While I’m waiting for the wedding to be here, going to counseling, and waiting on the lease on my apartment to be up, I am still struggling with these nightmares, daymares (they are more like hallucinations at this point), and depression. I also found out in after a couple months of counseling that I had repressed memories of being raped as a child. Everything was pretty foggy for a while, but I remembered feeling utterly scared, and I remembered purple walls. That was the color of my bedroom for a while growing up. I thought I was around seven when it happened, but I wasn’t sure.
I continued living in the apartments with Elisabeth for the next couple months; she remained a great friend throughout the entire time. There were also multiple times in high emotion settings that my legs would feel weak and then stop moving entirely. January rolls around, and I move back in with my parents from January to June. These were a rough five months. I wanted to have a more distant relationship with my parents while I figured out boundaries, while my mom wanted all the time with her daughter that she could get before I got married. She would barge in my room to come check on me when I didn’t want her to. On top of that, I was in my last semester of nursing school, and I was also trying to plan a wedding. My mom wanted to basically plan the wedding for me, thinking that would take pressure off of me. But I wanted to make the decisions about my wedding plans and have control over something in my life.
My mom and I fought over some of the wedding details, but in the end it was a great wedding. John and I got married just a few weeks after I graduated college with a BSN; my life looked great on the outside. But even on our honeymoon, I was terrified. The idea of sex scared me. I mean taking your clothes off in front of someone else?!? That was terrifying, and the whole sex part from what I remembered as a child was filled with fear, pain, and no one taking my feelings into consideration. Then there was what I was taught as well. Basically, my parents taught me that sex was bad and evil unless it was within marriage. But, for some reason, my brain only caught that sex was bad and evil. This caused even more shame around sex.
When John and I got married, we went to Colorado for our honeymoon. I remember enjoying all of the planned activities we did, but having sex was painful and scary. I was not mentally ready for sex, but I didn’t want to tell John no, as I knew he had been waiting for this (we decided to wait until marriage for sex). As the first weeks of our marriage went on, I became more vocal about my wants and needs. Thankfully, I was met with a very understanding spouse. However, while John was understanding, he was no therapist. We didn’t know what to do, except communicate extremely well and take things slow. This did help some, but sex still remained a scary thing for me for quite some time.
Early on in our marriage, my legs would become paralyzed, sometimes for hours. At one point, I was home alone in a wheelchair while John was at work. I grabbed a pistol I knew we had and just held it, debating, for probably 30 minutes. Again, God intervened here. I very well could have pulled the pistol out of the holster and done something with it. But my arms felt weak, and I had the thought that I couldn’t do that to John. That was definitely God intervening.
I finally contacted John, who came home in an instant and brought me to my counselor’s office. She recommended I go to a nearby mental hospital, and I was there for five days. During this time, I was given a series of psychiatric tests, and placed on escitalopram.
When I got out of the mental hospital, my counselor (Geraldine) recommended that I see one of her friends who could keep up with my medication. So I started seeing a psychiatric nurse practitioner, just a few months after John and I got married.
The suicidal thoughts were due to wanting to escape. I didn’t know how to escape the shame, the hallucinations, the depression, the memories of being raped. I also wanted to escape feeling like I wasn’t a good wife, or really good enough as a person overall.
I was also still masturbating, which in my opinion could be totally fine if it were to my husband, but it was not for the first couple months as we were figuring out sex. Sex was still painful for a while, and masturbation wasn’t. I think it would have been okay to do had I been thinking about John while doing it. But I wasn’t. I wasn’t really thinking about anyone in particular, although sometimes a stranger or shadowy figure would pop into my head. But in my opinion, because I wasn’t thinking about John (and sometimes a stranger or shadowy figure), this made it wrong.
As we continued to figure out sex, though, my thoughts became more and more about John. By about month 3 or 4 of being married, I had completely stopped masturbating in a sinful way. Now, it was to John and only John. This was a major thing for me, because I had struggled with it for so long and felt so much shame around it. I thought I would never be able to stop doing what was wrong, and I thought I would feel this immense shame forever. It lifted this massive weight off of me to be able to stop doing the things that I didn’t want to do.
That breakthrough happened in the fall of 2021. In the summer of 2021, after we got married, I took my test to officially have my RN license. I was very stressed about it, but I passed by God’s grace the first time! I had studied some, but I didn’t have as much time as I wanted to due to planning a wedding and moving and working through all my stuff.
My legs continued to sometimes be paralyzed, and one time in September of 2021, they became paralyzed for several days. But more on that in the next post.
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