The Peace Drug

When the stranger at the door asked if her husband were home, she hesitated. Not long, but long enough. That was her mistake.

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"That was it," Donna, 39 now, is saying. "He pushed in. I backed up and picked up a poker from the fireplace. I was screaming. He says, 'I've got a gun. If you cooperate, I won't kill you.' He unzipped his jacket and reached in. I thought, this is it. This is how I'm going to die. My life didn't flash before my eyes. I wasn't thinking about my daughter. Just that one cold, hard fact. I checked out. I could feel it, like hot molasses pouring all over my body. I went completely numb."

She dropped the poker.

Afterward, she stayed strong. She wasn't going to make the classic victim's mistake of blaming herself for provoking the attack. She had no doubts about that. She'd screamed and screamed until the police came through the door. (They later reported that her attacker jumped up, clutching for his pants, saying, "She said I could!")

And, bottom line, she'd survived. She'd be fine, she told herself. She was wrong.

"It was what it must feel like to have no soul," she says. She quit all her hobbies. A passion for tennis died. Devastating nightmares woke her in the dark, her heart racing and palms slick. She dreamed of explosions, tornadoes, bears eating people.

"Psychologists will tell you to go to your happy place," she says. "Well, my happy place had bears in it."

Five years passed. Whatever went wrong, or right, in her life, it felt like it was happening to someone else. She found a wonderful, loving man -- she could still recognize those qualities, even though she couldn't respond to them fully -- and remarried. She had more kids. But even her family felt alien. It was "almost like going overseas and being an exchange student, living with someone else's family . . . I didn't like being close to people, and my children didn't understand that. Mommy was always busy." She was often irritable, and felt an unaccountable anger, which sometimes morphed for no obvious reason into a heavy-breathing, sweat-streaming rage. Almost worse, she couldn't feel the love she knew surrounded her. "I was afraid it was gone -- when you look at your child and say, 'I would die for that child in a heartbeat,' I didn't feel it -- and I was afraid I would never get it back."

As she says this, she never breaks eye contact. Talking about her trauma and her treatment is a decision she's made, she says. "It's important." But it is also, obviously, hard, and she looks a little pale as she explains what it was like for those five years: "I would put my finger on my arm, and it would be like touching a dead body."

Incredibly, she didn't see a connection to the rape. Then, one evening, she was sitting on her couch watching a disaster show on TV -- she calls her interest in the genre "an addiction"-- when her apartment door opened. Something about the angle of it seemed odd. As she looked at the door, the room began to swirl. "It was kind of like a whirlwind, make-you-dizzy moment, and I saw the whole thing, that man pushing through the door, the warm molasses pouring down, my body going numb. I call it, 'when I left my body.'"

Now she understood: She had left her body -- and never come back.

The panic attacks began at work one Friday. She felt butterflies in her stomach, then couldn't breathe. "I thought: 'Oh my God, I'm dying. I'm having a heart attack.'"