Tag Archives: fallen world

christofascism

04 Wednesday May 2022

Posted by in addiction, Catholicism, christianity, Evil, kids, love, outrage, parenting, Politics, PTSD, Rape, Sin

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Nowhere in the Bible does it say life begins at conception. Nowhere in the Bible does it say 10 year old girls ought to carry and birth their father’s baby if he chooses to rape her which fathers sometimes do. To think this is what God would want says an awful lot about a person. And it isn’t good.

Howard Zinn says you can’t be neutral on a moving train and so I want to hear from my Christian sisters today. I want to hear them screaming for the women who will die, the girls who will die, for the dreams that will die. They asked Jesus the most important commandments and he said love God and love one another. Why is that so fucking hard for so many ChRiStIaNs?

Contraception is next. Do you know I didn’t use contraception for years and I’ve never been a fan and it’s failed me on occasion and I still will give my all to defend our right to it. Do you know the horrors I have seen come of lack of access to effective contraception? Where are you my fellow Christians? With your youth groups and your worship songs and your testimony? Jesus hung with the prostitutes and the lepers. She had two beautiful kids and a hole inside of her so wide and so deep because she’d never been loved and only ever been hurt and that third baby done did her in and now all three of the babies are with someone else and she is in jail detoxing meth psychosis and I miss her so damn much. She chopped wood at 8 months pregnant to try to make enough money to keep the water on. And where were you? At yOuTh GrOuP

I sat in my car and cried for the world we’ve given our kids. I tried. I believed. But here we are. Poor lost children of Eve banished from Eden. But Eden wasn’t enough. Or maybe it was too much. We wanted that apple and who could blame us? How boring a perfect life must be. So huddle together in this Whale with me and let us tell each other tales until the light goes out.

addicted

12 Tuesday Apr 2022

Posted by in addiction, autism, Catholicism, christianity, empathy, kids, residency, Sin

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all of my patients are physically dependent on opioids. ICD 10 F11.20. some of them are addicted to opioids. a lot of them aren’t.

maybe you’re physically dependent on something. for which there is no ICD 10 code. caffeine, zoloft, dopamine, adrenaline. maybe you’re addicted. coffee, zoloft, social media, shopping, toxic relationships, speeding, gossip, little debbie Christmas tree cakes, work, success, sex, HGTV.

maybe you think I’m being cute. or metaphorical. just making a point. no one goes to rehab for gossip addiction (maybe they should). no one goes to jail for possession of little debbie Christmas tree cakes (maybe no one should go to jail for possession of anything. maybe the jails are a crime)

addiction is an escape from the pain of being human. being human is more painful for some than others. but it is painful for all of us. and if someone tells you it isn’t, that is because they are so deep in their addiction, they have lost touch entirely.

eve and adam ate that apple and it all went to shit, you see. our eyes were opened and sickness and pain and toil entered the stage. we all fell down, down, down. and ever since, we have very logically sought to numb the pain of it. because there is no way up, up, up. not in this life anyway.

we are afraid. to hope, to love, to ask for love, to speak our truth, to share our pain, to need or be needed, to want or be wanted. we are afraid to take up space and that we might disappear, to be silenced and to be heard, to be alone and that we might make a genuine connection. we are afraid we are unlovable and that to be loved would be the most unbearable pain imaginable. or perhaps, worse than that, ecstasy.

in addiction we connect with other people. no we don’t. we are with people and we are less lonely and so we think we are connecting. logical. understandable. but let me tell you a story about the time my friends let G die when he overdosed because they were high too and didn’t want to get in trouble and i knew they loved drugs more than they loved me or each other. and the time i went back to my dopamine adrenaline filled emotional intimacy free relationship because right at that moment i loved it more than my kids and i do not want to tell you that but how else can we do better?

and they told me my son played next to other children but not with other children and that he was too old for parallel play. but tell me how much time adults spend engaging with other people and not engaging next to other people? are we connecting spiritually or are we churching next to one another? and those residents we work 90 hours a week with that we save and lose lives with, do we know them at all? and so pass the pipe and hand me that spoon and we will share a hit of Netflix and yoga and pumpkin spice latte next to one another in this Fallen World.

there is no ICD 10 code for the unbearable lightness of being but maybe there should be

Fuck Ted Bundy

31 Thursday Mar 2022

Posted by in Catholicism, christianity, empathy, Evil, kids, love, marriage, my awesome husband, narcissism, outrage, parenting, PTSD, romance, Sin

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Flesh of my flesh

Bone of my bone

Leave your parents cleave to me 

I am your new home

Home forever

Til death do us part

And if I make you yearn for that end 

Why that’s hardness in your heart

For if you love God

You love marriage, you love me 

And you know when God joins together

You’ll never be free

Free to be who you really are

To follow the fate signed in your stars

No you are mine and I am yours 

Don’t lock your phone 

Don’t lock your doors

We are one in heart and soul 

We are both driven by the hole 

left behind by the barren wombs that birthed us underneath the moon

Mother moon has cried for us while Brigid’s fire inspired us 

To reach for something better than us 

Wait Did I say us? 

