Dealing With The Darkness

I’m knackered. Beyond that. Multiply that up 100 times and then you’re starting to get there. Knackered to the power of 100. I can’t sleep. Those brief moments I do fall into unconsciousness I’m beset by nightmares of the worst variety. When I awaken there’s no respite, no relief, no ‘oh well it was just a bad dream’ because it wasn’t. These nightmares revolve around actual life events.

My mind and my body are completely out of sync. When the body’s exhausted, the head’s racing. When I’m detached and my mind’s set at empty, resting out there on the ether, the body’s locked in, fully functioning and awake. One rests and the other works, or else they both race together, driven by an insane energy. Their periods of rest have ceased to coincide.

I’m dealing with some really heavy shit in therapy. This is the stuff I’d not planned on telling anybody – myself included. I’d put it in the deepest, darkest, furthest corner of my mind with a great big fuck off ‘DANGER’ sign lest I forget. The mind, like a flight recorder, took it in – took it all in – the beatings, the violence, the pimping, the rapes. My boundaries broken one by one, humiliated, treated like an animal, savaged and increasingly savage. Of course, I did my best to minimize, to forget about it, to deny it, just to survive. I didn’t allow words like ‘rape’ or ‘pimping’ in my vocabulary. The drink and drugs helped and the head injuries too.

But this stuff, these memories, fractured as they are, would simply not be obliterated. Nor will they now, despite my best efforts. That’s 5 years of trying to ignore them, 5 years unable to face them. I’ve been in therapy for maybe six months now and you know what, it takes time. I find trust incredibly, painfully difficult. When people have used and abused you, done things you didn’t even know it was possible to do to another human being without them dying – and then brought you back so they could do it again – it’s hard to have faith in people. When the hand that soothed you was also the hand that hit you, it becomes confused. Safer, surely, to trust no one.

It’s massive that I’m beginning to even try and talk about this stuff.

In terms of sheer volume, this ain’t going to be quick. But things move on as they do and voila! I’ve hit the really heavy shit now. Talking through the other stuff, painful and difficult in itself, I could feel it all around the edges of my consciousness, a foreboding darkness with little darts of movement, closing in. The occasional snapshot of something, like a subliminal message in a movie – there one second but gone so quick you’re not even sure it happened at all. A lingering feeling of deep unease, an inability to concentrate, head and body starting to pull in different directions. Unnamed and unacknowledged as it has been, this stuff has a slippery, nightmare quality. Struggling to look at it directly in my waking moments, small wonder it should be invading my sleep, such as it is.

This is stuff I couldn’t say aloud – even alone - couldn’t bear to think about. I’d do the psychic equivalent of going ‘lalala not listening’ yet it remained, patiently, waiting for a moment of stillness, of quiet, to re-emerge. Bedtime is an ideal spot, hence the insomnia. I don’t want to name it, or even acknowledge it. Too real, too painful, too scary. But it is there and it is real, whether I talk about it or not. It happened. Speaking about it is the only way. When I walled this stuff in and turned my back on it I didn’t realize I’d walled myself in with it, turned my back on myself. It has remained, a threat to my recovery, an unhealed wound thinly covered over.

Head and body are mashed with it all. When I’m sat opposite the therapist I can see him, see his reactions, and I trust him. It feels safe. Comparatively. Afterwards, at home, it’s not so clear. The trust thing kicks in – my ex taught me well not to trust by both his words and his actions. I face the horror of the reality of what I have managed to say and the fear of the rest of it – all the other stuff that I haven’t said. How am I to say it? I can’t. I must! And on. No rest! When I talk, I feel as if I’ve said too much. I oscillate between this feeling, this certainty, and knowing that I haven’t said enough. I feel this massive pressure, this crushing weight of all the horror and degradation just lining up to be spoken, to be heard. My body hurts with PTSD – leg pains! Abdo pains! Wrist pains! Jaw pains! Pains, pains everywhere, and my head hurts too, full as it is with images, feelings, thoughts, emotions. The feelings are so intense, how I felt when that stuff was being done to me, how I still feel, that words seem inadequate. I grope for vocabulary but there is none. And yet words are all I have.

The emotions take me right back. Like being sucked into a vortex, I leave this body and time behind, revisiting. It’s like I’m haunting myself. The body responds to what the mind’s telling it is happening – it hurts, freezes, sweats, shakes, becomes nauseous, becomes faint. I become lost, split between two places, not fully in either.

But one thing I do know – no matter how painful and scary looking at this stuff is, it is necessary. There are no other options. It’s move forward and deal with it with help as best I can or sink with it. Sink or swim. It’s rough and it’s going to be a whole lot rougher before we’re done but I got in some little practice at surviving. My ex set out to break me and break me he did, but he could not determine the lines along which I broke. For in with the fear and the pain and the weakness there grew a cast iron will to survive. Terrified as I feel with this stuff, he has yet to beat me. Survival is itself a form of defiance. I will pull through this, somehow I will pull through it. What better ‘fuck you’ could I hope for?

