I Believe Dr.Ford...
I was raped at age 8. I believe Dr. Ford. We lived a lovely life in the Berkeley Hills. My parents hired two teenagers from a city work program to clear our side yard. My Mother was in the house and I joyfully ran down the back steps and to the side yard to see what was going on. They were in the basement getting the garden tools ready. I walked down the few steps into the basement. They cornered me. One of them raped me while his friend tried to discourage him but did nothing to prevent the crime. Frightened out of my mind and not understanding what happened, I ran upstairs to the bathroom just outside our laundry room. My Mother came in and found me on the floor curled up in a ball. Alarmed, she asked me what was wrong. I told her that my stomach hurt. Why didnât I tell her what happened? Because they threatened to kill me and my family if I said anything. My bedroom faced the backyard and side yard, with windows over the entrance to the basement below. Every night, before bed, I would stare through a small opening in my blinds to make sure that they werenât coming back. I was terrified. I sublimated this terror by channeling my intellect and my charisma. I over-achieved (Stanford, Harvard, graduate degree and grad education). I used my glamour to hide my pain. My sister always said, âthere is a hole in my sister that I cannot figure out.â Despite the outward achievement, I was deeply insecure and had this feeling that somehow I had done something wrong. I hadnât done a damn thing wrong other than being a little girl skipping happily through the back yard until those demons changed my life forever.
The trauma didnât begin to surface until I was going through marriage counseling with my ex-husband. The therapist suspected that something had happened to me. She hypnotized me and vague memories began to come out. I always wondered why, whenever I passed by that house (we subsequently moved four blocks away up the hill), I would get chills and have this terrible sense of dread.
I buried the trauma again because I had a child to raise with joint custody after our divorce and a growing career to attend to in the coming years. Then one day it hit. I lost my appetite. I couldnât sleep. I lost an incredible amount of weight. My Mother, who was working on her doctorate in psychology, urged me to get help. A brilliant psychologist in Berkeley suspected something and engaged in EMDR (look it upâit saved my life as it does for many victims of trauma). I remembered all of the details and who did it (I had blacked this out over the years and never knew their names).
It took a year for me to begin to heal. For my weight to stabilize, for my hair to stop falling out, and for my sleep patterns to normalize. It took a friend in my doctoral program who noticed that every time that we would watch a movie that involved women being attackedâI became very angry at the women for not being able to defend themselves. She also noticed that I couldnât watch any movies in which children were harmed. Now I know why. I was angry that I didnât defend myselfâlike somehow it was my fault.
The horrible thing is that repressed memories are real and will surface. The horrible thing for me is that my Mother was almost angry at me when I told her, even though she was a trained psychologist. She very soon thereafter apologized, saying that she was really furious with herself for not being able to protect her precious child. But it wasnât her fault either. It was the demons in the basement.
So, Dr. Ford, I stand with you. I have become a fierce warrior against any injustice. And no, Senators, you do not get to skewer this woman. We will no longer carry shame for the sins, sicknesses, and crimes of others. #MeToo#TimesUp
