assaulted in plain sight (trigger warning: sexual assault)

I am obsessed with psychopaths, master manipulators, serial killers and the psychology alike. Like many people I immerse myself in the drama of Netflix documentaries on these subjects. I had long been putting off watching one of them in particular however. I am lucky enough to have a friend who is equally obsessed with these subjects, he had watched ‘Abducted in Plain Sight’ and had warned me not to tune in. “Triggering” had been the word he had used.

Lately however I have been dwelling on the shifting changes in my life, all that has happened in both past and what’s happening in the present. I have come to a point with my post-traumatic stress where I don’t tremble in the fear or shame that I used to. Realizing and giving myself credit for growing stronger in the face of what transpired to me as I am approaching the fourteenth anniversary of it’s happening, there’s a healing there. I am no longer a naive child and I am that much wiser because this happened to me.

So in the face of this, I did watch ‘Abducted in Plain Sight.’ I was most certainly triggered in many senses. I was taken back to a dim basement den, my friends at the time in the background laughing at the newly founded YouTube, probably some stupid clip of someone falling or something. My ever pondering mind wandering and not in line with their entertainment, isolating myself away. Laying down and staring at an old square wooden television. A man I had known for much too long laying down next to me and sliding into the blanket I had covered myself with and taking my sanity into his own hands.

I was there again, yes. But that is not me, not anymore. There’s an empowerment in the idea that that child was physically myself, yes but mentally I am a decade beyond that child now. My body having almost completely grown out of the cells that once resided and experienced this trauma. Sure, there’s apart of me that will never forget laying there frozen on the ground as a prisoner in my own body. There’s the distortion that has grown over time in my ears from too many loud rock concerts, probably trying to drown out the sound of him whispering, “It’s supposed to hurt.”

The manipulation of Berchtold resonated with me in a way that my assaulter’s had. I had known my assaulter since I was a child, he was my older sister’s age and they had been in school together. Being told what I had about him, there was abuse in this man’s home when he was a young child. But there is no excuse for perpetrating the abuse cycle further. I think of myself in an uncontrollable situation, one where I can’t say ‘no’ and I think that a violence escapes me when I let the trauma take hold of me, to control me. PTSD controlled my emotions, my life and I let it control my reactions. I think of this when forgiving the man that abused me. He is controlled as if a child in an uncontrollable situation and he may have never gotten out.

My victory is that I have mostly escaped my perpetuating cycle. I’m not afraid to face new people the way I used to be, I am not as terrified of unfamiliar places or things anymore. I have learned to stand in the face of my fears and to remain silent and still in reaction.

I also think of institution in a much different way after my assault. For many years I was a victim to really more than just one master manipulator, in many different churches I was met by a whole host of them. All of them ready to bleed me dry in some form or another in the name of ‘God.’ I have long since reconciled with God over this. It was never His fault, certainly in the same way that my assault had never been mine. His name was placed in the mouth and on the tongues of people for causes He had never consented to. This in the same way I had been placed in the hands of my assaulter against my will.

There’s something inside me that mourns for Jan, the victim of this assault for the length that it was allowed to go on for. One thing I am proud of is that for a few mere moments I did not move, I allowed myself to be overtaken by another but then I took my life in my own hands. I made the decision to get away from the man that was trying to harm me and did not let the assault end in any warped conclusion of his making. I walked away and into the darkest point of my life. I can't imagine what she feels losing entire years to this man.

Where the difference lies I suppose was that my assault was in plain sight. Jan was abducted, she was assaulted in shadows but this man was also allowed in her bed. This man was allowed inside her mind and able to wield his manipulation into stories of alien abductions and saving a planet. I can’t help but think of the religious cultism of it all. This is why I also have a strong discomfort in the institution that calls itself ‘the body of Christ.’ Maybe that’s why I find myself much more comfortable among the sinners and in forging relationship with them instead.

