Cassie Sands | CPTSDfoundation.org

The Archaeologist

Cassie Sands — Fri, 02 Jul 2021 10:00:57 +0000

A survivor poem…

And through all of this messiness and brokenness and trauma
I begin to piece together a more cohesive story of me
I discover forgotten, wounded parts of myself
Sealed into catacombs of silence and submission long ago
Demanding to be heard

I find clues in the unearthing process
A master’s fingerprints
Left behind from the intimate touch of creation
Marks from the tools required to shape the impossible memory-stone
A passionate forcefulness
A fierceness of intellect
An iron will
An impeccable thoroughness
Only I could have done this

I gaze upon my crafted wonders
The beautiful, terrible things that I have built
In order to survive

Retching at the stench of pain and loneliness
Repulsed by my own neediness
I seek out
I excavate
I uncover
I tend to
The softer pieces of myself

And at every turn
There is a reassuring presence
An everlasting fire
A network of fibers
I encounter the unbreakable threads of my own strength
Weaving together lifetime after lifetime
Of my own experience and being
Into a cohesive story of me
A master craftsman
An amateur archaeologist
A cohesive story of me

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Cassie Sands

Cassie (they/them, she/hers) is an Aerospace Engineer, Planetary Scientist, and complex trauma survivor pursuing a PhD in Space & Planetary Sciences at the University of Arkansas. They started writing as a way to make sense of and find meaning in their own story, and write about lived experiences including childhood sexual abuse, narcissitic abuse, anxiety and depression, religious abuse, and being a queer and non-binary person. When they are not doing research or going to therapy, Cassie enjoys reading, cooking, traveling, and spending time with their dog Reggie.

Unrequited Love From our Family of Origin

Cassie Sands — Thu, 11 Mar 2021 11:00:27 +0000

I started writing as a way to process and talk about exceedingly difficult things I knew I needed to discuss in therapy but was unable to even begin to make sense of myself. For such a long time, I wasn’t able in any way to discuss much more than I had been sexually abused by my father and my mother had been mean to me.

At some level, I sensed that the level of expression I had on the topic of abuse was inadequate to get me much of anywhere. I could say that it happened, but that was about it.

And so, I started to write with some regularity. I opened up a dedicated document in a word processing software, and I would, a couple of times a week, begin to write about my worst experiences. At first, it started out by acknowledging the depth of some truly horrific experiences that I had been through as a child. But, I noticed that as I continued to write, more and more would come up for me. That what I had been through had not only been overwhelmingly terrible. I started to get a sense of objectivity with respect to my past – the view of someone able to make sense of these experiences rather than being completely consumed by them.

One thought, experience, recollection, would lead to another. And, in my infinite curiosity, I would follow this train. After recognizing myself as being unfairly treated by both my parents in various ways, I came to the rather sickening realization that they weren’t abusive 100% of the time. I would encounter an occasional memory filled with an unsettling tenderness or lovingness that I wasn’t entirely sure how to make sense of. I was trying to be victimized and misunderstood, and I didn’t entirely appreciate a wrench being thrown in my plans like this.

I originally went about trying to show how deeply my father had violated me. But I would end up writing about how, every year, he would plant a different rosebush on the side of our house. The planter that ran the length of our townhome in the Chicago suburbs was lined in untreated wood planks and filled with delicate pink rocks. My mom always complained about how much work it was to keep up, but even after my dad left home, I looked forward to seeing the roses bloom every year. His same big and rough hands that had violated my young body with so much demand and need were used to gently water the roses he had planted with such intention and care. Long after he abandoned our family, I would rush outside to recognize and cut any roses ready for a vase inside.

When writing about my mom, I started out detailing her endless rages at me, hellbent on calling out her covert narcissism. But, at some point, I landed at her making pancakes or waffles for the three of us – her, my sister, and myself, – every Sunday morning, for years on end. How patient she was teaching me how to bake. A patience, she was never able to extend to anything else. I learned fractions from her in the kitchen, her hand resting gently on my small shoulder. An occasional egg dropped on the floor would warrant a knowing laugh; an act that under any other context would have warranted endless rage and excoriation.

Every year, we would drive to Michigan in early August to go blueberry picking. I recall my mother, in her mauve shorts and white patterned shirt, being so at ease amongst the endless rows of shrubs and the long summer rays of midwestern sunlight. So proud of my and my sister’s ability to pick fruit that she would use for baking throughout the winter. Such a juxtaposition from someone who, at most other times, held great contempt for all living things.

