Twisted

Posted on September 25, 2014 by Lisette d. Johnson

Knowing I cannot change what happened to me, I am passionate to learn and be involved in promoting awareness, changing how IPV is approached and effecting best outcomes for survivors. This prompted me to attend a recent conference on reducing intimate partner homicide through lethality assessments, high risk teams and offender profiling.

Certainly not a typically recommended post trauma activity for a survivor, I felt I had the support I needed, ample therapy under my belt, and the distance from my personal trauma to remain detached and learn.

I was particularly interested in the dynamics of the abuser, from both an early recognition and prevention standpoint and to raise the awareness of those transitioning out of violent relationships of factors that increase the likelihood of lethal violence.

The last day of the conference focused on personality traits of men who are violent against women, including those specific to men who kill their partners. All my emotional safety strategies served me well until a presenter was drilling down to different offender personality attributes identified in those who kill. He asked the simple question “Why do you think men kill the children before they kill their partner?”

Just as these men use their children to control their partner to do what he wants, just as she tries to protect them from him, just as he uses them to keep her from leaving, he uses the children in a final deadly game. It is to further torture her.

The answer has been emblazoned in my mind and heart for five years now. But as I said the answer aloud, an old reflex sprang forward so effortlessly in itself it created a biliousness that arose from the pit of my stomach and exited with the waterfall of my tears. For a split second I was immensely thankful to my husband, my murderous husband, for having spared me the torture of killing our children before I arrived home that day.

This. The twistedness of being thankful to the man who hurts you for not hurting you as much as he is capable of, being thankful to him for only shooting you, instead of your children first, then you. This.

Remembering I am thankful only to God for sparing my children and me, I was able to swallow hard, dry my tears, reorient and recover. In a moment of grace I was reminded of the work He has given me to do; to further understanding of the insidious conditioning like misplaced gratitude that is at the core of intimate partner violence.

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Sustaining Faith

Posted on August 10, 2014 by Lisette d. Johnson

I believe we come to this world with an innate sense of rightness and wrongness, that instilled in even the most unchurched there is a presence of a higher being which is ignored, denied by those who would choose to intentionally inflict pain to hurt others. I believe we are only as far away from our creator as we choose to be.

As he demanded to know how I would live when I left, I could not have foreknowledge the last words I would ever speak to the man I’d married twenty one years prior were “I don’t know, but I have faith”. I said this to the man who regularly asked on Sunday mornings, as I prepared to go to church, to choose what was more important, God or my family. Try as he did, he could not invade my relationship with God, could not divide me from it, manipulate, ruin or steal it away; it was that solid.

After the shooting a public prayer vigil was held at my church. Prayers were initiated by my professional association and in the community by friends and strangers alike. Those prayers and my faith have sustained me and my children in the darkest of hours. There were and still are times when I feel alone but I have been fortunate to quickly return to the faith I professed that last day.

Perhaps there is nothing that can more powerfully convey the healing aspects of prayer than meeting with my trauma surgeon for a post discharge follow-up after the shooting. Her first words to me were “my family has prayed for you”. These almost five years later, as she prepared to take a position at another hospital, I met with her again to reiterate my gratitude for saving my life and to say goodbye. Once again, her faith was evident as she reassured me God has an amazing plan for me.

As an advocate who now works with those who have been injured in intimate violence, I sometimes feel as though I cannot do enough. I do what I can yet what I offer, to listen to them tell their story, to affirm them, comfort them, provide resources and options, to help them gain perspective and plan for their safety; it is all limited in the scope of what they are many times experiencing and the enormous decisions that only they can make.

My personal experiences with violence bring concern at times to co-workers and friends that I will be emotionally triggered. They don’t know I have a secret tool not found in any advocacy or trauma training. It is one of the same tools my surgeon used. After I leave a call with a survivor, many times uncertain of their safety, uncertain of their future, moved beyond words by their strength in their journey; just as I was prayed for, I say a silent prayer for them.

There are times I am coming out into the night intensely emotional after hours of being in the bright temperature controlled surreal hospital environment with someone who has experienced unspeakable emotional and physical pain inflicted upon them. In the quiet I breathe in the pulsing summer heat and humidity, or pull up my collar against a winter wind as I fold my shoulders inward to shelter myself from bitter cold. Sometimes I look skyward to a full moon, or marvel at the feel of rain on my skin or a welcoming spring breeze; always in a state of reverence that I have this amazing privilege to be here. In these moments of grace, I simply pray.

