Tag: assault

The Worst Year

Posted on by Brenna Lakeson in feminism, mental illness, relationships, sex, social justice, theology

TW: assault, abuse, self harm, suicide

This was the worst year of my life. It feels dramatic to say, but I know emphatically that it’s true. My second year of seminary in 2015 is a pretty close runner-up, but the struggles of this year reached a new level. I’ve never been so glad to see a new year come.

It’s also been a pretty rough decade if I’m being realistic. This decade began with an abusive relationship. I spent five years being told what I could wear, who I could hang out with, and what I was supposed to think. For half of this decade, I wasn’t my own person. I wasn’t myself. I had no way of being myself because I wasn’t given the space to learn who I was. I was the person he made me into. He gradually isolated me from family and friends. I had no one to rely on but him.

In 2015, after a year and a half of seminary, I was finally developing some of my own ideas, and those ideas began to reveal what a terrible situation I was in. I wanted out, but I didn’t know how to escape. My way out finally came, but only with more trauma. My first sexual assault ended my abusive relationship because I was blamed for cheating. My abusive partner doubted my story and became more angry than I had ever seen him. I knew then that I couldn’t do it anymore. I dealt with the fall out of my break up and the recovery from my assault at the same time. I still look back on that semester with amazement at how I made it through.

Things eventually began to turn around. I fell in love with a partner who treated me with respect and equality. I graduated from seminary. I found my first job doing something I loved. Just as things began to shift, though, they fell apart again. Last Thanksgiving, I was sexually assaulted for the second time. This compounded my trauma and left me with Complex PTSD. Instead of dealing with my symptoms, I pushed them down. I told myself that if I never thought about the assault, I could pretend that it didn’t happen.

All of this compounded trauma finally came to a head in the spring of 2019. I had started self harming again for the first time in 15 years. I was drinking more than I should’ve. I was lying to myself and everyone around me about how I was doing. I reached a point where I couldn’t do it anymore. I wanted out. My anxiety and depression were overwhelming, and I felt trapped. On May 21, 2019, I attempted suicide. Thankfully, I wasn’t successful. My roommate drove me to the hospital and I spent a week in the hospital followed by six weeks in an intensive trauma program.

I finally began to face the trauma of my assaults, my abuse, and the loss of my mother in early childhood. I realized how lonely I had been for most of my life. I finished the program on wobbly legs but ready with the tools I needed to live. My body was able to leave the state of emergency it had been in for years and finally breathe. It hasn’t been simple. A lot of days are still hard. There are mornings I have to choose to use the tools I learned in order to get out of bed. There are moments when I struggle not to blame myself for my assaults. There are times when all I can do is feel my emotions and cry. But I’m doing it.

I don’t know what this next decade holds, but I know it has to be better. I bought a house with my partner a month ago and we’re looking toward a future together. I’m writing more and becoming more serious about working toward publication. I’m dreaming with a friend about opening a bookstore full of adoptable cats. I know that making this new decade brighter will be work, but for the first time in years I feel equipped for the task.

Happy New Year. Happy new decade. Morning is coming.

Trauma Therapy III: Leaving the Hole

Posted on by Brenna Lakeson in body image, death, family, LGBTQ+, mental illness, relationships, religion, sex, sexuality

This is part III of a III part blog. If you haven’t read part I, read it first by clicking here. If you haven’t ready part II, read it by clicking here.

Once I reached the bottom of the hole, it was difficult to pick myself back up and find my way out. Everything was painful, but the pain had become comfortable. I was used to being raw. I didn’t know how to fold up the mess and prepare to get back to my life. My everyday life had become so encased in reviewing my trauma that I wasn’t sure how to go about my daily life anymore. I had done the work, but now I had to actually recover.

When I was hospitalized, I could tell the day I started feeling better because I started straightening up the common room. For nearly a week, I floated around, not particularly caring about myself or my surroundings. But two days before I was released, I threw out old papers that had piled up, organized the crayons and coloring books, and put all of the remotes in a little basket. That was the moment I knew that I was getting back to normal. While sometimes my obsessive organizing can be a negative sign, here it pointed to the fact that I was getting back to normal. The same was true in PHP/IOP but in a different way: I started mentoring other women.

New women arrived in the program each day, and I watched them go through the same phases I had experienced. When I saw them fighting the process, I called them out. When I saw them willing to be vulnerable, I celebrated. My recovery was no longer just about me but about the women around me as well. My therapist relied on me and other “old-timers” in the group to help guide new women who needed to let go and trust the process. I began to see that I knew everything the program had to offer, and that, if I stayed too much longer, I would start to go backwards.

This happens pretty often in recovery programs like the women’s trauma program at Ridgeview. We reach the bottom of the dark hole, we claw back out, and then we’re not sure what to do. For me, I was too afraid to enter back into real life, so I started crawling back into the hole again. The hole was painful, but at least I knew my way around in there. It seemed like a kind of strange Stockholm syndrome where my trauma was holding me captive. I started to feel comfortable in the misery and resisted returning to my old rhythms. I was different now and didn’t know how to negotiate daily life with my new tools. I knew how to negotiate trauma therapy, though, so I held tight to it as long as I could.

