Freeing the Angel

I have only one keepsake from my childhood. It’s a book I received on my fifth birthday called Love is a Special Way of Feeling. I can still remember reading this small book over and over again. It affected me deeply, mostly because my father had died just two months earlier. His disappearance blew my world apart, and this book about love was a life raft. It told me it was okay to feel sad, that the only way through grief was opening the heart to others and to be present for their sadness, too. The book was all of 200 words, a work of spiritual wisdom disguised as a children’s book. Decades later, when I’d have some adult revelation about my father —like, his love has been alive in my heart all this time — I’d rediscover this book on my shelf and, to my amazement, reread that very revelation. I had understood all of this at age five.

The point is, by age six, I’d forgotten everything in the book. That was the year my mother remarried. I found myself in a stepfamily that was volatile, scary, sometimes violent. My favorite place was under the bed where no one could get at me. In the midst of this chaos, my mother unwittingly handed me off to a sexual predator in exchange for a box of cannoli. If you can’t imagine how such things can happen you can read my memoir. This psychopath — a social worker and camp director by profession — proceeded to control my life completely for two years. But he controlled my mind in ways large and small far longer than that. His grip was fully released only when I reclaimed my own voice and story, which took another 50 years.

You may wonder: Why did it take so long? The answer may be found in this beautiful quote from Michelangelo about his process of sculpting: “I saw the angel in the marble, and I carved until I set him free.”

In the search for my own angel, I had a lot of stone to get rid of. By the time I was a teenager I was encased and impenetrable. I was terrified of everyone, especially men, and deeply ashamed of what had happened to me. I felt trapped inside the marble, entirely cut off from those around me.

Yes, I went through the motions of life. We’re wired biologically for survival. I was being sexually assaulted on a regular basis, but I could still get up every morning, go to school, and be an A+ student. That’s quite extraordinary. Consider how much pain and terror must be sealed off from the conscious mind in order to function. No doubt we had hominid ancestors who couldn’t compartmentalize trauma. They were the ones who starved to death, and evolution got rid of their genes. We’re the survivors. Our brains have this kind of super-power to absorb trauma and wall it off from our conscious thought process.

Of course, you pay a price for sealing off trauma. While I was going through the motions of seventh grade, my entire emotional life was controlled by some dark unseen force. I didn’t know why I was no longer lovable. I didn’t know why I felt doomed. I didn’t know why I had night terrors. I staggered around Zombie-like, feeling alive and dead at the same time.

How then do you start chiseling away at the stone encasing your true self? You can’t tell your story until you’ve uncovered the story. Therein lies the conundrum: how do you excavate an experience so painful the unconscious has buried it deep enough to protect your biological survival? How do you liberate the angel?

For me, this was a very mysterious process. I can’t say what was guiding me — maybe some higher power, maybe an intense streak of self-examination, maybe dumb luck. Probably all these things.

I began my journey in the late 1970s, before anyone was talking about trauma. PTSD wasn’t even a thing. I learned through trial and error. I stumbled on ways to crack open the stone. When I was 23, working in a restaurant, the dishwasher offered to shoot me up with cocaine. Sure, I said. I was hellbent on erasing myself. As soon as the drug was in my veins I had a profound realization: my body had been gripped with fear for years. I knew this because all that fear was suddenly gone. That meant I didn’t have to be consumed by fear. Soon enough, I realized that shooting drugs was not a good long-term strategy.

A couple of years later, in the throes of a nervous breakdown, I decided to kill myself — again. First, though, I decided to pay one last visit to a psychiatrist I’d been seeing for a few months. I demanded he tell me what was wrong with me. To my surprise, he did tell me, probably because I said I was never coming back. He said: “Stephen, you’re terrified of connecting. You retreat into shame. You have no authentic emotional contact with other people.” That was a brutal thing to hear, but I knew it was true, even though, at age 25, I didn’t know why I was like that.