I meant me. 

You conjure planks in all our eyes 

But yours are fine 

(It’s a disguise) 

A pleasant reflection outside of you 

Rot and decay is what is true

What god has joined together I will put asunder 

For how can we be one when your trunk is putrid and diseased at its core?

Swoop up the fruit before it hits the floor 

If you can tell a tree by the fruit it bears you’ve done a damn good job of fooling God 

For our children are precious fruit indeed 

Owing little to your bitter seed 

They grow and bloom in spite of you 

Soaring so far past the height of you 

Knowing there is something not right with you

People look at the women that fell in love with Ted Bundy

Stood by Ted Bundy

Accepted a proposal in a courtroom from Ted Bundy

And they think these women are naive or dumb or victims themselves

But has it ever occurred to you that they were there because being in love with Ted Bundy worked for them?

Instead of looking at him as this charming manipulative sociopath fooling these women

Has it occurred to you that she was manipulating him too?

Judas and Ted Bundy and Jeremy Noyes 

Sinners that God so loved he gave his only son 

God and Abraham would sacrifice their sons for the sins of the world

And so do you think yourself holy when you hurt your kids to hurt their mother? To punish her for leaving? For putting asunder what You joined together?

Because it was never about God 

And always about you 

And you, are a jealous and vengeful little demigod 

So easily beat by Brigid and Mother Moon

silver gray honey

01 Monday Nov 2021

Posted by in love, marriage, narcissism, romance

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We got engaged in December. It was cold and clear. In front of cameras of course (it doesn’t count if no one’s watching).

The next day, it began. It was cold and sharp. In my car along the Turnpike (with no one watching, of course).

I wouldn’t say the real you came out because I don’t think there is a real you.

You are honey mixed with gray silver micah. Lacking form and shape. You cannot be held but you stick and don’t let go. Clinging to my hands and I cannot quite get all of you off my skin. Dirt and remnants of what was and what wasn’t latched on.

I soak them in water. Warm and clear. And I watch as you dissolve and wash down my drain.

Drip, drip, drip (better times up round the bend)

25 Friday Jun 2021

Posted by in empathy, Evil, kids, love, marriage, my awesome husband, narcissism, PTSD, Rape, romance, Sin, Uncategorized

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Water torture encompasses a variety of techniques using water to inflict physical or psychological harm on a victim as a form of torture or execution

I’d like to start this post by pointing out the term “Chinese water torture” is racist and nonsensical actually. When this torture technique has been used, it has been mainly by Europeans and there’s no recorded instances of the Chinese ever having used it.

Ok, onward and upward.

There’s this book by Lundy Bancroft I bought years ago titled “Why Does He Do That?” It’s about abusive partners and the many myths that surround our ideas of abuse. He’s a counselor that works with abusive men who either want to change or have been forced by the courts to undergo counseling. We often say abusive men need to learn to manage their anger but Bancroft argues that abuse isn’t an issue of out of control anger. Rather, it is a systemic, deliberate process used to control for the benefit of the abuser. They don’t need to learn to control themselves; they need to learn to stop controlling their partner (and everyone else in their lives they’re controlling).

In the book, he details ten different categories of abusers. The one I am going to talk (err-write) about today is the Water Torturer.

We’re all familiar with the idea of water torture. Not the waterboarding done by the US government. Rather, this idea of tying someone down and dripping water down onto their forehead slowly, drip by drip. The drops come randomly and it induces a psychological breakdown.

Lundy uses this as a metaphor for the kind of abuser who doesn’t yell or hit. He is always calm and appears to the outside world to be a great guy. He rarely slips up and lets anyone see what he’s really like. He knows how to push his partner’s buttons and get *her* to scream and get emotional. Then he says “why are you getting so worked up?” “you really need to work on your mental health problems” “stop abusing me.” He doesn’t punch or kick but he engages in subtle physical abuse such as blocking her from leaving the room or following her around the house arguing when she tries to get away. He doesn’t engage in blatant sexual abuse such as rape but rather makes degrading comments about her sexual interests, her appearance or withholds sex. He makes extensive use of sarcasm, put downs, controlling where she goes, controlling money, undermining her sense of self worth, isolating her from friends and family, badmouthing her to other people and gaslighting. Lots and lots of gaslighting.

Because you see, like Harry Houdini who helped popularize the idea of water torture, he depends upon an illusion to keep her with him. He depends on creating distractions so neither she nor the outside world can see what he really is and what he’s really doing.

The good news, friends, is that you don’t have to remain strapped down to that table. The damage done by this abuse is extensive, but most definitely something you can heal from.

You just have to keep in mind the Wizard of Oz is not real and keep your eyes on the little man behind the curtain. It’s hard to do, but you’re a badass so you got this.

I see this a lot in my practice. I have women who come in with black eyes and broken ribs, but more often they come in telling me stories of emotional abuse like this. They’ve been so worn down by it, like a pebble in a stream that becomes small and smooth over time from the water flowing over it. They are too tired and broken to leave. And they’re in love. And they’re addicted to the chemicals our brains grow to crave when we’ve been in toxic, tumultuous relationships for so long.