At some level, I felt ready to confront the pain and the darkness and abuse of my childhood. But I definitely wasn’t prepared for these arresting, poignant memories to bubble up to the surface, flooding me with guilt about ever saying anything negative about my parents. The more I learn, the further along I get in my own healing journey, the more I realize how much of the pain I have been through comes from a place of deep love and understanding for both of my parents.

I was willing to and did, do anything for them. I allowed my father to violate my body at his will. I was so attuned to my mom’s pain that I let her yell at me whenever she wanted. All I wanted was for her to be able to see herself through my eyes. But she was never able to, and that isn’t and has never been my fault. And that is not to say that, as children, we are responsible for our abuse. Our parents and caretakers were responsible not just for taking care of us, but also for honoring the gift of our love and they failed us on so many fronts.

Reckoning with that lack of reciprocity has been at the core of my pain in dealing with the abuse that I went through. It’s why I’ve gone no contact with both of my parents. I couldn’t stomach being around people who ‘love me’ but are slaves to their own trauma responses before my wellbeing.

Even though writing opened up these doors that I never wanted or intended to open, it has allowed me to view myself, my struggles, and my experiences with a richness that would have otherwise been lacking, even though it is a richness that I am still not entirely comfortable with, that I wish would just go away much of the time. But I guess life and healing and recovery don’t work like that. It’s messy and complicated and sometimes feels impossible to untangle. And often we come across unexpected parts of ourselves and our stories along the way.

Cassie Sands

Coming Out as a Complex Trauma Survivor

Cassie Sands — Wed, 24 Feb 2021 11:00:00 +0000

Like many others in the LGBTQ community, coming out was a painful and difficult experience. For someone like myself, who comes from an abusive family of origin as well as a strict religious community, this process was especially complicated.

After I came out to my mom at 18, she had me attend ‘Christian counseling’ – what I describe as conversion therapy lite. This took place with a counselor my mom had known for years who had bought into her narratives of what was going on. Essentially, I was told that I thought I was gay because of my strained relationship with my father and that I could live a ‘normal’ life if I just prayed enough and deferred to my mom. I didn’t want to go, to begin with, but I was afraid that if I didn’t that I would be disowned.

Though I stopped going after a few sessions, it was still enough to do quite a bit of psychological damage. ‘Christian counseling’ was not an experience that made me any less gay, but it certainly further eroded my faith in therapy, family, and religion. After having all three of those weaponized against me, attempting to undo that harm has been a years-long process. I still struggle with talking about my sexuality in therapy because of how much shame and stigma I felt after coming out.

This experience was superimposed on a lifetime of hearing ad infinitum about how sinful gay people are – how they erode the fabric of society, particularly the sacrament of marriage. I was a bit confused because my heterosexual parents had made a complete mess of their attempts at both marriage and parenting. Yet it was LGBTQ people who were scapegoated for problems that had long existed. Instead of focusing on becoming better parents or dealing with intergenerational trauma, my parents were told to double down on their controlling behaviors and pray harder, a response that only exacerbated their sense of helplessness, shame, and contempt for their children.

During my teenage years and young adulthood, the cracks in my faith began to show. As a young girl, my prayers that my parents stop fighting and that my dad would stop coming into my room to touch me at night seemed to have fallen on deaf ears. Though I retreated into religion for many years, my devotion to scripture did nothing to either alleviate my social issues with peers or help me be seen by adults in my church.

After my dad was taken away by the cops one night when I was six, my mom was finally willing to leave him, and a messy, years-long divorce process ensued. Though my dad was physically abusive and a sexual predator, it was my mom who was shamed by many in our church community for the sin of breaking up our family. It was painfully clear that doctrine and faith were more important than human well-being, including the ‘family values’ I had heard so much about.

I also found myself increasingly unable to reconcile an all-powerful and just god with the limited opportunities allowed to girls and women. Shouldn’t he care about our abilities and what we have to offer? But it was clear that that was not the case. Women weren’t allowed in church leadership, and boys and girls had very different opportunities available to them.

