Rahema - Facing the Memories
Excerpt from "No Secrets, No Lies"
by Robin Stone
Rahema is a rising administrator in one of Baltimore's social services agencies. In her power suits, her pumps, and her striking African-inspired jewelry, this thirty-seven-year-old mother of four is the epitome of the professional woman. You would never know that sixteen years ago, she was a closet junkie, as she describes it, making the grades at school while piling up arrest warrants for shoplifting or stealing, and dancing with death by sleeping with men to feed her habit.
She grew up in a household full of addicts. In her family of seven older siblings and their single mother, four were on drugs, three were alcoholics. Chaos reigned, and when there wasn't self-medication, there was mayhem and misery. One brother was murdered outside their housing project just before Rahema was born, two brothers died of AIDS, and a sister succumbed to cancer before her fortieth birthday. Rahema's first taste of alcohol came at eleven. Cocaine? That came at fifteen, courtesy of a sister who was dating drug dealers. "I was a dope fiend at seventeen years old," she says.
For years Rahema lived with deep, gnawing feelings of fear: "Fear of intimacy, fear of not being good enough, fear of overachieving, fear of underachieving, fear for my safety and, most of all, fear of not being loved." Fear, she says, "became a living, breathing being inside of me that dictated my actions and determined my behavior. I have made at least twenty years' worth of bad decisions because of this one emotion."
Just as shoplifting was her escape from poverty, alcohol and drugs were her escape from fear. But every so often that fear would swoop in on her, clouding her vision and her judgment, and leading her to run. In, after several failed tries, she finally decided to confront her addictions. In doing so she explored the roots of those fears: long-buried memories of sexual abuse by one of her brothers. Allowing herself to remember led Rahema to reclaim "that terrified little girl" who was left behind at age six.
"To date I still don't have a vocabulary or clear memory of the acts committed against me," she says, "but I have all the feelings and behaviors of a survivor." She does remember the special relationship she had with one of her brothers, and that "I was his favorite." She began to explore these memories in therapy, after detox. And then she began to get her life back.
It was a life that was almost lost. At her lowest point, Rahema found herself married, a new mother struggling to stay clean, a college student with a part-time job, watching her husband being carted off to prison on drug-related charges. With no support or script for living an addiction-free life, she says, "I just kind of gave up. I wound up back on drugs real heavy this time. I gave my daughter to my mother, quit my job, dropped out of school, and took to the streets. I was twenty-one and just out there, stealing, getting high, robbing jewelry stores, getting in a world of trouble. I am so grateful I'm not dead."
And there was sex. "I was confusing sex terribly, sex for money, sex for love, sex for attention. I was the kind of girl who would let you feel me up in the hallway at twelve or thirteen. I remember a guy feeling me up and ejaculating all over my leg in the stairwell in the housing projects. I had no value, no concept that this is not something that girls do."
She was high on heroin when she learned that one of the men she'd slept with had died of AIDS. That scared her enough to get tested. But to be tested, she was told, she had to be clean. She had tried before, but this was the first time that she'd done so in about five years. She was twenty-five and remembers it well. "It was Easter Sunday and I left my daughter with my mom, in her dress and her shoes, and I said, 'I'm going away, baby, to get myself together.' I stayed there for weeks, detoxing from heroin and cocaine. That is where I first heard what we call the message of recovery."
April 24, 1989, is the day Rahema celebrates as her release from drugs. She got pregnant by a recovering addict and had a son. Her children stayed with her mother as Rahema tried to build a life. A few years into recovery, her sponsor saw her wavering and suggested therapy. "She said," Rahema remembers, "'I can bring you the message of recovery outside or I can bring it to you in jail. Which will it be?'" Rahema chose therapy.
She chose therapy also because she knew it was time to face her fears. "I was having all these recurring feelings and I was afraid to mention them because I thought I would be called crazy. Two of my sisters had mental illnesses; one was bipolar. My brother-the one who abused me-used to do cocaine and run through the neighborhood naked and people would tease me at school. I always felt, 'I don't want to be like those crazy people.'"
She found a therapist through a community mental health program that provided services on a sliding fee scale. The therapist was a White Jewish woman. Across the chasms of race, religion, and class, they managed to connect. "I would say something like 'You don't understand what it's like to grow up like I did,'" Rahema says, "and she would say, 'I know what it's like to be angry, to be disappointed.'"
In her second session, the abuse came up. "I remember she was going through my family and I was talking about each sister and brother. And I got to this brother and said, 'Well, we were special.' She said, 'Why?' I couldn't answer. But things started to click. I didn't really understand fully how much this had really affected my life. But as I grow older I become a little bit more aware. It's only recently that I've been able to identify myself as a survivor. It was easier to say I was a drug addict."