The University of Illinois did some research and noticed there are 5 stages to leaving an abusive relationship. The first two stages encompass the very beginning of the abused partner noticing there is something very wrong, something that goes beyond normal relationship issues. She’s nowhere close to leaving, but the spell has started to wear off. Stage three, women start to notice the effect of the abuse on their children. They start viewing the abuser’s behavior as abuse on a regular basis. And they start preparing to leave. Maybe they tell a friend what’s going on. Start stashing away cash in case they need to run. Call a domestic violence line. Stage four is an interesting one.

Stage four is the yo yo stage. You leave but then you come back. You might end up yo yo-ing several times before you truly leave. Why? Because he says he’ll change. Because being on your own is hard, financially, logistically (with kids), emotionally. Because he gets other people to guilt trip you. Because he won’t “give up on you.” Because you’re addicted to the brain chemicals. Because this dynamic is comfortable to you. Because you love him.

Stage five is the final one. You have left and you have stayed away and aren’t going back. The researchers define this as having left and stayed away 6 months or more. The abuse can continue if there are children involved and you are forced to have continue contact with your abuser, but it’s much less than before and you can begin to heal and move on.

It’s hard as doctor to have patients in those first four stages. Hard for friends and family too. But you can’t skip stages and you can’t rush someone through them. They have to make the choice to leave and stay left. You can support them by listening without judgement and validating their feelings. If you’re a friend or family, offering help with kids and other logistics can help too. And if they yo yo back, be there for them. They may be afraid to tell you. They may avoid you. Don’t give up on them. The abuser will likely make even greater attempts to isolate his partner if she goes back, so stay in her life whatever way you safely can and let her know you’re there is she ever needs you.

A lot of doctors shy away from dealing with the issue of intimate partner violence because they find it so frustrating to have a patient that won’t leave or who goes back. There are a lot of reasons women stay or return. And the sad reality is, sometimes it’s safer or necessary for her to stay. Being there to keep her as safe and supported as possible is hard, but it can be life changing for her. If you abandon her because she won’t leave, you’re just continuing the patten of the abuser, seeking to control her.

The longer you stay, the harder it is to leave. So, if you’re in a relationship with a water torturer, don’t put off considering leaving. A lot of times the reasons we come up with to stay aren’t as convincing if we discuss them with someone outside the relationship like a therapist, domestic help line or friend. Once you’re down in his world of gaslighting, isolation and control, your sense of reality is skewed. You need someone who isn’t riding that Tilt-A-Whirl.

Once you are out, the healing is not necessarily the most fun process. It’s kind of like when someone is getting over opiate addiction. There’s a lot they need to dig out from. A lot of pain and sadness and the practical part of rebuilding your life. But there’s also joy. And as the months pass, there is less and less pain and more and more joy. And you will look back and say, how did I do that all those years? How did I survive? And you’ll see what a badass you are. And that there are far better things at the carnival than the broken Tilt-A-Whirl. And you and your kids will eat cotton candy and laugh and sleep soundly at the end of the day cozy in your warm, safe beds.

40 Days and 40 Nights (or, what doesn’t kill you also makes you more grateful (if you let it).

03 Sunday May 2020

Posted by in Catholicism, christianity, doctors, empathy, kids, love, medicine, parenting, PTSD, Rape, residency, Uncategorized

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We have now had a fever for 42 days. Off and on. Mine had gone away yesterday and I thought, maybe this is it. Maybe this was a fever that lasted 40 days and 40 nights, that started two days before I stopped being 40 years old. And maybe if that’s true, there is a deeper spiritual meaning to it. So, I researched the number 40.

They say 40 in the Bible essentially means, a really long time. It rained for 40 days and 40 nights when Noah was out on the ark. The Israelites wandered in the desert for 40 years. Moses’s life is divided into three 40 year phases. Jesus was tempted by Satan for 40 days. He stayed with the disciples 40 days before ascending to Heaven where he is seated at the right hand of the Father.

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They also say 40 represents a new beginning. It has to do with it being a factor of 5 and 8, and 4 and 10. I will skip over those details. After 40 days, the flood receded and it was a new world. After 40 years the Hebrews were considered to have paid the price for their disobedience and given a new life in the promised land. After 40 days, the Holy Spirit anointed the disciples and they were reborn. In Judaism, the embryo is considered to be formed at 40 days gestation. And a pregnancy lasts 40 weeks.

It also represents water, baptism, mikvah. There is the great flood. In traditional Judaism a woman goes to the mikvah ritual bath for purification 40 days after having a son, 80 days after a daughter. The mikvah is filled with 40 seah of water.

According to the Jewish Talmud, at 40 years old you gain the gift of understanding. You come to begin to fully understand all you’ve been taught.

