by Alisa Kaplan
Unfortunately, that dehumanization process doesn’t stop with the rape itself. It continues every time someone tells a rape victim not to report what happened to her, every time someone asks what she was wearing, every time she’s brutalized by defense attorneys and in the media. It’s not surprising that so many victims of rape don’t feel very human at all.
That’s why standing up at the rally was so important to me. You might not have agreed with everything I said, but hearing me speak, you knew that I was a person. You couldn’t dehumanize me or discredit me as nothing more than a dumb teenager who’d made a bad call. I stood up there with dignity and self-respect, able to articulate exactly what had happened to me and everything I’d had to do to find my way to wholeness.
I stood up and spoke for me and for all the women and girls who aren’t there yet, those who have accepted their attackers’ understanding of them as less than human and have a long way to travel before they can see themselves differently. That was me, for years. Standing up to speak at that rally was a way—almost ten years later—to fight back.
I will never forget that day. It was truly life-changing, one of the most joyful days of my life. I truly felt, standing up there, as if I was doing good work, working to transform the road. It was the work that God had intended for me all along.
Chapter Fourteen
Struggling Toward Forgiveness
After the victims’ rights rally, I was invited to speak at my aunt Kathy’s church.
Speaking there meant I’d be addressing the same women who’d been at the retreat where I’d accepted Jesus into my heart the year before. Her church is about an hour away from my house, and I spent the drive over filled with the spirit and thinking about the year that had passed. It felt very meaningful to me to be speaking there.
That day, I wasn’t nervous at all. When I stood up to speak, I felt God with me again. I began, “Hello, my name is Alisa. I’m twenty-six years old. I’m speaking tonight because I’m a survivor of sexual assault. For many years, I was a victim. But today, I’m a survivor, and I owe it all to God. I am amazed by God and His mercy and unconditional love, and I’m going to use the strength and the determination that God has blessed me with to continue to succeed and win, and to help others become survivors, too.”
I went on to talk about the blame and shame associated with rape, and about the power of God’s love to transform even the most broken life. At the victims’ rights rally, I’d been speaking to a secular audience, and I’d wanted my speech to have the widest possible appeal. But it felt great to talk about these issues I cared so much about in a church, to Christians—to testify and to connect the turnaround in my own life with my faith.
The minutes after my speech were filled with tons of hugs and warm wishes. Then Samantha, one of my aunt’s friends, approached me. She’d been at the retreat the year before. Like everyone else who’d seen me there in my furious teenager mode, she was astonished by the change in me. We embraced and chatted, and then she asked, “By the way, have you read the passage I highlighted for you yet?”
I had. Before my aunt had given me the pink Bible after that first mountain retreat, a few of her friends had gone through it and marked passages and stories that they especially thought I should read, with little notes in the margins explaining why. Samantha had been one of them. Marking those pages had been a beautiful act of fellowship, and I’d deeply appreciated it. Reading those passages when I got home had helped me to feel that the retreat was ongoing and that I was part of a loving community, although I had not yet found a church of my own. That feeling had sustained me while my mom and I were on our search for a church.
I remembered which passage Samantha had highlighted. “The Joseph story, in Genesis. I did read it! Thank you so much. You were right; there were a lot of important lessons for me there.”
“After hearing you speak, I have a feeling you’re ready to read it again,” Samantha told me. “I’m pretty sure you’ll find some new messages in there for you now.” I nodded and made a mental note. After all, she’d been right once.
When I got home, one of the first things I did was reread Joseph’s story. Joseph is his father’s favorite of twelve sons and the recipient of a fantastically colored cloak. His brothers are filled with hatred and jealousy, and they sell him into slavery in Egypt, telling their father that he has been killed. In Egypt, Joseph rises from slavery to become wealthy and powerful, the pharaoh’s right-hand man. Then he is wrongly accused of rape and imprisoned. After ten long years in jail, he interprets one of the pharaoh’s dreams and rises again.
Because of his leadership, the Egyptians build up their food stores so that there is plenty when famine strikes. Joseph’s brothers, meanwhile, have not prepared and are starving. They come to beg for food, not realizing who Joseph has become, although he recognizes them. Instead of turning his brothers away in retaliation for their cruelty, Joseph forgives and feeds them. When his brothers see the forgiveness he’s capable of, they tell his father the truth about their actions before he dies.
One of the things I think is so amazing about reading the Bible is how it reflects your own life and concerns back to you, depending on what you’re going through. The Joseph story is a good example of this in my own life. When I’d read it the first time Samantha recommended it, after the retreat, the part that resonated with me most strongly was the way that Joseph kept coming back to flourish, though he’d been pushed down over and over and over again. This was someone who did not get beaten down, no matter how hard his trials—someone who went on not just to survive, but to thrive.
That theme still speaks strongly to me, of course. Resilience—the ability to bounce back after encountering adversity—is one of the hottest topics in psychology and education today. But there’s no better source for stories about resilience than the Bible. Joshua, Job, Joseph, Naomi, Esther—even Jesus himself. The Bible is filled with people who are tested, often bitterly, and draw upon their faith to get back up and go on, stronger for their struggles.
