by Torah Bontrager

Flashbacks

Summer 2015.  Out of nowhere, I found myself clutching my body and rocking back and forth on my bed.

You’re okay.  This is a flashback.  You’re not in actual danger right now.   

Five years earlier, I finally found a therapist who was actually skilled in handling sexual assault cases.  I was 29 years old, dealing with my childhood traumas for the first time. That is, after a failed first attempt with a Columbia University clinical psychologist who re-traumatized me when I went for help during my last year of school. Those sessions with her opened up a Pandora’s box of nightly gruesome flashbacks that nearly prevented me from surviving and making it to graduation.

In 2010, after nine months of intense five-days-a-week therapy or therapy-related activities, I had acquired the self-awareness and tools to manage my triggers and PTSD for the first time since age six or younger. I felt I hit a ceiling in terms of recovery: I was about as close to healed as a recurring child rape survivor could ever hope to be.

Hunched over on my bed, my knees pulled up to protect my vagina, I expected the flood of flashbacks to stop after the aware adult observer me acknowledged the triggered child panic-stricken me.

But, unlike past results, the PTSD escalated.  Even right now while writing this, the exact sequence of events is a blur.  The next thing I knew, I was in a fetal position and screaming at the top of my lungs––in overpowering, sheer terror.   It shocked the adult me.

What is happening?  

What exactly triggered me?  

Was it this? That?

I don’t know why or how exactly I got there, but I became aware that I was now on the bare floor, still in the fetal position, pulling my knees up so tightly against my body that my arms hurt. Internally I kept clenching my vagina in a futile attempt to add another layer of protection. But still I didn’t feel safe from the penis weapon approaching me, looming closer and closer.

The terror intensified.  Following another blurred sequence, I felt myself rolling around all over the floor, trying to get away from that penis. I couldn’t let my hands go from maintaining my protective posture, and that made it impossible to roll away fast enough to keep from getting attacked.    

THIS is the daily fear, the terror, I lived under when he was raping me? THIS is how I felt that first year all alone in his house?

I lived with this for 15 years!

I don’t remember having attempted to ever physically evade or retreat from the first uncle, Harvey Bell (last known location: Alder or Sheridan, Montana and/or Alaska), who raped me repeatedly. The day after the first night, he bought my silence with a death threat. If I told anyone, he’d kill me. I didn’t dare resist subsequent attacks from him; the only way to save my life was to endure the rapes until I could figure out a way to escape.  

I think the event on the floor was an indication of how trapped I felt during the first half year of my escape—from my Amish parents, Henry and Ida Bontrager, in Ovid, Michigan.  For as long as I can remember, I endured some form of abuse or another: physical, verbal, emotional, psychological, spiritual/religious, and sexual. At age 11, I made the conscious decision to leave, which led to four years of planning a way out.  During my last year, I’d collect-call Harv after my parents and siblings were asleep. Harv, my father’s oldest brother, had also escaped when he was a teen. I trusted him completely; he was the only person I knew by whom I felt understood. I’d crawl out of the bathroom window at night and run out to the phone in the barn.  Never once had it occurred to me that he would rape me, or that I wouldn’t be safe with him. Instead of being free, I was trapped again: a 15-year-old, alone in his house. I had jumped out of a frying pan of parental abuse and into a fire of routine sexual assault. I couldn’t protect myself from Harv and I had nowhere else to go.  I was his hostage.

The surreal part of the PTSD strike was that I was fully aware as the observer that I was not in danger in that present moment, yet I was simultaneously rendered powerless to stop the danger from the past playing out as if it were real in the present.  That past was just as real to my body as the concurrently safe present was to my adult mind.

Why can’t I make this stop?  

Then, the part where the adult me lost it:

What’s going to happen if I can’t extract myself from this scene?

I think the possibility of never being able to recover control in order to get out of that moment overrode the terror of the flashback itself.  Somehow I jerked myself out of it. The screaming stopped. My hands gradually loosened their grip. I got up, off the floor and back onto the bed.

What just happened?  

That particular event led to 24/7 memories looping through my head.  The flashbacks started out relatively mildly, gradually becoming more intense and then taking over my conscious awareness until I was suffering full-blown memories day in and out.  I even began to see a therapist again, but like most therapists, she wasn’t trained to deal with sexual assault (despite her claims that she was experienced in this).

