I intended this month to write about art therapy, through my own experience uncovering and healing from childhood trauma, and I am. But this blog was delayed because, on January 28, 2023, I was drugged, assaulted, and sexually assaulted by someone I invited to my hotel room in Palm Springs, CA.
So I write now with a fresh reminder that trauma reverberates over a lifetime. Survivors often put themselves in danger, in a subconscious effort to rewrite old stories. I believe addictions to unhealthy substances and behaviors are an attempt to regulate a central nervous system profoundly destabilized in early life, as mine was. And I write with fresh humility, recognizing that in a moment of loneliness, I am still vulnerable to those.
I am grateful to be alive.
Recognizing Trauma through Art
When I was five years old, I was sexually assaulted, repeatedly, by a teenage boy on our farm. For decades I held this secret and hid the details from my own awareness. I recalled only fragmented memories of the force he used and my efforts to escape. In my memory, it “wasn’t that bad.” I minimized it as most survivors do.
What couldn’t be hidden was the influence this and other childhood experiences had on my self-worth and ability to value and protect myself. I felt responsible; why couldn’t I fight him off? Why was I so weak? For decades I was unable to identify my own needs or protect myself from abusers in a variety of settings, professional and personal. I struggled to believe anyone would love me. And I was an only child way too bright, and gay, which especially at that time (but even now) made it very difficult to understand and communicate my emotional and sexual needs and feel they were valid.
One staple of therapy is inner child work: looking at the damaged, younger emotional self for whom time and distance are meaningless. To tap into that self, one writes or draws with the non-dominant hand.
This is what I drew when I first did this exercise in 2015, using only my left hand.
Inner Child
The stick figures are children, playing on a grassy, sunny hill, so happy, living their lives.
I am represented by the eyes, above, crying as I look onto something I will never have: the joy of play and friendship, intimacy, and the ability to live life as other children seem able to.
I was profoundly lonely as a child. As an adult, the loneliness is still overwhelming at times.
As I drew this little piece I started crying, and the reality of those old horrors became present again.
Most vivid was the first assault and my meaningless threat to tell my father to get my attacker to stop.
I remember the look on my father’s face when I came to him on the farm that late afternoon. He was often angry, and he was that day, over something that had gone wrong with the milking. I knew not to do or say anything to make him angrier. I walked away. My mother, of course, had to be protected, as hers was a perfect world. So I sat with this secret for decades.
The Crackup, 11×14” marker on paper, January 2023
I have worked to identify and integrate these and other fragmented trauma memories in a way that makes my life manageable. I have also worked to acknowledge and integrate my shadow side, as Jung put it, the unpleasant things I don’t want to admit about myself. Often that is a good quality that can have a negative expression. For example, care and concern for others can turn into an effort to control others.
Integration Two
In 2019 I did a series of pieces focused on integration, which for me means to heal and have a unified sense of self with clear acknowledgment and acceptance of all the parts of me.
Art as Therapy
Most of my work now is collage. But in Palm Springs, before the attack, I drew two little pieces with markers on paper.
I don’t know what these mean exactly, but they helped move troubling emotions through me and out into something tangible and external.
Before my trip I ended the first relationship I had attempted in recovery, after five months, when it became transactional. I didn’t want to buy love or feel used.
Then a short California rebound experience, for which I extended my stay a week, ended with him ghosting me. I was unexpectedly alone several more days in Palm Springs. And I was hurting.
I wish I had drawn more, before the attack.
Trauma and Attachment Injury
People think of trauma as an event, but more often, it is something ongoing. And just as damaging in early child development are attachment injuries, breakdowns in the relationship between the child and the primary caregiver.
Pastel Fountain, 11×14” marker on paper, January 2023
Through art, I have examined those issues as well: emotional abandonment, emotional incest, emotional abuse, transactional love, and perfectionism. There was also physical abuse: I can still see my father’s flushed, angry face as he hit me with his belt, repeatedly, while I cowered in the corner of my little bedroom. Years later, my mother told me she protected me from him doing it again and I thanked her for that.
Even before l could speak, I sensed my mother did not have emotional support from my father, who was a wounded veteran also incapable of giving it to me, although I always knew he loved me. I was drawn to meet their needs, so I would earn their approval and love, the beginning of a long pattern of believing I had to provide something to others in order for them to love me. My presence, alone, wasn’t enough. I had to provide something else, do something else, to earn love.