For a while, Rahema replaced one addiction with another and went into debt. "Every time I would go to a session I would have to come out and shop. I would buy myself something, 'cause I needed to do good things for myself. All that talk about me growing up, being in that house, feeling what it was like, all the anger and disappointment with my mother-it was hard."
The therapist suggested that she transfer her feelings to paper rather than her credit card and recommended that she read The Courage to Heal Workbook. Rahema found it extremely useful to write everything down. "I didn't think that I could ever have been abused by my brother. How could you love somebody who hurts you? It was hard for me to make that separation."
She says her therapist helped her through the conflicting feelings. "She said it doesn't mean you're crazy. It doesn't mean you're a bad person. And she would give me references of what a healthy relationship was. She'd say, 'People who love people don't do this.' She gave me an assignment once to go and watch some young kids in the schoolyard-about my age when I was abused-and I would just sit and watch them and then see how innocent they were. That helped me not be so conflicted about my feelings."
And Rahema remembered her own daughter, when she was about three, with redness in her genital area and white stuff oozing out of her vagina. Rahema had emerged from her haze of heroin to take her daughter to the hospital, where the doctor suggested that the child might have been abused. For some reason-she doesn't remember why-neither the police nor the city's child protection services personnel were called in to investigate. That night, she returned her daughter to her mother's chaotic home, and while she didn't point fingers, she accused everybody there of molesting her baby. She never linked her brother directly, but she knows he used to babysit. There were no more signs of abuse after that.
As Rahema grew stronger with the help of counseling, her sisters began to follow. Three are now off drugs and alcohol. Sober and drug-free, they now compare notes. Rahema now knows she wasn't the only prey in her family. "My sisters said, 'We believe you because this is what happened to us.'"
They told Rahema about how another sister kept the brothers away by threatening them with a knife. And they told about how their mother, who they believe is also a survivor, left the South at thirteen to get out of her own household. Rahema could see how she continued the pattern by escaping home at eighteen. "I used to be angry with them, but knowing about their abuse helped me see I wasn't alone. It helped us bond."
Rahema's mother refuses to talk about the abuse. "My mom would be like, 'How do you know?' You know. I would say because it's not normal for a kid to do all the things that I did to myself, and I would say because I remember some things. But she couldn't really deal." Rahema feels her mother has been so troubled by the loss of so many children that she cannot bear to see any of them in a negative light. "I think she was present physically, but I don't know how present she was emotionally," she says.
The brother who abused Rahema is one of those who died of AIDS, so she may never know the extent of the abuse. And at this point, that's okay, she says. What's most important is that she's off the drugs and making a life for herself and her family. She first went to court and got her arrest warrants bundled together and did three years of probation and community service. She applied to a local college, and based on an essay about her life, she was awarded life-experience credits. She recently completed her master's in social work and is blazing trails in her department.
And she's learning to experience emotions, like anger, joy, happiness. She agreed to be interviewed for this book, she says, because she wants to encourage others to turn to therapy. "I still struggle with my inner child. It's hard because she's still very angry, very hurt. This has been so freeing, because abuse disconnected me. I didn't even have memories of being a child. It's like my life began in sixth grade. This has helped me be a parent to my kids, because that little girl was somewhere off in a corner and wasn't coming out."
Rahema joined a church and began to nurture her spirit, reading scripture and joining a Bible study group. With her new attitude and approach to life, she attracted a man who brought new energy into her life. Rahema's man, who is divorced and has an older child, specializes in holistic healing and practices bodywork. Rahema says he has taught her how to love. "I would say the first year I would cry every time he touched me. Sometimes I would cry so bad that we wouldn't even finish making love. He would just hold me and let me cry. I was a mess. It was like he was healing my spirit in a place it was broken. And I was so afraid to give myself to him because I had to learn that this was not about abuse, not money, not drugs. He didn't want me for my things. I am so thankful for him and what he has brought to my life." They recently had twin boys.
Rahema's daughter, the oldest of her four children, is now headed to college. Rahema has told her about the time she thinks her daughter was abused, and about her own memories of abuse. In one of her daughter's admissions essays, she was asked to tell about her role model. "She wrote about me," Rahema says. Then her eyes turn misty and she smiles. "That's priceless."
© Robin D. Stone, 2004. From "No Secrets, No Lies: How Black Families Can Heal From Sexual Abuse" by Robin D. Stone (Broadway Books, 2004).
|
