This week, Anne Lauren continues her series on abandonment and shares what her path to recovering was like, especially her search for the "bottom of the healing barrel"
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It was my second business trip to New York that year and I was just starting to feel it: the joy, the freedom, and the energy won from years of difficult recovery work. My plan this particular day was to visit the World Trade Center Memorial.
I approached the waterfalls in awe. Two square holes left in the ground from where the two demolished buildings used to stand. Many feet wide and even more feet deep. Names of victims of the terrorist attack etched around the perimeters, I ran my hand over them. I then made my way into the museum. Original banisters stood tall and proud inside this symbolic mausoleum, the names of victims and their life stories shown within a room of TV screens. A simple touch of each screen yielded the life of every individual who passed, their deepest loves, who they belonged to, etc.
I exited the museum, passed by the waterfalls once again, then headed into the new tower. I waited in line for what seemed to be forever as more TV screens lining the walls spoke of personal accounts of those who had the opportunity to work on building the new project and what it meant to them. I entered the elevator and the expansion and changes of New York City appeared before my eyes through more screens that lined the elevator walls: the closer I got to the top, the more the images before me mirrored the New York that I was visiting that day.
The elevator rang at my arrival, the doors opened, and I stepped out to see the most spectacular view. New York, New Jersey, the Statue of Liberty, the Hudson River, the Empire state building could all be seen from the height that I stood. I sat down and cried. What beauty had been born from such brutality.
I often heard myself telling friends that I was waiting to find the bottom of the recovery barrel. For nearly 10 years I had been clearing, cleaning, and clinging to a barrel full of traumatic memories, unprocessed abandonment, and the hope to carry on. But where indeed was the bottom of the barrel? Did it even exist? Can incest and illness be recovered from or do the physical and psychological consequences just become chronic diseases that need to be managed? Can I ever let go of being abandoned by my father, my mother, my brothers, my government? I didn’t know the answers to these questions, so I continued to exhaust myself while running away from abuse and desperately searching for the bottom of that barrel.
Recovering from abandonment caused by sexual violence feels impossible. I still did it. I’m not going to pretend that there’s a magical, easy way to succeed. I’m not going to write a list of steps to follow so others can also succeed in doing so. It’s too simple. Instead, I’m just going to talk about how I did it, write about how I did it, live all the lessons that I learned in doing it and hopefully my story will be used to encourage others trying to recover to keep trying.
When my body shut down when I was 22, I knew that I had hit rock bottom. I couldn’t take care of myself and no one I knew could take care of me without the consequence of enduring more abuse. I knew that I wouldn’t survive long in the state that I was in, so I sought medical assistance. The problem was I didn’t know about the trauma yet. I had repressed the memories of sexual abuse. The abandonment issues were still normal to me. I didn’t know any better. I was diagnosed with anxiety and depression, but without understanding the root cause, it was difficult for doctors to come up solutions. So I tried the general ones: I went on mental medication, I wrote down 5 things I was grateful for everyday, and I saw my first therapist.
My first lesson from my first therapist was that sometimes it’s hard to find the right one. It was always nice talking to her, but she seemed to talk more than I did during our sessions. She told me stories of her life, when I was trying to recover my own stories. I didn’t seem to be finding it helpful. Then I met a new therapist who suited me for a time. She taught me about basic boundaries. I felt responsible for solving my family’s problems, but with her learned that they needed to take care of themselves and I could distance myself.
Eventually I went to graduate school miles away from home and met my next counselor. She taught me to be strong; to stop engaging my family all together. There was no room in my life for what they offered me. She gave me the freedom to cut them out. So I did. It wasn’t supposed to be permanent. It was just going to be for a little while. I needed a some space to process that I had been a victim of sexual violence, but my space was never honored.
I received daily phone calls from parents, siblings, grandparents, and friends of parents reminding me of my responsibilities to take care of the family. I let their calls go to voicemail with no intent of returning them. I was sent gifts and money to bribe me to come home. I donated it all. Finally, my mother showed up uninvited to my graduation. Here, I had had enough. I changed my phone number, blocked them from my emails, and never let them know where I was living ever again. The planned temporary space became permanent.
In this new safe space I could finally heal. But I was still at the top of the barrel, completely exhausted, with so much work ahead of me. I was in 60k worth of debt, had just received a degree from a church I no longer wanted to work for, had no money in my bank account and needed to replenish. So I got the best job I could and started building.
New healing modalities became more available to me as my income increased. At the advice of a few mentors, I began EMDR and acupuncture. My brain needed to be rewired, the abused child raised again, and my body needed release from years of toxic energy. Each day I woke up, got dressed, finished my responsibilities at work, returned home, and laid on my furniture-less floor processing memories, letting my body rest, and trying to make sense of years of unprocessed trauma. Some days the fatigue was so bad I could barely get out of bed, some days the triggers were so traumatic that I would spend most of the workday on the bathroom floor crying, some days the retrieved memories were so horrible that I would literally throw up while revisiting the horror of what I went through at such a young age. Everyday my body purged more and more as I ran away from the abusive environment and tried desperately to build a better life. I could hardly eat, I couldn’t sleep, and as much as a 20 minute walk exhausted me. I was so tired and had so much work to do.
My job kept me stable but didn’t suit me. After two years, the stability gave me the confidence to try something new. I wanted to be an artist, so I applied and started as an interior designer at furniture store. I succeeded quickly and my confidence grew. I began to focus more on what I enjoyed and engaged simple things like eating lunch in the sunshine or choosing to live near the ocean. Life became more lovely, but I still felt isolated and lonely.
My body was getting stronger, and I wanted to start exercising again. I learned of a co-ed water polo team that practiced near my apartment and was introduced to a new and incredibly supportive community. There I was allowed to be angry, I was honored for being a strong, vocal woman, I was admired for my natural abilities. I had a lot of emotional energy and let it out in the pool without complaint from my mostly male teammates. They were sensitive and sweet- played competitive but never hard enough to hurt me: an entire community of men supporting my healing and commitment to never causing me harm.
This team was also full of women who became my best friends. Women who honored my progress, supported my journey, and saw the best in me when I didn’t see it in myself. New family was being created on that pool deck as we squatted and swam and shot balls into goals. They restored normalcy to my life: invited me to holiday dinners, family events, and even took me on vacation. They helped me to understand what family life should have been like, what love without strings attached felt like, and how freedom to be myself while learning in a safe environment gave me the possibility to grow. They broke the chains of abandonment tied by my own family and gave me hope for the future.
Eventually, recovery led me to the top of the World Trade Center where the beautiful and the broken could not be extricated, where trauma and triumph were strongly bound together, where past and present met in a state of absolute wonder. The barrel may not have a bottom but it didn’t seem to matter there. I was above it all now, standing at 1300 ft, safe from abuse and abandonment and looking out at a future of possibility.
Where would I go from here?
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Anne Lauren is a word weaver, a woman warrior, and a wisdom wayfinder. She authors the blog, Blue&Lavender, which speaks of her experience recovering from incest and illness and seeks to educate and inspire others to do so. She runs her own coaching program, speaks publicly about her experience, and publishes writings to spread her hope for healing. Check out her blog at www.bluandlav.com. She can also be found on Facebook, Twitter, and Medium @BlueandLavender and on Instagram @Blue_and_Lavender.
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