My Reality Check Bounced! - Jason Ryan Dorsey [47]
When he was finished with his attack, he left her among the trees, alone and scared. She managed to find her torn clothes and get herself home. Her mom frantically called 911.
At the hospital the emergency room, staff took Lindsay through the standard rape protocol. As much as they helped clean her up, she still felt dirty. She felt violated. She felt empty. Most of all, she felt fear. She didn’t want it to happen again, to her or anyone else.
A fighter at heart, Lindsay did not take long to recover physically. Then decided that nightmare in the park was not going to take her spirit. To prove it, she signed up for a marathon. Then she began regularly running with friends through the same park where her rape occurred. As long as she stayed busy, she could occasionally forget the pain.
However, the pain never went away for her boyfriend. It began to surface in their relationship. He became distant, reserved, and seemed to blame himself. Lindsay did not want to lose him. She thought opening up about the rape might rekindle their closeness. So she wrote him a letter detailing what happened that terrible afternoon in the park.
Sitting in her car as her boyfriend read the graphic letter, Lindsay was struck with a powerful realization—she herself was not healing. She was not moving forward. She was not getting better. The rapist was not in the car with her, yet he was still influencing her future.
The next day Lindsay and her boyfriend broke up. So she packed all her belongings and moved back home. She could not sleep that first night in her fluffy old bed. She could not even relax. She kept thinking how she had done nothing wrong, yet she felt so powerless and weak. She needed some sort of a guarantee that the painful violation would not happen again, but no such guarantee existed.
Lindsay and her family knew she couldn’t go on this way. She had to recover the fragile sense of control that had been stripped from her. She started with the Internet.
Lindsay began to spend hours online reading about other women in her situation. Their stories helped her see that she was not alone. In fact, it’s estimated that one in three women will be sexually assaulted during their lifetime. Reading first-person accounts of women living through this trauma gave Lindsay her first glimmer of hope: She too could survive.
FROM VICTIM TO SURVIVOR
Feeling secure became Lindsay’s top priority. The security she needed arrived in the form of a cuddly but fierce German shepherd. Soon the two were inseparable. It was Lindsay’s first baby step toward control, the first whisper of her moving on. It would slowly get easier.
Trauma in your past reenters your life in different ways. For Lindsay, she could not handle someone walking up behind her or physical contact. She knew this was unhealthy, so she began getting massages to regain comfort with human touch. This helped her learn trust again, hold someone’s hand, sit comfortably at a crowded table.
After one semester at home with family and friends, Lindsay rebuilt the foundation of trust and control she needed. She saw it was okay to be scared and angry. She saw it was okay to cry at night. She was human.
Lindsay returned to college. By a stroke of incredible luck, the police apprehended the man they believed had assaulted Lindsay and several other young women. The district attorney called to tell Lindsay about the arrest. He told her the case was strong but not airtight. They needed a victim’s testimony. All the other victims refused. Would Lindsay be willing to face her attacker?
On the witness stand, Lindsay’s testimony was emotional, explicit, and powerful. The jury convicted him on all counts. The rapist was sentenced to life in prison without parole.
After sentencing, Lindsay learned she had the choice to speak to her rapist in open court before he went to prison. This is called a Victim Impact Statement. It’s designed to help victims vent their emotions so they can begin to heal and move on from their painful experience. Lindsay took the stand once more. She looked her rapist square in