**** WARNING TRIGGERS ****

What is PTSD and Rape? PTSD is the ongoing invalidation and loss of self to the past. PTSD isn’t just the simple things like the finality of death. It’s the living death of those things ripped from your heart, your life, by heartless, selfish, insensitive men who violate our lives and bodies taking from us everything and nothing all at once.

RAPE is any act taken by someone else, against us, without our consent, is any contact with someone that treats us (woman) as chattle, property, less than human, less than people and with or without intent to cause pain or distress DOES cause pain or distress.

RAPE is being forced, or otherwise caused to suffer anything we don't want to, and any other definition is simply pure self serving bulls**t men use to claim it wasn't rape and they aren't reponsible.

RAPE is any act by an outside person or persons that causes me pain, leaves me feeling violated, dirty, humiliated, used, abused or discarded.

RAPE isn't just physical violation of my body, it's that and much more, its giving my heart to someone I love and trust, someone I belived loves and trusts me and having my heart, mind, body and soul violated and discarded. Used and thrown aside like a piece of garbage.

Men can never properly understand the pain, the finality of rape, of violence taken out on a woman’s life simply because they do not at the deepest level understand us, or how we feel about things. We (women) are sensitive, emotive creatures and texture is more than something felt with fingertips and skin.

Violence against our lives, our bodies, our hearts and souls leaves damage that takes a long time to heal and the slightest thing can in an instant reduce us to hysterical, sobbing, wretches that frighten men. Men just “suck it up” and get on with life and such displays are weakness and they simply cannot have that.

Rape will never be taken seriously by men because they cannot possibly understand it and expect us to get past it . . . “Come on Lady just grow up, you brought it on yourself.” OR “Well, what did you do to bring it on?” It is the very act of dismissing the violence and pain, the trauma, the invalidation of our suffering because it cannot easily be measured that is the nothing.

When a husband rapes his wife it is even worse because the assumption is we surrender ourselves, our bodies, to men as in property and have no right to complain or refuse something that is his right! Men marry for sex, babies and so on. . . We are nothing but servants, slaves, sex workers, and private whores. We are nothing and since they cannot of will not relate to what we feel it is as if it doesn’t exist.

I cannot even go near a Bed Bath & Beyond because it is one of a number of places my husband and I shared during our life together and while yes, it is a place where only good memories were formed it exists now as a part of a scab on my heart and soul covering the wound placed there by the violence, the betrayal, the violation of my heart, mind, body and soul.

He took everything from me when he left me after using me up and throwing me away like so much trash. It is the links and bonds that hold our lives together and make our history complete and continuous. By violating me and discarding me as a used and broken piece of property he has taken from me years of my life, years of memories, places and things and ruined them forever. Nearly a decade of my life is gone and even the good memories force me to remember the agony, the violence and this is everything.

I can be driving along and see something we’d both have laughed over – Now its like a bullet through my heart. Its not being able to go shopping without becoming hysterical and running from the building crying if I can even make it in to the store in the first place. Everything, everyone, makes me recoil in fear, pain, terror of it happening again.

My life has been forever changed and PTSD makes this so much worse because when the memories surface in nanoseconds I’m RELIVING the pain, the fear, the abuse and everything is gone. The ground I have gained trying to heal is taken from me. I’m back in that place with Earl screaming in my face or demanding sex the way he wants. It’s his hands beating me, his eyes filled with anything from contempt to rage and hatred boring into me, through me. It’s the feelings, the texture, the taste, the smells, the light, sound, tone of voice and so many other things that in a nanosecond ends my life once again.

PTSD is like dying a slow horrible death at the hands of a horrible, evil person intent on inflicting intense pain and then when you think it’s over, think you can crawl into the loving embrace and peace of death because it’s finally over, you find instead you have been resurrected only to have to go through it all over again, and again, and again. . .

. . . and again . . .

. . . and again . . .

. . . and again . . .

. . . and again . . .

. . . and every time you go through it the pain is every bit as real, every bit as dangerous and damaging so that when you are done you never want to have to go through that ever again. You are left drained, soaked in sweat and in pain, tired of being treated this way. You want it to stop and it gets to the point that death makes sense because it will, you think, finally end the pain.

Treatments for this takes time, there are drugs that can mask, minimize some of the body’s reactions to things even numb ones heart, mind and soul so that living isn’t constant agony. But, it’s a fine line between being drugged into a flat state, a pain free life that is that way by virtue of the fact that you can no longer feel anything!!! This is not living either SURVIVAL means finding new ways to live and means time to heal enough to be able to leave the house, go to the store, meet people and talk to them, maybe even work.

This all takes time and so much hard work that it’s the only “fulltime job” you’ll have for a while. Like I said, medication can help block some of this, can help ease the depression enough to keep one from ending the pain. It can help one get back and forth to Doctors and Therapists who first have to understand what you are dealing with before they can help you learn new ways to deal with, you guessed it, everything and nothing.

Samantha . . .