When I came out, I was punished not for my behavior but who I was – I hadn’t so much as held hands with another girl at that time in my life – and I was finally forced to confront all those doubts about religion that had always nagged at me but had never been quite enough to change my mind. When I left home to go to university I thought that that was pretty much the end of it; that my mom was difficult and religion was not my cup of (gay) tea. That it was in the past and wouldn’t affect me anymore after that.

But the things that we try most desperately to avoid have a way of catching up to us. Shortly after I moved for grad school in 2018, a full decade after coming out, my girlfriend at the time and I went to visit a friend of mine from undergrad who lived in a nearby city. Saturday morning we went to brunch and then a market downtown.

As we were leaving, we came across a group of women at the end of the block. They were all wearing shirts saying ‘Free Mom Hugs’. I recognized them from some posts I had seen on social media. Knowing what they were about – giving hugs and emotional support to LGBTQ people who had been rejected by their families – I did my best to avoid eye contact with the woman closest to me on the sidewalk. I knew that if she looked at me, she would see right through me and I would absolutely lose it.

She did make eye contact and offered me a hug which I couldn’t refuse. I had a complete breakdown as she held me. Years of being rejected and ostracized for being gay, and countless years before that being treated with cruelty by my own mother came flooding back to me in the arms of a stranger. I surprised even myself at the depths of my pain that those old, unrecognized wounds still carried. When my deep sobbing had subsided enough for me to talk, she asked me if I was ok. I wasn’t sure.

Something that would take me a couple of years and lots of therapy to deduce was that the trauma of coming out enabled me to pin my discomfort with my abusive childhood on this somewhat more normalized experience in my community. Instead of addressing my issues with my family of origin or the incestuous religion, I was raised in, it allowed me to connect with other gay people.

I didn’t want to admit how dysfunctional my home was, and pointing to this other reason allowed me to delude myself for longer than I would have been able to otherwise. I don’t know any gay people my age who went through the coming out process unscathed. We often bond over these shared experiences. Even for those who have a good relationship with their families now, overwhelmingly that was not the case when they first spoke their truth.

Like many other LGBTQ folks, my experiences in religion have left a bad taste in my mouth. A lifetime of being told that you are sinful just for existing can really do that to you. Throw in my other traumatic and shaming experiences at the hands of my religious parents and community and it’s enough to create a deep bitterness in me at the very idea of any organized religion.

As I get older, my disdain and adamance that religion is overwhelmingly harmful to have softened into an understanding that many others’ experience with religion has been vastly different than mine. That for many, religion is a source of meaning and connection, and empathy. In a world that is too often lacking in those virtues, who I am to pass judgment on how anyone else finds purpose?

I will always carry some scars from my religious upbringing. I hope that gay and trans and bi and queer kids in the future don’t have to experience the same rejection and self-hatred that I did. Thankfully, the tide seems to be changing, in many religious circles as well as society overall. I still cry when I see welcoming churches marching in Pride parades, something I have witnessed increasingly over the past several years. LGBTQ youth are coming out at younger ages, meaning they don’t have to spend as much of their life living in shame and fear.

It has been what has felt like several lifetimes since I had faith in God or religion. I never felt loved or accepted in my family of origin. But I have taken what was previously dogmatic religious fervor and disconnection and transformed these things into faith and a sense of belonging and connection within my family of choice – our collective human family – and our infinite capacity to continue to change, learn, and grow for the better.

Cassie Sands

Coming Out Via Flip Phone

Cassie Sands — Wed, 03 Feb 2021 11:00:20 +0000

When I was fifteen, my mom got me my first cell phone – a black Nokia flip phone. Texts were character limited and cost 25 cents both to send and to receive. I still have it, along with its charger, in a box in my second bedroom, nestled among other technological relics from bygone eras.

In high school, it allowed me to go down the street to my best friend’s house, and to stay after school for track and cross country, and math team. When I first went away to college, it would begin to fill me with dread. My mom would call me regularly, much more than I wanted. If I didn’t pick up, she would get angry with me. When I did pick up, she would aggressively demand to know what I am doing with who, when, where, then respond with her characteristic criticism. As always, she took what could just as easily have been gentleness and interest and curiosity and instead made it invasive and coercive and demanding.

My cell phone would ring while I studied in my dorm room, and I would have to take a couple of deep breaths and collect myself before going into battle with her. I didn’t realize it would only get worse.