In a twisted irony I have run into many Christians who think that my gender not conforming with the body I was given is somehow tied into my assault. This does not explain my explicit faith as a four-year-old in God’s ability to turn me into the male that I am now, over twenty years later, finally becoming. I was recently tested in both this faith and in my PTSD again.

A man had asked me about my recently acquired tattoo that in a statement of pride I declared was due to my gender identity. He had made a hurtful statement, one that I believe was not meant maliciously. In fact, I got no malicious intent from him in general. But he told me, “I think there’s a spirituality to that.”

Wholeheartedly I agreed but probably not in the way he thought I did. I regaled, “I believe God made me this way.”

I laugh now thinking how the man was shaking his head slightly as he claimed that I was saying that “God had made a mistake.”

I simply shook my head in return and told him, “I am not saying that. I am saying that God made me this way, we all have our struggles and our mountains to climb. This is mine.”

The man had no response to that and instead he rattled on about having known “homosexuals and lesbians” who had been that way only to repent after having walked into a church.

This is when I was at peace in my soul and just told the man, “I’ve been in church my whole life, I believe God walks with me every day, trans or not and nothing’s gonna change that.”

I left the man with a little salute and walked away from the conversation. Admittedly I walked away with a bit of fear of repercussion and I was also angry at the man’s ignorance of the complexities of being human. Maybe I was angry at his humanity momentarily too. My post-traumatic mind sent me spiraling for maybe fifteen minutes into the what-ifs and possibility of being exposed to another trauma, this man possibly attacking me for just being who I am and trying to harm me.

Reaching out to friends, both believers and non-believers, I found peace in the situation and calm and sense of right in myself again. Re-balancing my brain, I was able to move on. Later that evening I was able to talk among some co-workers, the man standing right there as these people and I were lightheartedly joking about them trying so hard with my pronouns. The man laughed along with us and everything was fine.

So I find myself trusting the instincts God has given me, the wit and the faith and the gut feelings, all the things that have come along with that since my trauma. I stand proud in my skin, now as a male who was sexually assaulted. Growing up in a world silent in the face of sexual trauma, seeing that maybe start to finally flip on its head brings up an entirely different conversation.

When and how do we forgive our assaulter? Not just the assaulter themselves but also the people who were so easily fooled and allowed it to happen. How does a living victim forgive the person who tried to steal a precious part of our life, our sanctity and sanity?

It took about ten years to forgive my assaulter and everyone’s timeline is different. My method was through writing a project I call Ambivalence that revolves around the idea of sexual assault in the military. I honestly learned that it’s less about the man and more about how you let the moment control you still. Do you still let it affect every moment of your life, your happiness? Do you let your life fall to shambles every time you think of this person, these moments? If you do then you let them win and you still allow them some form of control over you.

The hardest thing you’ll ever have to face is the blame and ridicule that you place upon yourself for letting it happen to you. No words can describe that healing process truly. It is something that one must find in themselves how to cope with. Mine was a spiral of self-loathing that had already existed but wound further into a dark pit of disrepair for ten more years. Then I slowly unraveled the seeds of self-hatred and bloomed in the face of all that had tried to tear me down.

So revisiting my trauma is a lot like an alien abduction for me now than it was then. Yet I am the alien returning to tell the foreign land of my trauma that it no longer controls me. I tell my thirteen year old self, ‘One day you will no longer be afraid of this moment and one day you will be made brand new, this will make you stronger and wiser than you could ever imagine and one day, you will love yourself in spite of it.’

So whether abducted or assaulted in plain sight, you may also be allowed to heal in the bold light of day.

In finality I return to the victim of the abduction, Jan Broberg, “Forgiveness is a tricky word. In my mind, not forgiving somebody only puts up the jail cell kind of around you. I figured out I can live with my tragedy in a way that the tragedy doesn’t run me anymore. It’s taken something to get here.”

'Abducted in Plain Sight' is available now to watch on Netflix.