A huge blessing in my life is a website called Survivors Connect Network (http://survivorsconnect.wordpress.com). It includes countless stories from countless bloggers who have been hookers and now have escaped! Praise God!
My favorite thing about reading other women’s stories is knowing that I am not alone.
I often mention in my blogs that it takes SO MUCH EFFORT for me to make eye contact with men, and even more effort for me to talk to them! I feel like a crazy person every time I share that information.
But then I go to the Survivors Connect website, and I learn that I am not crazy! Countless other women are experiencing the same thing I’m experiencing, after going through prostitution. Wow!
I’ve been dealing with PTSD for years, feeling like a crazy person, but once I started this blog, I got connected unexpectedly to so many others like me. Yay God! He is giving me all the tools I need to survive, and not only survive – but to thrive.
MY FUTURE DOESN’T HAVE TO BE LIKE MY PAST. There is much hope, girls. Much hope indeed.
Check this out. This is letter that an ex-hooker wrote to her younger self. I got this from the Survivors Connect website:
Now when most men come near you feel a stabbing at your eyes, your throat, and your gut that you know isn’t real. You don’t want to admit it but you’re terrified. You start, you tremble. Your hands shake. Think about it, you’re being stabbed a lot these days. This is a quite reasonable reaction to being used by man after man, day after day, in this prison of a brothel. It doesn’t mean you are so miserably flawed that you can’t do anything but be a hooker.
Being a hooker doesn’t make you subhuman. It’s not OK for your (white) pimps to smack you and tell you they’ll kill you.
You have to work up the nerve to pay a cashier for a soda. You’re too scared to ask that guy behind the deli counter to make you a sandwich. This isn’t weakness, it’s biology. Trauma changes your brain. Your hippocampus, where you form narrative memory in the brain, shrinks. This is a symptom of PTSD – a neurophysiologic response to repetitive trauma –not evidence that you deserve to be in prostitution.
So much love to you Alexis. Yes there is much hope. I’m so glad you’re in the world. XOXOXO
Thank you, Stella! That means a lot to me! I’m glad you’re here too, and thankful that I met you