When a child becomes the main emotional support for a parent, it becomes very difficult for the child to separate their own identity and form healthy intimate relationships as an adult. Recognition is just the first step in healing from this emotional incest. I’m many steps down that road now, but as they say, it’s a process.
Repetition Compulsion
My life is very different today than at any point previously. My relationships with friends, my professional relationships, and my nascent romantic explorations are healthier because of the healing work I have done and my strengthening ability to remain aware, in real-time, when I feel the tug of old, unhealthy patterns. But the vulnerability remains.
When I decided to look online the night of January 28, on a website where men meet men for sexual hookups, I didn’t intend to actually meet anyone. I was “just looking.” But when someone almost immediately messaged me, I was gone. Someone wants me? Sure, come over. There was almost no thought.
Assault
I consider this a relapse because I knew the person coming over was using drugs and that I might as well, and because I voluntarily participated for a few minutes of consensual activity.
Then he unexpectedly slipped a large amount of methamphetamines into my rectum and I went in and out of consciousness over the next several hours as he raped, beat, burned, bit, and kicked me. I asked him repeatedly to stop and repeatedly to leave. He continued to add drugs and assault me sexually and physically. I was very weak and both physically and emotionally unable to defend myself. When the attacker did finally leave I called for the police and EMTs. My heart was beating in the 170s. I was hospitalized, and the injuries were extensive, with third-degree burns on my right hip and buttocks and numerous lacerations and torn skin on my head, arms, torso, legs, feet, armpits, and face.
The attacker faces charges for assault, sexual assault, and elder abuse.
Aftermath and Moving Forward
I feel good now and my wounds are healing, the burns most slowly. Those will take several months and leave permanent marks.
From the hospital, I contacted my aviation medical examiner and grounded myself. I’ll follow the FAA’s direction, and will have an extensive cardiovascular workup. Early signs are good that I will be able to fly again, and that there was no permanent cardiovascular damage.
I am seeking trauma therapy and any other treatment the FAA may determine necessary in the aftermath of this experience. I do expect to be back in the air again in a few months.
This attack has stirred up the whole trauma train, going back to the original childhood assaults. Rather than just sit in an ongoing series of aftershocks, I want to seize the opportunity, now that things are cracked open, to resolve as much as I can.
This is a physical thing, not a talk therapy thing. Trauma is held in the body. I understand intellectually what has happened, from early life on. Now is the time to heal it, and move it out of me, as much as it can be. Art and music will be part of that healing.
So much in this assault was a repetition of the role I played as a child. My subservience; my fear; my inability to physically attack him back and get him out of my room; my temptation to blame myself and feel this was what I deserved; my humiliation and destruction of my self-worth.
I’ve talked with other male rape victims over the past few days. There are a lot of us, and not many resources. All have experienced the powerful emotions I have, and they warned the feelings will continue and at times be overwhelming.
I am playing the piano, a lot. Those of you on Facebook can listen to my very simple recent version of Amazing Grace. You can also see my public posts about the attack, and aftermath, complete with pictures which may be disturbing.
I wanted to let others know about this person, and through my Facebook posts, two other victims have come forward. I hope my attacker doesn’t hurt or kill anyone else. That’s my first priority now, beyond my own healing.
Closing Narrative; What it’s Like Now
“I’m so sorry,” she said when she realized who I was. Then, lowering her voice and speaking hesitantly, she added, “It happened to me too. I’m so sorry.”
I was checking out of my hotel. When I had gone back after the assault, the staff had changed my room, giving me a quiet third-floor corner in the back building. My old room was still in place as it had been the last I saw it, but missing the bloody sheets, some clothes, and other evidence collected by the police.
“I’m sorry that it happened to you, too,” I said. She was the second female hotel staff member who had told me that they, too, had been raped.
“Did you do any counseling yet?” she asked. “California is really good, they will provide counseling for a year I think.”
“Just the initial visit in the hospital, as the forensic nurse documented the injuries,” I said. “But I’ll be doing trauma therapy soon I think, back home in Florida. A lot of old stuff is very present right now.”
“It’s not your fault,” she said. “Please believe that. At first, I blamed myself, thinking, ‘if only I hadn’t been drinking or hadn’t gone out that night,’ but that’s not right. Nothing you did meant you should have been attacked.”
