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Editor’s note: The following is part of a series called Untold Stories of Resilience: Stories of recovery from sexual assault and eating disorders, a photojournalism project by Deryne Keretic.
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Q: Tell me about the first time you were aware of your body’s shape, size, or appearance.
Kelly: I would say my body image stuff goes back to first or second grade.
Q: What about more recently (maybe within the last year). When was the last time you remember being aware of your body’s shape, size, composition?
Kelly: Every day. In the past year, I became a yoga teacher and yoga really changed my view. It put a lot of space in between me and identifying as my body. I still have times where I definitely struggle with it but I’m much more aware that when I’m struggling with my body, it’s not really about my body. Yoga gave me the space to understand that more than I ever had before.
Q: When you say you think about it every day, what is it that you mostly think about?
Kelly: I definitely do a lot of mirror checking. I try to police my thoughts but I’ll think: “Oh, I don’t like that or I don’t like that” and I try to fight it. My intellectual mind very much doesn’t buy into the narrative, but there are still a lot of residual subconscious beliefs tied to: “You will not be worthy of love or affection unless you look this certain way”.
Q: When you say you don’t like something, is that your own opinion or do you think that’s coming from somewhere else?
Kelly: I think it’s a combination of everything. In my head I can’t think of an ideal image that would make me happy and that’s how I know it’s a problem. I know that if I got all the things that I pick at now fixed, I still wouldn’t like it. I think that that was a really helpful realization. Not that I can afford plastic surgery but even if I could, that wouldn’t be the solution.
Q: Tell me about a time you were proud of your body.
Kelly: I don’t know.
Q: How do you feel when you’re doing yoga?
Kelly: When I’m doing yoga I feel a weird mixture of detached but really connected. My body is a vehicle for what I’m doing and I can appreciate what’s happening and notice how it feels and notice how different things I’m doing change the sensation but it’s not like: “What do I look like right now?” That’s why I really hate yoga studios with mirrors. Part of it is just exploring that sensation and having a safe place to explore the sensation. In the context of sexual violence, I’m pretty hyper-vigilant so I’m always aware of how people around me (in particular men), might be perceiving me moving in space. I’m pretty on edge about that because as a woman, even if you didn’t experience overt physical violence, you still live in a violent society.
Q: Was there never a moment you were proud of your body?
Kelly: I struggle with finding a balance of healthy appreciation and detachment for the aesthetic component of my body, because I have the tendency to get very obsessive. I’ve done three fire walks and that was pretty cool – that my body could literally walk on fire and not get burned. That was really awesome.
Q: How has your relationship with your body been impacted by surviving your trauma?
Kelly: It strips ownership away from your body. I think being a woman in the world strips ownership away from your body just because of our world. I love sex-positive feminism but also can’t see anywhere in my life where I would really feel that I had the power to fully embody that. That was one of the ways I coped with my trauma – by being more sexual and trying to be in control of it. I know there’s a lot of people who can’t do anything sexual after trauma. I had repeated trauma over time and I think I became obsessed with gaining that power and control back. Now that I know more about sexual assault there are a lot of incidents I would categorize as assault, but having that sexual trauma at a young age made me internalize the idea that: “This is what I offer and I can’t say no and if I give someone the idea that I might say yes, then I owe it to them to do it even if I don’t want to.” So that completely stripped ownership over my body away from me.
Q: What do you wish the public knew about sexual violence and eating disorders?
