"The evil that men do lives after them"

"The evil that men do lives after them; the good is oft interred with their bones."

From "Julius Caesar"
William Shakespeare

I mentioned in previous musings that my self defense class (krav maga) scrubs my psyche in unexpected ways.

Tonight's class really broadsided me. My mind may gloss it over, but my body vividly remembers the sick violation of rape. It skims just under the surface of the familiar pain in my every extremity, the way I ache from being thrown and punched and straddled and pinned. Some of it, too, is the intimate parts of an unwanted Other too close to my own intimate parts. And some of it is still feeling like a victim 18 years later.

The statistics sound both tired and horrifying: every two minutes, someone in the U.S. is sexually assaulted (http://www.rainn.org/statistics). I should point out that not all of these people are women or adults. But the VAST majority are. And these are not just stranger to stranger assaults; ten to fourteen percent of married women report rapes by their husbands or ex-husbands (http://www.musc.edu/vawprevention/research/wiferape.shtml, from an old statistic as long ago as 1990). This "wife rape" is the category I fall into.

And I am one of many, many women I know that carries these kinds of physical and psychic wounds: my partner was sexually molested by a family friend; one of my best friends was raped and cut by her father when she was a little girl; another dear friend was also sexually abused by her husband (now ex). I can't help but wonder if the wounds in me draw other wounded to me; given the men in my life who were also molested, I have to say, I am a magnet for the damaged.

With therapy I realized what was done to me by my then-husband was "rape." Because after being raised in a conservative religious household, such concepts were never discussed. The wife submitted to the husband. Period. I also grew up with the fundamental assumption that someone I loved and trusted would never hurt me, would never FORCE me. I feel lucky to have had that basic belief, however untrue it was; my friend with the sick father has an even deeper hole to live in than I do.

Somehow, though, acknowledging the reality that I was a "victim" of someone who supposedly cared about me did not help me heal. It only made me feel worse. In my weird reality, it is one thing to be assaulted unexpectedly by a stranger. But to have it happen repeatedly from someone that shared my intimate space? What kind of LAME person was I? I still blame myself for not fighting harder, not screaming louder, for just laying there and crying over and over. 

So many parts of me rebel at this wounded state of mind. In the Peanut Gallery of my mind, I have the Inner Puritan clucking about who was I to have said no ANYWAY, and the Inner Whore (no offense at the word use, please) saying there are worse things so get over it, and the Inner Feminist who rages because she cannot BELIEVE I needed a shrink's permission to call those violations anything BUT rape. None of them are happy with me. I can't even win in the jury of my own mind.

Until the last few years, I would have said I was a Man Hater and felt fully justified in that judgment. Even now, as my hatred has slipped by degrees and I now willfully agree that not all men are bad, I find another subset of my inner choir appalled that I am letting my guard down, that I am admitting that perhaps "Nothing but evil from men" is not only unrealistic but also poisonous to me as well.

"What if you become a VICTIM again???" hisses the Peanut Gallery.

I have to believe that with the krav training, I won't be a victim again. Not for a stranger, not for a trusted companion. I have to believe that nothing that happened to me in the past was deserved, and that I am better equipped now, physically and emotionally, to protect myself in ways that my younger, more trusting self was not.

But when I am sweating and straining in class to push my "attacker" off me, when my muscles are failing and my head is exploding from the effort to FORCE. HIS. WEIGHT. OFF. ME. When I feel like I might fail to protect myself again? I want to die. I feel just as weak and pathetic as that 23-year-old girl I used to be. And I am ashamed that I am not stronger, that I am not meaner, that I am not throwing his heft across the room with the most explosive "bucking" in the class (the movement when you piston your hips off the floor towards the ceiling is called, accurately enough, "bucking").

"Maybe you're still a victim," the inner choir hums. "Maybe you deserved it after all."

It didn't help that tonight I wrenched both my thumb and wrist in class, so I was in increasing discomfort for the better part of the hour, too. I just wanted to cry. And I was ashamed of that, too.

"No one else is crying," the Inner Voices murmur. "Only victims cry."

Shame, shame, shame, I drown in oceans of shame over this issue. I wasn't a defenseless child. I wasn't surprised in the parking lot and drug off at knife point. My Inner Stoic is disgusted that my reaction to any of this is the desire to cry. The Stoic says tears are WEAKNESS. And so I channel my tired and dull Anger, that saws-all of emotions in my toolbox of coping skills, and I find I it readily accessible as always but stale as ashes in my mouth.Yet I have to be careful to keep that anger fully strapped down and contained. What might I become, what vengeful demon of hatred might I become if I loosened those straps of loathing and condemnation?  

I continue to wonder "Does the evil die?" When will the stink of this leave me? How is it possible that I continue to drag these evil things done to me into the present? That ex-husband is dead to me, but his acts live on. What will it take to make me let it go? I have so much healing still left to do, and I am frustrated that my answer to this pain and humiliation was to run away and hide from men, finger pointed crookedly, shaking, in condemnation and fear.

This vortex of recrimination and unhealed pain begins to make a bit of wobbly sense. Healing will take more than one tactic, more than one emotion, more than one person, to help me get it done. Until I can accept that multifaceted approach, I will keep doing what I've always done, and clearly that has not worked. Ironically? One of krav maga's basic tenets is the simultaneous defense, combining multiple defense moves at the same time to disable the attacker and make an escape.

And so begins my simultaneous defense ... 18 years later. It begins with forgiving myself, because I've already let the ex off the hook. It's only me I continue to roast over the fires of my anger and betrayal.