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”.

Freedom

I was taking a course to become a bereavement companion and was at my weekly training class and the instructor that week was running us through an exercise that taught me something so valuable about what I believe.

She handed all of the students, twelve small pieces of blank paper.  She then instructed each of us to write down three people we love , three things we have that are important to us , three activities we enjoy doing and three quality traits about ourselves, all each on a separate sheet of paper. This took a lot of thought for me and in a short amount of time I wrote down the following.

3 people I love - I chose Wayne my husband because he is my soul mate and very important person in my life. I have five children and could not choose between any of them and so I left them out. I choose my mother and one of my girlfriends.                                                                                                                                

3 important things to me - My wedding ring, my writings, my bible,                                                                                     

3 activities I enjoy- dancing, writing, talking                                                                                                                      

3 quality traits about me- intelligent, creative and free

After this she asked us to close our eyes and she began to walk us through a visual meditation and gave us instructions as we moved along.  

You are not been feeling well and have made several visits to the doctor and are now in his office where you have received a fatal diagnosis. Take a moment and breathe and pay attention to what you are feeling.  You leave the doctor and get in your car you are finally alone, what thoughts are coming to you? You arrive at your home and begin to process this information before sharing the news with your family. How will you tell them? How will they respond? What are you feeling now? Days begin to pass and you begin to experience the loss that comes with this illness. At this point she asks us to throw away any 2 pieces of paper.  

Now I am a very visual person and because I meditate often, I was very much involved in this exercise. My whole being began to see myself with a fatal illness and I began to experience the feelings of helplessness. I took time and thought in what I would throw away and discarded 2 pieces of paper.

As she walked us through the rest of the exercise going into detail about what someone who has a fatal illness experiences and then gave us the choice to throw away pieces of paper that represented “you” it became more difficult and harder to throw away. I also began to understand that this was all about the loss that comes with death. We were finally down to three pieces of paper and all this time I had been thinking and prioritizing the order of what I would choose next and slowly letting go of the loss of things that I thought represented me. Then suddenly she sprung a surprise on us that caused me to gasp so loudly that everyone in the room looked my way to see if I was ok.

She was going to come and take the next piece of paper.

Right then I lost something that I realized was very important to me. I didn’t have any more choices. This profoundly impacted me and I began to pray as I had three things left that were very important to me.  The three pieces of paper were Wayne my husband, my Bible that represented my faith and the quality of free which represented my freedom.

I quietly under my breath began to say take my Bible or Wayne , take my Bible or Wayne , please don’t  take my freedom. I wanted to be left with my freedom, because I felt I knew the word in my heart and that was enough for me. I knew I was one with Wayne and I was willing to let him go as well.

Sure enough she picked the piece of paper that said Bible and I breathed a sigh of relief. I was even sweating at this point and was very heavily invested in this challenging pretend exercise.

Now she had come to the end of our journey and we were near death and at the hospital and she would come around again and remove another piece of paper. I was a bit more relaxed this time around as it worked out ok the last time and I just believed that just the thought that I wanted her to take Wayne was good enough and as I looked at the last piece of paper in front of me- there was the word Free. I was so happy that I had my freedom and that no one could take that away from me.

Then she told us to rip up the last piece of paper because we had now died. She told us that everything was gone and nothing was left.

As I slowly ripped the paper containing my freedom I had a thought, then a feeling and then a revelation. I would never lose my freedom even in death I would still be free or maybe even freer than ever before, because of my faith and my beliefs about death. I would gain back everything and more of what I had lost. I was so happy and relieved at this point that my heart became full and I began to smile with my teeth showing!

She gave us a few moments to sit quietly and to process this exercise and then asked us to share with the group anything about how we were impacted by the exercise. I shared what happened to me and was able to use this as a platform to share my faith in the midst of this class that had many different types of people with different beliefs about death and the afterlife. But this would also set the undertone for my work in bereavement. Freedom would be a pillar of my belief surrounding death and loss. I would use it to frame my life work in every way as I could now see the importance of this state of being to me. This thread has been woven throughout the course of my life and is my eternal message to the world. I am free to be me, you are free to be you and no one can take that from you.

I would have never imagined that one of the greatest lessons I would learn in my life would come from a pretend exercise to help me understand how to be a compassionate bereavement companion.