I have been feeling exhausted lately, burdened. And feeling like I will forever be wandering in the wilderness, the promised land always just slightly out of reach. Time and again telling myself, you just need to get through this phase and then things will get easier. At what point do I admit to myself it’s a lie, that this is as good as it gets? In other words, I have been hopeless and have lost that sense of possibility I’d been so grateful to regain back in 2015 when my PTSD was healed.

My life is better than a lot of people’s and I know this in my head and I know this in my heart. But their suffering did not seem to alleviate mine. I kept telling myself to get over it, but I just couldn’t.

Perhaps it’s the nature of this fever. You feel good for a day or two or three. Really good. And you’re so grateful. You have energy and joy and you can run and get things done and enjoy life. And you think this is it, I’m better. I can get on with my life. And then it comes back.

Perhaps it’s this quarantine grinding us all down. Or the fact I had three people close to me in my life a year ago and now I have none. And I’m in isolation and can’t replace them. I cannot picture my future because none of us can. We do not know what will happen with the economy, with the pandemic, with the election, with the way things are done and the way we relate to one another. And so, how do we have a sense of possibility? There are infinite possibilities and none at all.

And so I looked to the number 40 for hope. If my fever lasted 40 days then maybe there was a divine reason God had allowed it to go on so long. Maybe God had a plan for me. Maybe beyond 40 years and 40 days and nights I would emerge from the wilderness and finally enter the promised land. Purified and born again.

But here I sit on day 42. Maybe sometimes a fever of unknown origin is just a fever of unknown origin.

I had the energy to play with my daughter today. She couldn’t believe it. We ran shuttle runs and played charades and had a jumping competition. I felt great. For now, I’ll take that and be grateful. We’re not promised a damn thing in this life. If I ever return to good physical health and energy I will be grateful in a way I couldn’t have been before. When we emerge from this quarantine and I can be with my patients in my office again, I will be grateful in a way I couldn’t have been before. And when the second forty years of my life are easier than the first (and they will be. I know this much is true), I will be grateful in a way I couldn’t have before.

I hate the saying what doesn’t kill you makes you stronger, even though it’s true. I mean, what a crappy gift: the knowledge now you can make it through something even more awful. But this truth has saved my butt more than once and I put faith in it that my children’s difficulties have done that for them. Because life is hard and the best thing we can do for our kids is prepare them to face whatever it throws at them without falling apart. But what doesn’t kill you also makes you more grateful (if you let it).

I’m grateful for my kids’ fever because at one time their immune systems were so dysregulated, their bodies couldn’t mount a fever response to invading pathogens. I’m grateful every time my 14 year old acts like a jerky teenager because he gets to a live a relatively normal teenage life now instead of being in PANDAS hell. I’m grateful every time I eat a meal without an abusive husband there criticizing what I’m eating or not eating because that was not always the case. I’m grateful to be a doctor, the good and the bad, because it was almost taken from me and I gave literal blood, tears and a piece of my soul (and my cervix) to get through my training. I’m grateful for the sense of possibility because for so many years in PTSD, it wasn’t there as I dwelled in that place between life and death.

So maybe that’s what the promised land really is: gratitude. If we never wandered through the desert for forty years, how could we even know we were in the promised land? Maybe it is not a static place, this promised land. Maybe it can’t be. Maybe it’s an oasis where we replenish ourselves and get a rest before heading out again. We never know how far into the wilderness we will go and for how long, but we know the promised land is always there. Until we reach the end of this life and enter the world without end and find that possibility we have been been seeking once and for all.

Epstein is not a freak and neither are you who stay silent

12 Monday Aug 2019

Posted by in doctors, Evil, kids, medicine, outrage, PTSD, Rape, Sin, Uncategorized

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Jeffrey Epstein, the billionaire pedophile, died in a presumed suicide a few days ago. I cannot get over how similar his plans were to Jeremy Noyes’s, my perp from med school who now sits in federal prison in Arizona.

epstein

I am not just referring to their love of raping children. Jeremy often spoke of having a private island or farm where he would propagate his colony of child sex slaves and work towards creating the perfect race through the use of bought DNA. So did Epstein. In fact, Epstein spent millions seeking the advice of Harvard scientists , hosting a conference on his private island at one point.

Jeremy spoke frequently to others like him online. There was a whole community. I told myself they were lying, that it was all just a sick fantasy world. But, clearly, it was not.

I am a doctor who treats patients for PTSD. They tell me about the powerful men who’ve taken their childhood. They have no reason to lie to me. They don’t speak about it publicly. Oftentimes I’m the only person they’ve told.

Jeffrey Epstein is not an isolated case. He is not a freak. His crimes do not die with him.

There were so many people who knew what Epstein was doing and they did nothing. Made zero effort to save these girls. I cannot comprehend it. I can’t. I risked my life, my children’s live,s my career, everything. I risked everything to try to save one little girl. How is it that children matter so little that we would allow this go on? I didn’t understand it with Sandusky and I certainly don’t here.

