Wisdom from the Trenches

Well after I encountered trauma, about the time my children came into my life, I began to have a recurring dream. From the very beginning, the dream would always make it clear to me that my life was blessed.  The house in my dream was always perfect on the outside and impeccably decorated within. My family always wonderfully dressed and happy. And yet, something nagged at me. I was never able to enjoy this life. Something was “off”. Something inevitably bothered me about this house. Shame would creep in over time as I was unable to enjoy this beautiful house. Was I that ungrateful? 

There always came a day in the dream where my husband would take off to have fun with the kids, leaving me alone in that eerily perfect house. I would meander through the hallway, passing through each of the rooms. It would always be during this time that I would realize what was ultimately “wrong” with the house: It did not feel like home. As I would come to that conclusion, I would inevitably notice something on a wall…a small stain. I would poke at the stain and it would crumble, forming a little hole. Frantically, I would begin to tear at the wall. I needed to find the source of what was causing damage to the wall! What I uncovered would always shock and horrify me.

Behind the damaged wall would be another portion of the house that would effectively double the size of the house, but the section of the house would also be in total disrepair. The rooms I discovered were always fully furnished…and flooded. Although I always seemed to be the only living thing in the area, water damaged furniture was always covered with rat poop and there was always residual evidence that homeless vagabonds had used the space in the recent past. Graffiti spread across the walls, often containing derogatory words or phrases toward women. Peering in on the devastation, I would struggle to understand. How could we not know about this hidden portion of the house? How could we not see it from the outside? How had the home inspection missed the water damage and the extra square footage? Where did all of this come from? Why was it so destroyed?

After a moment or two of silent deliberation, I would always make the same decision. I would decide that the area was beyond salvaging and I would begin to meticulously patch the wall, sealing out the filth I had just discovered, and hiding it from my family’s view. I would place a full length mirror or hang a large painting in front of the patched hole, to conceal any additional water damage that might seep through. I never spoke about the discovery, never made reference to the mirror or painting randomly placed against the wall, diverted everyone’s attention away from the area when damage inevitably continued to seep through.

This dream repeated over and over for years. I always made the discovery. I always hid the discovery. I always chose to move on with life and keep it a secret from everyone around me. And I always woke up from this dream confused, but I never spoke about the dream with anyone. It was as if the heavy secret in the dream carried over into my everyday life. Even though it was fictitious, there was a sense of shame about that extra space. There was something incredibly unnerving about its total desecration. It was disgusting to think about the dirty water, the smell of urine and feces, the offensive graffiti, the remnants of a shantytown, which, to me, felt like a total violation of my family’s safety and space. 

Without fail, upon waking after that dream, I would immediately head for the shower. Perhaps I was hoping I could wash away the nasty feelings the dream always left behind. The dream relentlessly haunted me. It would show up on the most random of nights and it would disturb me for days.  Life moved on at its usual pace and years filled with periodic showings of this dream passed by without any insight as to why I had the dream or what the dream meant. 

Until one morning when I awoke, disturbed. Again the dream had come to me, disrupting my sleep and leaving me overwhelmed with feelings of shame and confusion. As always, I left the bed and headed for the shower. Clean, clear water cascaded down on me. I tried to turn my mind to other things and it was almost as if I had succeeded when I heard God’s voice, “The house is your life.” I froze. Did God really just speak to me? It came again, “The house is your life.” 

Suddenly, everything about that dream made sense. I wasn’t at ease in the dream house because I wasn’t at ease in my own skin. In real life, I was a stranger in my own family, a visitor to my own home, an outsider to the life I saw before me. I knew about my trauma and I hid it, I never discussed it, I buried it deep, covered it with a plastered smile, and I diverted attention away from it.

By shutting out the the areas in my life that had been shattered, soiled, and destroyed, I was living half a life. I was living in complete denial of the total devastation that trauma had done in my past and the damage that actively trickled into my everyday life that I fought hard to conceal. I thought I had moved on, but I was simply walling off that portion of my heart and mind. Yet I still carried with me a burdensome secret and the difficult task of hiding what continually threatened to make itself known in my life and my family.

Nothing could have prepared me for my own husband’s reaction when I finally told him about what had happened to me. Sitting on our couch, fourteen years after the horror that destroyed my heart, I told him I needed to tell him something important. I expected him to become angry for bringing up the past and for talking about what another man had done to me. I was prepared to hear words that would sting to my core, words that my rapist had originally branded onto my heart from the very beginning, lies about who I was that I still actively believed as truth. My story about what happened that night spilled out of me. It was as if a dam had finally broken. With nothing to hold it back, all of my pain surged out of me. My husband silently listened, his face giving no indication of what he was feeling or thinking. At long last, he finally spoke, “Everything makes sense now.” In just four words, he validated my entire experience, all my pain I had kept hidden for so long, and all the heartache I carried with me all these years. But what he said next absolutely amazed me.