Peace I leave with you; my peace I give you…do not let your hearts be troubled and do not be afraid. John 14:27

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Traveler

Posted on July 20, 2014 by Lisette d. Johnson

It took about two years for PTSD to hit full force. Once the exhilaration of survival yielded to the resumption of normalcy in everyday activities, my defenses were lowered and the protected boundaries were left wide open.

As it does, it took me by surprise at an inopportune time, while I was out of the country staying with friends. It hit so severely I hardly knew what was happening. It was precipitated by the combination of lingering grief at the suicide of my daughter’s close friend and the pending death of my brother-in-law, who had been a part of my life since I was sixteen. Complicated with being out of normal daily rhythms, my emotional vulnerability created perfect conditions for the full onset.

For those without personal experience, it is hard to understand it is not a mind over matter proposition. It is comparable to willing a heart attack to stop once the symptoms have begun. It is not a matter of reassuring us we are now safe, that we have nothing to fear. Trying to apply reason to an illogical sequence of responses doesn’t work.

It has been a painstaking therapeutic process to disassemble the images, to separate piece by piece the sounds, smells, sights and feelings that are imprinted as a whole, to reassemble them to stand individually and diffuse the intensity. While I have found EMDR therapy immensely helpful overall, I still experience nightmares, though infrequent they are none the less disturbing; as well as a terrifying physical reaction to sirens, which seems oddly more resistant to therapy than seeing guns.

There isn’t a day that goes by when I don’t think of the events of that day, multiple times a day, but it rarely elicits the intense emotional responses it once did. I merely observe and move on most times now.

I advocate for and with domestic violence survivors with no ill effects. Recently, however I was introduced via social media to a rare intimate partner shooting survivor, who herself is in the throes of PTSD. I find myself again reliving not the shooting but the aftermath of my shooting through hers. I recognize I have more work to do in therapy, yet the value of our unique and growing kinship far outweighs the negatives. She and I understand something few others can begin to grasp.

We both traverse friends and acquaintances expressing “I know this terrible thing happened to you, but when will you back to your old self again? Do you have to keep talking about this?” as we begin to comprehend this is who we are now. While my new friend recoiled and hid in an unexpected reaction to firecrackers on Independence Day, I sat in a movie theater, watching as the female character was hit in the chest by a flurry of gunfire, trying to tough it out; trapped between immobilization and fear.

She, too, is a tireless voice in a silent war few are able to fight and fewer still want to know about. She, too, is a mom who has to navigate not only her own trauma but that of her child who witnessed it, whose father is also at the center of that trauma; a child whose stages of emotional healing throughout his life will draw her back in. She, too, will at some point share her scars with future partners. She, too, recreates a life every day as she hovers somewhere between the before and after.

Her journey, however, is her own. I am simply a fellow traveler enormously grateful to know this strong beautiful woman walking this path at this time with me.

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Wildflowers

Posted on July 9, 2014 by Lisette d. Johnson

I love country roads in the summer. Growing up in a rural community I am always transported to my childhood of fields of hay and corn, narrow roads flanked with cornflowers, black eyed Susans, Queen Anne’s Lace and Tiger lilies. The fragrance of Mimosa trees and the silky feel of the blooms are what home felt like.

Amidst the pleasantry of a drive on less traveled roads a few hours from Richmond, the rolled hay in the fields reminds me of the farm bordering the house in which I grew up. Out of the blue, a rogue memory of him invades.

We were living on the farm in Varina. It was late afternoon one fall. He’d decided to get on a tractor the farmer had left and drive around the fields. He was as far from a farmer as imaginable and we laughed and laughed and laughed. In a softer moment still, I remember the Saturday nights with dinner and champagne and dancing slowly in front of the fire.

It is not the abuse that is the most difficult to bear. It is the unexpected moments of remembering being in love with him that are absolutely crushing. I cannot mourn him both as the love of my life and my would be murderer. To an observer it seems easy to choose. I wish it was me who had the capacity to hate him to the degree that I loved him, or to any degree. We were tied and the loss was undeniable.