Kelly: How common the two are together. I experienced sexual abuse as a kid and a conservative estimate is that 30% of people with bulimia experienced childhood sexual abuse. I was EDNOS; I had anorexia and bulimia (although they recategorized everything so it’s different now), but when I was in treatment that’s what I was called. The feeling of being dirty inside permanently was really related to my bulimia behaviors and wanting to get out whatever it was inside me that was bad. I think it played a really big role in my bulimia. I do not say I’m recovered. I’m very honest that I still struggle with it. Not to the degree I used to, but I still struggle with my body every day. I have not been able to completely shake off the bulimia. It’s so intertwined with the sexual trauma. It’s really frustrating that when a lot of people talk about treatment they don’t mention the underlying trauma. If you don’t heal that, how are you going to heal what you’re using to cope with it? You’re just stripping the coping mechanism. A lot of times people will just go to something else because you’ve taken the coping skill away from them (even if it’s not a healthy coping skill), and you don’t give them something to replace it with because you didn’t address the thing that was causing it. I was also diagnosed with bipolar disorder, but I would say that my mood and eating problems came before my sexual trauma but they were absolutely exacerbated by it. How I showed up in the world made men feel a lot more comfortable doing the things they did to me. I had really really low self esteem and struggled a long time with believing that the things that were done to me were what I deserved. I would not stand up for myself in those situations. It’s not a victim-blaming thing, but I was in really bad shape. I was in a lot of scenarios where people took advantage of me being in really bad shape emotionally. It’s weird because it’s almost like a different part of myself.
Q: Is there anything else you want to share?
Kelly: The big thing I want more people to understand is this idea of re-victimization. I struggle with sharing my story because it’s messy and sounds fake in my head. Separate from all my mental health stuff, I experienced sexual trauma in middle school and then was raped multiple times in high school and assaulted multiple times in college. The stories I’ve heard are often that somebody had one assault and any assault is so terrifying, but I don’t really hear about repeated trauma. It sounds like that’s ridiculous – how do you keep finding yourself in scenarios like that? But it’s actually really common.
Q: It’s very common and people don’t understand how hard it is to break a pattern.
Kelly: I’ve received a lot of victim-blaming because I was very drunk every time I was assaulted and people say: “Well maybe don’t drink” – because you’re not beating yourself up enough already, like: “Please give me more, I need more pain, thank you very much!” It’s just horrifying to me how common this stuff is. I don’t understand how most of the women I know have experienced sexual assault. One of the things that’s hard about surviving is that rape (people don’t even want to say rape!) is so horrific, people don’t want to believe it happens. So when you share this horrifyingly painful thing somebody did to you where they stripped you completely of power and agency over your body and you didn’t “fight back” or do anything but froze; people don’t want to have to sit with that so they give it back to you and they won’t look at it. It’s so shameful but I’m not ashamed of my eating disorder. I’m not ashamed of the things I’ve been diagnosed with. I’m ashamed of the things that people did to me and that doesn’t make any sense. I even find myself saying today: why didn’t I fight? But the two times in high school I was raped I was literally so incapacitated that I had to be carried. I had an alcohol problem – absolutely. It doesn’t make it OK for anyone to do what they did to me, but I couldn’t move. I can’t speak for anyone else but I’m so mean to myself thinking: “You could’ve fought back”, but also; I really couldn’t stand. I kept going back to a scenario where that stuff was happening because sex was how I understood love. When I’m being mean to myself, I find an eleven-year-old and say: “Can that person consent?” No. So when I think about me not “fighting back” I think about somebody who is so incapacitated and the horror that comes with thinking that somebody would hurt that person. For some reason when it’s yourself, it’s different. The big thing I’m dealing with now is that part of the eating disorder helped me feel like I had control. When somebody strips your body of power you need some kind of control. Blaming myself was a way to keep control and to not admit that I was in scenarios where I was powerless and somebody was hurting me and I couldn’t do anything about it, because that’s actually more painful than me making a mistake.
Q: Did you start therapy after the first assault?
Kelly: I was in therapy before and it’s definitely helped me process a lot of stuff but I’m still working on it in therapy now. I think that yoga really really really made an immeasurable difference. I work in the mental health field and I have a lot of frustrations with psych and therapists, but one of the frustrations of therapy is that it ignores your body. When your trauma is violence towards your body, to not include that in your recovery doesn’t make any sense. When I did my yoga teacher training, I started to have night terrors and would be sobbing in the class. We would do these deep meditation practices where I would literally just have to drive around in my car afterwards and scream because so much anger came up. I realized: “Holy shit, I was carrying all of that stuff around and it gets stuck in your body”. It’s hard to get to that place where it’s safe to let it out. Also, boxing helps so much because it’s like I’m looking at something and I’m going to fight back. Not all therapy disregards the body and not necessarily the research does but in practice it’s different.
