FROZEN

I was frozen. I was stuck and couldn’t not move or talk or think.  He was on top of me and after a few minutes of struggle where he was overpowering me physically some internal instinct of survival told me to stop wrestling and accept the inevitable and live to tell the story by just staying still, by staying frozen.

This was the story of my rape. (Rape is unlawful sexual activity and usually sexual intercourse carried out forcibly or under threat of injury against the will usually of a female or with a person who is beneath a certain age or incapable of valid consent)

I was 17 years old and dating the star basketball player at a rival school. He was tall and good looking and all the girls were crazy for him. We began going out and he seemed to be a nice enough guy. He took me on a few dates and that summer was looking like it would be a lot of fun.

That same summer a friend of my mother had given me a house sitting job while she was away visiting her family in Jamaica. She lived on the 10^th floor of our building and she asked me to weekly get her mail, water her plants and dust her furniture.

I made the mistake of telling my new “ boyfriend” that I was doing this job and  he came up with a great way for us to spend some private time together. He would meet me on the 10^th floor during one of my visits and we could be together. Now I wasn’t a virgin I had lost my virginity and had sex already with a previous boyfriend but I was not planning on having sex with a guy I had just begun to date. I had the thought that we would kiss and hug and maybe fool around, but I made a foolish mistake as we didn’t have any discussion about this.

So he arrived at the apartment and I let him in and he watched while I did the chores and then we began to fool around like young teenagers do. I don’t know when it changed for him but I remember when it changed for me. There was this one moment when I began to feel like I wasn’t comfortable anymore and I tried to move off the couch. He grabbed my hand pulled me down and before I knew what happened he was lying on top of me and I began to tell him that I wanted him to stop and I writhed my body underneath his and tried to move my position and instantly realized that this 6 foot 2 tall guy had me pinned down like we were in a wrestling match.

I asked him to get off me a few times nicely and softly , maybe I wasn’t stern enough  as I fought to remove him off of me and then it happened, I froze. As he continued to quickly remove my clothes and began to have sex with me I became as stiff as a board and went into survival mode. This was a learned behavior from my days as a young girl when my stepfather would sexually abuse me at night. I would leave my body and my mind behind and go somewhere else so that I could cope with life when he was finished. And now this coping mechanism was failing me at a time when I could have and would have screamed, punched and told this guy to get the hell off of me. I was frozen and didn’t have the skills to do anything.

When it was all over I was like a robot and my memory now fails me as to what happened next. All I remember was the next day him trying to call me and me not ever wanting to talk to him again. I never did.  I told my best friend what happened and cried for two days about how stupid I had been and that this guy was an over privileged jock that felt that he had a right to treat young women like pieces of flesh and not like l was a real person. Needless to say many of my female friends were shocked that I had let a good looking catch like him get away. How could I share with them that he had left me… “frozen”.

This is similar to the story Frozen by Disney of Elsa’s response to a traumatic event – She caused everything around her to become frozen.

I have since dealt with the pain of this incident in my counselling sessions about my sexual abuse and have many years ago disabled the frozen mechanism within that had helped me to cope with some of the most horrible memories that I had experienced in my life.  Yet I still wonder what would have happened to me if I had chosen some different tools that others use to deal with this type of abuse. Many turn to drugs, alcohol, withdrawal, sexual promiscuity and other means just to live another day. So in some ways I hated being frozen but this state of being actually helped me to get to the very moment in my life when I could be thawed and warmed by love. I may never know what would have taken place had I been able to make some other choices but that isn’t my story and it isn’t my ending. I have since forgiven that young teenage boy full of hormones and ideas about what sex was like. I have also forgiven myself for yielding to a frozen state of being.

Gods plan for me was never that I become frozen and locked in a tower trying to stay away from those that can hurt me or those I may possibly hurt back. I was made to have a heart of flesh and to use the power of love to release my voice to speak, to be heard and not to allow vulnerable situations to render me powerless.

Maybe you have never experienced a situation like this or maybe you have, my message to you is that survival isn’t the only way to live life. God has a bigger plan so don’t stay frozen or numb. Don’t let shame, pity, guilt, anger, vengeance, frustrations, flashbacks, triggers or any other kind of abuse render you immobilized and unable to live.  Use that energy and force for good and channel all the love in the world towards yourself.

Like the famous song out of the Frozen movie it is time to just “Let it go”.