I was my own Drug Dealer

Now I know what your first thoughts must be when you read a title like this one but read on before you make any assumptions, judgments or refer to your already established preconceived ideas and beliefs about drug dealers.

I was a drug addict and I was addicted to the drug Fiorinal. It came in a pill form that is taken orally that contains butalbiltal, aspirin and caffeine.  It was prescribed for me by my heath care professional as I was a chronic migraine suffer. Now for those of you that have never suffered a migraine you may have some difficulty understanding how I could be a wife, a mother of three, professional business woman and a Christian leader and still become addicted to drugs. But if you have ever had one migraine or like myself suffered daily with a pain so excruciating that you thought your head would explode and that surely you had a bomb going off in your brain and this was it- your last moment on earth. Or at the least you felt like you wanted it to be. Then you will fully understand my story.

Now all drug addiction starts with one main ingredient- pain. You have some sort of pain and you want it to subside, go away or just be able to forget it for a while. My pain wasn’t just internal, it wasn’t imaginary, neither was it getting any better, as a matter of a fact it was getting worse and more frequent. Like every human being that suffers, I really just wanted it to stop. For many years I tried natural ways to handle the intensity of these headaches that were quite debilitating and most of the time I just suffered through the pain and became more resilient.

So when my doctor offered Fiorinal to me I thought about it and felt that the benefit to me would be worth any of the risks of the side effects. Never did I once imagine that becoming addicted would be a side effect.

This is what happened. The Fiorinal actual began to work. Whenever I felt an aura or the beginning of a migraine coming on I would take a Fiorinal and sometimes it wouldn’t go any further and if it did then it would just be a light headache and end very quickly. This was a miracle drug to me as I had suffered with migraines from a very young age and nothing had ever given me this type of result.

But then after renewing my prescription a few times I remember my husband asking me if I thought maybe I was taking too many of them. I became irritated and angry, I even suggested that he was more worried about all the money they were costing than he was about me. Yes as any drug addict can tell you money wasn’t an object to stop me from getting my next fix. Fiorinal was not cheap, it was pretty expensive but it was worth the relief or at least that was the lie I was telling myself so I could live supposedly pain free.

 In truth I had increased the dosage prescribed, I was taking it more frequently and even if I had a thought that my head might begin to hurt I popped in a pill. After some secret soul searching I had to admit to myself that I was addicted. But what was I going to do? I couldn’t go back to the pain.

In here lies the dilemma that every addict asks themselves- do I go back to the way it was? What do I do now? I was faced with the truth that I was addicted but felt powerless to stop. As I put the pros and cons on the scale to measure it was very imbalanced. The drugs were heavily winning. In my mind I needed these drugs to continue with life. Or did I?

I was brought back to my early childhood when I was a thumb sucker for comfort. Sucking my thumb was something I began as a baby in my crib all alone to soothe and comfort myself when no one was giving me love and affection. It continued into my childhood and even adolescence until I was 12 years old and my buck teeth began to protrude out. Then one day I just threw away the embroidered pillowcase that I used to scratch when I slept and sucked my thumb. I had tried everything to stop up until this point. I had put the most disgusting things on my thumb, wrapped it up at night, hid it under my pillow while I slept , but every morning when I woke up my thumb was still in my mouth. Then one day I just decided that I wasn’t ever going to suck my thumb again and I stopped. I never sucked my thumb ever again. Cold turkey is what they call it. I made a decision and I stuck to it.

That was what I would do now. So I fired myself as my own personal drug dealer. I flushed away all the pills I had left in the toilet and to this day have never taken another Fiorinal or other drug for the migraines. The withdrawal symptoms were difficult but I was determined to beat this addiction.  I was also willing to face the pain and instead of masking the hurt I would go on a search to find the root cause of why these headaches had such control in my life. I am glad to say that I am no longer a migraine sufferer but the way I received that miraculous healing is for another story.

  They now have a warning attached to Fiorinal -This medication may cause withdrawal reactions, especially if it has been used regularly for a long time or in high doses. In such cases, withdrawal symptoms (such as nausea/vomiting, mental/mood changes, seizures) may occur if you suddenly stop using this medication. Consult your doctor or pharmacist for more details, and report any withdrawal reactions immediately. Though very unlikely, abnormal drug-seeking behavior (addiction) is possible with this medication.