Someone once said that biology is connection and belonging. Trauma disconnects, it isolates. We’re not meant to recover alone. After that final session with the doctor, I didn’t go home and kill myself. I made up my mind to connect instead — or least to try. I started going to talking therapy, which I’d never done. The therapist was a short, sweet, friendly guy. Still, I was scared to death of him. But after two years of talking with him, cracks began forming in my defenses, and the truth about my childhood began bubbling up. I also began going out on dates, mostly disastrous. But then I met a woman, an actress, who seemed to have direct access to her entire range of emotions. Apart from falling hard for her, it seemed like a good idea to spend time with someone who was committed to emotional truth, no matter how terrifying. She would become my lifelong partner and field guide to the landscape of emotion.  

Learning to trust — learning to feel safe — allowed me to begin chiseling away the outer layers of denial, fear, and shame. I then explored ways to get back in my body, because I’d been dissociated since age 13. I did yoga, a lot of dance, various somatic therapies. At a certain point, in my early 30s, I trusted myself enough, and I trusted my girlfriend enough, to face head-on what had happened to me as a kid. We were lucky enough in the 1980s to have access to MDMA, which was then being tested for the treatment of PTSD. The drug allowed me to relive the trauma of sexual abuse without fear, without overwhelm. So much that had been frozen and sealed off began flowing through me.

This was clearly a turning point because a few weeks later I went to the FBI and reported the sex predator who had victimized me and many other kids. One of the FBI agents said, “You’re a writer. You really should write about your experience so people can understand how these crimes happen.” Yes, I thought, that’s a very good idea! That was 1987. It took me another 30 years. which seems strange, because at that point I certainly knew the story. But it turns out that knowing the story and telling it publicly are two very different things.

For starters, I had to get over my terror of exposure, which comes from the child brain’s certainty that getting caught means getting killed. That took a very long time. Then I began to understand it wasn’t just my shame I had to overcome. There was a collective shame, a communal code of silence that shields powerful perpetrators. And then were other victims who shared my terror of exposure but didn’t want the story told. Finally, there was my family. I realized I couldn’t subject my mother to the public revelation that a social worker she had idolized was in fact a serial predator who had conned her. So I waited for her to die before writing.

While I waited, I did a lot of meditation, many 10-day silent retreats. I learned how to observe the thought patterns of guilt, shame, and self-loathing without getting sucked into believing them. A new spaciousness opened up around my childhood experience — enough space that I could hold the abused child inside with compassion. At long last, I could see the angel. That’s when I began writing for real, and I didn’t stop until I was finished, 18 months later. I’m sure it could not have happened a day sooner.

And here’s the thing: once the angel is freed, the story has served its purpose. The story is just the journey to liberate the self from whatever is binding it. Once you’ve done the journey, you don’t need to keep picking up the pieces of all that marble you discarded, much less lug them around. There’s a memoir out there with my name on it. It has a life of its own. It’s not me. That was the only the chiseling, the process that freed me to be present right here, right now. To be available to others.

I turned 70 last spring and since then I’ve been having strange and beautiful dreams of those who harmed me when I was a child. In these dreams I’m completely open and vulnerable to them. I’m embracing them. This is an amazing thing. For decades I had night terrors about them — fear of violence, fear of annihilation.

My psyche is now embracing these same people. These are not dreams of forgiveness. I did a lot of work to forgive myself. But the people and institutions who harmed me have never asked for my forgiveness and I’ve never given it. I think these are dreams of liberation. In them, I’m an open-hearted child again, untouched by those who harmed me. Released.

Looking back now, it’s clear I knew everything I needed to know about love and connection at age five. But recovering from childhood sexual abuse forced me to learn it all over again. To quote my favorite childhood book: Love comes quietly, but you know when it is there, because, suddenly, you are not alone anymore.

Stephen Mills is the author of Chosen: A Memoir of Stolen Boyhood, which won a National Jewish Book Award, and co-author of Next of Kin, a Los Angeles Times Best Book of the Year. He serves on the board of Darkness to Light, which empowers adults to prevent the sexual abuse of children. For more information visit stephenmillsauthor.com