Lighting A Candle: The Battle for Words

To write, you must have energy above and beyond that necessary just to get through the day. I haven’t written for a while quite simply because I have lacked the energy. All the energy I possess has been channeled into surviving. Things are shifting and it’s painful, even if it’s good. Sometimes the pain is absolutely overwhelming – physical, mental, spiritual. I keep my head down and weather the storm. There are no quick fixes in recovery and boy, do I hate that! I do all the right things, but that doesn’t always mean I feel better – at least, not immediately. Opening up about my past seems to mean feeling worse in the short term.

When things have been really black I think, I can’t do this anymore. Too much, it’s too much. I feel raw and broken and scared and hurt and damaged, damaged beyond repair. And I’m exhausted from not sleeping, and my body hurts with PTSD and my mind’s full of technicolour images of the abuse, the scents, the sounds, the feelings. Enveloped with pain, frozen and mute with trauma, it chases through my mind: I simply can’t do this anymore.

But you know, what are the options? I contemplate suicide but I don’t want to die, I just don’t want to feel like this, to hurt like this. The survival instinct which brought me through the abuse and into recovery burns deep at the core of my being. So I put one foot in front of the other and do what I can to look after myself, to take care of myself, to pull through this, now as then.

Facing my past without drink and drugs to take the edge off, seeing my absolute powerlessness, experiencing fully the horror and pain and degradation that was my life is absolutely terrifying. I struggle to talk about what’s in my head: the realization of the brutality and humiliation to which I was subjected make the words stick in my mouth, make my lips seal together, form a dry sob in my throat. I’ve never felt more alone. But I do have help these days in the form of my therapist and my sponsor. I am doing the right things, trying to talk, trying to trust, trying to heal.

An old Chinese proverb says ‘it is better to light a candle than to curse the darkness’. In taking care of myself as best I know, in keeping going, in riding it out, in being proactive in challenging the lies of the sex industry by telling my story, whether people choose to listen or not, that’s what I’m doing. I’m taking action, even if that action is painful and scary and feels woefully inadequate at times. Keep putting in the right actions, and no matter how slowly, things begin to change for the better. There's a long way to go, both in my personal recovery and in the larger scheme of things. But I'm in it for the long haul. It's the only way to be.

Behind the Lens: Living Porn

In porn and prostitution, women are fucked over and over again for the sexual gratification of others, as entertainment. Our bodies (and minds) are put through extreme stress and trauma, to turn other people on. Sex in pornography and prostitution is rarely gentle or thoughtful. Instead, it involves prolonged, brutal penetration by strangers. The woman's discomfort, should she show it, is a source of amusement rather than concern.

So what is it like to be penetrated all day long by stranger after stranger? What is it like to be at the other end of that camera? What does it actually feel like to be that woman who users of pornography laugh at, being penetrated with anything that can be forced inside her, by object after object and man after man, for the entertainment of men she's never even met? I write from my experience of being pimped, of that abuse being filmed and photographed to make money for my abusers.

I think that if they had to endure what goes on at the other end of the lens for themselves, people might think twice about fighting for their 'right' to access this material, and about funding a system that lines the pockets of pimps and pornographers whilst quietly destroying the women it uses.

Being groomed for more and more hardcore sex acts, your relationship with your body changes. Before all this, in another lifetime, you could talk without complication of ‘I’, ‘my body’, ‘me’. They were all one the same thing, and yeah, while you might’ve had a few body hangups (who doesn’t) you accepted that it was you. Then comes the violence, verbal, physical and sexual, thanks to your partner, later your pimp: the insidious slide into being controlled that is so subtly executed that you hardly even notice it. By the time you realize where you are you’re too far in, and even looking back it’s hard to pinpoint how things happened, when things changed.

As the abuse increases, the relationship with your body becomes something else. When he shouts at you, sometimes, when he hits you, sometimes, you feel like it's not really you - you're not really there. You feel yourself splitting. Things happen to the body but you’re detached. Unable to remove yourself physically from what’s happening, you remove yourself mentally as best you can. And given what’s happening to the body, what he does to the body, and later what the men who pay him do to the body, it’s not surprising you want to disconnect. The body ceases to feel like it is yours: there are no boundaries. The porn-fuelled imaginations of the men who use you decide what happens to it, not you.

You are irrelevant. Your humanity is disregarded. Your hopes and dreams, your feelings, your pain, are unimportant. The only thing that these men want is the body, the orifices in particular, your mouth forming what they deem to be the correct noises and responses on cue. You are a living, breathing vessel into which these men pour the sickness of their perverse, woman-hating fantasies.

