“Surely none of us wants the other one to know,
That somewhere lurks a coward deep inside our soul,
So all of us pretend that such brave hearts are we,
Never realizing, what we fake will someday be.”
These are the last four lines to a poem I wrote about courage while I was going through recovery. It took five years to do so, but then I had a lot of debris to work through. It had been 27 years since, at the age of 13, I had been first raped by my father and the years in between contained a mountain of shame, bad decisions, suicide attempts, nervous breakdowns, time spent in psychiatric wards, time spent in a women’s shelter and a lot more that even now I am loathe to remember.
So many times I didn’t think I had the courage to go forward. I wanted to quit. I wanted to continue living in despair and pain. It had become so familiar and it’s easy to deceive oneself into believing that familiar is best. I needed to make tough decisions and I wasn’t sure I was capable of that. I had heard once that you could tell people who had strong character from those who didn’t. The strong charactered ones always took the difficult road; the weak charactered took the easy one. Oh the shame of taking the easy road. I had always had such contempt for people with weak character and now it was returning to haunt me for I was one of them. More shame to pile on my huge mountain.
But I was stronger than I thought. I reminded myself that surely I couldn’t have survived all I did if I wasn’t strong. I realized I had a few more qualities I had overlooked. I was persistent. So I continued, one day at a time, one hour at a time and sometimes one minute at a time. I kept thinking of what lay behind me and what lay in front of me. Did I really want to live the way I had lived for so many years?
One day I decided to write a list of all of the things I had done that required courage, no matter how small. The list contained things like: dove off a high board as a young girl when I was terrified of heights, drove a car for the first time when I was shaking with fear, ran away from home when I had little money, only one friend and knew my father would try to find me. The list became very long. I read it and re-read it. Then I realized that all of the things on the list contained one common denominator, fear. My common sense told me that fear was a great motivator and that if I was afraid I needed to be afraid. Otherwise I would never push forward.
I discovered something else. No matter how small the victory, everything I did strengthened me. It gave me hope to shoulder on. While my teeny bit of strength continued to grow I read, journalized, went to domestic violence meetings and Twelve Step Co-Dependent Meetings, constructed a Magic Mirror (you can read more about this in the book REPAIR Your Life) and cried. I cried for my lost youth, I cried for all the beatings I’d received, all the rapes. I cried for not being there for my oldest two daughters when they were sexually abused by my second husband, not being there when my 17 year old daughter had been raped at gunpoint. I cried for the loss of my mother. Mostly I cried for my shame. How was I ever going to get well?
I was married to my third abuser at the time. I fought back physically against his rapes, his verbal and emotional abuse. He had found the journals I kept over all the years; journals that contained all the damning information of my affairs. Every time I failed to do something he wanted, change my clothes, hang up the phone while talking to my brother, not laugh at a joke or the worst, not have sex with him even if it was in the middle of the night for the tenth time that day, he berated me over and over about all my wrongs, about what a horrid, shameful person I was. I felt covered in shame. After sharing with a counselor I was going to what he was doing, she told me I would not survive his abuse. This therapist was the first one who pinpointed what my problem was. She had been sexually abused as a child and was a specialist in the field of child sexual abuse. Trying to go through recovery, while married to an abuser, is like trying to swim upstream with heavy chains around your neck. But I had come so far I didn’t want to turn back no matter how dark and frightening the path ahead of me was. I continued on. I bought a sweat shirt that said, “What Part of No Don’t You Understand?” The first time I wore it I thought he would kill me but, instead, in a confused way he asked, “Why are you wearing that?” “Because I can,” I responded. My life improved.
After five years my daughter got him out of the house for me, my son got a restraining order against him and tearfully I filed for a divorce. It was another six months of post recovery before I felt stable and strong and was able to start my life. I wrote a saying over my desk: “If I’d have known life was going to start out this good I would have started sooner.” Courage, once that elusive quality I didn’t think I had, walked at my side the entire time. Courage had been the friend that helped me cross that Bridge of Recovery. Today, I can say: I am brave; I am courageous. It’s a great thing to be. Everyone of us is brave; we need only take the 1st step.
