Danielle Delaney is a certified Rape Crisis Counselor also specializing in the areas of Adults Molested As Children (AMAC), Domestic Violence, Life Coaching, and GLBT community outreach. She is also a Court Advocate and works with both men and women over the age of seventeen by appointment for both counseling and advocacy. She can be contacted @ LEMIOW@aol.com or at (323)957-4669. Any and all contact with her regarding treatment is legally and ethically mandated to be entirely confidential.
MENTAL HEALTH... THE ENVIRONMENTAL ALTERNATIVE
By Danielle Delaney
I seem to have developed a problem with swearing. Just the four letter word variety. Well, to be honest, there are sometimes entire phrases of profanity spewing from my mouth at any given time. Because almost all of my friends have small children, I must learn to control my expletives! However, there is one four-letter word that seems to be whispered by so many, yet spoken by so few. That word is rape.
I speak about this because somebody absolutely must. The statistics are staggering. I am a survivor of violent rapes in the last few years, but I am also someone who has lived to tell. Because of that, I have become a certified Rape Crisis Counselor. Also because of my own personal experiences, I have discovered what heals and what harms the process of healing from trauma. My chosen treatment for my own patients, in addition to verbal counseling, is Nature.
As any survivor of trauma will tell you, visits to many doctors in various parts of the city are traumatic enough to make a person feel like there may not be any help available to them. Support groups are hard to find, and most are costly or are lacking funding, so they are in frightening locations. I could not believe that I was actually being further traumatized by interviews with the police, interviews with counselors to see if I "fit in'' with their support groups, as they want to put people with similar situations together, and then forced to settle on attending meetings at night in a sketchy area of downtown. These other patients I met were also sleepless, lost, flailing and feeling misunderstood. They too were suffering from non-combat Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder. They were clear in voicing the problems with crisis counseling...they, too, were being over-medicated, were unable to function on a day-to-day basis, and had trouble leaving home because of fear of other people and unknown situations. Also, those of us who did our homework found out that many psychiatric professionals have only a few weeks of training in the areas of trauma, drug-assisted rape, and rape in general. Because rape is unfortunately so prevalent, this is a nightmare situation for anyone trying to recover. Medication does not always help, and often can present a new set of issues for the survivor, including hair loss, night sweats, heart palpitations, confusion, mood swings, alarming weight gain, and other coping issues the medications are supposedly healing, yet may only be masking.
Being unable to walk into a store or to meet people's eyes or even to simply sleep are a huge part of Rape Trauma Syndrome. This is a very specialized field, and most psychiatrists are in a hurry to do the three M's... Medicate, Motivate and Move the patients out of their office, in my opinion. Fortunately, right before I started private courses to learn to work with Special Victims, I finally found a doctor who was near the beach. He was my twelfth specialist, as I had also suffered physical injuries from these attacks. This doctor was helpful, but I found that sitting on the beach after my sessions relaxed me from the added stimulation of driving to see him. I found that although leaving my home was difficult after the assaults, seeing a bird or petting a dog was remarkably soothing. I found that my love for swimming also soothed my soul, as well as helping to heal my injuries. I found that the elements of earth, air, and water were working far better than sitting in even the loveliest office. I learned that sound and sensation and stimulation were not my enemies, as long as I could try to block the ones that were negatively affecting my progress, and could capitalize on those that were pleasurable. Any patient suffering from childhood molestation, trauma as an adult, rape, domestic violence, or any trauma at all usually has some general difficulty in distinguishing which sensations are creating which emotions within themselves. Friends do not understand why the victim goes from being "fine" to having episodes where they cannot function, and become abandoning, isolating the victim further. The victim often experiences the perpetuation of the many rape myths...is it what she wore? Was she drunk? Were any drugs of any kind in her system? Where were her friends? Is it because she is so sexually attractive? These are called Rape Myths for a reason. Rape is a crime of violence. The elderly, infants, and the homeless are often victims who are targeted. No victim is ever to blame, regardless of their past, their occupation, their sexual orientation, their relationship to the perpetrator (partner or spouse rape is indeed still RAPE), their clothing choices, their promiscuity, or their looks. Ever. The perpetrator of the crime chose to commit the crime. This is the only person it is ever appropriate to blame. Rapists are not even classified as mentally ill. They are violent offenders. The fact that many people are further traumatized by remarks said to them by family or friends while in treatment causes relapse into their own self-injurious behaviors. Hello, alcoholism, drug abuse and poor choices! Survivors often try to self-medicate when they cannot seem to find any alternatives (Also, drug-assisted rape is on the rise - this is when the attacker uses a substance to paralyze or impair their prey. Ten thousand of these types of attacks occur in emergency rooms every year and they are very difficult to prosecute. Again, this is still rape, and this form of attack is on the rise).
