Peace from Pain

More than half of my lifetime has been spent dealing with the painful realities of my childhood. At the age of 18, I had my ugly secret reality defined while listening to a radio talk show. I sat alone and mesmerized in the driveway of a good friend, while tears streamed down my cheeks and my "unique" situation was provided with a label: I was a victim of "incest". And I was not alone. The nauseous feeling I carried deep inside had always been right...what my father had done to me was wrong. The sad part was, it took 18 years for someone to define it for me, and it's taken another 30 years to reverse the damage that the act inflicted upon my soul.

In the beginning stages of my gruesome reality, I was stuck in an angry game of handball with the memories. Slamming the visions fiercely away, only to have them rebound off the wall and return to hit me in the face once my hands were down. It was an exhausting game with few points won.

Very few books had been written on the subject at the time, our society still shoved this unspeakable act tightly into the closet. When I went on to college, I came across clinical studies and definitions of perpetrators in classes such as Sociology of Deviant Behavior and Psychology of Sexuality. But the textbooks rarely focused on the victims and the effect it had on their lives. All the words were arranged into juicy explanations of these socially deviant monsters and placed labels of "rapist" or "pedophile" upon them. But I knew that they were missing the point. The majority of those "monsters" were real-live, all-American, God-fearing, tax-paying fathers who flowed with the main stream. Not the salivating, ten-horned, Devil worshippers the books described. Their victims were of their own flesh; the innocent little girls in their pink-frilled Easter dresses out of Norman Rockwell lithographs; the ones who looked up to their daddy's with pure love and trust in their fawn-like eyes. I knew too well, because I had lived it. I had lived it, and I had no idea how to escape it.

The discovery that my father had no right to treat me as he did while a child, served to validate my pain. I had a right to feel as miserable as I did. I had a right to feel angry and robbed and abused. Amazing enough, before I knew that others too had suffered this lot in life, I felt so alone and guilt-ridden when those feelings arose. With my validation came the realization that I had been robbed of a "normal" life. Something was wrong with this picture. My whole foundation, the people I trusted, my perception of love and family, had been crushed with one radio talk show and a couple of college classes. With that foundation destroyed and my pain seething to the surface, I was left with two choices: I could conveniently go insane, or I could begin to rebuild my life.

Though there have been times when I feel it would have been easier to jump the ledge of sanity, I chose instead to move through the pain. I had no idea how I was going to get there, but I knew there had to be a better world for me eventually. I discovered that miraculous things begin to occur in life when the desire to heal is expressed within ones heart. I found circumstances, job opportunities, and people materializing before me. In looking back, all played an integral part in my healing process. I now view my journey towards healing as one intimate, tightly interlocking puzzle, each career move, friendship developed, or intimacy shared, adding vivid color to the final picture.

My journey has taken me back into the pit of hell, to do battle face to face with my ugly monsters; at times I found myself frozen there, paralyzed by fear and confusion, doubting my strength to conquer them. There were times when facing the pain seemed unbearable, as if my soul had been laid wide open, all the memories fighting to push their way back down into the shadows and away from the light. There were times when I shoved it all back down and tried to numb it with every imaginable source known to mankind. There were moments when I was certain I was falling off of sanity's edge and would wake up to find myself incarcerated within its prison.

Then there was the point when I finally found the ladder. Climbing slowly up each wrung as my load began to lighten; I began to catch a glimpse of Heaven. The promise of its beauty drove my upward and the closer I came, the more peace began to enter my soul.

There is hope for all those who have suffered. Though the reality and its devastation are at times unbearable, it is possible to reach peace out of the very depths of pain. I have been to the very bottom, and now I stand here very near the top. And the song in my soul is for all who have lived it, and my prayer is to see them up here as well one day. All it requires is a decision to heal and the courage to take those baby steps forward. And one of us can rest peacefully in the knowledge that we never again have to hide it or to go through it alone.