Porn is the training ground for the men who use you, and they use it to train you. They see something, they want to re-enact it. And the woman in the original was smiling, she enjoyed it (though her face said otherwise) and so will you. The twisted logic of the johns. Educated by porn, they are obsessed with penetration – anything goes.

The level of aggression should be shocking but it becomes just a fact of life for you, an everyday occurrence. They push your head down on their cocks so that you gag and choke, they drag you by the hair, they make you crawl on all fours. There’s a monotony to the pain, a predictability as to the format. The details differ, the men differ, what they do differs, but largely in degree. It will be painful, but how painful? You will be fucked but by how many men? They will be aggressive, but how aggressive? Will they piss on you today, half strangle you today, or merely spit on you and call you names as they fuck you?

Group stuff is rough. Surrounded by men whose only intent is to use you 'til they orgasm and the viewer at home orgasms, the sounds, the colour, the scents are too much. You are in body and out of body, detached and present, numb and in pain: God, the pain. The drink helps. Time ceases to have meaning. Hands paw at you from all directions, touching you where you don’t want to be touched. They have you on your knees, one man then another then another pushing his cock (sans johnny) in your mouth. Your jaw aches, your throat’s raw, you can’t breathe, the stench of their body fluids in your nostrils, eyes streaming as they force your head down. You’re put onto all fours in the centre. At times you feel you might just pass out, sometimes you do from the pain, only to be brought back round to carry on. Man after man inside you, if they’re filming it usually more than one at a time: double penetration, airtighting, more extreme stuff. At times you observe in a detached manner: then the sickening fall back into the body, to feeling with every nerve and every fibre of your being what they do to you. You focus on different things – on breathing, on anything your mind can distract itself with to take you out of here. Just get through, get through, got to get through. You are passed about, posed in different ways, contorted for maximum pleasure and for the camera, just breathing is hard and you don’t take it for granted.

It goes on. They cum in your mouth when they’re done, in your face, in your body and on it. The foul body fluids of man after man make you retch but you have to swallow, like a good slut. They display you for the camera – the audience at home want to see your body swollen and distended, covered in cum.

Left alone to clean yourself up, you move slowly and painfully, still not quite attached to the body, not quite in control of it. Disorientated and confused. How many men today? How long have I been here? It’s just another day being sold, the days blur and run together. You don’t remember all of it, don’t want to remember. You can’t acknowledge the reality of where you are, what’s just happened to you and what will happen to you again tomorrow or the next day,couldn’t survive it. So instead you split. You slowly, gently clean the body, because it hurts - it’s bruised and bleeding and you sort it out. And you think to yourself, I’m not really here, this doesn’t really matter, they can do what they want to this body but the joke’s on them because it doesn’t touch me at all. I am untouchable, and this is just a body. It's not me.

You have to dismiss the fact that when you touch the body where it got hurt, you feel it. You tell yourself that you don’t and chastise yourself for your weakness. To admit your powerlessness is to open the door to terror and ultimately insanity and suicide. Instead you take blame – they tell you get what you deserve anyway - and if people do stuff to you because of how you are, at least you feel you have some measure of control in things.

Looking back, now, in recovery, the truth hits and it hits hard. I was pimped, I was raped on a daily basis and gang raped frequently. This abuse was filmed and photographed and is still out there, making him rich, getting people off. I was absolutely powerless and could have died at any time. That body was me, what they did they did to me, though I still struggle to accept that. My body has been in the wars. My body and I were once one, and to heal and become whole we must cease to be strangers to one another. The me that endured all that I have endured deserves acceptance and love. Instead, in recovery I have continued to battle with my body, inflicting self harm wounds to ease the mental pain, neglecting to feed it and treat it with even basic compassion. I still often call it ‘the body’, speaking of it as if it were separate and other -lesser - still drawing a clear dividing line between my mental and my physical self, still sacrificing my body to protect my mind. We have become almost enemies, co-existing uneasily for the most part in a state of mutual mistrust. The body does its own thing: vomiting and shaking, tensing and aching; my mind is powerless to control it. Communication remains fragmented at best.

To reintegrate body and mind means feeling and acknowledging pain beyond words. My mind itself is fragmented, a result of the trauma: healing is a long and complex process. It means owning fear, powerlessness, horror, revulsion, confusion and a whole ocean of sadness. It’s a painful journey, but one I’m making now, in baby steps, because I want to be whole. I lock down, I go mute, I get nightmares - if I sleep, which I struggle to do. This stuff’s working it’s way out of me! I’m talking about my past and it’s scary and it’s huge and it’s necessary. My body and my mind have been through enough shit. I figure they deserve a shot at something more, something better. That I deserve something better. A bit of gentleness is the way forward, even though that makes me want to cry. I had things back to front: I didn’t deserve what happened to me, but gentleness? I deserve a whole heap of that.

