The Box.
Never open the box.
It’s an unwritten rule with sexual abuse victims.
The box can be real, or metaphoric, but every survivor has one.
It’s a container, a safe, a storage unit for all the crap that happened to you.
Some are big, some are small, some are different shapes, and some aren’t really even boxes at all. Some are bags, some are journals, some are painting and drawings, and some are even just a blocked off part in the survivors mind.
Once in a rare while the survivor will take that box down, open it, and stare at all the crap they lived through. If the survivor does this they are prepared, in control, securely handling the contents of their box so it can be examined and analyzed. So the survivor can heal, until one day they can maybe throw the box out, or the box merely fades away.
The box is something you made with a mixture of love and hate. It is something your poor some of your most vulnerable moments into. Something you cry over, something you smile over. A visual container to describe a part of you.
The problem comes when it’s not the survivor that opens the box.
The survivor becomes caught off guard, their walls unprepared for the crap that follows. The lack of control scaring them.
A child could stumble upon the box and ask a question.
A friend who didn’t know the circumstances behind that box could jerk it open.
A parent could force their way into the box.
You see the box, you the see the person that opened the box and time stops.
The first thing you’ll feel is anger.
Anger at someone finding something so personal to you.
Then the anger transforms into anger not at the person, but the person who made the memories you placed in there. You explode at the memories, furious that you even own a box because of them. Furious that you even had memories that need to be locked away.
The person pulls things out of the box, staring and analyzing, but not understand the objects purpose. They might joke, or mock the item, fueling your anger. Now, unintentionally they are laughing at your memory, at your pain and your joy in that box.
With every item they pull out another memory will slap you. It’ll crash through your carefully built walls and you will feel exactly as you did the moment that memory was made.
You will feel small, insignificant, dirty and stupid.
You will probably be unable to stand this and in a desperate attempt to make it stop you will jerk the box away from them. You will either close it and angrily dash away with it, or you will shut down. You will feel the cold numbness you used to succumb to take effect, desperately trying to regain mental control.
You will be quiet, the memories flashing behind your eyes, you aren’t seeing the person who accidently opened the box anymore, you are seeing acts from another place and another time.
I can tell you how I handled the opening of my box. I didn’t.
The anger immediately turns into numbness and I begin to methodically go through my box. The damage was done, the box had been opened. I began to pull out the items that had been shown and explain their purpose. Hatefully I threw them to the ground trying to break them, break every memory that went along with it.
The person was shocked, confused, they wanted me to stop. I can’t just stop. Nothing just stops.
You can say stop, but once you start on the roller coaster, you can’t get off, not until it’s complete.
That’s the other part that makes you angry, they all want you to stop. Everyone, friends, lovers, parents, pick one. They want to poke, to prod, to ask around it, but when you actually start telling them what they want to know, when it starts getting to hard, to intense they all want you to stop.
Well I wanted it to stop too and it didn’t. I didn’t even want to know, but guess what I got it anyways. So don’t fucking ask me to stop. Either you want to know it all, or don’t ask me. It’s just to fucking hard to stop.
You know what it feels like when you ask someone to stop, mid-way in? It feels like you didn’t care after all, it feels like you really didn’t want to know the truth, it feels like another form of being let down, of being betrayed again. So don’t fucking ask me to stop.
That will snap my cold numbness faster than anything. And it did. It resparked that anger.
You know who my favorite heroine was? Anita Blake, a character from a novel. Not because she’s just cool, or badass, or does neato vampire things. No, that’s not why I respect her, look up to her. I like her cause whenever something horrible was happening she stared it straight in the face, because she know someone, somewhere had to live with it, so it was the least she could do was to hear it out, or to watch it happen.
There was this one book, where a friend of her’s son was being molested, and she was tied up and forced to watch it on a TV screen. She didn’t look away, she didn’t back down, she started it straight in the face and vowed to watch the whole damn thing because she knew that boy would have to deal with it for the rest of his life and she was the only validation he would have. She killed the chick that hurt him later, but that’s not the real point.
I feel like that sometimes. I know I do it to myself, but I’m willing to listen to any horrible bad thing that has happened because I know that person had to live with it, but in all honesty I don’t feel like others will do that for me. That’s one reason I stay so guarded. I can’t take that disappointment, that rejection if someone let’s me start to be vulnerable, and then forces me to stop half-way through.
That’s why I don’t share things. That’s why I don’t fully trust. That’s why the only person I do let get that close, my counselor, is because they aren’t allowed to reject me that way. They encourage you to tell more, not stop and hold it in.
Anyways, I’m off track, back to the box.
After the person left and you are alone with that box you let yourself cry. You cry for hurting someone who didn’t know. You cry for the pain of reliving parts of that box. You cry for losing control. And you cry for the effect the memories can still have on you.
You might even throw your box, releasing your anger for one brief moment, but it does nothing. You aren’t doing anything to the box, to the memories. You are just frantically looking for a release.
And for a moment you’re broken again. You’re back in time once more. You shake your head and start rebuilding your walls, tightening the bolts and chaining up the memories one at a time. You carefully put them back in the box. You close it up and hold it sadly in your mind. You’re lost, what do you do with it now? Do you put it back and risk someone else finding it, do you place it somewhere new, do you throw it out, or do you just stand there and hold it?
It’s true it brings negative memories. It’s true you should rid yourself of negative things, but it’s hard. It’s hard because you put so much time, so much energy, so many tears into it.
I threw my box away.
My literal box anyways. My mental one is still there, will always be there. For now it’s under a bed and it comes out for a controlled counseling session and then it goes back away. For now that’s where it stays until I know what to do with it.
We all have a box, not all of them are about abuse, that’s just mine. We each have things that are precious and close to us, things we don’t want to share. Things we want to keep for just us, things we want to share, but are scared too. We fear the rejection, the pain opening that box will cause. We fear the result of a box opened, but not by our hand.
But if someone can comfort the pain, if someone can accept the flaws of the person that has the box then real, true healing can begin.
