Blinded

We have always lived an overt life; we know the process of learning to live with our issues is via being able to talk about them openly.

Having grown up beside my wife, I know first hand the lasting effects that childhood sexual abuse can have on a person and left unchecked it can be devastating.

You know that person who always seems to end up with stray dogs, well that’s my Vickie, but she collects people that seem to have lost their way. Which in itself is not a bad attribute to have in these days of everyone yarning for those past days of community. Sadly, the other edge of this sword is the vulnerability it can create.

This is the foundation of why we let Amber into our lives.

It went something like this, a young girl has started at my wife’s place of employment, and its obvious she is troubled. Like the Winnie the Poo character, Eeyore, she had that black cloud followed her around. Vickie recognised her moody, reclusiveness and aggression with her co-workers as signs of a person crying out for help.  As Vickie took Amber under her wing, the support she needed spilled over into evening texting and the pouring out of her experiences. We believed she was a scared girl just out of her teens with experiences that no one deserves to endure. She needed protection.

Amber could never actually speak of her experiences, they were always written in a note. I mean how could you face someone and tell them the most shocking of abuse that you have endured, writing it was so much easier, especially when according to her, it was her father who put her through these horrific experiences.

A few nights a week on our couch, told us that she was deeply affected, we could hear her whimpering like an injured puppy in her sleep.

After seeking advice from our psychologist and debating between ourselves the pros and cons, we decided that it was our duty to take this frightened and abused girl into our home and protect her whilst we helped her get justice and support.  We knew it would be a long road, but we figured what’s a couple of years in the great scheme of things and how could we live with ourselves if the death threats she endured via texts came to fruition.  We finally got to decorate that room and fill it with a bed, cupboards and shelves to create a safe space for her to retreat too.

Vickie was on a mission, taking her to her Dr to get checked out, dragging her to the rape clinic to get support, forcing her to confront what we thought were her fears and walk into the Police station to report the abuse.

She must have been so deeply trauma because no matter how much support we gave her it didn’t seem to lift her mood; this poor girl must be suffering so so horrendously.  But we kept up the pace and as time went on, she told us “you are both the parents I wish I had”.  We thought our roles were to give Amber a ‘normal’ life; to experience what life could be like. We introduced her to our family and friends as a way of creating that normality.

As I have mentioned in the past, we spent 10yrs on the psychologist couch, you can’t be there for that long and not discover things about yourself. What I discovered was I had a kinda ‘White Knight Syndrome’, which I recognise now is more about being a fixer, there is a problem I can work it out. Our life journey so far has taught me that as a male, I don’t always have to fix those things that Vickie is going through, just being there as a support and listening to her was enough, because at the end of the day, she knew what the solution was, she just needed to know she wasn’t alone.

So, with Amber I decided that this is how I would be the support, being there when Vickie needed me. It was also clear to me that this mission of Vickie’s was more than just getting justice for Amber, it was also her vicariously righting the wrongs of what Vickie had endured with her step father.

And if we are honest with ourselves, it was like us finally being a parent, but instead of taking her to a sporting competition, it was the rape clinic for her or a birthday party was replaced with detective interviews, there was not visits to friends that was seeing our psychologist who never charged because she too felt the need to support Amber.  It was difficult getting Amber to her appointments, but we understood why, its hard having to relive these episodes over and over again. We knew, this is how it works, desensitising you and allowing your brain to make sense of what is happening and learning to live with the experiences rather than bottle them up to fester.

But we were all wrong.

What we didn’t see, was how Amber gathered information about Vickie from her co-workers, creating a story that would hit home to Vickie in the most powerful of ways, using the story as the talisman to hypnotise her.

When the Dr would discretely say, “Vickie how do you know this girl is telling the truth”, she would just brush it off as the Dr just being cautious. What she didn’t know was the Dr could see the online medical records and of her personality disorder, but of course couldn’t divulge this to her.

The rape clinic representative did divulge once everything had come to a head that Amber did not behave in the way of a person who had been abused.

But the straw that broke the camels back, so to speak were the Police.  At their last interview, the two female detectives played bad cop, bad cop. Vickie was mortified that they would treat this abused girl in such a way, she still can’t believe that she screamed at the police to ‘stop’.  Even after the police investigated and told Vickie of how Amber would go back home and visit her parents, using her dads phone to text herself abusive messages. Or how the exact same scenario had been played out with another childless couple in her last place of employment, nearly break apart the marriage, she chose to believe Amber.

As she drove her home, Vickie still reassured Amber that things would be OK.  But once on her own as she came to pick me up from work, the light switched on and everything started to make sense. So much so that once I was with her, she arranged a meeting with the detectives to allow me to hear the results of the investigation first hand.

I was livid, that someone had taken us for a ride, I was livid that Amber had made Vickie relive her own experiences through this whole episode. I was angry with myself for being duped in this way.

Needless we went straight home as instructed by the Police and kicked her out; at no time did I have doubt, as the behaviour she showed was not one of someone being thrown to the wolves. She was angry, damn angry and I now know this was her narcissistic behaviour shining through. Not all her belongings fitted in her vehicle, so I decided that we would deliver them at a later date.  That later date was an eye opener, as I stacked the items neatly next to the house, Vickie handed all the letters of those horrible made up experiences to her mother and asked, “did you know where she was?” “O, yes” was her reply, “so why didn’t you warn us” Vickie asked, “I needed the rest” she said.

Stupid, angry, disappointed, betrayed, gullible are just some of the words that come to mind as we sit here and write this. How she was able to drag us to a place that we thought we had finally climbed out of, told us that she had put us in jeopardy too.  We recognise that our childless situation made us a target, as we finally thought we would be that parent we so longed to be, albeit only if it were for a few years.

As we debrief even now, we get angry that someone could be so thoughtless to use our vulnerability for their own selfish reasons.

A positive realisation is that we good people, we did this because we have heart and wanted to make a difference in someone’s life.

But, together we survived yet again, we owe this to our ability to communicate about the ‘right stuff’, checking in with each other and truly knowing that we have each other’s back.