Irritable Hearts: A PTSD Love Story (12 page)

Some evidence shows that pleading with an attacker actually makes your chances of escaping without rape and injury worse.

I hated all these statistics. I had, and I felt every other harassed and assaulted person had, the right to feel zero percent responsible. Experts said it was important to make victims understand that only the perpetrator was responsible for a crime before urging them to examine and accept their own role in what happened, and I couldn’t see how these opposing sentiments could be reconciled.

I thought of the second day I’d spent at the hospital with Marc, several days after our first together and the day after my scary day with Henri. How after the victim we’d been with had gone off to her operation, I’d sat crumpled on the tiles of the lobby floor, demoralized. How weak I must have looked to Marc then. Broken girl. Vulnerable girl. Not a girl who, if you sat at a table asking her repeatedly to take your dick, would upend that table into your face.

Thus did I take it upon myself to get up at six in the morning three weekends in a row after Haiti Part II to drag my ass to an Oakland dojo for a “full-force” personal safety course Meredith had recommended. This particular class was inspired by a black belt in karate who had found, one horrible day, that despite all her training, when it came down to it she couldn’t defend herself against being beat up and raped. She was an expert at fighting—in theory. But all the highly skilled kicking and chopping she’d done had been in controlled spars, not under the influence of survival adrenaline, which can overwhelm cognitive function.

In other words: She froze.

In general, the people who came to Impact Self-Defense had either experienced a similar paralysis or anticipated that they might. There were thirteen other women between the ages of twenty and sixty in my class, which was built on the philosophy that though you can’t stop your instinct to freeze—your instinct to not move, to hide motionless in plain sight, which can be a dangerous way of hanging out—you can learn to overcome it and transition to proactivity in about a second. If you get enough practice.

In this case, practice was spending eight consecutive hours each week with a guy wearing astonishing amounts of padding. This was not the light play-acting assault of my self-defense elective in college. Though the instructors poured all their energies into creating a safe space
around
the practice, they couldn’t change the fact that this practice was unnerving and uncomfortable and terrible. This was a guy approaching me, when it was my turn, in front of a bunch of other people and exploiting my social training to be nice. He was polite and friendly while inching into my personal space, then kept talking to me even after I’d said I wasn’t interested. He chatted me up like a normal person, then refused to go away when I tried to end the conversation.

And then, suddenly, he attacked me. Or he did go away, but then ran at me from behind and tackled me to the floor. Or came at me from the front. Or body-slammed me from the side or grabbed hold of my hair. All day the first day, we alternated between running down drills of strategies to defend against these assaults, and getting assaulted. Practicing “full-force” defense meant that we were not allowed to pull or mimic our punches; the assailant fought us until we struck him as hard as we could, multiple times, and he thought he could’ve been legitimately knocked out if he weren’t padded. Or until we called a safety word (which in this class, no one did).

Otherwise, the fight continued, whether very bad memories came up and overwhelmed you or not. At one point in the afternoon, those of us whose turn it was not to be assaulted watched our assailant attack a young woman who was unable to fight him off with her initial suite of standing moves (throwing a palm into his nose, slamming a knee up into his dick). She started crying while she continued to struggle with him on her feet, failing to get away from his heavy bear hug by swinging a punch behind her into his groin, or extending her arm and slicing it back to elbow him in the solar plexus, or extending it again but palm down for the windup to a backward elbow across his face. We all winced, some of us turning our heads, as he dragged her kicking and screaming to the ground.

“How was it, my baby?” Nico asked when I get home, inquiring about my day as if we were a normal couple, his little face peering into my computer screen after he’d typed the question.

It was the single worst thing I could think of voluntarily doing with a day. That is, until the next week beat it with the “what to do in the incredibly unfortunate position of being on your back and seconds away from getting raped” module. That would be the one where you lie alone on the floor with your eyes closed, and all of a sudden a guy pins your arms to your sides. When your eyes flash open and you start to struggle, he holds you tighter and barks, “Behave!” You do, because you haven’t figured out what else to do, and because he’s put all his weight on top of you and put his nose to yours. His fingers are tight around your wrists, and he’s crushing your chest.

You go completely limp, which can be a self-defense strategy itself if you use it to plan your next move. A fake-out. But in this particular case maybe you have simply been shattered by the awfulness of what’s happening and his breath on your face. “You thought you were tough, didn’t you?” he coos. “But look at you now with your weak, hot ass.”

Because some experts suggest that women can be triggered into paralysis merely with words—if they elicit enough fear and a sense of entrapment—our assailant employed them liberally, and disgustingly, in Week Two. Even more unpleasant than being under him, somehow, was being witness to his climbing on top of the other gals in the class. One of the students was in her mid-fifties or so, like my mother but much shorter and frailer. She went perfectly still when the big young guy pinned her arms and mounted her, telling her gently, assuredly, that she was going to like what he had for her, rolling her slowly over onto her stomach. When he pushed her legs apart with his knees, telling her to “relax, you disgusting slut,” and settled his groin in between them with a low and satisfied groan, something inside my chest crumpled. For the better part of an hour, the monstrosity repeated and repeated itself with different women on the floor in front of us. We all cried silently as we watched.

But every time, after the initial freeze, something would change in the woman on the ground: Eventually, she would get her wits about her, and gather the fight in her, and activate the tools she’d been taught. Essentially all the options in that module led to a dirty ground fight in which you had to free your legs from his grasp with a move called pistoning so that you could kick him in the face enough times to knock him out.

Oh, but that wasn’t all. Week Two also included more intensive drills about how to verbally de-escalate situations, including setting boundaries with people who weren’t strangers and sessions of customized assault, in which Impact instructors deliberately reenacted your personal nightmare.

