How a motel fire helped me heal from childhood trauma
[Music]
four young women
checked into a motel in hoover alabama
on january 17
- they were students at the
mississippi university for women and
they were best friends
they had come to the area for a shopping
trip
they walked into their room on the
second floor room 292
at about six o’clock that night and then
they rested
and relaxed after a long day of shopping
and fun
in his room just below them a
maintenance worker
was also enjoying an evening in he went
outside for just a moment
and when he returned he found that the
incense that he had been burning on a
table
had tipped over and caught the curtains
on fire
this fire spread really quickly
and soon it was taking over the whole
building
the girls in room 292 smelled smoke so
they opened the door to see what was
going on but
they were met with just a wall of flames
the only way out
was blocked by fire so they closed the
door
and they called 9-1-1 where the
dispatcher assured them that a fire
engine was on the way and it was
they could probably hear the sirens in
the distance
but this motel is at the top of a very
steep hill
and it was covered with wet leaves that
night so
while the fire engine struggled to
ascend the hill
the flame spread into the girls room
they retreated to the bathroom
and they called their parents and that
is where they were
when the ceiling caved in on them they
did not survive
i know this motel because i’ve been
there
i vacationed there with my family in
1975
and it was there while i was at the
motel pool
that i was abducted by a pedophile
i was at the pool that morning with my
mom and my three sisters
and my mom left for just a moment to
change the baby’s diaper
but while she was gone he saw an
opportunity
and he seized it and he snatched me
this part of my past came up in therapy
i had started going to counseling as an
adult
because i was struggling with anxiety
and my counselor and i talked for weeks
about
what might be the root cause and after
weeks of building trust with him i
finally shared
the story of my abduction he
asked me what had happened next he asked
me if we had reported it
and i told him that we had not
that might seem strange but reporting
the crime would have actually been an
uncommon decision
according to rain the rape abuse and
incest national network
their research shows that only about 25
percent of sexual assaults are
ever reported to the police there are a
number of reasons
why people don’t report perhaps it’s
because
99.5 percent of perpetrators
never go to jail or prison
perhaps it’s because the process of
reporting
can be as traumatic as the assault
itself
but after that conversation with my
therapist where i said the words out
loud
we never reported it i realized that i
wished we had handled that part
differently back in 1975
when i was abducted and i began
toying with the idea of reporting it now
as an adult i wondered if that would
even be possible i wondered if it would
make sense
and honestly i wondered what my parents
would think
so i sat down to write them an email
and the more i wrote the more i
remembered how mad i was
i told my mom how mad i was at her for
leaving me alone at the pool that day
and i told my dad how angry i was at him
for not helping my mom that day
and then i got to the part where i said
i am going to do what you should have
done for me back in 1975
i am going to call the hoover police
department and i am going to report this
crime and if you are willing to be there
with me
i would love it but if you can’t or
won’t
i am going to do this anyway
and i signed it love melanie
my dad came back with a response that
was surprisingly lengthy by his
standards
it said count me in love
dad my mom
replied with a long letter of personal
reflection
and empathy and regret
and guilt and a long list of concerns
about reporting this crime at this point
it could get picked up in the press
people might read about it
and then she asked is that motel even
still there
i had wondered the same thing myself so
i started doing some research and that’s
when i found the article about the motel
fire
that had happened just a year before in
2010
once i read their story
it was really hard to stop thinking
about those girls
i kept asking myself what would i have
done in their situation
how would i have tried to escape would
that even have been possible
and of course knowing what they knew at
the time the girls made the obvious
choice
there was a fire engine at the bottom of
the hill they knew
that help wasn’t far away
but knowing what we know now
what if what if they had wrapped
a wet towel or blanket around their head
and taken a deep breath
and just run straight through the smoke
and the flames and jump from the second
floor balcony to the parking lot below
that would have hurt they would have
been burned for sure they probably
would have broken bones in the fall
but looking back we know it’s the only
way they might have lived
how would you even do that though how
would you make yourself run through
smoke and flames it would be so hard
because in moments like that the body
tells us what to do and
sometimes what it says is this retreat
curl up and hide in the deepest darkest
place
and wait
i know this instinct very well because
it’s what i had done after my abduction
on that day in 1975 my eight-year-old
sister eventually realized
that me leaving with a strange man was
not normal
she went to my parents and she said
melanie left with a man
of course they panicked and they started
looking for me
and all the while i was only a few
hundred yards away
he had taken me to another part of the
motel
to a room with a door that wasn’t locked
and after the assault he left me alone
he said don’t leave i’m coming right
back
and i didn’t move that may seem
counterintuitive
but it makes sense if we think about
what happens in the brain of a victim
during a sexual assault at the onset of
the assault
the victim’s brain suddenly starts
receiving terrifying information
and the amygdala the part of the brain
that’s responsible for sensing danger
sends frantic messages to the adrenal
glands
they begin producing stress hormones
which flood the body
and those stress hormones are important
they numb the body
from physical pain and also emotional
pain
and they can lead to the fight flight
or freeze effect so of course the
logical thing to do when he left me
alone would have been to run
but my body was filled with those stress
hormones and i was stuck
in freeze mode
and then suddenly a little girl appeared
out of nowhere she looked a lot like me
she walked over to the window and she
looked out