I really wish that this warning had been on the bottle I began using when this drug first arrived on the market. But then I wouldn’t have had the understanding or the courage to face the truth about the pain that I was experiencing that was the catalyst for these migraines. Truth comes to us in many ways and my prayer is always that no matter how difficult or painful the process, that aligning my life with Truth would be a foundational principle that I choose to live by. 

Truth and Reality- a story of depression and hope

I had just completed my third fashion show production under my company Charms Presentations and was in my hotel room at the Holiday Inn discussing  what had happened with my husband the following morning. The reviews were coming in and everyone was commenting how amazing the show was. It was flawless and they all loved it and though this was the answer I wanted to hear, I knew the truth. It was a disaster but only to those who could see behind the scenes. I had difficulty with the models, some of the clothing went missing, sales were low and I would have to financially cover the overage personally. In this very moment something inside me went still and I began a journey that would take me into my “pit” experience.

I am not quite sure exactly what happened but this I know – that the analogy of life being a fashion show and everyone only caring about what they saw on the outside and their perception of perfection being that everything they saw looked ok, triggered something in me to begin to deal with what the truth about what is really happening behind the scenes, in the wings.   I began to understand that success is measured in totality and truth not perception of reality.

I was living a lie. My life was all about the perception of reality and there were things in my life that were very wrong. I had lies I had told my self to just survive but now they were taking over and beginning to control me. I had begun a journey to deal with the truth.

I began to travel into a very dark place and after a while I found myself in what I now refer to as the “pit”.

This place is dark and lonely and desolate and cold and hard and you have no energy and you cry continually- some call it depression others have names to label it but all I know is that I was in a pit and I couldn’t do anything to get myself out. It was too deep and too wide and I was too tired and confused and overwhelmed and lost.

I gave up on everything – I was lost deep in myself. I stayed on my couch for days and couldn’t tend to anything, I struggled to do the very basic things, I couldn’t talk or pray or even the sight of my children caused me to cry. I had a new born infant during this time and this too may have been one of the reasons that I reached the precipice of the pit at this time. I was unable to bond with her and my mother instinct was dormant.

I knew I was in a bad way but my natural human instincts to pretend and get on with life were not working. I was facing truth and behind the scenes there was a mess. This mess was me.

I don’t know how long this went on for but it felt like months and years. But then one day when everything was really dark and I thought my life was over and I didn’t even care anymore then something amazing happened. I heard a voice deep in me telling me to grab His hand. I had heard so many voices during this time but this voice was different. The other voices were telling me that I was a failure, useless, a liar, I didn’t deserve to live. But this voice was sweet and gentle and strong and powerful and so full of Love and then I saw the hand. It was reaching down into “my pit” and offering me hope. I couldn’t believe that He would come this far for me and that He still loved me and wanted to rescue me. It took everything within me and all the strength I could find to grab a hold of that hand and let Him pull me up and out of that pit.

Now, I want to tell you that instantly everything was better, but in truth it was just the beginning. But  now I had hope.

I would hold onto that hand as a very lifeline as I daily began to find my way back from the distance that those lies had taken me to. I began to face the truth and speak out what was really happening and what I was experiencing and what I was struggling with. I began to tell shame and guilt that they were no longer welcome and that I was getting help from another source. Fear became my enemy and hope became my strength. Everyday I was becoming a little bit more … free. Free from the past, free from bondage of a reality that wasn’t based on truth, free from unhealthy relationships, free from letting the darkness overcome any light that was trying to shine through. I was letting Him pull me out of the pit.

Now I know I haven’t shared with you all the gory details of what happened in my counselling sessions, what steps did I take to become free and  I am sure you are wondering what were the lies she was believing? But none of those things really are the focus of what I am sharing with you. The reason I am telling this story is because I wanted to acknowledge my pit experience and let anyone out there know that your experience is real though it may be different than mine. You may feel like you are in a deep dark space or a wilderness, a desert, a dry place, or maybe locked in a cage, a jail or even feel like a slave or a prisoner, maybe you don’t even have words to describe where you are but I wanted you to know that there is someone who can help you. Listen to the voice that is extending His hand to you and let Him pull you out, lift you up, shine the light, unlock the door, give water to your soul. Let Him rescue you.

And then do the everyday work that may be hard sometimes, but is required to gain your freedom.

What you are experiencing is just the beginning of your journey from darkness to light, from pain to joy, from empty to full, from lies to truth and it can become glorious if you surrender and travel the path back from reality to truth.

I know you can do it – because I did.