After Childhood Trauma

 First, this may be triggering for some of you. Feel free to skip it.

Many years ago, and after a lot of support group sessions, I decided I needed a therapist. I began to be aware something was buried.  Not enough to be simply forgotten, the way you might forget the name and face of a long ago casual friend. The after-effects had always haunted me, something too scary, too shameful, too totally awful to ever talk about. I'd tried once, and gotten dismissed, and part of me grabbed onto that dismissal as a reason that whatever it was, it never happened. 

It just didn't erase it. So I went to a therapist who didn't dismiss me. She also didn't try to fill in my blanks, push me in any particular direction. But there was a room involved where that something happened. Her only advice was to talk to my parents, describe that room, and see if they could place it anywhere I'd lived. 

They did. There was also the - now somewhat understandable - betrayal of their denial anything ever happened there. They needed to know, in a later conversation, that I wasn't accusing them of any responsibility. I wasn't. They had already told me who else was there, somebody even then long dead. There'd be no confrontation, adult to adult, however healing that might seem to be.  But healing did begin. Somewhere in that early discovery timeline, the poem below got written, back in 1984.

I am posting it now because the memories came up again in another discussion of rape on another forum, along with a comment on how the brain protects us from "knowing" things that hurt us deeply. I recognized my own childhood. It was time to go dig out that poem again and read what I'd written. In the process, now having all the pieces, I recognized one thing else: my memory of that room was always from the vantage point of being on the bed, looking up at the ceiling, with a shadowy "HIM" at the end of it doing things I couldn't see, didn't know how to describe. But I always recalled, even in my recurring dreams, the pain.

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The Room

There is a room I cannot enter.
My memory lets me walk
All through that house
But there.
For me
Even its door does not exist.
What happened there I think I know.
Child Within was there
And from the darkened prison
Where she hides
She haunts my dreams
And private moments.
For years I did not know the room was gone.
I’d had no need to enter.
Now others tell me I have need,
Tell me what I’ll find.
I am afraid.
Memory paces up and down that hallway
But the wall stays blank.
Imagination wills a door
Designs a room
Builds a window
Slopes a ceiling
But I’m left pacing in the hallway
And still the wall is blank
And still I am afraid.
I claim I do not need the room
Or “someday” I will enter.
And I struggle with the pieces of my life.
I juggle one piece, then another
Build new competencies, skills,
And hide, even from me,
The blackened core within.
I know it’s there now, waiting,
And the hiding isn’t working very well,
And soon, though I am still afraid,
I’ll be back pacing in that hall,
Not in that room,
Not free to go.
Child Within, forgive me:
I’m not ready yet to help us both
Be whole.
There is a room I cannot enter
And I think my biggest fear
Is that when I walk in
I’ll find it empty
And I will know
That all the  awfulness
Is only -
Has always been -
From inside me.