Q: How are you working in mental health in your professional life?
Kelly: I am not explicitly in anything related to sexual trauma, but I make sure that I’m always pushing the idea that a lot of people who are struggling are just people who are really trying and it’s not their fault. None of it is their fault anyway, but trauma plays such a big part in people’s struggles. One of the things that makes it worse is not having people to support them through that trauma or not having ways of understanding what things mean or somebody they can talk to about it. It took me a long time after I was raped. I still struggle with that word – this event I’m thinking about happened about eight years ago and it’s still hard to say. Other survivors know about all of these things but not having people to talk to is difficult. Although I found it frustrating – I went to support groups and I didn’t like it. I think there’s a balance between talking about the details of what happened and learning how to process what happened. I couldn’t sit in what happened that much. You have to find your threshold of what you consider enough and it’s hard.
Q: What would you like to communicate to someone who might be experiencing something similar? Do you have any advice?
Kelly: The whole “life will get better” thing obviously. I would like to say: I’m sorry this is really really hard. I think it was really helpful for me to talk to other survivors and there are a lot of spaces online and spaces on college campuses where you can do that now. There are a lot of advocacy groups so if you don’t have one near you, there are people out there who dedicate their lives to this work. It’s just really hard and I think that sometimes you need to be validated in that what you’re experiencing is really hard. One of my big pet peeves is when someone tells me: “You’re not a victim, you’re a survivor” – fuck you, I’m a victim. People committed violent crimes against my body, I am a victim. I don’t live in that space and I know that you’re trying to say: “You don’t have a victim mindset”, but I was a victim and you don’t get to take that from me. Just because it makes you uncomfortable that someone victimized me doesn’t mean it didn’t happen. I decide when I’m the victim and I decide when I’m a survivor.
Q: It makes people really uncomfortable, but here we are laughing during this interview.
Kelly: People don’t understand that these are our lives. Sometimes one of the hardest things is that I just have to say to myself: “None of this can un-happen”. You have to figure out a way to live with it and it’s so horrible that survivors are thrust into that world but it’s the horrible truth – I have to laugh because if I can’t find a way to laugh, I’m really fucked.
Q: I want people to discuss it so that others don’t feel alone and others can learn. We can see that this is a huge problem and it can happen to anyone. It’s not really heavy at all, it’s factual and a necessary discussion.
Kelly: I get it but I can’t relate to that anymore. I can’t relate to that feeling of heaviness because I know so many people and I’ve heard so many stories that I can just sit with it. I can give it space and I don’t feel the need to shut other people down because their stuff is painful. I really love this concept of post-traumatic growth and the hope that we can heal. I care so deeply about helping other people because I’ve been hurt so bad and that drives me to go above and beyond probably than what I would’ve done had I not had those experiences.
Q: Having someone there to empathize must make a big difference for the survivors you’re talking to and I’m sure they appreciate speaking with you.
Kelly: When I first started speaking I realized that everybody really loses their shit when I start talking about this stuff. I can talk about being suicidal and all these other things and people say: “Oh, OK”. When I talk about being raped, everyone’s like: “Woah, are you OK?” and they freak out. Why can’t I talk about that? I can talk about trying to kill myself but I can’t talk about what someone else did to me? That doesn’t make any sense. That’s the case in my experience at least, I don’t know about other people. It’s just bizarre. People don’t want to believe that this stuff happens. For me personally, having lived through the things I’ve lived through, it gives me a lot of perspective on the day-to-day stuff. There are very few things someone can do to me now that I won’t be able to figure out how to handle, because I had to figure out how to handle a lot on my own and how to live with a lot of awful stuff.
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This post was originally published on the author’s Tumblr “Untold Stories of Resilience” and is republished here with her permission.
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You may also like Deryne Keretic’s series “i aM A femiNist” about male feminists, here on GMP.
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Photo credit: Deryne Keretic