Building identity after trauma
by Bee Gibson
Image by Edanur Sonkaya for Pexels
Trigger warning for sexual violence
“I want us to try and find evidence for the defence of yourself; proof that you are a person who deserves to be loved.”
I was in the trauma therapists’ office, in the usual bulky grey armchair, the usual silky blue pillow hugged to my chest. When I sit there, my therapist says she can practically see the wall I have built around my body. She calls it my “protection zone”; I call it the place I catapult back from if I try to leave it.
It was something like my eighth individual session, with an extra five group sessions I had before that. I can have up to twenty individual sessions in total, and each week feels like a tense countdown to zero. At the end of each weeks’ hour, I imagine a reverberating chime of the clock, vibrating through my limbs. It is loud and yet, I am the only one in the building who hears it. I can’t stop myself from imagining the twentieth session, how the clock will chime, if a large placard will be revealed with the words,
“Still fucked up. Try again next time.”
In the eighth session, my therapist gave me homework. She wanted me to start writing a list of facts about myself that I feel on some level, certain of. Facts that I can look back at, and read aloud, in the stretches of time where I am free-falling, trying to grasp at some semblance of myself. Trauma can have the immense power of making parts of yourself, parts you once knew with certainty, seem unknowable. It rearranges them, distorts them, shatters them and soon, it becomes clear that they no longer fit. I have spent so much time trying to find a route back to myself: a way of fitting these pieces back together into the version in the before. To create something whole, and tangible, that I can present to the world and feel sure in its place here.
Almost two and a half years ago now, I was sexually assaulted by someone I met on Tinder. He asked me to go over to his place, so I said yes. I hugged my friend, who was visiting from Brighton, goodbye and got a taxi over to where he lived. The night felt possible; I had promised my friend I would visit Brighton soon, in a few months maybe, and now I was going to spend the night with someone new, someone exciting. It was going well. A reality that has since turned my body into concrete, an unmoveable thing. My insides hardened by the knowledge that a moment decorated with anticipation can so quickly transform into a thing to be afraid of, to run full speed away from. To still be running from years later.
Conversation felt almost effortless. He cooked us food, which feels blurry and unrecognisable now, and I felt seen. But stood there in that kitchen, leant with my back against the counter and my date turned towards the hob, cooking, I began to feel nauseous and lightheaded. My body somehow seemed to know what I didn’t yet know: seemed to turn towards the door and beg for the exit. I wonder, now, how different my life would be if I had listened to my body and its warning. If I had made some excuse and left, returned home and crawled into bed to watch mindless TV, would these last two years have been clear memories I could hold on to, rather than the out-of-time, out-of-body, place they became instead?
Sometimes, I feel drunk on the potential of my other lives. Sometimes, they come dressed in all of my shame; the guilt draped around their neck, a thing that can choke if it wants to. My anger, wrapped around their wrists that taints anything they reach for or dare hope for. The memory of the woman I was then, the woman who opened that kitchen door for fresh air before closing it and staying instead of leaving, lingers. She never leaves.
The homework the therapist gave me felt impossible. I wracked my brain for facts that I could write down and turn concrete. Facts that I could build into a version of myself that felt real; parts of myself that other people could recognise, and perhaps even love. I did what I have become accustomed to: I persisted. I ruminated. I delved for what still lives here: played hide and seek with my body in the dark. Wrote the shrunken parts of myself in a small list I could read to my therapist in my next session. And so, when the next week came, I sat in my familiar chair. It hugs my body perfectly: makes me feel small in a world where I always feel the opposite. A throbbing wound of a girl. I told her I had written a small list of facts. Each one, wavering in my persistent doubt, even still.
“Do you want to read the list to me?”
Starting to read, I felt exposed. Vulnerable, like the time I read two separate poems to an audience at an open-mic poetry night. That night, the poems I read were ones that I had written in the immediate aftermath. My body shook, my vision blurred, and my voice wavered. It was painfully obvious, then, what hadn’t been for so long. My body was, is, material. It’s feet plant on the ground. Its hands, reaching for things to hold and touch. My body, both mine and not. My voice and the condensed story it was speaking, then. The story it is still trying to crystallize, now.
I was there, reading the list of facts, to an audience of one and yet the room felt entirely packed. All of my other lives, all of my doubt and fear and shame, crowded together to make a full room. The heat of us all painting sweat on my upper lip. I concentrated on the trauma-informed therapist, who enables people – people like me – to piece together their stories week after week, to make us realise our voices can be bigger than our fear. That our story can be bigger than our own sabotage.
Fact one: I am curious about the world and the people in it.
(doubt: you are curious because you want to believe that you, too, are something interesting. you are curious because you want the people at the party, in the seminar, at the book store, to want to know you.)
Fact two: My pain is real whether people believe it to be or not.
(doubt: your pain is your own doing, and undoing. your pain follows you into the room and immediately, everyone stops dancing.)
Fact three: I am resilient, even when I do not want to be.
(doubt: you have broken down in too many places to count: at the supermarket, on the bus, on a sofa outside Primark. strangers have pocketed your tears as they handed you a phone to call your father. they know your fragility better than you know yourself.)
Fact four: I have passion and try my best to cultivate and nurture it.
(doubt: your passion is locked away somewhere too far away to hold it. even if you could, would it recognise the dents of your palms? are your hands still the same as they were once?)
Fact five: I believe in the best of people. It may have landed me in unsafe situations but that doesn’t make it my fault. It doesn’t make me flawed or faulty.
(doubt: our other lives say different. our other lives peek into this one and shake their head and call us “naïve”. “too trusting”. “too much and too wanting”.)
I did not read every fact I had written – did not want to seem too sure of myself, or to be caught out in some kind of lie or fabrication. When I had finished, my attempt of carving out a sense of self hung in the air, reaching for a thing that could ground it; plant its feet on the ground. For a thing to affirm it is there – that it is real. After a few seconds had passed, my therapist smiled and said I had done a good job. I smiled back, letting myself accept the possibility that I could be proud of myself. That other people could, too.
I am still trying to understand the world. How it can be a place where love can feel light, effortless. Here, where my mother knits me several new pairs of socks each year in my favourite colours. Here, where friends have written me love notes, drove an extra hour to pick me up and drop me off home afterwards. Here, where my nephews say they love me as they leave to go to school, backpacks sat on their small backs. I am trying to reckon with the fact that the world can also be a place where protecting myself from it feels like a daily necessity. Where bad, unthinkable things can happen, and you still need to buy food the next day from the supermarket; make small talk with strangers who would never suspect the events of what was done to you. A place where slowly, you can retreat inside, your sense of self dissolving like salt, leaving behind a bitter taste that accompanies everything.
I am still learning to believe that my thoughts aren’t always necessarily where the truth lives. There is truth there, yes; a truth I am shaping through building a voice. But the doubts aren’t always reflective of reality – and so I am adding to my facts as I move slowly, carefully, through the world. I write them, even if I do not believe them yet. I write them, so that when the twentieth session arrives dressed in an ending, I can read them to understand that the clock chime likely will summon the reality that I need more support, more small steps, more self-compassion; and that this, too, is also a beginning. A placard revealed to say:
Fact: Still healing.
Bee Gibson (she/they) is a writer of personal essays and poetry, often around lived experiences of chronic illness and trauma. Their work has so far appeared in Heroica and swim press. She is also currently doing a Masters in Social Research after obtaining a BA in Sociology.
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