It is complex to love someone who hurts you. It is gray and blurred and difficult to draw a clear easy conclusion how to move forward when every choice included with it extraordinary pain.

That final summer the narrow course I navigated to leave was interrupted by a tranquil week at the cabin in the North Carolina mountains. We walked hand in hand every morning, gathering wildflowers. He picked blackberries and stopped, gently feeding me, opening his mouth as I opened mine to receive them, like when urging a child to eat. We stripped and swam in the river, the fish nibbling at our feet; reminding me of one of our first outings, a picnic at Sugar Hollow outside Charlottesville.

We had come to some middle ground I thought, a truce, been able to experience each other again. I savored our togetherness but couldn’t be fully in it, knowing I had to stay the course and exit the marriage. I understood the peace of the trip would be short lived. I knew he could not maintain it.

Only days later, after we’d returned home, I walked into a dark bedroom to find him putting bullets in a gun. The calmness he had is incomprehensible knowing now what his intentions were. Later that night he insisted I didn’t understand what I saw, that he meant to protect us with the gun. Indeed I did not understand because my fear was that he might kill himself, not all of us.

Certainly it was not what love and protection look like. But for a short while driving down that road, in a memory stirred that stood isolated from the end scenes, I felt that inextricable longing of loving someone who is no longer with you.

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Parry

Posted on June 24, 2014 by Lisette d. Johnson

After being in a committed (at least for me it was committed) long term relationship that spanned over twenty-five years, I’ve taken the opportunity over the last few years to explore different kinds of relationships while getting my legs back under me emotionally. I’ve acquired some new friends, left a small piece of who I am with most, and I am grateful to everyone who I’ve interacted with for helping me further refine what I want and need.

Though I have made it a conscious point of late to engage only with those who I discern are emotionally available and otherwise unencumbered, love seems very elusive for me. It takes time to ferret a lot out and while my list of favorable/desirable qualities are a great foundation, they cannot account for the magic part, the unexplainable reasons we end up caring for and loving someone. Likely those inexplicable reasons are the same things that make it so very difficult to disassemble loving someone, even when it is clear other parts aren’t working.

It amazes me with all the processes that happen that any two people end up loving each other. So many things have to align on both sides. How is it we lose the innocence and purity of first love that was created without any criteria, any agenda, that simply was, and for most of us remains forever pressed into our hearts as true?

I love the idea of being in love. I’d like nothing more than to fall headlong, deliriously in love with total abandon. I feel I am finally ready. As I reflect on those men who have interested and engaged me on a level to seriously explore potential, I question if there is something in me that creates a barrier. Not something wrong with me, but things that are not fully right with me. The many tiny fissures that feel like too much for someone to take on as I cannot even most times process them. Why am I hesitant to acknowledge an inner need for someone who might have the balm to heal them?

While I am quite capable of being vulnerable, am I unable to yield or surrender to it, to let go of my independent self-sufficiency and accept someone else in my life? Love can’t begin and flourish in an en guarde environment. The ability to yield then, to an emotionally healthy partner, is important. A question is posed: can I?

I, with a deeper instinct, choose a man who compels my strength, who makes enormous demands on me, who does not doubt my courage or my toughness, who does not believe me naive or innocent, who has the courage to treat me like a woman. I love this Anais Nin quote, yet I see that her strength did not produce unions that ever truly satisfied her.

I have a very full life. Why, why does it mean so much to me? Clearly to love and be loved is a basic human drive. I saw my parents whose souls were fed by their best friend in their union. Not a perfect marriage, still they merged and grew and between them had something indelible, two separate banks who shared the constancy of the water between them. I want a chance at that, and their balance.

My temptation is to withdraw from the process but my nature is to not remain confined in status quo, any status quo. My melancholy is surely a spiritual issue; a lack of trust in the process, in my journey, in timing. Still it remains, and I wrestle with staying open, feeling I’ve somehow failed at intimate relationships 101. Am I simply afraid of what will be revealed given my marriage? Perhaps I choose partners who I feel safe will not fully engage so I don’t have to. Can I go the distance or, like my writing, are short interludes all I will manage?

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