Healing Reveals The Truth Of Our Memories

This article deals with a personal account of sexual violence as well as data on sexual violence against Autistics.

An article from the Autism Research Institute shares that Autistic youth are three to four times more likely than non-autistic youth to experience sexual victimization, and between 40% and 50% of autistic adults report experiences of sexual abuse during childhood.

A 2022 study revealed evidence to support that nine out of ten Autistic women have experienced sexual violence - compared to 30% of women in the general population.

I have been struggling to write an article for today.

I’ve been thinking about various topics relevant to myself and my readers, and started and stopped a dozen drafts. I couldn’t find the fire. The thing is, I’ve known for a couple of weeks what I needed to write about today, but I kept pushing it aside. I wanted to ‘keep things lighter’ amidst the heartache and rage so many of us are feeling right now as we continue to witness atrocities. But my mindbody chose the topic a fortnight ago, and I’ve just been making my way to this moment masking as a writer who has something else to say than to talk about an experience of sexual violence. As it is, this is the only thing I can share with you today. And if it will harm you to engage with it, I hope you can set the boundary to stop doing so now.

I believe I live with what is sometimes referred to as Complex Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (CPTSD). I have not been formally diagnosed. From PTSD UK: ‘C-PTSD develops as a result of sustained, repeated or multiple forms of traumatic events… while PTSD is usually caused by a single traumatic event’. One symptom of CPTSD is having flashbacks of traumatic memories that impact the nervous system such that trauma is ‘relived’. I have these pretty much daily, and they range across a broad spectrum of traumatic events across many years. Usually they are repetitive, in that the same memories will intrude on my thoughts regularly. Sometimes, I remember something I haven’t thought about in years. Two weeks ago, I had a flashback that I have never had before, that began in a dream.

My dreams are always vivid and complex, I believe this is because I am trying to process a great deal of difficult emotions and experiences - historic and present, combined with one of the ways ADHD shows up in my mindbody. I am used to violent, disturbing, frustrating and busy dreams. This one, however, felt more like a memory. And when I woke from it, the memory came into clear view, except something was different. It was a memory I had looked at before, but it was not until this moment that I realised what was truly taking place in that memory. As the pieces crashed into place, as my heart raced and my system went into shutdown, the familiar feelings told me it was a flashback of a traumatic event.

When I as 19, my best friend and I went to Kos, a greek island known for its party scene. When we were on the pull (English slang for looking for a hookup, and exactly how we would have described it at the time), we were a formidable team. Very different from each other to look at, our dancing the perfect combination of self-deprecating and rhythmic, and we were wicked funny - especially when together. I can remember a great deal of that holiday. A tortoise that hung out near our apartment. A cat that visited too. Sleeping next to the pool with the sun on my skin. Lovely boys we met, lovely nights spent with them (I thought I was cis and straight at the time - and it was an extremely heteronormative environment). The 24 hour bar where we would meet up with the hot barmen when they got off work at 6am. My best mate having to literally hold me back when a racist told me that Ilford, my home town, was ‘going down hill because there were too many Asians’. Meeting some lads that went to a school near where we grew up. Playing pool. A beautiful guy passing me in the crowded street telling me I had a ‘lovely boat race’ - cockney rhyming slang for lovely face. An unusually charming and non-threatening compliment, perhaps why it stayed with me. Laughing with my bestie until I cried, this happened every day, several times a day. I remember that there was an apartment nearby, that saw three different groups of lads staying there while we were there. We made friends with each group. In one group, there was a sweet boy called Seth. He was tall, racialised white, with brown eyes and hair, and sort of awkward. I liked him a lot. I think he liked me too. We spent a few days flirting, and I think it was building up to more. But then something happened.

