• I’ll Sleep When I’m Dead

I'll Sleep When I'm Dead

~ writing my way through motherhood, doctorhood, post-PTSDhood and autism. sleeping very little.

Tag Archives: Sin eater

christofascism

04 Wednesday May 2022

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

≈ Leave a comment

Tags

abuse, addiction, death, dying, empathy, Evil, fallen world, family, feminism, forgiveness, good, innocence, joy, Justice, love, meaning, medicine, mental illness, morality, original sin, Parenting, patriarchy, privelege, PTSD, rape, religion, sexual assault, silence, Sin eater, trauma, truth, viktor frankl

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.

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

25 Friday Jun 2021

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

≈ Leave a comment

Tags

abuse, addiction, be my valentine, betrayal, children, divorce, empowerment, fallen world, family, feminism, forget paris, joy, Justice, laughter, love, morality, narcissism, Parent, patriarchy, Possibility, PTSD, rape, silence, Sin eater, trauma, true love, truth, twinflame

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.

happy valentine’s day

22 Wednesday Feb 2017

Posted by elizabethspaardo in kids, love, PTSD, Rape

≈ 1 Comment

Tags

be my valentine, innocence, PTSD, rape, Sin eater, trauma, truth, wounded warrior

Those of us who’ve lived trauma have our anniversaries. There are no greeting cards or flowers as a general rule, but you never fail to remember it, year after year. There’s not a daft husband among us, covering his calendar in sticky notes to try not to forget to get his someone special that something special.

The peculiar thing about a trauma anniversary is that you share it with someone horrible. You’re the two people in the world who hold it an anniversary. Thinking of each other but hopefully not sending chocolates or poems. My 11 year old would say that doing so would be “cringy.”

Jeremy’s trial started the week of Valentine’s day 2011. The Ordeal with him began around the same time in 2008. So, it’s our special time of year. Me and Jeremy.

The thought had occurred to me a few months ago that the only two people in the world who think of my trauma everyday. Who will think of it everyday for the rest of our lives. The only two people are me and Jeremy.

I double checked with my husband on this one. He doesn’t think of it everyday. Probably most days but not everyday.

It took some getting used to, this idea that I will most likely continue to think of him and of It everyday for the rest of my life. Me at 87 still thinking of it everyday. Maybe I’m wrong. But that’s not likely.

It’s not that I think of him for very long. Something reminds me of It and the thought flits through my mind and it’s gone. It doesn’t linger. I don’t ruminate on it. It doesn’t ruin my day or activate my sympathetic nervous system. No fight or flight. No pupil dilation or rapid heartbeat or paresthesia. Not anymore.

Valentine’s Day this year for me was filled with sweets from my beloved and my four year old daughter squealing with joy over the Shopkins pens her Secret Admirer got her (hint: it’s me. I’m the Secret Admirer). The rad tech at work made a coconut cake. I got the joy of making my husband smile with the surprise I got him. I also looked up articles on the trial and re-read the chapter in my book on it, lost in the quotes of what was actually said on the stand. Remembering. I’m okay with that. I don’t find it cringy. Maybe you do. Eh.

PTSD is a result of fighting these things. It is allowing the cringiness of sharing Valentine’s Day with your trauma memories to keep you locked in it. How do we find a way to be so brave as to face a thousand little things like that? To let go of how we know things should be, of how we thought they would be.

It’s the same thing I went through with accepting my son’s special needs. It’s the same thing so many of us go through in so many ways throughout life. The only difference with trauma is that it’s a whole fucking lot harder. Terrifying actually.

I saw on the news today that Milo Yiannopoulos gave an interview saying pedophilia (that is, child rape) is okay as long as the kid is 13 or so. And now his career’s hit a slight blip. And I thought of Jeremy and his love of Foucault and his love of Ron Paul. Of Trump’s friend Jeffrey Epstein and the man who protected him and of Trump himself.

Jeremy wasn’t a freak. He was just a working class predator who got caught and couldn’t afford an expensive lawyer, whose parents didn’t have connections. Child predators are literaly running our damn country. And no one really cares.

I wish I could send a Valentine to all the little girls out there suffering under predators like Jeremy (and our President). I wish they could know how wonderfully made they are, how strong they are to go on surviving and how much I admire and love them for that. How wrong it is we leave them there because talking about the epidemic of child rape is cringy. I wish they were opening Shopkins pens and squealing instead of drifting off in their minds to another place as they are hurt.

I share my Valentine’s Day with them too. And it may not be okay, but it is what it is.

 

New Year New You! (How Ima Got Her Groove Back)

10 Saturday Jan 2015

Posted by elizabethspaardo in empathy, kids, love, medicine, my awesome husband, parenting, PTSD, Rape

≈ Leave a comment

Tags

empowerment, feminism, forgiveness, laughter, mental illness, Possibility, Sin eater, trauma, truth, wounded warrior

image

I found this idea on Pinterest for keeping a jar where you write down happy/funny things that happen throughout the year and put them in this jar. I believe it advised a big jar (with the assumption being you’ll have lots of good things happening I suppose). You open the jar up at the end of the year and read over all the little happy moments you otherwise might have forgotten. The woman who’d pinned it had written it was a “super cute idea !!!!” and that she was definitely going to try it.

