Independence: Losing one's voice
June 11th 2009 12:59
I think one of the hardest things that happened to me, through my sexual assault, was losing my voice. Not just because I couldn’t tell this guy to back off but because I couldn’t tell anyone what happened either. It was a fairly conscious choice not to tell, made under duress.
What I mean is that I, in the aftermath, made the decision that I wouldn’t tell anyone because I didn’t feel that I could trust them not to blame me, especially my Catholic family… after all I had let this guy into my hotel room in the first place – that certainly doesn’t make me virtuous – more likely a ‘whore’.
I use that term disdainfully as I don’t feel that the catholic religion had the capacity to exemplify sexuality in terms other than virgin or whore. It seemed to me, growing up, that sexuality was a perfectly normal part of human life but for some reason the church chose to push it behind closed doors. And so behind closed doors it is, along with anything that could potentially go wrong. If you enjoy sex then you’re a whore. If you get yourself into trouble you’re also a whore – so where does anyone win here?
Somewhere in the bible it says that sex is for procreation only… I want to make it clear here that as a writer, I understand every author has their own agenda…I don’t believe that the bible was divined straight from God. In fact I think the bible is a handful of stories made up by people along the way. I don’t deny the existence of Jesus, Mary and the rest of the characters in those stories. I do though deny that any account of history is a direct reflection of what actually happened. It simply cannot be. We each have a mind that interpret and changes and adapts aspects of our own and our global history to suit our own needs. Perhaps who-ever wrote that piece of information about sex being just for procreation was just really pissed off that they had bad sex and wanted to limited it to just a few times a lifetime.
I don’t think that the Catholic church as seriously considered its stance on sexuality (probably why I have such trouble with it). Afterall, if sexuality is really so bad, why did God give it to us?? Oh, that’s right it’s to test us. We are born of immortal sin and need to prove ourselves through the tests of God to ensure that we get to heaven. Well, I’ve lost my chance. I had sex. God will punish me, unless I redeem myself by going to confession and telling the priest that I’ve had sex. Thankfully the priest can forgive me on behalf of God and my whore-ishness will be redeemed with 10 hail-mary’s and 3 our-father's.
You know what? ‘God’-I gave me-myself this experience. Not to ensure that I meet the devil but to ensure that I meet my own guidelines of forming a solid state of independence… as explained below.
I think the Church has a lot to answer for. I think that it’s gone upside down with its thinking here and refuses to back-track. Firstly because demonizing sex has cause the demons to roam…
I will carefully but happily admit that my demons came out through my early sexual experiences because I was acting in ways that, I see now, were emotionally-unsafe. I was not caring for myself emotionally, spiritually, sexually or mentally through my drunken sleeping around. (I’m really pushing back the desire to justify that I didn’t do it that many times, but enough to damage my self-respect the morning after…I’ll try to hold back…)
I say this carefully because I feel that I had little else to work with. I had a burgeoning sexuality, discovered in my late-teens. I didn’t think that there was anything wrong with this sexuality. But I didn’t have any guidelines about what to do with it either – other than ‘don’t’. I think we have learnt by now that repression doesn’t cause anything to go away, it pushes it underground where it fester and takes on a (demonic) life of its own. Have you ever discovered an emotional reaction to an event that you buried for a long time? When you found it, it horrified you as it was interacting with your day to day life in a way that was both damaging and emotionally challenging? This is what happens to us when we push our real and positive sexual desires underground – it becomes a feeding ground for all those thoughts of unworthiness to take hold… I am not worthy of what I really want so I will have this thing that hurts me…
Well, at that early stage I wasn’t going to push my sexuality underground – ‘I was right, I knew that there was nothing wrong with it, I would use it because my mother didn’t want me to and I could show her!’
I’m not going to say that I was wrong, but I could have learnt a great deal from a role-model who told me not to be afraid of my body. Because all I did was throw it around and feed into those base sexual desires that said, have anyone, just anyone… needless to say I woke up on the odd Sunday morning feeling more than a little emotionally-battered and ashamed of myself because I had used my body to make me feel ok about myself.
In hindsight of my assault, I feel a little bitter, but I can’t blame anyone in particular because the adults around me at the time didn’t actually have anything to offer me in terms of guidance. They were just as afraid as their sexuality as the Church wanted them to be.
I’m still unsure as to why the Catholics had to demonise sexuality – I think it has something to do with joy. A real, passionate, trustworthy, sexual relationship (I suspect) has the ability to build joy within one’s heart. The church doesn’t want this. It’s much easier to entice people to following you if they are negative, unhappy, disturbed and disoriented… of course, I’m not saying the that Catholic church wants to control anyone. I just think they want more from people than they would be willing to give through joy – their hearts (or is that control of their hearts?).
A joyful heart is one that listens to itself rather than other people. Unfortunately, I don’t think that the Catholic church wants its followers to listen to their hearts at all. If the Catholic church has your heart, it also has your money. I’m not saying this is a conscious decision on behalf of the church but it’s steeped in its history. The Catholic church is wealthy, historically bigoted and sexuality maligned. It’s rulers have followed their own footsteps rather than looked at what’s best for its followers and has created a vast amount of dissatisfaction the world over. And a little digging would find that rarely has priest’s sexuality been restrained. They hide facts, hide women and assume the role of God himself in pontificating to their followers just what life is all about. If we bothered to look at the double standard presented throughout history we might find that we have trouble swallowing their guidance – if they haven’t bothered to follow it, why should we.
Recently, it was suggested through a survey of church goers in Australia that Catholics were the unhappiest of all the religions and that numbers of church goers was declining (if I’d bothered to keep the reference I would have quoted it here.)
Moreover, Australia has the highest known incidence of child molestation at the hands on a priest than anywhere else. It’s those demons coming out again… sorry if that’s a little dry. I can’t help but feel that the Catholic Church has a lot to answer for, and somehow, also that my hands are tied in doing anything about it.
Anyway, back to my voice. It was bad enough that the church had taken my capacity to speak up about my own rights in front of my family, to have it take away my right to speak of my own pain is a whole other matter. I couldn’t actually tell anyone had happened to me because I feared that I would be blamed rather than comforted. Outcast rather than supported. And when I eventually did say something, I found this to be true. Whilst my family are none-the-wiser about it all, the friends I did have fell off the radar one by one. I suppose this is somewhat indicative of the type of friends I had… but then again, they didn’t understand because they hadn’t been through it.
I do want to say that whilst their catholic upbringings had been questioned, turned inside out and judged just as mind had, I misjudged their capacity to turn the event back around on me. They still found ways to blame me, such as I should have gone to the police in case he had done it to anyone else. I had no proof, nor a name. I was in a hotel in the middle of nowhere at a wedding with a whole lot of people I didn’t know… what the f#$@ did she expect from me? Not only had I been through the whole event, now she wanted to turn it back on me and was asking me to turn it back on myself because I was a bad person if he was doing it to anyone else. I can see her point – it would have been worthwhile going to the police if I’d had that capacity – or someone to go with me... Should I have rung the bride the next morning, asking her as the closest person to me at the wedding if she would mind just stepping down to the police station with me? Could I have come back home, suggested to the guy I had been seeing for a few weeks that I needed his assistance in a a small matter? My fury at the circumstances of the whole event and aftermath is only just rising. As is my fury at those people who suggest that when your voice, and your sense of control and your physical presence is taken from you – that you should have the capacity to speak up. At a time when people are expecting you to speak the loudest – you have just had your voice taken from you. I know that some people reading this blog have been through similar assaults and will understand my anger, others who have not or who know someone who has, might simply be able to understand that speaking full-stop is not always an option.
I also know that my friend wanted to blame me because she was hurt by the fact that it happened to one of her friends and didn’t know what to do with her own pain. If she placed it back on me, then it might leave her.
I still blame her for blaming me for the whole not speaking up thing…of course, we’re not friends anymore. I don’t trust her, actually I don’t think I ever did, but it took this particular event to see it. Through eventually dealing with the event 12 years later, I find myself much more aware of people and question more readily if they are someone I want to hang around. I’m less likely to fall into ‘bed’/friendship with someone who I don’t trust, or at least more likely to get out of there much faster than I would have in the past. Maybe this is just a part of growing up, I don’t know.