I was no less interested in resilience than I had been, but Samantha had been right: There were more lessons for me in Joseph’s story than the one I had first perceived. Reading the story a year later, I found that it had taken on a whole new dimension. It was as if certain passages were printed in a larger type or had been underlined in bright red pen.
And those passages had to do with forgiveness.
Joseph’s story wasn’t my first engagement with the concept of forgiveness. I had begun to grapple a little with the idea already. Mostly, though, I’d spent the year coming to terms with the gift of my own forgiveness.
At the retreat, I’d been overwhelmed by the joyful realization that, although I had done some horrible things, I could be forgiven. Over that weekend, I had understood—really understood—that Christ had died so that could happen. Understanding this for the first time drove my decision to stand up and take Jesus into my heart.
What a tremendous gift it was, to be forgiven! For years, I had been consumed by guilt. I felt guilty about the role I’d played in my own rape. I felt guilty about what the aftermath had done to my family, both emotionally and financially. I even felt guilty about pressing charges and ruining the lives of the guys who had assaulted me.
Misplaced or not, this guilt had been my dominant emotion for years, and trying to escape from it had led me down a very dark path. This led to even more guilt, because when I was using drugs, I did a lot of things I wasn’t proud of. By the time I had a serious habit, guilt was such an omnipresent feature in my life that those crimes (moral and actual) were simply more fuel for the fire.
Guilt is one of the most toxic emotions we’re capable of. Living with a constant, chronic sense of it paralyzes you. It deeply erodes the foundation of your self-esteem and makes you feel completely unlovable. My own sense of guilt and the resulting feeling of worthlessness had been so deep, so complete, that I had tried to kill myself with the drugs.
What a re
velation, then, to understand at the retreat what it meant that Jesus had died for us while we were still sinners. He had died so that I might be forgiven! In God’s eyes, I wasn’t ugly and flawed and destructive and unlovable, but infinitely precious and worthy of redemption. There was no sin too big for Him to forgive; in fact, the only sin He couldn’t forgive was the one I didn’t bring to Him.
I didn’t have to beg for it, either. His love, as I had to remind myself when those guilty feelings marched back in, was unconditional, and His forgiveness was guaranteed. As long as I had repented and turned away from my sins, I could count on that.
To my surprise, the feeling of joy and gratitude that discovering this had given to me didn’t wear off. Like most people, I was used to the novelty dulling on anything I was excited about. I’d buy a shirt I couldn’t wait to wear, and then a short time later I’d find myself folding it into a bag for Goodwill. Great feelings didn’t seem to stick around very long in my life, but the glorious feeling of knowing that God had forgiven me never lessened or felt any less miraculous than it had that night.
That good feeling is one I want to keep going—forever. I never, ever want to go through another notebook like the one I filled doing my fourth step in AA, listing those 112 people I’d hurt and disrespected. I have been forgiven, and I want to stay forgiven. And so, after I started attending church regularly, I began a ritual that I still do every single night before I go to bed. After I’ve said my evening prayers, I do a mini-fourth step.
I replay my day in my head. If some comment or interaction with someone pops up that I’m not proud of, I need to talk to the person about it. Maybe we need to hash something out together; often, I simply need to apologize. (“I’m sorry I yelled at you when I asked you if my butt looked big in these pants, and you said it sort of did. You were simply telling the truth.”) But I need to do something. If I don’t address whatever feelings are unresolved, then I’ll start to harbor guilt and a lot of bad feelings, and that’s not good for me.
I think of it as living clean. You know how people go on cleanses, to detox and get rid of all the garbage that’s built up in their systems from eating junk food? My daily inventory helps me to live cleaner, so that there aren’t a lot of bad feelings building up and making me sick. Most importantly, it keeps me right with God.
Knowing that I have been forgiven doesn’t always mean that I feel forgiven. I still find myself asking, Is this really it? Isn’t there something else I need to do to earn this, to be worthy of this tremendous gift? It’s a gigantic leap of faith to believe in the all-encompassing hugeness of His love. After so many years of feeling unlovable—unlikeable, even—it seems crazy that He can love me. But I know that He does, and with God’s help, I’ve been working toward feeling forgiven—and forgiving myself.
It had not yet occurred to me that my relationships—with God, with other people, and with myself—were also being profoundly affected by the fact that I had not yet taken steps toward forgiving the guys who assaulted me. And it would probably never have occurred to me without church.
At our church, there’s a twelve-week class called Wounded Hearts, designed for survivors of trauma and abuse. It was one of the things that had first attracted me to Water of Life, and in 2012 I participated in the group.
It was very powerful to participate, for all the obvious reasons. I had spoken at the victims’ rights rally already, but I was in no way done with the shame and blame associated with being a victim of rape. It gave me a lot of comfort to be able to talk about those issues in the company of other Christians who had suffered similarly.