I used the opportunity to get a redo on my scene with Marc, that scene also a proxy for plenty of similar ones—nonsexual pressures from people I knew, conversations with bosses, even—that I wanted to go differently next time. The guy in the padding pretended to be my translator. Our conversation started friendly enough. We were just hanging around, chatting, until it turned ugly as he asked me when we were going to screw.

No, no, I said. We weren’t doing that. That wasn’t happening.

He persisted, and persisted, reminding me that he knew where I slept. The guy in the padding, who’d been given just the most basic parameters for this scene, was making up his end of this universal conversation easily enough. Plenty of American gals put out, he said, and I had been acting as if I was going to, and weren’t we friends, and it was time, and I was hot, so what was the problem?

No, I said. No. We were just friends and this was totally inappropriate.

But just as when it had happened in real life, I hated this conversation so much that even my body language was trying to escape it. I stood at a ninety-degree angle to my antagonist.

Another therapist, when my symptoms got much worse later, would show me how this would not help my chances with a potential adversary, as Meredith had also been trying to explain. The new therapist would turn her body away from me in her seat across the room, legs to the side at a ninety-degree angle, whole body facing the wall to my right but her head turned back to me to say, with something of a side-glance, “No.” When I saw how unconvincing and unserious I found her in that position, my heart would sink.

In my Marc reenactment, an Impact instructor had to put her hands on my shoulders and forcibly turn me toward him, because I was physically incapable of facing him straight on even though she was standing right there the whole time saying, “Hold your ground. Hold your ground.” It wasn’t until I did so, and raised my voice forcefully enough to make my “This conversation is over” sound believable, that he said, “Fine.” And left.

I won! The other women clapped, as we always did when someone won. I was free to rejoin my place in the peanut gallery, though the adrenaline and memories had made me so sick to my stomach that I inched away from everyone in case I had to go throw up. I wasn’t sure that even if I had been taught to break my paralysis when feeling threatened, to aggressively enforce my boundaries, I would’ve have had the energy to do it in Haiti with Marc. But the next time it was my turn in class, I was able to fully face the guy and bark him down faster, and I was slightly less nauseated. Which was good, because that time, the instructors had decided that after I talked my way out of that threat I would immediately suffer a surprise assault by a different guy, who attacked me from behind as the other was walking away. An instructor had to reprimand me for instinctively trying to escape at one point during the ensuing fight, because in this hypothetical scenario, I had no safe place to go, and so had to continue fighting until one of us gave up.

Every fight you won further embedded in your body the possibility of doing it again. So we kept doing it again. Until our bodies performed the physical and verbal drills automatically. Until our bodies had broken the habit of not yelling at dudes who were being assholes. Until our bodies weren’t so shocked by a physical attack that we could respond fast. I had far from nailed it, even after the third, final day of training, with “extended” fights—where you struggle with an assailant who … Just … Won’t … Quit. Usually only one of your blows had to be hard enough to knock out the mock attacker, but these fights required landing five or seven knockout blows, since, as my instructor described it, they were “meant to simulate scenarios where the assailant is either on a psychotic break or high, and thus not receptive to a ‘pain knockout’—and requiring a ‘structural knockout.’” As in, he must be kicked or punched in the head so that his brain knocks against his skull hard enough for him to lose consciousness.

Those fights were “also meant to provide students the opportunity to continue fighting even though exhausted,” the instructor said, “so that you know you are capable of doing so. And because we don’t hit students in our class, fighting through that exhaustion is the closest we can get to safely giving you the experience of fighting back through pain or shock if you were hit in a real-life scenario.”

Even at the end of the third day, with all that fresh practice, I failed to prevent an attacker from knocking my legs out from under me. With all the things everyone had seen so far, my back still hit the mats from such a height and so hard as to draw gasps. I could hear them while I lay there, temporarily stunned, the air knocked out of me, really preferring not to have to get up and engage that guy in hand-to-hand combat. Really, I preferred to lay there forever.

People that I knew, I had found, were for some reason under the impression that I was a brawler. I speculated that it must have been because I was opinionated and independent, supporting myself with a job that was hard, or with a job that was usually done by men. Or because I rarely wore skirts? But being adept didn’t mean being violent. I’d landed my job because I’d wanted to write about a hidden war in Asia, not because I was an adrenaline junkie. I’d taken it because my father had told me, every day, that I could be and do anything. Not because I’d hoped I would get in fights. I hated fights. More precisely, since my childhood home was run by two adults who loved each other—and, frankly, pot—I was never exposed to, and never developed tolerance for, fights. The only big fight I’d known of between my parents had happened when my father said something out of line once—when I was about four years old. And the only reason I knew about it was because I was there when my mom got the flowers he sent from work the next morning.

But as conflict-averse as I was, I did get good at fighting during the training. Despite the exhaustion of many highly adrenalized hours in a screaming-and-assaulting environment, I could generally drop the assailant in two blows in five seconds, even when the timing and style of the assault were a surprise. Over the past several months, I’d so often felt so overcome with my post-traumatic fear—and this practice made me feel less afraid.

I couldn’t know if the training would translate into results the next time my emotional or physical space was violated, or if it really would have made a difference in, say, Oklahoma, against that many fightin’ men full of beer and darkness. Or if my odds would improve further yet if I took the next, knife- and gun-fighting course. I was there less for the fight moves than for the practice making my boundaries clear and heard by any means necessary. At least I understood that I hadn’t just
felt
powerless. I had in fact been powerless, sure as if I’d been sent into battle with a weapon I’d never learned to load or fire.

“Now I know that if I got attacked, I would definitely fight back,” one of the other women said before we left class. When we’d first arrived, she’d said she couldn’t even scream if something bad happened. But here we were hours of training later, and she had changed her tune. “I don’t know if I’ll win,” she said. “But at least I know I’ll do something.”