Permanent losses - Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) Message Board

hergy · 01-23-2007, 11:28 PM

If you lose your favorite grandmother's ring, you're preoccupied with finding it. The loss never leaves your head, especially if you're the sentimental type and your grandmother has long since passed away.

In the throws of the flashbacks and nightmares in 1999, I awoke one morning after a recent memory revealed I was raped. Cold and empty, the grave thought planted itself in my mind: "I'm not a virgin." That's a bigger deal to me than I can describe. It's a validation of worthlessness over something I lost that was valuable to me and I didn't even know it was gone. That issue remains paramount, the ruination of my life. I know this matter seems small, but I can't dismiss the grandiosity of the crime. I always feel skinned.

After my second breast surgery, I was blessed with a four-inch scar and quite a bit of tissue missing from my right breast. I buy bras that make me look normal, but when I dress and shower, I see the deformity. The scar has marred my sense of femininity, what tiny bit I had. I don't even like to look at it. I'm a pretty naturalist kind of girl, so I'm very familiar with my body. But I hate looking at that breast. Again, I lost something I can't retrieve. When my scar healed, I took a long walk in the woods near a mountain lake alone. I swam nude. That meant something to me. I have no words for its importance. I searched for a sense of normality. A way to belong to nature as I should.

I can't feel like I belong. No matter how much progress I make in therapy, those things will always be true. I have no idea how to create worth out of something I want to throw away. I didn't ask for rape or cancer - that's ok. But they took things I never wanted stolen.

I'm not whining, complaining or trying to fish for validation and comfort. I guess I'm putting it here because I can't address it otherwise. You bring up things in therapy to get help. My therapist can't make me a virgin. She can't make me feel like a whole woman.

All the other crap in my life doesn't measure up to the pain of these events. I realize plenty of people have gone through so much worse - the kids who sleep in sewers, the returning vets, adult victims of rape and battery.

I feel petty. But I can't shake the hurt over the losses. There was the flood, the abusive relationship, the cancer and other crap. But I can never find the two things I really want back.

Sannah · 01-24-2007, 07:22 AM

Nikki, do you think that you need to still grieve these losses?

Phoenix · 01-24-2007, 08:07 AM

My dear Nikki,

Let's look at this for a moment:

With regard to you being raped and wanting your virginity back, thus feeling it was stolen from you:

From a biological standpoint, if they broke through the hymen, you are no longer a virgin. This is what scientists and physicians "brainwased" the worldwide population into believing.

As I am an independant thinker, whatever I do not agree with, I just don't. This is not to say that they are right or wrong, I just will not debate a few things and this is one of them.

The amount of years that your vaginal walls had to heal will most likely provide for painful "love-making."

This duplication of this painful moment can be considered a "rebirth" of sorts.

No one can steal or take away a person's virginity; it was never given to them in the first place. Virginity is a "mind and body" experience, special to each individual.

Cancer may have taken a portion of your breast but it is not your flesh that makes you the kind and caring individual that you are; it is you.

The real measure of a person is not their outer but inner beauty and it is that inner beauty that transcends predominantly over the "physicality" of it all.

What the mirror allows the eye to see, also does it, the mind. It is your perception of yourself at this point in time, coupled with the way you feel others might view you.

You are beautiful to me; Hannah and "little FM" told me this also........

"and the children shall lead you."

Take care
God Bless

FTM

hergy · 01-25-2007, 08:35 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by Sannah

Nikki, do you think that you need to still grieve these losses?

Yes. But I've never climbed out of my disgusting pit of denial, so I still do that thing I did when I was a child - if I pretend otherwise, this awful thing isn't really happening.

Love,

Nikki

hergy · 01-25-2007, 08:42 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by forthemasses

You are beautiful to me; Hannah and "little FM" told me this also

Thank you FM. Your bravery when approaching a difficult subject is admirable and beautiful.

Like I mentioned to Sannah, denial reigns over my consciousness, so I turn my head away from reason because I don't want these things to be true. That sounds pretty stupid, but that's one battle I do know that I'm fighting.

It has been about 6 or 7 years since my full knowledge of the rapes. I still make excuses, tell myself I'm lying or that I'm just crazy and made it all up. The only thing irritating those methods are the actual bits of evidence that the incidents happened. It's not just my memory, but I still try with all my might to wish it away.

Love,

Nikki