Quiet... meaning to not speak or to stay silent.
Control... meaning to make something or someone react the way you want them to.
So often, you hear of the abused not speaking out. You wonder how they didn't stand up or how the abuser got away with hurting them. You think you'll be different... if it ever happened to you, surely you'd stand up. How could they not see what was happening to them? How could they think that it was okay?
A letter came. All her dreams were coming true. A huge music scholarship would pay her way to her dream school. His name was just a signature at the bottom. She didn't even read that signature... the name wasn't important until the second time she read it three years later when she found it again. Except this time, when she looked at the letter, all she saw was a ticket to the worst three years of her life. Oh if she had only known, she could've saved herself, but she didn't. Innocent and 17, she was so excited to get on with her adult life.... to move to school, to make her mark, to be the best that she could be.
He saw that. He knew he had the tools to make her do his bidding and that's where we find her standing in his office discussing how much potential she has. He is so kind, she could never imagine him being anything else. He says he's going to push her to be better. She can handle it. She is a professional and her skills are unmatched. She is the best he has ever seen.
Slowly but surely, his compliments get fewer and farther between and where they once stood, insults are now included in his speech. He talks about how she's not good enough. How she doesn't practice like she should. He wants more, louder, harder... She pushes herself because she wants to be recognized for her gifts. She wants the chair. She wants to be the best. The pain in her neck starts. But, she keeps playing. Pain is gain you know. The insults keep coming, but she plays on trying to be strong. Soon, the pain doesn't even register anymore. She's numb... physically and emotionally. Now he can say anything and she responds like a robot. He can CONTROL her and she just stays QUIET.
He talks about her clothes like she's a slut discounting the fact that she's barely 18 and he's over 30. He flirts like he's interested in her without thought that he's supposed to be a roll model in her life. He makes it her fault. Somehow she feels she should dress differently so he'll stop. She thinks maybe she should talk less like she's leading him on somehow. He tells her that he feels closer to her than he does to the other girls and that's why she's not in first chair. See, he doesn't want to give the wrong impression. The door is always open because he doesn't want people to think he's being inappropriate. All the while, he's letting his leg touch hers and making her wonder how far he would actually go if she hadn't gotten up and left quickly.
He's yelling. She blocks him out. She'll never be able to remember what he said. See, that... that's surviving. Whole parts of her memory are gone until she tries to remember the happy things; like the boy she had a crush on in college... then she remembers why she ran away from the boy, the memories of the man, and college in general. It's because every good memory is connected to a bad memory. All her best moments fade into her worst moments and she can't get away from it.
She's angry. She's hurting. She can't breath. She can't stop crying. The numbness. The pain. The blank feeling of absolute exhaustion. These are the things that make her remember what he took and what he did. On the other side of this man, though she's not under his spell anymore, she's still afraid. Afraid of getting hurt. Afraid of authority. Afraid of being trapped. She has PTSD - not the kind where you come back from war, but the kind where you wake up in the middle of the night trying to get away from him and smacking your hand or head on the wall by your bed. She wakes up at night sobbing uncontrollably unable to remember what she was dreaming about. When she sees him, hears his voice or his name, she can't breath, her head spins and she feels like she can't move. These trauma responses are there always. With her in her day to day life. She doesn't talk about it much. When people ask if she's okay, she says she is. She tries to hide the triggers so people won't know the hell she lived through. She doesn't want to be labeled as damaged. So, she'll just stay QUIET. People may not even believe what she has to say anyway... so she'll just stay QUIET. She tried to speak out once and they just handed her 8 weeks of free counseling as hush money and sent her on her merry way.
Now, she's fighting. Fighting to have her life back. Though she didn't know it at the time, this is the hardest thing she would ever have to live through. Accepting that she is a survivor is the hardest part sometimes. How did she not stand up? Why did she stay quiet? Was it her fault?
No. It's not my fault. It's his fault. I had the misfortune of meeting one of the most effective kinds of abuse out there. While physical abuse is often deemed worse than mental, I would argue, as a survivor of mental/emotional abuse, that this can be the most deadly and controlling form of abuse. This is the kind of abuse that people don't even see. The kind that you don't even realize is happening until it's too late. I was a shell of myself. I struggled to get out of bed every day, and I didn't even know why. It took me a long time to realize that I was an abuse survivor. Now, I'm on a journey to get my life back. Maybe someday, I'll wake up and realize that he doesn't effect me anymore, but for now, I'm living with the reality that some days are harder than others. I keep trying to find a way to reconcile what happened to me. Trying to figure out how to live with it. Endeavoring not to push it aside, but to deal with it head on. That's hard though.
Disassociation is a trauma response designed to protect our brains in a traumatic experience. However, if this becomes your go-to response to life in general, you'll never file memories properly causing the emotions to stay with those memories. When you think about the road rage you experienced earlier today, you often don't feel the same level of emotion. However, in a dissociative state, your mind will leave all emotions attached to the memories so that every time they are recalled or triggered, the emotions come rushing back and you end up feeling exactly what you felt in that moment over and over again. Then, you have to go back to that place, face the emotions, let them run their course, look at the validity of the statements that caused the triggering and then over time, your brain learns to file it properly.
The hardest thing for me about recovering is that the people that could have fired him or protected me didn't. So, now I'm left with a whole host of damaging lies to wade through before I can even get to the trauma. Then some days, I feel like if I get better, then no one will ever believe it happened because I won't look damaged. But, damaged is how he wants me to be. So, every day, I get out of bed and I try to live. For survivors, living feels like fighting. Abuse takes your control from you. You don't make your own decisions. You're programed to be who they want you to be. So, in the aftermath, you have to fight your brain at every turn to get your decision making skills back. You have to fight through the debilitating reality of anxiety, PTSD and emotions. Some days, I'm okay. Other days like today, I cry... a lot... Last night I woke up crying and it took me most of the day to remember why. This is a common for me. He took a lot from me. He took college. He took my trust in people. He took my innocence... See before him, I thought the world was a mostly good place and he made it a very ugly and dark place. He took my confidence in my body. He took my light. He even took the opportunity I might have had for a real relationship in college. He took everything and now I have to fight ever single day to get it all back.
Someday, I hope that I can look back and say that these three years, while hard, are just a memory. However, right now, though they are memories that are two or three years old, I am still living in the fighting to get my life back mode. So, if you questioned your words and the power they have, question no more. Words CAN kill. Words CAN hurt. Words can CONTROL. Words can SILENCE. The most damaging abuse were the words he left there in my head. The words that I'm still fighting to refute to this day.
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