It is not a conspiracy theory to not believe Epstein killed himself. In fact, to accept the story that this was suicide is a choice to talk yourself out of obvious reality. Men like Epstein don’t kill themselves. I know. I knew a man like him very well. Epstein’s case clearly held the potential to expose just how widespread the culture of child trafficking is. The media can try to shame me into not saying this publicly all they want. If their lame attempts work on you,you’re part of the problem too. Real shame comes if you have lived as a child sex slave. Shame you will never completely heal from. Boohoo to you, dear reader, if speaking out on this could be embarrassing for you. What would the neighbors think? The real question is, what are the neighbors up to themselves? This isn’t rare.

The choice to turn in a man like Jeffrey Epstein, like Bill Cosby, like Jerry Sandusky, like Jeremy Noyes, is difficult to follow through on but really quite simple to decide on. It is not a morally ambiguous situation. You will never find such a clear ethical quandary: try to stop a child rapist or not. You will not lie on your death bed at the end of your life and say, my only regret is that I turned that predator in. Unfortunately, it doesn’t seem very many of these people are likely to lie there and regret the fact they didn’t. And that truth makes it ever more difficult for survivors to heal. The truth that they’ve done nothing wrong is easy to see, but accepting it and moving on is the most difficult thing anyone will ever have to do.

I still feel some level of shame when I look at this. I still remember how I was made to feel by my medical school, the medical community as a whole, my family and complete strangers talking about me online. I spent years believing I was a crazy slut and bad mother. I wasn’t even consciously aware of it, but it drove everything I did. Like the trauma itself, the afermath almost cost me my medical career. It almost cost me my life. It stole a lot of things from my children.

Speaking truth is the only antidote to shame so I will tell my story over and over, to anyone willing to listen. I will tell you the heroic parts and the horrific parts and the parts that might make you not like me. To remind myself I did nothing to be ashamed of. They did. And to remind all my fellow survivors out there they’ve done nothing to be ashamed of. They are goddamned heroes and all the many people who failed to protect them are the ones who ought to be ashamed. And that, dear reader, might include you.

Until then, rape culture will thrive

05 Saturday May 2018

Posted by in PTSD, Rape, Sin

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Bill-Cosby-Mugshot1

A few things have happened in Pennsylvania recently that we should find encouraging. Bill Cosby was finally found guilty of sexual assault and two friars were charged for protecting a priest who they knew was molesting children. The near complete absence of legal consequences for rapists and those who stand by and do nothing about them is horrifying. That it may slowly be changing is a victory for activists. I felt a swell of hope when they announced the Cosby verdict. I belted out some Kesha on my drive home and cracked open a cider as I told my husband the news.

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But as this tide shift begins, there are certain things that must be said.

I have been seeing patients in my office for medical marijuana certification these past few months since Pennsylvania’s first dispensaries opened. It is amazing work to do. I hear so many heartbreaking stories of patients not only suffering illness but being abandoned by the medical system, struggling to hold onto hope. Their diagnoses range from cancer to pain to ALS to autism to seizures. And PTSD.

As a certifying physician, I am simply assessing if a patient has one of the 17 qualifying diagnoses Pennsylvania has designated to receive a medical marijuana card. As such, patients bring records from their treating physician and I use those records along with a history and physical exam to determine if they do indeed have the condition and are appropriate for medical cannabis therapy. They come to me because their physician either doesn’t believe in cannabis or, more often, recommends it for them but cannot certify them. A physician in Pennsylvania must go through a special process in order to be able to certify for medical marijuana and many physicians are reluctant to do so for a variety of reasons.

When I see a patient for PTSD I ask them about their symptoms, what other treatments they’ve tried, how long they’ve had PTSD and how its changed over time, and what their treatment goals are for medical marijuana. I do not ask them for the details of their trauma. It’s not medically necessary for what I am doing with them and just as I’d never perform an unnecessary pelvic or rectal exam, I am obligated as a physician to avoid being unnecessarily intrusive on a patient. If you’ve lived trauma then you know talking about it can be a more vulnerable and difficult procedure than an internal exam.

Still, patients often tell me their stories. I hope it is because they feel safe with me. I hope it helps them to speak their truth to me. It certainly helps me to hear their stories. It makes me a better physician and a better human being.

For the most part, I just listen. There are rarely words powerful enough to reflect back to them what they have just told me. I know it and they do too. Trauma is a language like no other. Sometimes I say to them, that’s horrible. I can’t imagine. I’m so sorry that happened. Sometimes I just listen and look and they know that they’re heard and that’s what matters.

I say nothing here of anyone’s story. Of any specifics. Anonymous or not. But I will tell you, dear reader, that something has surprised me. After spending all these years learning about trauma, thinking about trauma, writing about trauma, speaking to other rape trauma survivors, I have taken something new from it.

Many of my patients have gotten PTSD from being in prison. I wasn’t expecting that. And it makes me think of Jeremy. There was a time in my trauma healing process where I savored the idea of him being attacked in prison. I’m not proud of it but I do accept it as part of my journey through PTSD to the other side. It is not something I allowed myself to get stuck in. I believed before I ever met Jeremy in the importance of the corporal act of mercy of visiting the imprisoned. I recognized the inhumanity of our criminal justice system. And that wasn’t something I was going to let Jeremy take from me.