I have always managed to keep a sense of humor throughout the most horrific of situations. Sometimes you truly have to laugh to keep from crying. I recall accompanying a friend to her divorce hearing shortly after I had been kidnapped and held in a car for two hours, assaulted and beaten repeatedly. Some kind soul in the hallway said, "What kind of an animal could hurt that face." The first thing that shot out of my mouth was, "Well,you should see the other guy." I had, indeed, scratched and clawed and fought for my life, and I just didn't know how else to respond to comments. I, like many victims, was embarrassed to be seen. I needed my sense of humor more than ever.This random person had given me a compliment to be sure, but of course it added to my internal Rape Myth that maybe the attackers had taken me because of what I look like. At that moment, I wondered how many other women blamed themselves and felt judged by the older counselors looking at them through glasses perched on the tips of their noses. I started thinking that maybe, just maybe, I could educate myself and others, and change some of that. Does being a model, or a dancer, or a Playmate feed into violent fantasies? Are we as women feeding the machine and adding to the problem? I started to read about these dichotomies, and to take classes in Women's studies that I had abandoned after college. The answer for me is, NO. Violence is violence. Being attractive or not is a non-issue where violence is concerned, and it is certainly high time that the general public recognizes that. Nobody is "asking" to be viciously violated. The perpetrator is the only problem, and is the only person to blame.
My friend that day at court hugged me, and we quite literally had to laugh, or we would have burst into tears. We didn't know yet how my face would heal, and at the time I was a model and actress and had been for many years. I was having trouble walking because I was thrown from the moving car after these men attacked me, and I had no idea that I was making my legs worse by pretending to be okay and hobbling around, business as usual. I suffer from traumatic brain injury, and was terrified that so many of my memories are lost forever. I also had no idea at the time that my physical injuries were the least of my worries...Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder is the injury that is invisible but LETHAL. Rape Trauma Syndrome does not help, and many people commit suicide because of these conditions. They are cyclical, and can be triggered anytime without warning by a taste, a sound, or a smell that the subconscious mind isolates and fixates upon. I cannot tell you the amount of times I personally was triggered by the sound of car door locks, and also how many times I wasn't. These are such hard medical conditions to control, because like other diseases, they are unpredictable. However, in using my environment as my ally rather than my nemesis, I have studied trauma and found ways to ask the Earth, our beautiful planet, to help me to help myself. In doing so, I have created treatments that help others. In helping others and furthering my education, I have also helped myself. To hold the hand of a victim during a forensic exam and to help has helped to heal me. Hours later, weeks later, months later, helping others continues to heal me.
Beautiful surroundings are a luxury to many, but in Southern California they are not at all hard to find. I encourage my patients to meet with me in outdoor settings, rain or shine. It is fascinating to see the way that the smell of the rain, the crashing of the ocean, the contrast of the trees against the sky, music, and sunlight affect the traumatized soul. We must all do everything we can to save the Earth, because its intention is to save us from ourselves. The phrase "Mother Earth" is in existence because the planet truly does try to nurture and protect us.Yes, there are evil beasts and sociopaths that walk among us, undetected by most, and perhaps more easily detected by those of us who have encountered the worst Darkness firsthand. We are in a club we never wanted to join, we cannot unsee what we have seen. But there is also another element, the Light. And every day, with absolute certainty in an uncertain world, the Sun will always rise.