Being in the group was an interesting experience in perspective. When I’d hear another woman blaming herself, it was very easy for me to think, Cut it out! That’s crazy! You didn’t do anything wrong! Even if you’re as thickheaded as I am, eventually you have to turn it around: Oh, right. If she didn’t deserve what happened to her, then maybe I didn’t deserve what happened to me, either.
Being in a group of women with similar experiences, especially in a faith-based context, was intensely healing, but it was also very painful. We started the class with thirteen people, and about half of them dropped out, which reminded me of how important it is to be ready to tell your story.
Not everyone is ready to tell their story. First, you have to be ready for the possibility that someone will say something hurtful or upsetting, like “What were you thinking, going to that party by yourself?” There were many years when I was too fragile to hear a comment like that. You also have to be ready for the way attitudes toward you will change. For some people, the fact of your rape will become your primary identity in their eyes. Mostly, you have to come to terms with your own shame and self-hatred around what happened to you, and that can be the hardest part.
I ran into one of the women who had dropped out of our Wounded Hearts group in a hallway at church one Sunday. She dropped her eyes when she saw me and looked as if she wanted to run away. But I stopped her and told her about being in rehab and how long it had taken me to tell the group and my counselors what had happened to me.
“I didn’t start getting better until I could tell that story,” I told her. “But I wasn’t ready to tell it until the moment I told it, and nobody could make me ready to tell it. I had to get there myself. For me, that was an important part of the process. You’ll talk about it when you’re ready, and when you’re ready, I hope that you do.”
I had been telling my own story for a while, so speaking that truth wasn’t as hard for me as it was for some of the others. I did find it deeply painful to hear the other women’s stories, though. Not because the stories were hard to hear—although they were—but because with every one, I was reminded of the terrible toll that rape takes.
What a waste! All these beautiful, strong women, all charged with the difficult work of putting ourselves back together because of someone else’s violence. All of us were on a path different from the one we believed we would have taken. All of us struggled with intimacy and relationships. Almost all of us had attempted to anesthetize ourselves, whether through drugs or alcohol or sex or food. Almost all of us had considered suicide at one point or another, and most of us had made an attempt.
Another thing I noticed was how much our extended families had gone through. Some, like my own parents, had suffered terrible stress and financial hardship. Siblings and friends had been neglected. Spouses questioned their own attractiveness. Children struggled with the hardship of living with a depressed parent. The ripple effect was truly profound.
Even as I was marveling over the ways that rape negatively impacts so many of the lives it touches, I felt very proud to be in the company of these amazing women. These were my people, my tribe. These were the survivors. No one should have to get strong in this way, but each of us had gotten stronger at the broken places.
Then, one day, a woman named Emily spoke in that Wounded Hearts class. Hearing her story that day, I first began to grapple seriously with this question of forgiveness.
It certainly wasn’t a competition, but no one who attended our class would have denied that Emily’s was the hardest story we had heard over the course of the class. She had suffered horrific and systematic abuse at the hands of her parents over a period of twelve years. Hers was the kind of story that makes you think, I don’t want to know this. My understanding of the world is much uglier now that I know that these things take place in it.
Still, even as the terrible story poured out of her, Emily kept the same sweet demeanor. She wasn’t dispassionate and clinical at all, but calm and graceful. She was the only person in the room—including the leader of the group—who wasn’t crying.
But it wasn’t only her demeanor that impressed me. I listened with disbelief as Emily calmly told us that although her mother continued to lie about being an active participant in the abuse, Emily and her husband made a place for her in their family and in their lives. She told us how blessed she was that she and her husband were able
to afford vacations, and she told us about bringing her mother along on some of those trips. That very week, they had bought her mom a new car.
I was shocked. This woman had ruined her life and still Emily was willing to give her the world. After her father’s death, she had forgiven him, too, and made periodic trips to visit his gravesite.
What Emily described was completely beyond my comprehension. I saw her peacefulness and grace, and I thought, Wow. That’s what true forgiveness looks like.
Then I had two more thoughts, pretty much at the same time.
The first was I want that.
The second was And I’m not even close.
After the class was over, I felt completely wrung out. I could see it in the faces of the others in the group as well; it had taken everything we had to sit there and listen and pray. But I made a special point of approaching Emily, who still seemed completely calm and composed. I thanked her profusely for sharing her story and told her how much I admired her grace and tranquility.
To my surprise, she told me how affecting she’d found my own story, which I’d told the week before. She shook her head. “Honestly, I don’t know how you survived what happened to you, or all the stuff that happened afterward. Those trials. A hung jury. Just sickening.”
I could hardly believe what she was saying. “Are you serious? You think that what I went through was bad, when you endured twelve years of the worst kind of abuse—and at the hands of your parents, the people who were supposed to dedicate their lives to loving and taking care of you?”
I shared with her how impressed I was by her ability to forgive, and I told her I didn’t think I’d ever be able to get to where she was. Emily didn’t try to talk me out of my position, but before we parted ways, she said, “You don’t forgive them for them—your abusers. You forgive them so that you can move on with your life.”