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I cannot imagine how hard it would have been to let this idea go if I hadn’t been one of the extremely rare few whose attacker actually gets prosecuted, found guilty and imprisoned. I have a safety and a sense of justice that is almost unheard of (even in the case of convicted rapists, it is rare they get the 45 year sentence that Jeremy did. I need not worry about the day he gets out and comes for me. I did not face the indignity of him getting a slap on the wrist sentence). Letting go of anger and the desire for vengeance when justice is denied seems almost impossible.

What I cannot excuse or validate is the similar sentiments expressed by those not involved in a particular perpetrator’s trauma. We have all heard and seen on the interwebs the comments of so many people when someone is found to be a rapist or child sexual predator. They make comments, some purely serious and others sickly comical, about the fact they hope the perpetrator will be raped in prison. An eye for an eye, a rape for a rape.

It perpetuates the idea that prison is a place where the “regular” prisoners will institute vigil ante justice and give these deserving sexual predators their come-uppance. Not only does it violate morality in its wishes for violent harm of the sexual perpetrators, it presents a narrative of prison where those who’ve committed so called victimless crimes are seen as being free from being targets of violence. Prison is a macho sort of wild west where unsavory elements make up for their crimes by using their lack of obligation to societal norms to take care of the dirty work of making these rapists pay appropriately. They atone for their sins and satisfy out blood lust in one fell swoop.

The reality is that prison brings trauma to every prisoner whether they’re their for drug possession, repeated DUI, writing bad checks or murdering their mother. And the reality is, most prisoners are there for something like drug possession or writing bad checks and end up being punished not with time away from their families, home and work, but with assault, both sexual and non. They live in a constant state of fear and hypervigilance. They suffer violence, witness violence and are forced at times, in order to survive, to perpetuate violence. This is something those of us who’ve experience protracted trauma can identify with. This is trauma. This is hell. And no one deserves it. Not even rapists and men who kill their mothers. And certainly not twenty year olds who made a stupid decision and got caught (I speak not here of rich white twenty year olds who make stupid decisions. They don’t go to prison). Their sentence may only be a few years but the PTSD lasts the rest of their life. It is not moral. It does not benefit society. And it deadens all of our souls as a culture for perpetuating this brutal system.

When you call joyfully for anyone to be raped, whether they themselves are a rapist or not, you are promoting rape culture. You are ensuring little girls will go on being raped. I realize it makes *you* feel better and that’s just great because it’s all about you, but you sacrifice the bodies, minds and souls of little girls and boys and women and men.

No one deserves to be raped. Period. Ever.

We do need justice for survivors in this country. I am glad that Bill Cosby and these friars and Jeremy Noyes will be held accountable and it is vital for ending rape and for providing survivors what they need to heal. Prison as we have it in this country, however, is not the answer. When will we establish a humane justice system that truly serves victims and keeps us safe as a society? Until then, rape culture will thrive.

2016 was-boop!-a little-boop!- stressful boop boop!

19 Monday Dec 2016

Posted by in autism, christianity, love, special needs

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2016 was a helluva whaddayagonnado kinda year. Bernie rose and then had the election stolen from him by corporate Democrats. Trump won, ushering in an age of all out fascism. Brock Turner got a slap on the wrist for rape. Various police got absolutely nothing for murdering people of color. Aleppo. Standing rock protestors getting limbs ripped off for peacefully protesting. Global warming it is now unavoidably obvious is going to kill us all off pretty soon.

On a more personal front (hey, stick with me here. this post will take a positive turn soon. I swear), my autistic legally blind son got horribly bullied in our school district. My other son’s anxiety reached an all time high and his tics escalated to a whole new dimension. My marriage disintegrated, culminating in separation. I had a post-pregnancy hormonally induced mental health episode. My cousin died from mental health problems. A dear kind friend died from overdose. I found out some other beautiful friends from high school are on heroin (and therefore, will die soon enough. opiates are what they are). I broke off with my family. Is that enough, people? You want more? Oh yeah, our four year old still isn’t potty trained…

But here’s the thing:

Millions of people voted for, donated to, fought for a Jewish democratic socialist who demanded universal health care, maternity leave,  a $15 minimum wage and a kinder approach to Palestine. If you’d told me in 2015 that would happen, I’d have told you that you were nuts. And even though Bernie didn’t win, he’s still out there fighting like hell. And people listen.

For the first time ever, we actually talked about rape and the disgustingly low conviction rates and sentence lengths, as a nation. Some people even said “rape”. Do you realize how huge that is? (Most of the headlines still used euphemistic bullshit and called it “sex” but, hey, it’s movement).

Indigenous activists and their allies won. Won. The people who have endured the most, who have had the most stolen from them, who have suffered the most violence, in this nation won.  Did you expect that? I didn’t. They worked and sacrificed and prayed and endured and… won.

Pennsylvania (my home state) legalized medical marijuana despite the ill informed Pennsylvania medical society opposing it. I did not expect this. It’s huge.

