kit rempala Archives | The ManifestStation

When “Yes” Means “No”: On Trauma

May 15, 2017

CW: This essay discusses sexual abuse and trauma . For survivor support, contact RAINN for confidential online and phone support, https://www.rainn.org/get-help.

By Kit Rempala

One of the most beautiful and terrifying things about trauma is its relativity. It changes from person to person. My therapist says trauma is a defense mechanism – it shields us from the exiled emotions which well up to the surface every time our minds touch upon the permanent bruise which houses memory of the initiator. She says defense mechanisms are not our weakness; they are powerful tools that indicate just how strong we are in the face of adversity. She says although the initiators and their actions are not a part of us, the defense mechanisms – the traumas – are a part of us. And no part of us is bad, or defines us.

But what do we do when cases of trauma are not so clear-cut?

I should have known. I should have listened to my friends. I should have listened to my instincts. I believe in the core, primal, animalistic intelligence preserved in the human condition – the one that, when it prompts us to “Run!” is usually correct. I’m a smart woman. I am college-educated, I come from a well-adjusted upbringing in an upper-middle-class home, and I very rarely question my own judgments. And then there are other times…

I met “D” when I was nineteen. I had scarcely dated, and so I jumped at the opportunity for another’s attention, to feel desirable and wanted. He seemed like a nice enough guy: polite and witty. But even on our first date my neighbor’s dog growled at him as we walked to his car. I shrank away from his hulking form in the passenger’s seat, and again during the movie, and again on the way home. When I kissed him goodnight my apprehension was eclipsed by his powerfulness, the way he pulled me so tightly to him and pressed his lips so hard against mine. It made me feel small in a way I never had being 5’11” tall. My body shook, but not with the butterflies from a new connection. Continue Reading…

Eating Disorders/Healing, Guest Posts, healing

Sugar Spots: On Being Bulimic.

January 15, 2015

Jen Pastiloff is the founder of The Manifest-Station. Join her in Tuscany for her annual Manifestation Retreat. Click the Tuscan hills above. No yoga experience required. Only requirement: Just be a human being.

Jen Pastiloff is the founder of The Manifest-Station. Join her in Tuscany for her second Manifestation Retreat this year. Click the Tuscan hills above. No yoga experience required. Only requirement: Just be a human being. Sep 26-Oct 3, 2015

By Kit Rempala.

“So, this is rock bottom,” I find myself thinking again. “How does it feel?” Just seconds before I had been bounding up the stairs into the darkness, calling to my family that I’d be back in a few minutes, smiling. Always smiling. But once that light clicks on, that door slides closed, the lock turns over with that slow, grinding sound that reminds me of stiff, cracking joints – the world goes silent. On the other side of that door the rest of the house vanishes, as if I’ve been scooped up and deposited into the back pocket of the world. My entire universe is reduced to a bathroom. And once that lock turns over, I’ve got nothing left.

To me, rock bottom looks an awful lot like the bottom of a toilet bowl. With one hand around my skinny ankle and a toothbrush down my throat, I deposit the last shreds of my dignity into the water below. I stand to make it easier, though I tell myself it’s because I refuse to kneel before this disease. It’s a sad way of reassuring myself that there’s still some fight left in me.

The lining of my stomach blisters with the presence of food. The slightest crumb is too heavy for it to bear. It rejects each meal like a cancer, stretching bigger and bigger as though it would rather rip than absorb the toxin I’ve planted at its core. Nerve endings are peppered with the gunfire of pain. My abdomen swells like the belly of a pregnant woman, preceding me wherever I go. A dull ache spreads from my midsection to my mind, begging me to make it stop.

I never believed in sin before anorexia and bulimia. And yet now I feel the burden of sin inside me, not as something I carry but as something I am, a piece within me, an inseparable devil and parasite. It whispers to me and I believe what it says. Food angers it; I writhe in its fury – and I find myself craving a salvation that has nothing to do with God. I crave relief from the heaviness in my guts as much as anyone else craves the food itself.

Beating Fear with a Stick, Eating Disorders/Healing, Guest Posts, Vulnerability

About Knowing What I Don’t Remember.

August 26, 2014

By Kit Rempala

I’ve never been “normal” – if that word means anything at all. I see and speak to dead people. On occasion I read people’s minds and have prophetic dreams. Souls and emotions are as tactile to me as the fur on my cat’s back. I hear messages in nature, be they from water or fire or wind or earth or the moon in the sky or the rustling of leaves. I feel everything.

So, to sum things up: I’m pretty darned good at believing in things I don’t see, things I’ve never seen, and things that can’t be seen. Sometimes, I worry I’m too good at believing.

I never believed I’d been sexually abused until my therapist asked me. I thought I’d answer “no” and the session would move on. But instead she asked me another question, one I’d never expected: “Are you sure?”

What did that mean, am I “sure?” How could I not be? How could I not know? How could anyone not know?