I pitched the idea to Poobah and he liked it (although he didn’t call it super cute or exclaim). So I took the large clear plastic teddy bear shaped animal cracker jar and dumped the animal crackers out into a bag (they’ve been sitting uneaten in the jar for 3 months so why not keep them uneaten in a different container a little longer) and wrote 2015 on the bear’s tummy with a Sharpy.

As I did so, I thought, why only write down the happy times? Why not the bad times too? It was January first and I was heading to work soon. I wasn’t very cheery.

But it wasn’t just working on a holiday that made me think that. I’d been bogged down in PTSD and working crazy hours and stress and financial problems and family discord. Bogged down for a while.

I felt like there wouldn’t be much to put in the jar.

I said goodbye to my husband and kids and headed to the hospital. Holidays can be slow because people put off going to the hospital on a holiday if they can, but it’s been a particularly busy year for hospital medicine because of all the influenza. I expected I’d be fairly busy and hoped it wouldn’t be any worse than that. I hoped no patients crashed. I hoped for some time to think.

Earlier in the day, Poobah and the kids and I had gathered in the living room around our old school fake Christmas tree (the kind that really do look fake and aren’t “pre-lit” and don’t have green concentrated pine scent aroma sticks discretely hung on a strategically chosen back branch) to continue a tradition my sister Nicci and I had started when I was still in high school. Every New Years we make predictions for the upcoming year and then the following year we read over them and see who got the most right. We also talk about things that happened over the past year that were unexpected.

We’d each made three predictions but I wanted some time before I went and started the admissions to write down a few more and think about the year ahead.

I started writing and this is what came out:
I need to move forward. But these next 6 months are going to be exhausting. I’m not sure what to do. I wish it were a simpler tale. I wish I could figure it out.
Where did it begin? Before I was born? If it did, then what?

We all seek to be an individual with self-esteem
There are those who stand in the way
And so we assert to be ourselves in maladaptive ways
Because of the innate drive towards maturity

Malcolm has something special in him. Malcolm could change the world.
He said he wants to be an astronaut so he can change the world.

Mies has this amazingly unique combination of traits.

They’re extraordinary.

Maybe I am too.

And with those four little words, I got my groove back. I didn’t just get my groove back from before Jeremy Noyes traumatized me seven years ago or before my medical school rubbed salt in the spiritual wound and made it stick. I mean I got my groove back from Way back.

It’s a process, of course, but it is set in motion. It is inevitable. The rate limiting step of the reaction has been overcome and the chemical cascade is in full swing.

I’ve spent most of my precious little free time since then wading through shame and heartache, cleaning out every dark corner of the past 35 years. It’s amazing all the things I’ve been ashamed of over the years. It’s amazing how ashamed I still felt now, decades later, simply writing out the words different people have said to me. I’ve done that sort of thing before, sitting and trying to process bad memories. But the difference this time is that I finally believed that I didn’t deserve any of it. I finally believed I’m extraordinary and so deserving of love and safety and joy, it’s ridiculous.

The words lost their power over me. Those people lost their power over me.

There are things I’ve done in my life I’m ashamed of and I sat with those too. Some of them I reminded myself I had no control over (feeling ashamed I “let” myself be raped, for instance), some I decided are just inevitable mistakes of youth, and some I had to forgive myself for. I regret very little as a general rule, but the things I’ve done that have hurt people, really hurt them, I do regret, and I had to forgive myself and let go of the shame.

Another inevitable piece of it is that I am losing the extra weight I have clung to for many years. It’s time to let it go and so I am. I feel hungry but it doesn’t distress me because it’s what’s supposed to be.

I’ve recovered from political amnesia and am reading feminists and progressives and anarachists again. I’m engaging with people about things that matter. I’m throwing a hundred evolving ideas out to my husband on everything our future holds after we graduate this June.

It’s not that I’m becoming a whole new person. It’s that I’m returning to being myself. I’m doing what we are all made to do: becoming more myself and finding what it is I am supposed to be doing to make the world a better place.

I look at my two year old daughter and see she’s there. She’s got her groove on. She knows what she thinks and wants and feels and she lets you know it. She’s engaged with everything and everyone she comes in contact with. She’s alive. She’s in the flow.

I want to do everything I can to keep her there as much as possible. I want to help all my kids find their flow. And anyone else I can. Because that’s what life is. But I see now, it’s not selfish to enjoy having my own groove on. Quite the opposite. Flow begets flow.