That's what it's like at the other end of the camera, living porn. Predicted recovery time: considerably longer than reaching for the tissues, closing the magazine or ejecting the dvd.

PTSD and The Prostitution Trap

There have been times when I have thought about going back to prostitution. It felt to me, at times, inevitable that I would end up back there, as messed up by it as I have been and remain, with PTSD that makes everyday life almost impossible, with insomnia, when the splitting is frequent and time loses its meaning, when even being in a room with someone is too scary, too much. When things have been at their worst, I have felt any possibility of attempting ‘normal’ life to be laughable, and I have known the one place where I could go where I would be absolutely normal, where my fucked-upness would be not merely permissible but actually required. Prostitution. As a little girl I didn’t dream of one day growing up and having men fuck me for money. I don’t believe many little girls do. But we acquire damage on the way and end up there, getting more damaged day by day, desperate to get out, sometimes too damaged to get out, or out and sometimes too damaged to stay out.

I have had PTSD for more than a decade. It began with the violence of my ex, and continued throughout being pimped and then prostituting myself. Incapacitated by it, I struggled to speak or even move at times: I simply froze up. As the abuse continued and worsened, over time, the trauma continued to leave its record on my mind and body, layer on layer. My reactions to situations, from an outside perspective, might have seemed, probably still seem, at times, a little strange or unhinged. Sometimes in the face of extreme violence, I’d laugh: out on the other side of terror, a kind of hysterical ‘bring it on’. My different ‘heads’ – I remain fragmented – manifest quite differently. Or so I am told – I don’t always know. Difficulties with memory combined with splitting mean that I can lack continuity in relationships. I might react to the same situation very differently at different times, according which head I have on.

I never have gone back to prostitution. Even when it has felt inevitable, all I’m good at, when I’ve felt I’d never get any better and that I might as well get it over and done with rather than having it hang over my head – even then, I haven’t gone back. The reason? I couldn’t do it sober. The memory of the horror of what it would mean stops me. I have enough clear thinking even in those bleak times to realize that while things might not get any better, they could get a lot worse by going back. Hell, they would get a lot worse if I went back. Similarly, I have contemplated suicide when things have felt really black in recovery. In truth, I didn’t want to die, I just didn’t know how to live. I don’t want to go back but I haven’t known how to go on.

The help available out there to women who have exited prostitution is woefully inadequate. I have found it to be practically non-existent. The first hope I got was stumbling across the Object website (www.object.org), a UK movement against the objectification of women. I wrote to them, telling them my story and they wrote back. I couldn’t believe they took the time to write back! My attempts at accessing help elsewhere, at finding people who understood, who gave a shit, even within the mental health profession, had hitherto been unsuccessful. From my dialogue with Object, I gained a little confidence and started the blog, a big part of my recovery. I knew I wasn’t totally on my own, and had begun to be able to articulate some of what had happened to me, in print at least – it remained largely unspeakable. But I still lacked any face to face help. I needed someone who knew me, to whom I wasn’t anonymous, to see at first hand the different heads, the frozenness, to spend time with me and get to know me so that they could understand me and what it’s like to be me, and help me to move forward.

The last 6 months have seen that change. I am now seeing a therapist who listens rather than telling me how it is, who checks out if he’s getting things right and who I find myself able to trust. And I have a sponsor who I also trust enough to talk to about this stuff, which is immense – the power of a twelve step programme is that help isn’t confined to office hours and care isn’t on the meter. I have people I can sit down with and try and talk to about my past and work it through.

Now I have help, now I can talk to someone, I feel for the first time that I won’t have to go back. Prostitution is a trap, and simply having exited is not enough to stay safe. The mental trauma it causes serves to make women who have survived it incredibly vulnerable to going back - not because we want to (you can hear the johns rubbing their hands, gleefully saying see! They love it really!) but because in a society which has swallowed the lies and language of the sex industry, there’s quite simply no place else to go.

Things are hard right now. The PTSD’s bad: at night I keep the light on, bedroom door locked and wedged, and I sleep very little. I’m processing and re-living, body and mind. When I was pimped, it wasn’t safe to relax: I was always alert, always watching for the next danger, trying to stay a step ahead. Or I’d be dissociated, or numbed from the drugs and booze. The abnormal relationship between body mind and me is taking time to unknot. But I am so grateful to have help. I’ve done a lot of things alone of necessity, but carrying this stuff alone was impossible and made me incredibly vulnerable to going back. Things are moving, and that’s good, even if it’s painful. It’s not possible to change the future without disturbing the present, and I want a future that’s as far from my past as the east is from the west. I used to be a prisoner, locked up, beaten up, and told to shut the fuck up. Now I am free. Like a battery hen released for the first time from the confines of her cage, the mental cage can still confine me. It’s going to take a little sorting, a lot of patience and a whole bucket load of love for my head to catch up. Then I shall fly!