“One must still have chaos in oneself to be able to give birth to a dancing star.” - Friedrich Nietzsche
My therapist read me this Nietzsche quote one time at the end of a session. It was in the early aftermath of my traumatic rape1. He read it, then looked at me, quizzically.
“I think you understand this quote better than I do,” he said.
This man, this therapist, who saw me through many changes over the years, was in his final year before retirement. He was in his 70s, working only a couple of days a week as far as I knew. I saw him once a week, sometimes twice. He was my rock during a profoundly turbulent time. As the words began to tumble out of my mouth, while I tried to make sense of the senseless, this man was there, sitting with me, sometimes crying with me, sometimes crying for me while I sat there baffled and unable to cry. He was trying to help me understand, trying to ground me in an understanding that was slow to arrive.
I could not see for a long time. I held onto a belief about myself and the man who hurt me that I could not let go of, as is often common for those who have experienced intimate partner violence2. This man had given me things I’d longed for in my life, things I didn’t believe existed, an erotic connection that took me places I didn’t know were there. He was present in a way others weren’t, and an extremely good listener. I didn’t have anyone to listen to me at the time in my everyday life. I was the listener, I was the helper, for my clients and for my children, who I was raising in the aftermath of divorce and all the rubble there. I didn’t want to let go, not at all, because of all he’d given to me, all he’d been for me, up until that day.
“This man had given me things I’d longed for in my life, things I didn’t believe existed.”
I can’t imagine what my therapist thought each time I showed up expressing my love. It must’ve been disturbing and possibly depressing for him. He tried to reach me in all sorts of ways, even appealing to the therapist in me, imploring me to see the man objectively, as I might a client.
I could put on my therapist hat, for a while at least, and see all the problems, all the issues this man had, all the harm he did. I could see it objectively, but still I couldn’t let go. I did not want to let go because letting go meant losing all I’d thought was true, all I’d learned, all I still felt. Despite his efforts, my therapist could not quite reach me, and I remained in the dark for a long time.
This is the problem with intimate partner violence and why women3 have such a hard time leaving when they are in an abusive situation4 . There are many emotional, physical, neurobiological5 , and socioeconomic factors that cannot be adequately summarized in one essay. Saying this topic is complex is a profound understatement.
This experience, the aftermath and what I learned about my ability, or rather inability, to let go introduced me to the depth of the chaos that lived within me. I had thought mostly that everything was nice and neat, having taken graduate studies in counseling psychology where I learned the theories of therapy as well as research on effective therapeutic techniques and it was all so simple. Just apply these techniques to clients I have built a supportive relationship with and they’re good to go.
“I thought everything was nice and neat. Just apply these techniques and they’re good to go.”
It’s not that simple.
Being a survivor of such a betrayal6 has taken me into depths unknown. I began to see truths about myself and others. I learned the disturbing lesson that sex is not simple and casual, no matter what people say, and that choosing who I let into my life is not a straightforward decision. I let the wrong person in, even though at the time it seemed like a fun thing to do, to have a break from the complicated and demanding load of graduate school, raising children, and working as an unpaid intern. I had a full life that was full of responsibility. The fling with that man was supposed to be fun, simple, and good.
“Sex is not simple and casual, no matter what people say.”
The reality is that relationships can be simple and good, if you and the other person are on the same page with regards to communication, respect, and an understanding of boundaries and consent. I hadn’t really thought much about it. Yes, I knew about it all intellectually. In some ways, I took it for granted. These were concepts that made sense to me and came naturally, in how I treated others, as well as in other experiences in my past.
But the reality of the moment, when consent was broken in a heinous way that was so quick, so jarring… no one can prepare you for that.
The result of the traumatic event was an eruption into inner chaos that eventually, once the acute pain subsided, turned into an exploration of how it all came to be. This is not an entry point into blaming myself - victim-blaming7 is one of the horrifying outcomes in a culture that refuses to look at itself. But the healing that came of this experience was born out of the chaos.
Life’s test…
Back then, I kept saying to Life: but if only he knew, if only he understood, if only he worked with me we could sort it out. But then Life kept saying to me, no, he’s not coming back, he’s not good for you.
Now, Life says: Be careful who you bond to. Oh, and here are other instances where men violate your boundaries and you keep being silent when it happens.
It is a challenging thing, undoing the damage from a traumatic event that muted you. Because what often happens during a traumatic event such as rape is that the speech centers shut off and therefore the parts of the brain8 that help you organize your thoughts and spur you into action, those stop working. And you become dissociated into an inner space that has one intention that looks like a thought but is actually an instinctual response9: how do I keep alive?