And so, the other day, I took a little green slip of paper next to the empty animal cracker jar and I wrote the first memory of 2015: January 1st Ima got her groove back. (our kids call me Ima. I’ll tell you about it some time)

This is for my husband now: My name is Elizabeth Spaar and 2015 is the year I got my groove back

You will sleep soundly because we don’t

15 Saturday Nov 2014

Posted by elizabethspaardo in doctors, Evil, Rape, Sin

≈ Leave a comment

Tags

feminism, Justice, medicine, original sin, rape, Sin eater

“Professor Evans of the Presbyterian College, Carmarthen, actually saw a sin-eater about the year 1825, who was then living near Llanwenog, Cardiganshire. Abhorred by the superstitious villagers as a thing unclean, the sin-eater cut himself off from all social intercourse with his fellow creatures by reason of the life he had chosen; he lived as a rule in a remote place by himself, and those who chanced to meet him avoided him as they would a leper. This unfortunate was held to be the associate of evil spirits, and given to witchcraft, incantations and unholy practices; only when a death took place did they seek him out, and when his purpose was accomplished they burned the wooden bowl and platter from which he had eaten the food handed across, or placed on the corpse for his consumption.”

I gave a talk on PTSD in women to a room full of doctors today. I talked about incest and oral rape to a room full of doctors today. I started off my talk by telling them the next 45 minutes were going to be unpleasant and uncomfortable because discussing trauma, thinking about trauma, is an innately unpleasant, uncomfortable thing. And for the first five minutes or so they did look uncomfortable. Which made sense. And then they didn’t. They stopped looking uncomfortable and began to look the way they always do during a lecture. Some of them listened attentively and made eye contact. Some of them dozed off.

It went pretty much as lectures do. There were questions and comments afterward. About screening and medication and epidemiology.

I told them something else before the lecture started too. I told them I have PTSD and that I was talking to them about PTSD that day (not hypertension or diabetes or depression or all the hundred other diseases it would have been so easy to talk about) because I wanted to help all the survivors I’ve met along the way.

I have not told many doctors over the years that I have PTSD because the admission of the disease, quite unlike other diseases, is a confession of having lived something. In this case, something horrible and terrifying and evil. I’m not supposed to tell them what happened to me in medical school. Everyone who knows tells me so. We are a society that blames the victim and the medical world is no different. But these people who tell me this, these well meaning people who want to protect me, they don’t know how awful a thing it is to not tell.

What good is it to gain the whole world for the price of your soul? And a medical career, after all, is hardly the whole world.

The thing that keeps me from telling them what happened to me is not fear. I left fear behind the day I turned him in knowing he very well might kill my children, knowing very well bad men like him rarely go to jail for very long. The reason I don’t tell them is that they wouldn’t care, not enough anyway. They do not know evil as those of us who’ve lived it do. They do not have the darkness in them. When evil surfaces, we listen for a moment and tell her we feel so bad for her and tell her she’s so brave. And then we forget. Because anyone who can, will. And the reason we can is because of the sin eaters.

We swallow down the darkness for the rest of the world. It sits in us, contained in us, and you are safe.

It will never change. It is not patriarchy or capitalism or imperialism. It is evil, it is fallen Man.

I stood up there and I taught those doctors about the three stages of recovery from PTSD. I made them feel so good about the whole thing. These women will always have this chronic disease, they’ll never get justice for what happened to them, but they’ll be okay because they’ll break their silence and push through their fear and integrate the trauma experience into the story of their lives. They’ll be redeemed by learning acceptance. Not resignation, acceptance. Cue the music, fade out as the heroine smiles through her tears and heads out to conquer the world with her loving supportive man at her side.

I swallowed down the darkness for them. And there it sits.

I write this now not for those of you who will read this who do not know the darkness. You will never change. You can’t. You will forget this in a few minutes or a day. I write this for the sin eaters. So I might feel a little less alone for a moment before I head back to work, to the land of the those we protect who will never really know.

Subscribe

  • Entries (RSS)
  • Comments (RSS)

Archives

  • May 2022
  • April 2022
  • March 2022
  • November 2021
  • September 2021
  • August 2021
  • July 2021
  • June 2021
  • May 2021
  • April 2021
  • March 2021
  • February 2021
  • January 2021
  • July 2020
  • May 2020
  • April 2020
  • March 2020
  • January 2020
  • August 2019
  • June 2018
  • May 2018
  • March 2018
  • February 2018
  • January 2018
  • December 2017
  • May 2017
  • March 2017
  • February 2017
  • December 2016
  • November 2016
  • October 2016
  • February 2016
  • April 2015
  • February 2015
  • January 2015
  • December 2014
  • November 2014
  • October 2014
  • September 2014
  • June 2014
  • May 2014

Categories

  • addiction
  • autism
  • Catholicism
  • christianity
  • COVID 19
  • doctors
  • empathy
  • Evil
  • kids
  • love
  • marriage
  • medicine
  • movies
  • my awesome husband
  • narcissism
  • New York City
  • outrage
  • parenting
  • Politics
  • PTSD
  • Rape
  • residency
  • romance
  • Sin
  • special needs
  • Uncategorized

Meta

  • Register
  • Log in

Blog at WordPress.com.

  • Follow Following
    • I'll Sleep When I'm Dead
    • Join 787 other followers
    • Already have a WordPress.com account? Log in now.
    • I'll Sleep When I'm Dead
    • Customize
    • Follow Following
    • Sign up
    • Log in
    • Report this content
    • View site in Reader
    • Manage subscriptions
    • Collapse this bar
 

Loading Comments...