The day after my life was completely shattered by one man, my boyfriend (now husband) showed up at my door. Enraged at someone else, I cussed my boyfriend out, screaming that I never wanted to see him ever again, and slammed the door in his face – something he certainly wasn’t expecting. Confused, he headed back to his room. He got no further than the staircase when God spoke to him, “You don’t know what happened, but go back for her.” For fourteen years, as a blind act of faith, he stuck by my side – through my rages, bizarre paranoia, severe depression, cloudy judgment, self-destructive decisions. He saw my feeble attempts to conceal the devastating effect trauma had on my life. He stayed while I lived in denial for fourteen years. He stayed until “You don’t know what happened” became “Everything makes sense now.”

The last time I had the house dream was almost a year into professional counseling, but it came with a twist: We had moved into a new house in the dream. It was gorgeous. We settled in, but I didn’t feel comfortable. The familiar unease was there. As always, my husband took the kids and I was left to wander the perfect house alone. I discovered the damaged portion of the house. But this time, I lingered. I struggled with whether we could salvage this part of our house. While standing there, surveying the damage, I debated with myself. The same argument to shut it off and continue to keep it hidden was there, but it was not shouting quite as loudly as before. There, in the recesses of my mind was a new, brighter idea: Tell your husband what you have found. 

When he returned home hours later, I showed him the extra space I had found. I showed him the destruction and his response was immediate, “We need to clean it up.” I suppose I had expected him to be repulsed by the mess, ultimately rejecting the area and demanding we keep it hidden. So I fought with him about cleaning the area up. My primary point was that we had not made the mess, why should we have to clean it up? I told him that even though it presented potential, it was so destroyed, it was probably beyond saving. I tried to convince him to help me close the wall back up and seal out the damage, as if we had never seen it. He stood firm. “No. We need to clean this area up. This space can be used for good.” And then, I woke up.

Through these dreams, God showed me that hiding my past wasn’t keeping evidence of the damage at bay. Symptoms of trauma were seeping through my carefully constructed walls and wreaking havoc in my everyday life. It was clear that I could not totally hide what had happened to me. In attempting to conceal the damage, I was forced to resort to lying, denial, and smokescreen tactics to draw others’ attention away from any sign of trauma evident in my life. Not only was I living half a life, with the damaged parts of me carefully tucked away from view, but I had to wear a mask to keep up the perception that my life was perfect. Even worse was that I was keeping up appearances in half of a life, while denying the existence of another half that could grow me as a person and serve a greater purpose. John 10:10 says, “The thief comes only to steal and kill and destroy; I have come that they may have life, and have it to the full.” The devil had tried to steal my happiness, kill my dreams, and destroy my faith in God. God wanted to reclaim what the devil had taken from me, and heal my fractured life, which would allow me to live a whole and intact life. By living in denial, I was not living life to the fullest and I was not allowing anyone – especially God – access to the wounded and damaged parts of my soul to comfort, repair, and renew.

I don’t often watch TV, but I sure do love watching home renovation shows from time to time. Sometimes, interior designers come into a space and all that is necessary are cosmetic upgrades to make a house look like home – a creative furniture placement, a fresh flower arrangement, artwork decoratively displayed on the walls. Sometimes, the designers come into a space and see more work that needs to be done on the structure – for example, the kitchen might need a facelift. But sometimes, the designers walk in and determine that the entire structure would be best served if it was stripped down to the foundation and entirely rebuilt. In the process, the designers always encounter damage lurking under the surface. They deal with destructive molds, shoddy workmanship, and crumbling foundations to renovate a structure into someone’s dream home.

In my case, my life was like a house and God was like the designer, but I had to agree to let Him in. When I did, He walked into my life and revealed to me that the structure was rotting from the inside out and needed a complete renovation. Together, we ripped everything down to the bare bones and began to address the underlying issues that were destroying my life. Over the course of several years, God created a home worth inhabiting inside my heart…and He took up residence there.

When grieving our losses, shock often gives way to denial. We close our eyes to the pain, we hide the trauma from others by walling off that portion of our life, and we think we continue on just fine…but what lurks beneath the surface seeps through. Despite meticulous efforts to mask, others see symptoms of our pain. They might not fully understand because they don’t know the whole story, but they see enough to know something is amiss. However, the travesty is not the level of deception we must stoop to in order to keep things under wraps. The worst part about denial is that it forces us to live half of a fractured life, a lesser existence than intended. While useful for a time of acute pain and heartache, long-term denial robs us of the ability to truly live life to the full.