After All I’ve Done…
Are we afraid to admit our dark side? What are we when we thirst for revenge? What do we do? "After all the quiet stuffing, agonizing, self-blaming I’ve done to myself, what else is there to do? “Keeping quiet to cover up what you did to me, and after all you’ve taken from me….”
In the reading I’ve done, ‘anger’ is an emotion listed after the experience of sexual assault. We rarely engage in talking about the dark side of that anger. I remember feeling justified in my fury. But it wasn’t a good public image to storm on about it and frankly, I was just trying to hold on. At the time I’d stuffed it. Shut it down and tried to act “normal.”
“I’ve kept it quiet, acted like it never happened , covered up the truth and lied for you, all of you.
…At least you could, I don’t know - call and apologize? I didn’t call the police or tell everybody at school, I didn’t tell my best friend, or my parents. You raped me, all of you, and if I’d told it, It would have ruined my life! After all I’ve done, you creeps...”
I thought about a car crash where the power of two large machines colliding at forward speed moving in different directions resulting in an earth-shattering explosion of wrenching metal, burned rubber, and burst radiators. The boys’ screams muted as they were torn to pieces, their beers fizz-dripping into the pools of their blood.
I wrote out a similar scene in an essay assignment and quickly burned it, in the back yard, in my dad’s ashtray on a hot August night in 1964.
I’m not a psychologist. I’m not one who analyzes behavior models to evaluate the Battered Women's Syndrome Questionnaire (BWSQ) or The Trauma History Profile or The Belief Betrayal Trauma Survey (BBTS) or the Revised Conflict Tactics Scale (CTS2) but someone is. On the web page Science Direct, you will find a discussion of these behavior models. There is a long list of analytic instruments to determine, what I imagine are legal cases. But there are none that analyze how batsh*t crazy we feel after a traumatic assault. https://www.sciencedirect.com/topics/psychology/battered-woman-syndrome
Many articles talk about the sexually abused in terms of hiding, victimization, and withdrawal into a stupor vis alcohol or drugs. Not much is said of bloodthirsty revenge seekers. Most of us just stuff it.
It happened and I have murderous tales to tell – from my dark side.
Facing those raw angry murderous thoughts in my high school essay felt honest. I had those thoughts, and I am stronger after putting pen to paper, then and now.
If you choose to tell your tale from the dark side – tell us and submit your story to www.oursilentvoice.com/submit. For a small fee, we can edit and give you feedback. We can even add your story to the submission file for our next book, Fierce, Brave, and Loud.
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