One day, I was napping in our room. I think my friend must have been at the pool, it was rare for us to be apart on that holiday during the day. Our room was a mobile building, the kind that is stand alone, sort of on stilts, and can be put anywhere. We weren’t attached to the main building where there were more apartments, so you had to be specifically heading for our room to end up at our door. We kept the door unlocked during the day time, so we could come and go from the pool without fuss. It didn’t occur to me to do anything differently when I laid down for a mid-afternoon sleep. When I woke up, a boy was sitting on my bed. He was with the group of boys staying in the apartment nearby, he was a friend of Seth’s. I think his name was Adam, but I don’t really remember, because he wasn’t really on my radar. He hadn’t spoken to me very much, he was the person in their group I knew the least about. I didn’t have any opinions or feelings about him at all, apart from that I didn’t find him attractive, which was my main lens for meeting boys on that holiday. If he hadn’t shown up in my room that day, I doubt he would have registered in my memory at all. I can remember he wasn’t looking at me, he was looking down at his hands. I was half asleep, and I don’t know if he said anything, or if I said anything. I know that I didn’t want anything to happen with him. I know that when it did, it hurt, and that it hadn’t hurt with anyone else. I don’t remember him leaving. I don’t remember seeing him again. I think the whole group left the next day, and I don’t remember Seth speaking to me again before they did.

When I last thought about this experience, it was in the context of who I had hooked up with on that holiday. Reminiscing with my bestie about all the good times, and maybe mentioning ‘that odd boy that I didn’t fancy showing up in my room, and musing aloud, why on earth did I sleep with him?’. So maybe the last time I thought about it I was in my early twenties. When this memory appeared in my dream, almost 18 years after it happened, and then materialised into something concrete as I woke, it settled into my consciousness with the weight of 18 years of denial, and the breathtaking, world-shattering realisation that I was raped. What remains of that memory now is firmly contextualised in my full and comprehensive understanding of what is and what is not consent. And the unsettling details around it that I am only now giving thought to, such as how he would have noticed that my friend was at the pool, and I wasn’t. That he would have had to deliberately seek me out in my room, as it was not on the way to his. That he found the door unlocked and chose to let himself in. That he saw me sleeping, and chose to come and sit on my bed. That in all likelihood, he knew exactly what he was about to do as he stared down at his hands, unable to meet my gaze.

There are many reasons why Autistics are more vulnerable to sexual assault, and I don’t have the capacity to expand on it in this piece, perhaps I will write more on this in the future. I do encourage you to do some wider reading on it. Dismantling rape culture is something that we can only do together. Educating ourselves on the specifics of consent, of coercion, and the myriad ways survivors of sexual assault (SA) react and respond before, during and after assaults. In the days after being revisited by this memory, I went through many emotions. Shame was present and heavy. Despite everything I know about SA, I was still asking, why didn’t I stop him? I thought about how many consensual sexual encounters I had on that holiday, it was a lot. I considered how that would be used against me. I couldn’t bring myself to say the word ‘rape’ out loud. I showered more than usual. I told two friends, including the one I was on holiday with. I told my partner. Then… nothing. I stopped talking about it. I started pushing it away. But somewhere inside, I knew I was going to talk about it here. I knew that I needed to, because this is where I talk about the things that are too hard to talk about.

I want to tell you that this memory is the only experience of sexual violence I have had, but that isn’t true. I wonder if my mindbody waited until now to reveal it to me, because I have made so much progress, done so much work, that maybe it thought I was healed enough to handle it. Had it surfaced a few years ago, I genuinely don’t know if I would have been able to process it in any way that wasn’t harmful to me. And yet here I am today, writing about it in a public space, where anyone could read it. Why am I doing that? Because my story is the story of 9 out of 10 Autistic AFABs. It might be your story. It might be the story of your friend, your partner, your parent, your child. And not only do we deserve to tell our stories, we deserve a reality where it doesn’t take 18 years of unlearning, de-conditioning and healing in order to recognise rape. We deserve a reality where consent is taught earlier than ABCs.

Shame tells us we should be quiet. That we should hide. That we should shrink.

Well fuck that.

When I was 19, I was raped.

I was in no way to blame. I am unashamed. I am without guilt.

And I am fucking furious.

— AJ

Today’s Neuro-Embodiment Prompts:

Suggestions and questions to help you engage with mindbody decolonisation:

• What is missing from your understanding of consent? How can you educate yourself on this?

• Who do you have influence over that you could educate on consent and how to recognise and shutdown coercive behaviours?

• How can you show yourself love, compassion and gentleness around your own experiences?

• How are you going to show up to dismantle rape culture today?