In short, that counselor began gaslighting me.  Thankfully, I retained enough of my developed, educated adult self throughout the sessions with her to recognize what she was doing.  I called her out on her abuse via an email and her response to me was, in effect, “You’re the problem, not me.”

I wanted to sue her but the re-traumatized, fragile child part of me wasn’t able to go through that process at the time.  My adult self had to protect her child and shelter her from even more trauma, which the litigation process would have incurred.

Although I’ve mentioned these incidents briefly in some of my writings, this is the first time that I’m publicly disclosing the names of the therapists who abused me.  Unqualified and untrained mental health professionals who misrepresent their experience with sexual assault cases need to be called out publicly, just like the sexual predator criminals.  

The Therapists Who Harmed Me

Dr. Addette Williams, who forced me to recount in 2006 in X-rated graphic detail all the rapes that I could remember, worked as a Clinical Psychologist in Counseling and Psychological Services at Columbia University. As a student, I was limited to only six or so free counseling sessions. I couldn’t afford paying for further therapy, and Dr. Williams, after continuing to insist that I needed to recover, revisit, and retell all the assaults by both rapist uncles in detail, didn’t even let me know that I could get free services from the Crime Victims Treatment Center (CVTC) adjacent to St. Luke’s Hospital. CVTC is literally across the street from Columbia’s main campus, within walking distance from my dorm at the time.

I was refused further treatment by the University but given no free alternatives, of which New York City I learned many years later has an abundance.  Over the next several years, my untreated mental, psychological, and emotional state led to an increasing downward spiral that resulted in suicide attempts, homelessness, desperation, unemployment, and extreme poverty.

CVTC is who I found in 2010, and where I, for the first time in my life, learned that I had PTSD, what “triggers” are, and how to face my traumas.

“Why didn’t the Columbia therapist tell me about you in 2006?” I asked one of the staff. “I guess you don’t reach out to the University to let them know about you….”

“They do, and did, know about us.  We were actually formed because of a rape that took place on Columbia’s campus in 1977.  We’ve been trying for years to develop a relationship with Counseling and Psychological Services, to get them to tell the students about us.  But they refuse to.”

“Are you kidding me?!”

“No.”

[Even today, 2018, Columbia University still refuses to take sexual assault seriously.  The University has dumped $2.2 million into a research project that positions campus sexual assault as a matter of health, instead of crime.  

I am eternally grateful to Columbia’s undergraduate school for non-traditional students, The School of General Studies, which embraced me and my story and gave me the chance to become the first first-generation Amish person in history to graduate from an Ivy League school.  But this blatant disregard for women’s (and any person’s) safety is unacceptable and Columbia needs to stop protecting and making excuses for sexual criminals.

The therapist who gaslit me in 2015, and actually told me—after building up my trust with her—that I chose the rapes to happen is Rebecca Jeffers, M.Ed., LPC of Evolve Hypnosis & Wellness Center in Fort Worth, Texas.  

“In a past life, you chose these rapes,” she said, “so why are you upset about it?”

Other than CVTC, the single best resource I know of for finding free and more likely qualified help for sexual assault survivors is the Rape, Abuse & Incest National Network (RAINN).  They offer a free 24/7 number that anyone can call at any time just to talk and to be believed by someone who is trained and empathetic.

If you need help and don’t know who to turn to, please call 800.656.HOPE (4673) to be connected with a trained staff member who will give you confidential support, information about the laws, and referrals for safe, in-person help.  RAINN also offers a 24/7 confidential chat service. 

I always try to mention a resource whenever I talk about my experiences, because so many of us suffer in silence with no information or knowledge like I used to.  When I share my story, I want to also offer practical tools and tips for potential healing. Like any other organization, there are no guarantees that you’ll find a skilled therapist through RAINN, but I feel the chances are far higher and hopefully you won’t have to go through what I did.

The Medicine That Saved Me

January 2016.  

The detective assigned to investigate my case against my uncle Enos Bontrager (last known location: Fond du lac, Wisconsin; prior location:  Friesland, Wisconsin; place of business: Pride Originals furniture, Cambria, Wisconsin) dragged his feet. Detective Sgt. Michael Haverley, Jr., of the Columbia County Sheriff’s Office in Wisconsin, wasn’t interested in helping me and his lack of support exponentially exacerbated my flashbacks, PTSD, and re-traumatizion.  His treatment toward me and his refusal to conduct due process turned me suicidal.

