“Just let it come” Jen was saying.
“If I just let it come, if I don’t try to fight it, it’s like I wanted it to happen” I tried to explain to her.
She explained why it wasn’t. How it was important for me to try to gain some control.
So I let it come.

“He’s choking me” I tell her, “He is telling me how easy it would be for him to choke the life right out of me”.
“Oh God” Jen whispers so quietly I almost miss it. She sounds devastated.
She rarely responds like that and I find myself wondering what was so awful about that. I’ve told her worse. Maybe it’s perspective.
“You must have been so scared” Jen says, which makes me realize I am shaking and rocking.
I take a second to feel, and I nod. I am scared. Very.
I am so used to surviving by pushing my feelings aside and pretending that everything is alright, that sometimes I have to just sit and feel before I can realize what it is I am feeling.
“What word & picture match how you are feeling right now?” we were asked at Innovations (an intensive outpatient program).
Like children, we had to learn to express how we feel with words.

She tries a new approach with me.
“Look at that little girl,” she says, for the first time referring to her not as me but as a little girl, “What can you say to help her; to comfort her?”
“Nothing,” I find myself responding, “She doesn’t deserve it”.
Jen tries more, but the self-hatred is so strong.
“I hate her” I say, “I hate her”.

And then I’m gone.
I was able to separate myself for that time, but then I’m gone. I’m her again. I’m me again. I’m lost and alone and hurting and dying. I am dying.
Or maybe I just wish I was.

I am alone in my room and he is holding me down by my throat. He is trying to force his penis inside of me, but it won’t fit. I am crying, or maybe just choking, I can never tell anymore.

“Can you hear me?” I hear Jen ask from a distance, “Nod if you can hear me”.
I contemplate if this voice is real and where I am and who I am for what seems like hours.
I remember I am in Jen’s office. I am not at home. He is not really here. Or his he?
I remember I was asked a question and I nod. I nod to let her know I can hear her.
I wonder if my response took too long; if she remembers what I am nodding in reference to.
Then I remember it’s Jen. She is so patient with me. She knows. She was waiting and watching for that nod.
I feel her hand in mine, and I cling to it. Safety. I am safe. This is my reminder that I am in Jen’s office and not really where I am seeing & feeling.

I am both then and now. Mostly then.
I flinch in the now.
“He got it in” I tell Jen, and I realize I am crying.
I am crying audibly. If ever I cry it is only ever silently, and now here I am crying audibly. I feel shame, but I let it continue. I need to cry. It hurts. Everything hurts. And somewhere in there I am crying for what was lost.
I am crying for my childhood. For my daddy. For all the things that should have been and weren’t.

I have been gone again and Jen is calling me back.
She is asking questions, trying to get me to talk; to get it out; to share the pain so I don’t have to go through it alone again.
But I can’t. I try, and I was for some of it,  but I can’t when it gets to this. When he is starting to orgasm. I can’t share this because I feel so disgusting. I feel so ashamed.
But I try.

I can’t quite remember the dialog, as I was so far there. I am there and I am talking, knowing Jen is listening.
I tell her how he made me thank him.
How he came in my mouth and made me thank him.
“He tells me I’m not even worthy of his cum” I was telling her later, or perhaps it was then. Time is so confusing for me. It’s not linear, it’s random.

“Is he gone?” she asks when she senses it is ending.
She knows I get silent and still when it’s over. I feel dead. I feel awful. She is patient and waits for my response.
Finally I nod and I sit up. I keep my arms crossed over my chest, but I sit up.
I realize now that this is an improvement. I can’t sit up during it, I curl up as tight as I can, but I’ve gotten to a point where I sit up afterward.

I am silent. I am thinking. My brain is processing and remembering; and I am feeling.
“What are you thinking about?” she asks.
“His threats” I respond, “To put the knife in me. To kill my mom. That everyone will hate me if they find out”.
“That right there proves that you did not deserve or ask for what he did to you” she says.
“He had to threaten you. And he knew that you cared about other people. You cared enough to endure so much pain to save someone else. He knew you weren’t bad. He knew you didn’t deserve it, and he proved it by threatening to hurt your mom. He wouldn’t have had to do that if you were a bad person, or wanted it, or deserved pain like that”.
I think about what she says.
“But he doesn’t lie” I tell her, almost repeating his words to her, “He doesn’t lie to me. Other people do”.
I find myself believing these words less than I ever have before and I can almost feel hope. Almost. It’s hard to feel anything good after a flashback.
“He just… He repeated over and over and over and over. He repeated so much.” I told her.
“I know” she said, remembering, “He sat down and told you those things over and over”.
“He repeated them while he was doing it,” I revealed for perhaps the first time.
“The worse he made me feel, the closer he came to-” I cut myself off,  unable to say it.

“Do you understand what I was doing in the beginning?” Jen asked me.
I shook my head no.
“I was trying to get you to separate yourself. To see it like a movie instead of going completely there” She revealed.
“Did it help?” she asked.
I thought about it, and nodded.
“It did help at first,” I told her, “But then it…”
“It just got too overwhelming” she said, finishing my sentence.
I love that I don’t even have to explain things to her most of the time. She knows. She knows me and she understands.