Another strange occurrence is my realization that just before the event I make a pact with myself to be independent of my family. I wanted to go overseas by myself and work for a year or two. They flipped out and where adamant that I not leave the country – as a young woman – by myself (if I had been male it would have been a whole different matter). How could I think such a thing! And who did I think I was wanting to go out there by myself – as a young woman! I can see that they thought I was a whore, disgraceful, and hurtful (to them) for just wanting to go it alone. I was young, free, independent I told myself.
Strange, but, I see now that I built independence through the assault, then hiding it and now coming to terms with it. In telling the world that I wanted to be independent I found myself understanding what independence was not… in this particular instance I was not independent, I was at the hands of another person, at his mercy and he did not protect, care for or support me – only what he wanted was going to happen.
I can also see that independence was my ability to hold onto it in order to protect myself. It may seem a little weird to experience independence in this way but I know that if I had told anyone (including myself) at that time, I would have fallen very hard. I would never have left the family home, I would have had to admit that they were right – I should not, as a young woman, been allowed to go it alone, look at what happened to me! I would have become more dependent on my family and others for their interpretations of my life – what I should be, who I should see, how I should act.
I took a stance, said no, I wasn’t going to deal with it right now, and then buried the whole event within a couple of hours of it happening – it didn’t rise in my conscious mind again for about 5 years. At which time began a long process of dealing with small pieces, leaving it for a while and then dealing with some more. The healing, I’ve discovered, has a life or a will of its own. I simply follow, watch and sometimes fight it(!).
What I did become was dependent on the physical presence of people for protection, not that I understood why in that years that it was buried. I had an intense fear of being attacked, and didn’t see it as a consequence of my own personal experience. But here again, I have learnt to work through that and I know that I was afraid of being alone at night by myself even before it happened. So, I guess that independence has come out of this whole event and consequential dealing with.
Somewhere along the way the world showed me just want it meant to be independent and it’s not as straight forward as I hoped. Going overseas by myself would certainly have been an independent-making experience. But this whole experience has been a much deeper exploration of just why I might need to rely on another person for their approval, guidance or support. In reality, I’m all that I’ve got at any given moment and I can make the decisions that are best for me… regardless of that one decision to let that one man into my hotel room… then again, would I have been given an easier opportunity in the future to discover all that I have about myself if I’d told him to bugger off??
I doubt it.
What I mean is that I, in the aftermath, made the decision that I wouldn’t tell anyone because I didn’t feel that I could trust them not to blame me, especially my Catholic family… after all I had let this guy into my hotel room in the first place – that certainly doesn’t make me virtuous – more likely a ‘whore’.
I use that term disdainfully as I don’t feel that the catholic religion had the capacity to exemplify sexuality in terms other than virgin or whore. It seemed to me, growing up, that sexuality was a perfectly normal part of human life but for some reason the church chose to push it behind closed doors. And so behind closed doors it is, along with anything that could potentially go wrong. If you enjoy sex then you’re a whore. If you get yourself into trouble you’re also a whore – so where does anyone win here?
Somewhere in the bible it says that sex is for procreation only… I want to make it clear here that as a writer, I understand every author has their own agenda…I don’t believe that the bible was divined straight from God. In fact I think the bible is a handful of stories made up by people along the way. I don’t deny the existence of Jesus, Mary and the rest of the characters in those stories. I do though deny that any account of history is a direct reflection of what actually happened. It simply cannot be. We each have a mind that interpret and changes and adapts aspects of our own and our global history to suit our own needs. Perhaps who-ever wrote that piece of information about sex being just for procreation was just really pissed off that they had bad sex and wanted to limited it to just a few times a lifetime.
I don’t think that the Catholic church as seriously considered its stance on sexuality (probably why I have such trouble with it). Afterall, if sexuality is really so bad, why did God give it to us?? Oh, that’s right it’s to test us. We are born of immortal sin and need to prove ourselves through the tests of God to ensure that we get to heaven. Well, I’ve lost my chance. I had sex. God will punish me, unless I redeem myself by going to confession and telling the priest that I’ve had sex. Thankfully the priest can forgive me on behalf of God and my whore-ishness will be redeemed with 10 hail-mary’s and 3 our-father's.
You know what? ‘God’-I gave me-myself this experience. Not to ensure that I meet the devil but to ensure that I meet my own guidelines of forming a solid state of independence… as explained below.
