating in. I waited, hyper-focused on managing my abuser’s emotions, looking for the right time to slip away.

And when I did slip away, I felt euphoric. For a while. I wrote thousands upon thousands of words and spent a lot of time at plays and museums. I baked cookies and sang while walking down the street. I had boundless energy, and completed my PhD at breakneck speed. My professional colleagues were impressed with me. My creative writing buddies were struck by my productivity, too. Inside I was waiting for the emotional axe to fall, slowly becoming more and more aware of the utter wrongness of what my ex had done to me.

And then, nearly three years later, I started having PTSD symptoms. That’s how it goes. I was safe and feeling loved; I had a career and a creative life. I was doing good. It was time for my mind to rebuild the tissue that had been damaged during my period of abuse. It was time to pay the piper. At while it was unpleasant when it happened, I’m glad it did, because the intensity of my inner turmoil is what made me realize and admit, finally, just how bad things had been.

— — — —

It’s been five years since I broke up with my abuser. I’ve borne triggers and had flashbacks; I’ve had numbing and the sense of a foreshortened future and jumpy anxiety. I’ve reacted to small sexual harassments in overblown, violent ways. I’ve had outbursts of crying and fear. But I also know how to talk to students who are going through similar shit, or who are at this moment escaping abuse, and have such shit coming down the pike. I’m glad to have met this suffering, in a perverse way, because it’s taught me a lot about empathy and has catalyzed a lot of personal growth. That’s also a common sentiment among trauma survivors: like a sick twist on that Dorothy Parker quote about writing, we hate suffering, but we love having survived.

I can’t be as badass as the students who reach out to me in their moments of suffering. Unlike them, I didn’t have it in me to reach out for help when I was basting in the worst of it. I didn’t even have the gumption to describe it as abuse. It took me longer to realize things were fucked up, and that I, consequently was fucked up, and that the fucker responsible deserved to face consequences.

But that’s okay. Because now I can be the survivor who helps other people survive, just by knowing that it fucking sucks, and that we do what it takes to survive. That’s all a survivor is, anyway. Somebody who does what it takes.