“During a traumatic event, there’s only the instinct to stay alive.”
I am still figuring out this part of me, the speaking part that mutes itself in the face of (sometimes minor, sometimes major) boundary violations. Trauma expert and author Gabor Maté might offer that in the moment - the split second it happens - I am choosing attachment over authenticity10 and he might be right. It seems I automatically choose my perceived connection to this person rather than my true feelings about who they are or what they did. I still find myself being too nice when I am surprised (as a recent experience showed). It’s my ongoing Life test.
Life calls me to ask: What are you going to do with this, this challenge that creates chaos within you, that burns in you?
How do you answer Life’s relentless tests?
It’s a challenge to change our programmed responses from trauma but not impossible. I invite you to ponder these questions as you look at the tests Life gives you in your own life:
What chaos burns in you? There is something inside you, your own personal chaos, a challenge that calls you, that Life keeps testing you with. It could be due to the implosion of a relationship, losing your job, difficulties with your children, or the realization that the life you have created may not be going the way you hoped. Ask.
Once you’ve identified your own personal chaos, see if your can name it. Take out a piece of paper and write some specific words that come to you. You can write them in a column or scattered on the page (in true chaos form).
Ask yourself: What is one thing I can do to deal with this chaos? There may be a lot there, but if you can address one of them (how about the easiest one?), you can perhaps move towards sorting through the chaos and begin to create some order.
BONUS: Once you can feel and name your own internal chaos, what can you do with it? What burns within you to do?
The chaos that burns in me has shifted dramatically from those early days post-rape when I worked with my therapist. There’s deeper clarity and a new order within that has come with the processing I have done. I also have a strong sense of compassion for all that younger me went through then. I try to maintain compassion for myself now for the work I continue to do. The chaos still burns within, but its pull is taking me in another direction. No longer a force pulling me downward into despair, it now calls me to do something different in my life: it calls me to my own dancing star. This star is a beacon that beckons me to a place where Life’s tests offer new challenges borne out of hope, while gradually extinguishing the old ones borne out of fear.
How can you harness your internal chaos so you can give birth to your own dancing star?
This essay is dedicated to my former long-time therapist, whose steadfast belief in me and support for me during a profoundly-challenging time meant more than I could ever describe and I am incredibly thankful.
Yes, saying rape is traumatic is rather redundant. But I think it’s worth stating this for those who do not understand how horrific rape from a romantic partner (or anyone) is. It takes so much from you that cannot be adequately explained.
The Cycle of Violence is spoken of a lot in literature. It’s about the traumatic bond that remains with someone who was an intimate partner. When you are bonded to someone, it can be hard to see the issues in the relationship and can keep you looped into an unhealthy dynamic. Click this link for a graphic on Cycle of Violence.
Women are disproportionately victims of intimate partner violence with the global lifetime prevalence at 30%.
National Domestic Hotline states, “it takes a victim seven times to leave before staying away for good.”
It is not only women who are economically disadvantaged who are prone to staying longer. Dr Larry Young does interesting research on the neuroscience of chemistry and sexuality, showing how women can bond to men through sex due to powerful biological reasons, connecting them to men sooner than men do in reverse due to bonding hormones (like oxytocin).
Rape is devastating, so much more than the word betrayal can convey, as the harm is on all levels of a person, but betrayal remains for me the best word for the experience.
Society has a lot of learn about trauma and the weight survivors carry. If people only knew the pain the victims of such a crime carry with them, they may not be so quick to judge or assign blame to them, and more likely to shift blame where it belongs: on the perpetrator.
Bessel van der kolk writes at length about this in his 2014 book, The Body Keeps the Score. He describes research on the traumatized brain and what happens in the moment of trauma, that the person goes into literal survival mode, essentially responding in an instinctual way like an animal and there are often no words.
The instinct is not a thinking process, but is thought to be a combination of partly programmed societal responses (Dr Jim Hopper has a good piece on this) and the lizard brain jumping into action (which can often result in inaction - I’ll explore this more in the future).
Gabor Maté speaks on authenticity and attachment, that giving up our authenticity is often a survival response in children in order to remain attached to our parental figures, making it necessary. It can then become a pattern of people-pleasing, a giving to the other to protect ourselves. It takes concerted effort to begin the shift out of this habit to come from our own personal authenticity and trusting that this act will lead to connections with others who embrace us for who we actually are (instead of what we do for them).