I posted on Facebook that I was about to kill myself, or something to the effect that I saw no further reason for living. I had done everything I could to stop the flashbacks and to get justice. I was at the end of the road, especially now that even law enforcement actively refused to help me, despite that the statute of limitations for the State of Wisconsin was still in effect for my case.   

[To date, Detective Sgt. Haverley, Jr. still hasn’t investigated Enos Bontrager, which is part of the required due process when sexual assault is reported and the statute of limitations is still in effect. The District Attorney’s office hasn’t taken my case seriously either. They are aware of my reports as well, but no one from any agency has bothered in over two years to conduct an investigation.

The Trempealeau County, Wisconsin detective (a female whose name I’ve forgotten) likewise has never gotten back to me to conduct an investigation after I reported that Enos had molested me around age five or six.]

After reading my suicidal posts, one of my friends urged me to try ketamine.  

“That’s for depression. I’m suicidal, not naturally depressed. I’m only depressed as a result of the conditions that are causing my suicidal state,” I said.

“You said you tried everything but you haven’t tried ketamine. Will you just give it a try?”

I didn’t believe it’d help me but my friend was so insistent that I thought, what the hell. I have nothing to lose. I’m going to kill myself anyway so why not cross ketamine off my long list of alternative therapies, modalities, psychedelic plant medicines, and pharmaceuticals before exiting this life.

What I learned about this “designer drug” thanks to finding Dr. Glen Brooks’ website is that it isn’t necessarily for depression, unlike my misinformed perception and against the popular myths floating around. In fact, ketamine tends to help those of us with a background of childhood traumas the most.

“Based on decades of ketamine research,” Dr. Brooks said, “post-traumatic stress isn’t a chemical imbalance and is really much more of a structural problem.”  

He explained how ketamine can fix the neurons in our mood centers—which never developed due to early childhood abuses—so that we PTSD sufferers can have a normal mood.  

When I showed up in his office in Lower Manhattan on a bleak winter afternoon for my first infusion, I didn’t think I’d ever see the light of spring again.  

But Dr. Brooks was optimistic: “Statistically, you’re a perfect candidate for it. You fit the profile for success.”

After just one infusion, the 24/7 flashbacks stopped their incessant loop. I noticed only brief moments that first day, but the moments were real. The flashbacks took a tiny break.  

Two years later, my health is on a steady upward trajectory for the first time after a combination of factors—topped by law enforcement denying me justice via due process—created a living hell that pushed me toward suicide.  

I’m still not well enough that I can work a normal eight-hour day. I still haven’t found an attorney who is willing to handle my cases against my predators, abusers, and enablers of those abusers.  And I still have to constantly monitor my exposure to and shield myself from attacks by my birth parents Henry and Ida. (They resigned from the Amish church many years ago and claim to be born-again Christians, but neither of them believes that Harvey Bell and Enos Bontrager raped me. None of my siblings, all younger than I, believe me either. They all actively defend the uncles.)

What has changed radically for me, despite the nearly insurmountable ongoing challenges, is that I see that the MeToo movement is here to stay. For the first time, I don’t feel all alone anymore. Most encouraging is that I’m finding incredible, amazing Mennonite women who are standing up and not backing down. This kinship type of support had been one of the major missing links to the success in my work. Innumerable women outside our Anabaptist heritage support me, but change ultimately comes from within: The Mennonites are the closest group to us Amish who have resources, and I need that inside support to bring light and justice to survivors.

I see this spring, 2018, as a women’s spring and I’ll continue the fight to enforce change inside our Anabaptist culture.  I’ve decided to give up trying to kill myself because this fight is worth staying alive for. Even if I’m the only woman who remains committed to MeToo, I won’t back down. But I hope that you’ll join me in this, so the battle doesn’t get so lonely.

Please consider sharing your story here or on my podcast—or anywhere. What’s important is that you speak up, when you feel safe enough to do so. Your voice matters. Speaking out is the only way that we’ll see peace and justice manifest in our communities and make the world safer for us and our children. This is our time.