On my last day of the program, I cried constantly. I have always been a sentimental person, so I knew I would be upset about leaving all the women who had been on this journey with me. But it wasn’t just that. I was terrified. I didn’t know if I could do it. I knew I had tools and I had done recovery work to prepare me for being on my own, but I was afraid I was going to fail. I was scared that without the daily support of Ridgeview, I would end right back up where I started. What I didn’t realize was that, even when I messed up, it was impossible for me to go back to the place I had been in before.

Recovery isn’t linear but it isn’t circular either. Even when you mess up, you’re moving forward. Each time I relapse into self harm or have suicidal thoughts, I’m still learning about how to overcome those urges. Each time I have a panic attack, I make it through and I’m reminded that it will end. There are plenty of bad days, but each one makes me stronger. Everything that has happened in the past brings me to where I am now, so even though I’ve had difficult moments since Ridgeview, I can’t go back to where I was in May. I’m not the same.

The hole is still there, and there will always be more to work through, more to sit in. In fact, I am sitting in it right now. But the goal is to not avoid the hole for so long that it overflows again. I now have the tools to clean out the dark hole as I go. I will still be angry along the way. I will still sit and sob at night. But I’ve also witnessed my own strength and know that I can make it to morning.

Why and How to Make a Mental Health Safety Plan

Posted on by Brenna Lakeson in body image, mental illness, relationships, Uncategorized

*tw* suicide, abuse, assault, anxiety, depression, substance abuse, eating disorders

I once thought that mental health safety plans were only for people who were “really suffering”, only to be used right on the verge of self harm or suicide.  But recently, I realized that once someone reaches a place that urgent, it’s too late to make a plan.  Asking for help should happen much sooner, immediately after symptoms and warning signs start to appear.  Many of us, myself included, think our symptoms aren’t “bad enough” to get any serious help from a hospital or a helpline, but the truth is that it’s much better to ask for help too early than too late.  So, based on my limited experience (DISCLAIMER: I am not a mental health professional), here are some helpful insights into creating a mental health safety plan.

  1. Know your triggers.  Do you have something really stressful coming up at work?  Are you going to have to have a difficult conversation with someone you love?  Are you going to be interacting with someone who makes you feel unsafe?  Have you been looking at literally anything on the news? Be able to identify the things that trigger your anxiety and depression (or whatever it is you experience) so you can make sure to have a plan ready before the triggers are present.
  2. Make a plan while you’re feeling helathy. By the time you find yourself in a hole of panic or depression or suicidal thoughts or substance abuse, you’re not able to make a cohesive plan.  Have you been feel good lately?  Now is the time to make a plan.  Every office building and hotel I’ve ever been in has an emergency evacuation plan posted on each floor.  They don’t wait for the building to catch on fire to make an emergency plan.  They make the plan while things are still safe and functioning well.  Once the emergency begins, the chaos makes logical thinking impossible.  It’s important to be thinking clearly when you make a plan for yourself.
  3. Know your warning signs.  Know what to look for within yourself so you’re aware of when you should start to reference the plan you’ve made.  If you can stop yourself from spiraling deeper by implementing your plan early on, that’s a huge victory.  Knowing yourself and how you respond to triggers is crucial.  If you can identify what you’re feeling and understand your symptoms, that’s honestly half the battle.
  4. Plan for the worst case scenario.  As an anxious person, this is not always something I would suggest.  When I’m getting on an airplane, I should not imagine the worst case scenario because I’ll find myself in a panic spiral about my plane falling out of the sky in flames.  However, when it comes to imaging what you might do at your worst, you need to be prepared.  Even if you’ve never harmed yourself or attempted suicide or abused substances or developed disordered eating, mental health can be an unpredictable monster.  Know which hotlines to call, even if you’ve never needed them before.  Know what resources are available at hospitals near you.  Know your therapist’s phone number.  It’s not overkill to have the resources at hand.
  5. Have a support system.  Don’t be afraid to ask for help.  This is huge for me.  I hate asking for help.  I’m an #indepedentwoman and I don’t like having to depend on others.  But I promise that your friends would much rather get a call at 2am or have you ask them to come sit on the couch with you in silence than know you were suffering and didn’t reach out.  List a few people you can call when you’re struggling.  If you’re not good at saying how you’re feeling, develop code words with your partner or best friends so you don’t have to do the emotional labor of explaining what’s going on.

RESOURCES

This is all fairly new to me, so if you have any suggestions of your own or things that have worked for you, please share them!  Also, here are a few resources I’ve found helpful:

  1. Check out the My 3 app (not sponsored, just a great resource).  It’s available for Android and iPhone and provides a place for your safety plan that’s always in your pocket.  You can choose friends to contact, list resources for yourself, keep track of your warning signs and coping skills, and make a plan to keep yourself safe all in one spot.  10/10 would recommend.
  2. If you’re more of a “write it down” type of person, the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline has a great Patient Safety Plan you can print out.
  3. Lastly, here is a template that I made based on personal experiences.  I had trouble finding a template related to interacting with your abuser, so I made my own.  Check it out here: Assault/Abuse Survivor Safety Plan Template.

Stay safe out there, friends.  It’s a crazy world, and we have to take care of ourselves in order to fight the good fight!

If you are having thoughts of suicide (or if you are concerned about someone), there is help available right now. A trained counselor is ready to talk to you and provide help. Call the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline at 1-800-273-8255. This is a free 24-hour hotline. (Press 1 for a dedicated line for Veterans and their families. Para español, oprima 2.) If emergency medical care is needed, call 9-1-1 or go to the emergency room of the nearest hospital.