I think the Church has a lot to answer for. I think that it’s gone upside down with its thinking here and refuses to back-track. Firstly because demonizing sex has cause the demons to roam…
I will carefully but happily admit that my demons came out through my early sexual experiences because I was acting in ways that, I see now, were emotionally-unsafe. I was not caring for myself emotionally, spiritually, sexually or mentally through my drunken sleeping around. (I’m really pushing back the desire to justify that I didn’t do it that many times, but enough to damage my self-respect the morning after…I’ll try to hold back…)
I say this carefully because I feel that I had little else to work with. I had a burgeoning sexuality, discovered in my late-teens. I didn’t think that there was anything wrong with this sexuality. But I didn’t have any guidelines about what to do with it either – other than ‘don’t’. I think we have learnt by now that repression doesn’t cause anything to go away, it pushes it underground where it fester and takes on a (demonic) life of its own. Have you ever discovered an emotional reaction to an event that you buried for a long time? When you found it, it horrified you as it was interacting with your day to day life in a way that was both damaging and emotionally challenging? This is what happens to us when we push our real and positive sexual desires underground – it becomes a feeding ground for all those thoughts of unworthiness to take hold… I am not worthy of what I really want so I will have this thing that hurts me…
Well, at that early stage I wasn’t going to push my sexuality underground – ‘I was right, I knew that there was nothing wrong with it, I would use it because my mother didn’t want me to and I could show her!’
I’m not going to say that I was wrong, but I could have learnt a great deal from a role-model who told me not to be afraid of my body. Because all I did was throw it around and feed into those base sexual desires that said, have anyone, just anyone… needless to say I woke up on the odd Sunday morning feeling more than a little emotionally-battered and ashamed of myself because I had used my body to make me feel ok about myself.
In hindsight of my assault, I feel a little bitter, but I can’t blame anyone in particular because the adults around me at the time didn’t actually have anything to offer me in terms of guidance. They were just as afraid as their sexuality as the Church wanted them to be.
I’m still unsure as to why the Catholics had to demonise sexuality – I think it has something to do with joy. A real, passionate, trustworthy, sexual relationship (I suspect) has the ability to build joy within one’s heart. The church doesn’t want this. It’s much easier to entice people to following you if they are negative, unhappy, disturbed and disoriented… of course, I’m not saying the that Catholic church wants to control anyone. I just think they want more from people than they would be willing to give through joy – their hearts (or is that control of their hearts?).
A joyful heart is one that listens to itself rather than other people. Unfortunately, I don’t think that the Catholic church wants its followers to listen to their hearts at all. If the Catholic church has your heart, it also has your money. I’m not saying this is a conscious decision on behalf of the church but it’s steeped in its history. The Catholic church is wealthy, historically bigoted and sexuality maligned. It’s rulers have followed their own footsteps rather than looked at what’s best for its followers and has created a vast amount of dissatisfaction the world over. And a little digging would find that rarely has priest’s sexuality been restrained. They hide facts, hide women and assume the role of God himself in pontificating to their followers just what life is all about. If we bothered to look at the double standard presented throughout history we might find that we have trouble swallowing their guidance – if they haven’t bothered to follow it, why should we.
Recently, it was suggested through a survey of church goers in Australia that Catholics were the unhappiest of all the religions and that numbers of church goers was declining (if I’d bothered to keep the reference I would have quoted it here.)
Moreover, Australia has the highest known incidence of child molestation at the hands on a priest than anywhere else. It’s those demons coming out again… sorry if that’s a little dry. I can’t help but feel that the Catholic Church has a lot to answer for, and somehow, also that my hands are tied in doing anything about it.
Anyway, back to my voice. It was bad enough that the church had taken my capacity to speak up about my own rights in front of my family, to have it take away my right to speak of my own pain is a whole other matter. I couldn’t actually tell anyone had happened to me because I feared that I would be blamed rather than comforted. Outcast rather than supported. And when I eventually did say something, I found this to be true. Whilst my family are none-the-wiser about it all, the friends I did have fell off the radar one by one. I suppose this is somewhat indicative of the type of friends I had… but then again, they didn’t understand because they hadn’t been through it.