My legally blind son with autism started at a new school (not in our district) where he is thriving. He went to an amazing therapeutic summer camp. He’s made more progress at his new school than he’s made in the past few years combined.

My son with anxiety got a great psychiatrist and got comfortable at his school and is doing a ton better. (and he doesn’t make his “boop” tic unless things are really stressful now. Boop!)

My most recent episode combined with other events from this year caused me to truly shift the way I approach my mental health. I’m now committed to doing every single little thing I need to do to keep myself healthy. No matter what. I’m working through issues I thought were un-workable. I’m feeling more optimistic than I have since I was five. About myself, my kids, my marriage.

I worked through my lack of enthusiasm for Catholicism and have started a whole new kind of Catholicism in our home. I’m reconnecting with the mystical.

My son sang beautifully in his school musical. I had one of the happiest days of my life taking my daughter to the Nutcracker. My son with autism can now get his head wet in the pool without melting down (after 8 weeks of twice daily swim classes at his awesome therapeutic summer camp). My baby turned one and still has the chubbiest most delectable thighs you’ve ever seen. He calls me Mama and loves the water like a fish.

I prescribed suboxone to a lot of patients who hopefully will not die from opiates as a result. I started at a new urgent care where I actually have time to talk to my patients. I had a paper on intimate partner violence published in American Family Physician and got invited to speak at some medical education events.

I’m not going to sugar coat things. I’ve got nothing to say to you about Trump or this country’s refusal to face the racist police violence plaguing us. Global warming’s not looking good either. But, as Howard Zinn said, pessimism is illogical. Amazing things you didn’t see coming happen all the time. Look how many in 2016 alone? And, as my old pastor used to say, God is good all the time. All the time, God is good.

Happy holidays, everyone. Here’s to finding out what 2017 holds for us.

pretending to grill in the garden of eden

04 Sunday Dec 2016

Posted by in love, PTSD, Rape, Uncategorized

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I have lost some weight recently. A goodly amount, I think it’s fair to say. Only ten more pounds to go. I weighed 150 pounds nine years ago when my trauma began and by 2013 I was 224 pounds. I ate for a lot of reasons. I’ll tell you about it some time.

Today I am thinking about a picture of me grilling. Well, pretending to grill. It was 2007 and I had left my first husband and was just starting medical school. I was young. So damned young. 28 to be precise. I just knew my soul mate awaited me out there. And I would of course find him on the internet. A single mom going to med school doesn’t have time to go out, so she would of course take advantage of online dating. But, I needed a profile picture. This was before the advent of selfies and not too many of us had a gaggle of carefully angled, flattering pictures of ourselves lying around in our smart phones. I didn’t even have a smart phone. So I asked my mother to take a picture of me.

I wanted to look natural so I said, take a picture of me in the kitchen cooking spaghetti. (Because everyone has a picture of them in full make up smiling as they cook spaghetti. So natural. And maybe I could use it if I ever decided to sell my own brand of jarred spaghetti sauce. Kill two birds with one stone. Bam) Unfortunately, the lighting in the kitchen was bad so we went out on the back patio of my little ranch house in Erie. Unsure of how to keep up the natural theme, I went for the grill. Here, I said, take a picture of me pretending to grill.

And so here I am today, looking at a picture of me with my hair perfectly done, pink lip gloss shining, smiling with my mouth and my eyes (so it wouldn’t look fake. Even though it was). Holding a large grilling spatula in my hand, the cold grill lid opened. No sign of my special needs toddlers to be seen. None of the dark circles I’d soon earn staying up late studying. The flat stare of depression that had occupied my face most of my life, the fear of the abuse I’d lived under, the wide eyes of my mania, absent. I’m beaming with hope in that picture. An endless stream of possibility before me. Faith that I will have a wonderful life. (I did work in the Jimmy Stewart Museum in high school, after all).

I do have a good life now. Nine years later. I have been blessed and I have fought for it. I certainly do not have the life I imagined then, when I was young. How many of us do? I have walked through my darkness these years and come out on the other side.

I am now almost to the weight I am in that picture. And as I have dropped each pound, run each mile, I have thought, this is a victory over my trauma. I have reclaimed my mental health and now I am reclaiming my physical. He can’t take this from me. I am leaving behind my trauma pound by pound. I am escaping a body that is not really mine. Getting back to being myself after so long.

But now I am close to the weight in the picture, to wearing the clothes I wore then, all of which I have saved in anticipation of this day. And I look in the mirror and I have not returned to looking like myself at all. I am not the girl at the grill.

My stomach has gone from that of a 28 year old whose had 2 kids to that of a 37 year old whose had 4 and gained and lost a lot of weight. My face has crow’s feet and laugh lines it didn’t then. And my eyes don’t smile the same. They’ve seen too much to smile so damned naïve. They smile not with happiness, but with the joy that comes from knowing sadness.