“I know that, in my head,” I said. “But…”
“It took a long time,” she said. “You didn’t do anything wrong. Just keep telling yourself that. This shouldn’t have happened to you. You didn’t deserve it.”
Most people, like this stranger sharing with me some of the most intimate and horrible moments of her life, have been extraordinarily kind the past few days. The police, the medical staff, numerous friends, and people I never knew before who heard what had happened… so very kind.
A few were not, and here again, I learned I was not unique in having some of the people closest to me turn their backs.
“My husband blamed me,” the other young clerk had told me the morning after I got out of the hospital. I was spending a lot of time in the lobby, not wanting to be alone; later, a local friend picked me up and let me spend the rest of the day with him.
“I didn’t tell him at first, I didn’t know what to say, and when I did, he just got angry. It was all about him. He didn’t even try to understand.”
“That must have been hard,” I said. “I think I understand a little, not why he did that, but how that must feel to you.”
“It’s for the best,” she told me. “I divorced him. I didn’t want my daughter to grow up with a father like that. I saw who he was, and I left.”
This experience has given me a deep and personal understanding of what women have gone through, forever.
“She shouldn’t have worn that revealing dress,” or “She shouldn’t have gotten drunk or taken drugs or gone to that party, or…”
The list is endless. People can find many ways to blame the victim and distance themselves from unpleasant things.
The fact is, humans are fallible. We make mistakes. That doesn’t mean we should be raped and beaten and bitten and burned.
“I just tell people who ask that every time we think he’s ok, he’s not,” said someone I have known since the 1990s, who, with his partner, had hosted their usual group, which included me when I was in Palm Springs, for dinner and cards the night of the assault. He made clear I was no longer welcome in the group and that he would not see me before I left town. He had not reached out to see how I was, I had called him.
People have their limits on what they can manage, and that’s ok too. I respect their boundaries.
Not all agree.
“Anyone who would focus on what you did instead of what was done to you is no friend,” said my aviation medical examiner after I related the experience to him. “Let him go and don’t look back.”
But these are losses, the greater one not mine perhaps, but I grieve the friendship of so many years.
This was a life-changing experience. I’ve had a number of them through the years, good and bad. Running (and ultimately losing) a race for Congress. Working at a very high level in the Senate, the Florida Governor’s Office, and the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency.
Moving abroad and learning a foreign language.
Giving the order that ended my father’s life and enduring my mother accusing me of killing him, which in a way I did.
Being raped before by people I thought I could trust, although this was the first time it was accompanied by physical assault.
Being sexually assaulted when I was five, is part of the original trauma that still reverberates through me today, that now feels like it happened this morning.
I don’t know all the ways this experience will change my life. But I do know the compassion I’ve experienced far outweighs the pain of rejection by those unable or unwilling to understand.
Everyone who responded to my posts, or wished me healing, has given me so much more than was taken.
Often, people who have themselves struggled with substances and behaviors, who understand deeply how difficult it is sometimes just to live, have proved the kindest.
Those who have known loss understand. Those who have compassion for themselves, for their own frailties, are much more likely to be understanding and compassionate towards others. That is my own experience, too, as I now find compassion even for those who have none for me, and even for the tortured predator.
The humanity is there, not in the appearance that everything is ok, but in the recognition that often it is not.
“It gets better.” That’s what both strangers, both clerks at my motel, told me.
The night before I left, someone who heard me talk about my experience in a recovery meeting wanted to spend time with me. “You need someone to just hold you.”
It was a surprise, and as I felt his embrace, and returned it, there was a moment when it seemed everything I had always wanted might still be possible. That I could be vulnerable, and seen; and look at someone else as they were, with all the compassion and love that they needed.
I am grateful for that, as a last memory of my trip to Palm Springs.
There is a lot of work ahead, and I will take time now to retreat a bit, to tackle the original traumas of my childhood and the many echoes that have manifested over the decades of my life.
There is a lot of love in the world, and I still have a lot to give. It’s a beautiful life, still.
For more about art therapy, see:
For more information about trauma, the body, and trauma healing:
If you or someone you love has been a victim of sexual abuse:
If you are having suicidal thoughts, don’t stay in them, reach out here:
