Rumer,* on her first visit told me that she had a rape counselor, a rape support group, and she wanted a spiritual view. I extended her session as partway through she told me she’d never worked with anyone in the way I did and she wanted to return. I used a technique from Recovery of Your Inner Child by Lucia Cappachione, adapted to my creativity. What Rumer accomplished through drawing and role-playing with dialog on her picture was a release from her father’s derogatory comment she’d held for years as true. Her result was an immediate increase of self-esteem.
I noted the number of times a client repeated certain non-affirming words to which I offered different ones as a small beginning to change a large memory. For rape I had a long notecard with six ripe pears in a row. I showed that to Rumer, inviting her to add the rich look of the fruit to the images of self-damage that she carried (pear being a different spelling of the letters of rape).
With her other counselor and support group she could talk about the details of her experience: the emotions of anger, disgust, fear, powerlessness, and the thought of retribution. I spoke of a different direction—that of becoming a healer.
I worked with clients in a way that only drew from what I had experienced or was now experiencing. My life’s wonderful occurrences were collectively greater than the harder ones, but I’d learned that divorce, death, suicidal thoughts, psychiatric hospitalization, feelings of loneliness and hopelessness, and emotions of anger and frustration had been there to teach me. My clients briefly knew my empathy for them was personal as well as professional. At a point of necessity in my life I had turned to spiritual learning to view a better way to understand and accept what previously I had perceived as ruining my life; my counseling originated from that new foundation.
“Rumer, I had said, “I cannot know the experience of rape as you do, but I will offer you that it can, in time and if you choose, become your opportunity to help another in ways that I cannot.” I was providing the seed that she could use to take what had happened to her to build her own new base that would allow her to grow into one who could help others through self-forgiveness and forgiveness of others. Along with this would be a different worldly awareness through her other counseling and support.
Just once I had used the word rape in a personal way but the violence of the word suited my emotion. When my younger daughter left home, many of her art drawings were still there. Eventually I separated them into those to keep and those to let go. Stopping my car by an undeveloped roadside to get something in the trunk, I watched, horrified, as her drawings flew out over the field. Collecting them seemed impossible, so I continued toward where I intended to throw them away. Then I experienced an epiphany—a jolt of recognition that I’d raped my daughter’s art. Backtracking on the major highway, I picked up every piece of paper and at home ironed each. I’ve kept a few for twenty years, the rest (clean or ironed) I returned to her.
My realization is, “Over and over, situations offer us opportunities to face what we don’t like about our life and first change ourselves.”
*a name change for privacy