I’ll be honest with you, I wish my body looked like it did back then. I’d love to be a good feminist and not feel that way. I know I shouldn’t subconsciously convey such attitudes to my sweet daughter. But, life’s a process, okay? And I wish I was a little firmer, a little perkier. Less stretch marks. Less lines. But I don’t wish my eyes were perkier. I don’t wish these past nine years had been different. Don’t wish I could return to being naïve.

I’ve never believed in regret. It’s never made sense to my logical autistic brain. If you can’t do something over, why would you possibly sit around thinking about what might have been? It is what it is, I often say. Life is what it is.

I have no regrets about choosing the medical school I did. About pursuing the awful man I did. About turning him in as I did. Never have, never will. But I have been continuing to labor under the false idea we get after trauma. The idea that keeps us from moving on, that locks us into PTSD if we believe it enough. The idea that we can make this trauma not matter. That it can become a minor footnote in our life story. That we can go back to being who we were before. Before. Before *it*. You know, that event that doesn’t matter anymore. Even though it’s the yardstick we now measure every accomplishment by. Constantly claiming victory. Telling yourself, living well is the best revenge. Tallying up everything you have that your perpetrators never will. Telling yourself, I’m not like those whiny survivors who blame all their problems on their trauma. I’m different. I have overcome.

The truth is, your life was divided the day the trauma began. There was before the trauma and after. And it drives you mad. You just want that damned line erased. You want your life whole again. A beautiful continuous flowing story arc. With twists and turns and dips and peaks, but unbroken. But that fucking chasm, fault, break, schism, crack, gully, canyon, whatever you call it, it’s still there. Won’t budge. It’s not something you can remove. Because it’s not something. It’s the absence of something. You can try and try to fill it, but it’s still there. Go ahead, dump in food, pills, booze, drugs, sex, work, reckless driving, overspending, self injury, reality television, starvation, obsessive relationships, obsessive religion, hours of staring blankly at walls… It’s still there. Fill it til it overflows. It’s still there.  It. Will. Always. Be. There.

The Garden of Eden will not be restored. The fallen world remains.

And that’s okay. Well, it’s not *really* okay. It’s trauma. And trauma’s hell. But… it is what it is. It doesn’t have to be okay. It just is. And you have to learn to accept that it is. Over. And over. And over. You build up a life on the other side of it. You peer down into it and thank God you haven’t fallen into it. That you’re here. Looking back at it as you run, mile by mile.

I swallowed a vitamin yesterday. A really big vitamin. I’ve always been good at swallowing pills. So are my kids. Family skill. (baggy esophagus maybe? we’re not the most coordinated family so it’s certainly not that we have an especially athletic swallowing mechanism). The thing is, Jeremy raped me a lot of ways but the scariest one was the oral rape. Because I thought I would die. He would suffocate me and count to ten slowly and I thought he might just hold me there long enough to kill me and I’d never see my babies again. I felt so utterly powerless. I was so utterly powerless. He would tell me he was training the gag mechanism out of me.

It didn’t work and ever since then, I have had trouble swallowing certain things like big pills. Vitamins in particular I guess since he had me on a vitamin regimen of sorts. It wasn’t something I ever wanted to deal with. I  just took gummy vitamins. But yesterday my husband said, these are really good vitamins, maybe you could try and see. And so I did. I put this rather large vitamin and my probiotic capsule and my two medications in my mouth and took a big gulp of water and threw my head back. And they all went down. Down the hatch.

I felt so victorious. I thought, I wish I could tell someone. I was so happy that he’d now taken one less thing from me. I thought about telling people, though, and how I would need to explain that whole oral-rape-until-you-suffocate thing. And then I remembered the whole orally-raped-until-I-suffocated thing. And I felt so powerless. So utterly powerless. There in my living room, my babies’ toys strewn on the floor, the fireplace I love, the pictures of our wedding and our first communion at the Easter vigil and… I felt so terrified and so sad and… I thought to myself, a really awful thing happened to me. A freaky, awful thing. A thing no one deserves. That happened. It happened to me. And it can’t be undone.

The moment passed quickly. In a matter of seconds it was done and I was back to my life. To my beautiful fireplace and crazy bubalink babies and my devoted husband and I stumbling through Catholicism. And now I was doing all that with the benefit of a wonderful multivitamin.

You tell yourself, you need to stop running *from* the trauma and start running *towards* the good things. And the truth is, I do have runs where I think about the healthy habits I’m giving my kids and going on hikes with my husband, maybe learning tennis or kickboxing. How good it feels to be lighter on my feet, to get around easier, to know I’m probably going to dodge the bullet of diabetes type 2 and keep the arthritis at bay as long as I can. But sometimes I think of how far I’ve come. Sometimes I think of him, of her (the head of my medical school),  of the sickness in their hearts that makes them do the things they do. Of the happiness they tried to deny me.

They did, in a way. They took from me the naïve happiness I had then. They put a fault in my life. Made it into a before and after. But I have made a home on the other side. I am not hanging off the edge. I am not in the darkness of it. My happiness has given way to joy and wisdom and a greater love than I could have known. The fault is there to stay. And that’s okay. Well, it’s not okay. But it is. It is what it is. And after all, it really is a wonderful life.