In The Aftermath | A Survivor's Story of Intimate Partner Rape, Verbal, Emotional Abuse & Reclaiming Her Truth

Gabrielle Sojourner

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I sit at my doctor’s desk. 

“What happened to your relationship?”  

She pulls out her prescription pad.

“He was abusive.”

She pauses, pen in hand.

“Did he hit you?”

Something inside me snaps

She’s my Ob Gyn, she worked with Planned Parenthood for years.

The eternal did-he-hit you? 

How many women discount their experiences of abuse because

He-never-hit-me ?

His words drift back to me. You’re too slow to survive in the real world, Honey. How can you have boundaries when you don’t even know what you want? You’re as crazy as they come. I’m the only one who’ll put up with your bullshit. 

His words hurt like blows to my emotional core, my sense of being a fully fledged person.

Then, the sexual violence. 

Tell me how bad you want me to destroy you. I’m going to wreck you. When I’m done, you won’t be able to walk right.

Tell me you like it, he would say. He hated it when I was passive so I learned to say what he wanted knowing he would finish faster.

There wasn’t a time he didn’t hurt me.

That’s more than the seven rapes I was able to put on a timeline.

More than I could stand when I realized it.

I knew the physical pain was unavoidable.

You’ll get used to it, he said.

I told myself.

It’ll be over soon.

Breathe. 

Every-time he held my body hostage, parts of me were stolen.

Parts of me I’ll never recover.

Parts I’ve pieced back together.

Parts I found were somehow still there in spite of everything. 

Now I try to breathe through it again.

Sometimes, I feel so broken, so smothered by shame and self-hatred.

I should have, I didn’t.

The truth? I simply couldn’t at the time. 

I try to breathe through the sting of tears because it happened over and over again and I let it.

I try to breathe through the searing anger because I’m expected to prove just how bad it was time and again for it to be recognized. 

Tell me what counts as abuse?

Was it the systematic murder of

My mind, my body, or my soul?

Abuse happens in more ways than one and they all matter.

Ask me again if he hit me like he didn’t hurt me in ways you’ll never understand.

I don’t remember leaving her office, only that I’m standing outside crying, a white hot stone of anger pulsing in my stomach.  

I go through my journals looking for the times I was able document when he raped me. 

They are couched in the language of utter confusion, a stunned sense that something was wrong but not being able to fully name why. A sense of betrayal I couldn’t fully understand until now.

I call them sinister easter eggs.

I found another one yesterday.

I’m nervous about my appointment at the police station tomorrow.

I’ll have to say it all to strangers in a sterile, gray room who will ask me if I took my nightgown off myself, before they ask me what he did. 

I’m writing out the details in my notepad and I’ll read them aloud in front of the mirror to prepare for this, for having to go into something so personal, so clinically.

Something that should be as simple as: I told him to wait, but he didn’t.

I can’t handle the mirror today, so I say it to my hands as I write.

But they’re shaky and I feel so gutted.

My first therapy appointment is three weeks away and I don’t know how else to cope.

I see it again and again in my journals.

I wasn’t clear enough. He couldn’t read my mind.

Next time I’ll be clearer, if I don’t voice it, he can’t know.

Next time I’ll tell him why my hands are shaking, he cannot read your mind, you have to tell him.

Next time I’ll use my voice and say ‘stop’ instead of going along with what he wants, he won’t understand what’s going on unless you say something.

Except, there was never a next time. Nothing I said mattered in the end.

I knew it was a sinister easter egg, but I still didn’t trust what my words spelled out. 

I still needed someone, someone with more authority, to say it was rape so I could acknowledge my own experience.

“It wasn’t your lack of clarity,” the woman said.

“Wasn’t it my responsibility to make sure I communicated my boundaries clearly?”

“What happened when you brought up boundaries at first? Did he respect your boundaries then?”

I paused.

“No.”

I never told anyone what he did, until the medical examiner this summer.

I used the words he used. I read the word brutality in the report and something clicked into place. There was a word I could use to make sense of the violence.

Another call to the rape crisis hotline. 

“I always thought it was a core preference I couldn’t do anything about.”

“Brutality is a choice, not a preference,” the woman said.

It hurt to think about how bad things got, how the fear of abandonment pinned me down just as much as his body or his words had, if not more.