and then she looked over her shoulder at
me
and then she looked back out the window
i walked over to where she was and from
that perspective i could see my family
in the courtyard looking for me
and that was all it took suddenly the
paralysis vanished in an instant
and i ran out the door
for years i thought that little girl was
an angel
but a more likely explanation is that i
was experiencing a phenomena
called dissociation dissociation can
happen when the body is under extreme
stress
and when people experience it they say
that they see themselves from an outside
perspective
so when i thought i was looking at
another little girl who looked a lot
like me
i might have been seeing myself from
that outside perspective
i found my mother in the motel courtyard
and she whisked me back to our room and
she held me on her lap
and she cried my dad and my sisters were
sitting on the queen-size bed next to us
my mom says that i did not cry but she
says that i was shaking
all over they asked me what had happened
and i told them
and when i was done my mom looked at my
dad and she said should we tell the
manager
[Music]
and my dad said no no we’re not going to
tell the manager
let’s just pack up and get out of here
i was six my dad said the best thing to
do would be to pack up and get out of
there and so we did
my family and i put our things in our
pontiac sedan
and we pulled away from the motel
as if we were the ones who had done
something wrong
in my mind the logic must be that if we
could get away from the motel
we could get away from the pain
in reality my dad was just human
he was a parent who didn’t know what to
do
and like so many of us in moments like
that
he did nothing he hoped that
by not making it a big deal it wouldn’t
be a big deal
but it was a big deal
as we pulled away from the motel i
curled up
in my usual spot in the family car on
the back dash of the sedan
my body and my face were pressed up
against the glass
of the rear windshield and if you were
not alive in the 1970s that probably
sounds like a really dangerous place to
put a child
and it was but it was also really normal
back in those days
and as we drove down that long steep
hill
i realized that the pain did not
diminish
but i thought we just needed to get a
little further away
we pulled onto the highway and the pain
did not diminish
in fact it seemed to be getting worse
maybe we just needed to get a little
further away
but then we arrived home and we pulled
into the carport of our house and i
faced the fact
that my pain had followed me the whole
way
it was not any better at all it was
worse
because now it was in my home
and i remember being in the car looking
down
at the floor of the carport and i had
never noticed before
just how cold and gray it was
and i put one foot down and although it
was a hundred degrees in alabama that
day
the floor felt like ice and i knew the
next thing i needed to do was put my
other foot down
but i didn’t even know how to do that i
did not know
how to step into this new reality
and so i told my family that we could
never tell anyone what happened at the
motel that day we would never talk about
it ever again
and i took that pain and i pushed it
into the deepest place in my heart
it felt a lot like what the girls did
that night
in the bathroom of the motel
their story gave me the courage to come
out from that back corner of my heart
i understood that when it comes to
healing from trauma
the steps that we must take are the ones
that
hurt
and so i found myself at the age of 42
reporting a crime that had happened
over three decades earlier
i met my parents at the scene of the
crime that morning and we drove up that
long
steep hill and we saw the burned out
foundation
of the motel for that’s all that’s left
today
it felt really weird to be back there as
an adult woman
one who by all accounts is a normal high
functioning adult
the sun was shining i had my parents
with me the motel wasn’t even there
anymore
it was really hard to stay connected to
the trauma
that had taken place here 36 years
before
but then i turned around and i saw that
the motel pool
is still there and now the gate is
rusted
and the pool is filled with gross green
water
but it is still there
soon an officer arrived and he confirmed
that he had been briefed ahead of time
and that he was here to take a report of
a child abduction and molestation from
and then he let me talk i told him the
whole story
and he made notes and as his pen moved
across his pad
it felt like he was pulling my story out
of me
and it was finally getting where it
belonged the whole time
my story was getting out of my heart and
into a police report
i was no longer the keeper of this awful
shameful secret it wasn’t a secret
anymore
it was a public record and the new
keepers are people who are supposed to
keep public records
civil servants professional men and
women
with names and i imagine that their
names like
gloria or leonard people whose job
it is to maintain police records in
white boxes
in archive rooms i’m not the keeper
anymore
gloria and leonard have taken that off
of me
and they do it for me now
most importantly my story was no longer
shameful
when it stopped being a secret it
stopped
being shameful
the drive away from the motel that day
felt very different as we drove down
that
god forsaken steep hill i realized
that there’s an alternative to burying
your pain in your heart
you can run through the smoke and the
flames
i share this story with you today
because i believe that there are people
who understand me and those four young
women
i believe there are people here today
who understand that
you know what it’s like to hide and
maybe you even feel like your ceiling is
starting to cave in on you
maybe you’re not sure that you can stay
in that hidden place much longer
and if you are one of them i want to
encourage you to just think about what
it might mean in your case
to wrap a wet towel around your head and
run through the smoke and the flames
what would it mean to deal with your
guilt
or your shame or your secret
or your pain what would it take
to get it out from your heart and into
the open
i believe that the run through the smoke
and the flames
you have to do that on your own no one
can do that part for you
but hopefully you’re blessed with people
in your life who can be waiting for you
on the other side
and if for whatever reason you don’t
have those people in your life
you can call the national sexual assault
hotline
at this number
if you need courage to make the run
through the smoke and the flames
take just a moment
quiet your soul and focus on four words
i can do this
thank you