A couple of months into that first year of college, I came out. Just to myself at first, and then to my best friend. Over winter break I told another close friend while we were all back home. Shortly after returning to school, my conversations with my mom devolved from difficult to unbearable. Sometime in mid-January, she ended our call with words that still send chills down my spine ‘You need to be sure to stay away from any gay stuff’. I don’t remember what I said in response, I just remember my heart-stopping and the room distorting and being unable to breathe or move. She still had the power to make me dissociate even though I now lived hours away.

I didn’t know how she knew, but I grew increasingly consumed by fear. Weeks went on, and mom ended every conversation that way ‘Be sure to stay away from any gay stuff’. I went from having to collect myself a bit to pick up a phone call, to shaking with anxiety and dread. I started to avoid the calls entirely. Too distraught to pick up right away, I would call back a couple of hours or a few days later, citing schoolwork or rowing practice.

I began to piece together what had happened. A few months prior, she had demanded to know my school account password, under the guise of being able to look at my classes and grades. But it was a shared account with my email, so she effectively had my email password as well. Sometime in the past couple of months, I had signed up for communications from Purdue’s Queer Student Union, the LGBT organization on campus. She must have seen those while digging through my emails and put two and two together. Although not surprised by her actions, I was furious at the violation of my privacy. It also stung that I had gotten in such deep trouble over emails from an organization that I was still too terrified to even think about attending. I wasn’t out to any of my college friends or teammates yet, and I felt stripped of my right to share my truth with others on my own terms.

Determined not to live in this constant state of fear (I had more than enough of that the first 18 years of my life), I decided to tell her. I knew whatever consequences there would be better than my current situation. And so, on a blustery February afternoon, I went for a long walk on campus with my Nokia flip phone.

I called but she didn’t pick up, so I left a brief voicemail. She returned my call later that evening when she was done with her Sunday chores and I was settling in for the night. It was cold and windy out, so I walked to the top of the stairwell in my dorm to get some privacy. I didn’t want my roommate to walk in on this. Without much preamble, I said. ‘Mom I need to tell you something. I’m gay.’ And she responded exactly how I knew she would. Though I was used to bearing the brunt of her cruelty and rage, the rancor had somehow reached a new high. I don’t remember how long she yelled and screamed at me while I sobbed and tried to reason with her. I hadn’t yet learned that I could just say no, end the conversation on my terms. That was a lesson that would take me another decade or so. When she finally wore herself out, I hung up my Nokia flip phone and went back to my room to attempt to piece myself back together.

I used that same phone until 2012 when I finally gave in and got a smartphone. I had gotten a flat tire and ended up lost in the suburbs of northern Cincinnati trying to find the repair shop via some inaccurate MapQuest directions I had printed out. I have so many memories of that phone, good and bad, and everything in between.

Bored on the bus, I would play the one game installed on it – snake. I would occasionally take an extremely low-resolution picture and reset the background. I dropped it countless times, and it gained a few scars but never stopped working. Junior year of college, I woke up one morning, panicked, unable to find my phone after partying way too hard the night before. I guess I had dropped it in water or spilled something on it because I ended up finding it conscientiously laid out on the dish drying rack next to the sink, something that my roommates found endlessly amusing.

A day later, it was back in working order after I had placed it in a bag of rice. I took it to school and class and had my first professional job interviews on it. This past summer, after not using it for 8 years, I charged up my trusty old black Nokia flip phone again. Through some combination of curiosity, masochism, and desire for resolution, I hoped to uncover a series of texts that I had exchanged with my coworker the day after he had raped me. It had been a decade almost down to the day. I had forgotten how limited the memory was back in 2005 when my phone was manufactured, and the texts were, of course, long gone.

My phone anxiety has never gone away but it has lessened greatly – it was never again as bad as those couple of months being harassed by my mother before I decided to come out to her. I would go on to learn that most other people weren’t flung into a panic every time a family member called them and that it wasn’t something wrong with me, but something deeply dysfunctional in my family of origin.

I did continue to call my mom for years, but with dwindling frequency and increasingly on my terms. After the phone call where I went no contact with my mom, I find that my anxiety around calling has reduced even more. It’s not gone, exactly, but it is much more manageable. Shout out to my trusty black Nokia flip phone for being such a stalwart companion for so many years, a relic from a bygone era.

