YOUR JOURNEY TO RECOVERY

It's a painful experience to have someone take away your right and ability to be safe. We grow up learning to take increasing responsibility for our lives and that's exactly what the criminal rips away from us. As a result, we experience a variety of reactions: we feel afraid, angry, confused, frustrated, sad, occasionally panicky and even guilty. You may feel some or all of these and you may feel them at times when you least expect.

The experience, tends, however, to follow a pattern. We all travel along a road to recovery. There is a certain order to the journey that can be "mapped" allowing us to know where we are and where we are going. Once we get our bearings we know we're going to be all right and what we are experiencing is a normal part of the process on the road of recovery.

John Woolman, a Quaker leader in colonial America, has well described how we travel:

I have gone forward, not as one traveling in a road cast up and well prepared, but as a man walking through a miry place in which are stones here and there safe to step on, but so situated that, one step being taken, time is necessary to see where to step next.

The road to recovery does not always allow us to place the stones where we want to step. We can, however, find a pattern in place that we can use to move forward along the road of recovery.


SHOCK

When the crime first happens we experience a shock. Often, all we can remember is being numb and not reacting like we thought we should have. Many victims describe how all their feelings simply evaporated for a period of time. One police psychologist has called this "frozen fright" -- a stage when we only seek to get through this catastrophe.


RECOIL

The second stop on the map of our experience could be called the recoil stage when all those feelings rush back in like a tidal wave. This is when we usually feel angry, embarrassed, confused, frustrated and still afraid.
It can be compared to being hit by a big wave at the beach. It knocks us off our feet and before we can regain our balance along comes another one. Like our experience during the crime, we feel we're losing control.

While this is a scary thought it does indicate that we have regained some control since the crime and that we've begun to move forward on our journey to recovery. You will find that the waves will come farther and farther apart.

This recoil stage forces us to confront the confusing issue of who is to blame. You and I (and all the people we know) are built to make sense out of our experience -- and this event doesn't. It ought to be fair -- and this isn't. We ask, "why me?" and may be upset to find there is no particular reason other than the offender's guilt.

Our friends and relatives may ask the same questions and sometimes - because they're afraid and angry, too - they make us feel like it's something we should not have let happened - as though it's our fault. And it wasn't. Victims, by definition, do not want to be hurt.

We all want to make some sense of what happened and we know that is wasn't fair for someone to do this to us. It is correct to think "They had no right!" They did not. But they did it anyway and if we must blame anyone -- put it only where it belongs: on the one who did this. No "If only I..." or "If only you..."

This is no time to let anyone else invent reasons for the crime that don't exist. If you had the ability to know what is going to happen in the future, things in all the areas of your life would be different. But then, if you could foretell the future, you would be God.
But, what about God?

Victimization brings many losses:

• We lose our belief in a safe world.
  
  
• We lose our sense that the world is fair.
  
  
• We lose our trust in people.
  
  
• We, often, lose our trust in God.

Even those who have little truck with God are overheard expressing great anger at Him. "How could God let this happen?"

Spirituality goes to the heart of our being, It involves our view of ourselves, others, and God. Victimization is an attack on us: body, mind and spirit and should be seen in the context of our faith.


RECONSTRUCTION

The third stop along the road to recovery is the "reconstruction" stage. Some have called this the emotional roller-coaster stage. Here we gain increasingly more control over the situation as time passes. The "waves", so to speak, don't hit us as close together as they did before.

Bear three facts in mind to smooth the journey:

• We travel along the map at our own pace -- no one else's.
  
  
• Sometimes a wave will hit us when we aren't expecting it. People and places suddenly remind us; anniversaries and holidays are notable.
  
  
• It's O.K. to move forward and backward emotionally during these days.

If the person who did this to you has been apprehended, the roller coaster ride can get a bit scary. Dealing with the criminal justice system often creates new waves at both the recoil and reconstruction stops. Seek the help of Victim Assistance staff who can help you through each step of the system.


RECOVERY

Someone has said recovery has begun when the good days outnumber the bad days. Perhaps. Recovery does come, though, when we integrate the victimization into our life. It is important to notice that I did not say "Get well." The experiences we have as victims are not a result of being "sick." They are very common, normal reactions to a highly abnormal shock.

Thus recovery is not a matter of going back to the way things were before the crime.

In one sense, recovery is getting through the aftermath -- getting on down the road. It starts as we begin to do normal things for the "first time." We go outside. Then we go outside without being afraid. We go back to work, smile again, regain some sense of enjoyment and create a new life.

Recovery is NOT when the experience is gone forever. There may well be times and occasions when the effects of the crime come back and bring anger, sadness and even fear. You will probably read about similar situations in the paper. There will be anniversaries of the event that may bring one of those waves back.

Recovery is when we begin to take back control of our lives. It is when we no longer allow the offender to continue to offend us, to have power over us.

Victor Frankl, who survived the Nazi Death Camps, has captured this:

" Everything precious can be taken away but the thing that cannot be taken away is the power to choose what we will do with what happens to us."

Finally, recovery can mean a stronger life for you. Many victims who are quick to report the injustice and pain also say they are wiser and have become stronger than they ever were before.

These are people who have not only learned but have worked to make something good follow the bad.

This new life is a different life. In fact, we were victims and this is now a part of our life story, a part of one chapter in our life.

But recovery means no longer victimized.

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