If you ever…
It was dark when I got to my parents’ house. I was scared but determined. The therapist and I agreed that this had to be done, and I saw no point in delaying the inevitable. But for safety, I had told a friend exactly where I was going to be so that if she didn’t hear from me in a couple of hours, she would know something had happened.
I don’t remember any of the preliminaries, and I don’t remember leaving. But I do remember sitting at that table and, for the first time in my life, drawing a firm line in the sand:
“I’m in therapy.”
My father sighed. My mother said nothing.
“I came here to tell you that you won’t ever lay a finger on me again.”
His eyes widened. A look of surprise on his face.
“I want you to know that from now on, if you ever touch me again, I will call the police and charge you with assault.”
I expected an explosion. What I saw was shock. And fear. He grimaced, put his hand to his forehead, and looked away. I think he groaned something like “Oh no.”
My mother sat there stone-faced. No words. No expression.
That was it. That is all I remember of that moment in that house. If more was said, I can’t recall it. But my delivery of those lines, and his cringing across the table, those are seared in my brain.
I know I didn’t stay long. It wasn’t a social visit. I had gone to do what my therapist and I decided was needed — set me free from them, stand up for me, and set up my zone of protection. And I had done that. Strongly, calmly, fiercely. Now I could go on with my healing, undisturbed.
The only other thing I remember from that night was heading straight to my friend’s house to decompress from exhaustion and relief.
The aftermath
It’s funny. Looking back, when I said those words, I still wasn’t even thinking about the sexual abuse. I had never told my mother, or anyone except my friend and my therapist, about that. At that moment, I was determined to lay down the law about his violence. I wasn’t ever going to be threatened by him again. But I expect, when he heard my warning, he took it to mean both the violence and the sexual assaults because he never tried anything with me again.
The aftermath is a bit fuzzy. I know somewhere in there I asked them to join me in therapy. He refused. There were questions about why I was doing this and how long this would take. In spite of putting on a brave face to my father and standing up to his family system, it was very fragile for me. I had waves of guilt. I felt like I was betraying my family and questioned myself constantly about “Was it REALLY that bad?”
And I felt totally alone, and vulnerable. He had built a family system of rules all those years and I was breaking all of them. It was shaking his rules to the core. He was angry. Then the martyr and victim. When a person makes major shifts in how the family rules operate, don’t expect that system to be happy at what you are doing. Any threat to the carefully constructed walls and denials and that system will blame and attack you, not the abuser. And the terror is so strong. I felt like there was no place deep enough, dark enough, and walled off enough to be safe.
Painting by author
Then my mother ended up in the hospital ICU with chest pains that turned out to be an anxiety attack. And I remember standing outside the ICU with him, looking him in the eye and asking him when he was going to change the way he lived his life. The violence toward my mother. Me. Wasn’t it time to stop?
Within a few months, he took a field representative position for his company. He and my mother moved to Texas and sold the house. Even though they would return to Connecticut in a few years, they would never again live in Torrington.
My therapist offered to provide them with referrals for therapists in Texas, so my father could get help. Again, Dad refused.
It begins
As for me, it was a relief to be free from his interference. With the physical distance of them being across the country, I no longer had to worry about him just “showing up somewhere” unexpectedly.
Now…I had work to do. A lot of it. With him out of the way, that was about to begin in earnest. I didn’t know it then, but things were about to get a lot worse before they would get better…
Soul Mosaic 
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