My therapist has me write a letter to myself, to who I was when I first got out of the abusive relationship

I write it on fancy paper with a fountain pen.

Dear Love,

You are my miracle.

I can’t tell you enough how proud I am of your courage and your strength.

You made it out of the hell you were caught in.

In the aftermath,

Fear, doubt, and confusion curl around you like smoke.

Was it abuse? Was it bad enough to count? He didn’t hit me. It wasn’t that bad, was it? Am I remembering what happened right?

Everything you experienced was real, everything you’re experiencing is valid.

It doesn’t matter if you didn’t have visible bruises or don’t have physical scars to show for it.

It doesn’t matter if your experiences don’t fit neatly into what society expects of you.

There are no perfect victims.

Instead, there are women like you who have survived things words can’t fully convey.

There are women like you who thrive and grow beyond survival.

You will be one of them someday.

Remember, despite everything you’ve gone through you are still here.

You are still here, still whole. 

In the beginning, you often wondered if you made a mistake kicking Earl out of your life. You reminded yourself of the dread and the quiet daily cruelties.

Only to wonder again if you made the right choice, part of you genuinely missed him, but also missed things that were never there. 

You mind sensed this but your heart yearned for the comfort of what you knew.

It’s okay to miss him, to miss what’s familiar, what made sense then, what’s emotionally well-worn.

After you ended things and had your space back you felt relief, joy, and contentment but also worry, confusion, and loneliness.

Know that more than one thing can be true at once, this will help cut through the sense of shame.

The why-didn’t-I-do-something? loop.

Know that you did absolutely nothing to deserve what he did to you.

None of what happened was your fault.

You didn’t do this to yourself, he did.

He took your ability to choose for yourself away from you and held it hostage.

He betrayed you.

Made the choice to inflict this on you.

Healing will be complicated and frustrating in ways you won’t be able to anticipate.

It will also be a beautiful reclaiming of who you truly are.

Building a life you love, on your own terms.

Step by step,

Aligned with what’s important for you to honor and uphold.

Reconnecting with yourself as a full, vibrant person, worthy of a bright future.

It’s okay to have no idea what just happened.

To feel broadsided when you realize you were in an abusive relationship.

Piece by broken piece will come to make sense in time.

You don’t have to prove how bad things were.

I believe you.

You’ll be a messy tangle of emotions for a long while and that’s okay.

I believe you, even and especially when you struggle to.

Unequivocally and unwaveringly.

I believe you.

No matter what happens next.

I believe you.

As impossible and far away as it may seem, things won’t always feel as tough as they do now. It gets easier to breathe, I promise.

Healing doesn’t have a clear path or a set finish line but it will come.

There’s really only one thing I want you to hold fast to, to remember always.

I believe you.

Resources:
International Organizations Domestic Violence National/Global Resources

Sexual Violence Resources
US: Rainn.org - 24/7 online support 800.656.HOPE (4673)
France: Viols Femmes Info - 0 800 05 95 95 (Mon-Fri 10am-7pm) 

Domestic violence Resources
US Hotline - 24/7 800.799.SAFE (7233)
International: Domestic Shelters
France: 24/7 Violences Femmes Info - 3919  Suicidality Resources If you’re having thoughts of harming yourself or thoughts of suicide. You are not alone Please reach out. In the US call 988 Suicide and Crisis Lifeline 24/7 (also available in Spanish) In France call 3114 Numéro national de prévention du suicide. 24/7 International resources linked here
Next Steps: Braver In the aftermath of breaking free of Earl, post-separation abuse overtook every corner of my existence. He was stalking me. He was escalating, driving past my door to see if I’d fixed the damage, knocking at my window in the middle of the night. I lived in constant dread. I was trapped. I couldn’t move anywhere in the private sector because my disability allowance wasn’t three times the rent - it didn’t matter that I had benefits that would cover my  rent. The answer was always no. I almost got scammed, twice. Public housing, I was told, was at least two years down the road. As I tried to survive all of this I wrote a poem titled Brave Brave is breathing Breathing in, breathing out Using the resources and tools you have

 Step one: Determine Your Options and Prioritize Them

Make a list of your options.

Say you have two options like I did.

• Stay home, refuse to give in to fear, and keep the independent life I fought so hard to build, despite my disability.