I do want to say that whilst their catholic upbringings had been questioned, turned inside out and judged just as mind had, I misjudged their capacity to turn the event back around on me. They still found ways to blame me, such as I should have gone to the police in case he had done it to anyone else. I had no proof, nor a name. I was in a hotel in the middle of nowhere at a wedding with a whole lot of people I didn’t know… what the f#$@ did she expect from me? Not only had I been through the whole event, now she wanted to turn it back on me and was asking me to turn it back on myself because I was a bad person if he was doing it to anyone else. I can see her point – it would have been worthwhile going to the police if I’d had that capacity – or someone to go with me... Should I have rung the bride the next morning, asking her as the closest person to me at the wedding if she would mind just stepping down to the police station with me? Could I have come back home, suggested to the guy I had been seeing for a few weeks that I needed his assistance in a a small matter? My fury at the circumstances of the whole event and aftermath is only just rising. As is my fury at those people who suggest that when your voice, and your sense of control and your physical presence is taken from you – that you should have the capacity to speak up. At a time when people are expecting you to speak the loudest – you have just had your voice taken from you. I know that some people reading this blog have been through similar assaults and will understand my anger, others who have not or who know someone who has, might simply be able to understand that speaking full-stop is not always an option.
I also know that my friend wanted to blame me because she was hurt by the fact that it happened to one of her friends and didn’t know what to do with her own pain. If she placed it back on me, then it might leave her.
I still blame her for blaming me for the whole not speaking up thing…of course, we’re not friends anymore. I don’t trust her, actually I don’t think I ever did, but it took this particular event to see it. Through eventually dealing with the event 12 years later, I find myself much more aware of people and question more readily if they are someone I want to hang around. I’m less likely to fall into ‘bed’/friendship with someone who I don’t trust, or at least more likely to get out of there much faster than I would have in the past. Maybe this is just a part of growing up, I don’t know.
Another strange occurrence is my realization that just before the event I make a pact with myself to be independent of my family. I wanted to go overseas by myself and work for a year or two. They flipped out and where adamant that I not leave the country – as a young woman – by myself (if I had been male it would have been a whole different matter). How could I think such a thing! And who did I think I was wanting to go out there by myself – as a young woman! I can see that they thought I was a whore, disgraceful, and hurtful (to them) for just wanting to go it alone. I was young, free, independent I told myself.
Strange, but, I see now that I built independence through the assault, then hiding it and now coming to terms with it. In telling the world that I wanted to be independent I found myself understanding what independence was not… in this particular instance I was not independent, I was at the hands of another person, at his mercy and he did not protect, care for or support me – only what he wanted was going to happen.
I can also see that independence was my ability to hold onto it in order to protect myself. It may seem a little weird to experience independence in this way but I know that if I had told anyone (including myself) at that time, I would have fallen very hard. I would never have left the family home, I would have had to admit that they were right – I should not, as a young woman, been allowed to go it alone, look at what happened to me! I would have become more dependent on my family and others for their interpretations of my life – what I should be, who I should see, how I should act.
I took a stance, said no, I wasn’t going to deal with it right now, and then buried the whole event within a couple of hours of it happening – it didn’t rise in my conscious mind again for about 5 years. At which time began a long process of dealing with small pieces, leaving it for a while and then dealing with some more. The healing, I’ve discovered, has a life or a will of its own. I simply follow, watch and sometimes fight it(!).
What I did become was dependent on the physical presence of people for protection, not that I understood why in that years that it was buried. I had an intense fear of being attacked, and didn’t see it as a consequence of my own personal experience. But here again, I have learnt to work through that and I know that I was afraid of being alone at night by myself even before it happened. So, I guess that independence has come out of this whole event and consequential dealing with.
Somewhere along the way the world showed me just want it meant to be independent and it’s not as straight forward as I hoped. Going overseas by myself would certainly have been an independent-making experience. But this whole experience has been a much deeper exploration of just why I might need to rely on another person for their approval, guidance or support. In reality, I’m all that I’ve got at any given moment and I can make the decisions that are best for me… regardless of that one decision to let that one man into my hotel room… then again, would I have been given an easier opportunity in the future to discover all that I have about myself if I’d told him to bugger off??
I doubt it.
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