Cassie Sands

Rescuing My Inner Child

Cassie Sands — Thu, 21 Jan 2021 11:00:16 +0000

I distinctly remember the first time I met my inner child. It was the fall of 2019, and I had just started grappling with the realization that the things I went through with my parents did and do, in fact, affect me deeply. Perhaps this is obvious and easy to you, perhaps not, but I was in deep denial at the time and had been for decades.

The only way I had survived my childhood was through the belief that it was time-limited; that what I experienced at the hands of my parents wouldn’t affect me after I left home at 18. And although I certainly had a difficult time with both of my parents, breaking down the internal disillusionment I had about my mother and our relationship was what started to bring about real, meaningful change for me. I hadn’t realized how much I had bought into her narratives about herself, and about me, and about our family. Even though it was excruciating to see where I didn’t perfectly protect myself from these messages, looking back I know I did the best job that I could possibly have done in a series of impossible situations.

As I started to remember her flying into rages at me, putting me down, telling me that no one wanted to be my friend, that I wasn’t good at art or music or sports, it brought me right back to that time and place. I ceased being my confident, capable, adult self – someone who was fiercely independent and had insatiably lived and loved and learned and traveled – and became yet again a scared young child with my mother’s voice relentlessly reverberating through my head.

I was once again sitting at my spot at the kitchen table, my mom in hers, my head bowed in shame as she would take endless anger out on me. Whenever she was done with her outbursts, she would insist that how I should act after such an altercation is to stick around and comfort her since her outrage was, in fact, my fault to begin with.

During one of the therapy sessions where I started to discuss this regular occurrence, I remember my therapist asking me how I felt about kitchen tables. I hadn’t thought about it that much but replied that I had never owned a kitchen table as an adult and went on to cobble together a few rationalizations.

You see, I move a lot, and it’s a pretty big piece of furniture to haul around to different states, and I’m fine eating on the couch anyways. But if I’m being honest I was uncomfortable eating at them even at a friend’s house, or while I lived with a partner who had one but had never made that connection myself. It would be the first in a long line of triggers that were and still are some of the most difficult for me. Things that other people see as innocuous or even positive but for me are inextricably intertwined with unbearable pain, shame, and fear.

One night as I was drawing about some of these formative experiences I felt fully present with little Cassie, subject to so much violence and rage and unfairness. My heart broke for this younger version of me as I started to piece together a better understanding of what I had been through. Later that week, I had a…vision? I’m not sure exactly what to call it. It wasn’t quite a dream; I was awake and fully conscious. In my mind, I was transported aboard a ship on choppy, icy seas at night, guided only by the light of the moon and countless stars above.

The vessel was sailing to an unknown but far off destination, and during this expedition came across something unexpected. A lone figure, small and shivering, pale and frightened amongst endless cold and darkness. Navigating alongside this lost soul – she couldn’t have been more than 7 years old – I found myself bracing on the outer rails of the ship and extending my hand as a guide to safety. Hers gripped mine, and my strength combined with her fighting efforts landed her on the permanence of the boat. She coughed, cold seawater spilling onto the deck, and took the deep, desperate inhales of those fighting for their lives for far too long. We looked at each other, both in shock, not entirely sure what to make of the other.

I continued to have other, similar experiences of my inner child and myself after I realized what the first one meant. We would go on countless adventures, far too many to name or do justice here. It was and is very much an ongoing process. As we both navigate the pain and difficulty and power surrounding our experiences, I give her support and understanding and experience, and she gives me access to memories and a kind of ferocity and drives that I often lose touch of.

Seeing myself as I am through her eyes; as an adult with all of the things I have been through and accomplished has also been an unexpected but indescribable blessing.

My second vision of us was similarly powerful as the first and very much stood out to me. It was shortly after I had first rescued my childhood self from those many years of loneliness and isolation. This realization that that is who I had pulled out of the icy seas, coupled with a glimpse of what we might be headed for blended together to create a new vision. She was standing alone outside our childhood bedroom door, at the top of the stairway landing. Not scared exactly, but apprehensive, lonely, defiant. She already has to be here every day and doesn’t want us to have to go back. But I stand with her, slightly behind, my hand resting on her shoulder reassuringly. We both know it is something we have to do. She asks if she can wear a cape, like a superhero.

‘Of course!’ I exclaim. She slowly turns the doorknob, adorned in a cape, and armed with a sword. As the door cracks open we are both engulfed in rays of blinding white light, plunging into the unknown together.

Cassie Sands