When I was growing up in my mother’s large, tight-knit extended family, I was sexually abused. Mother warned me not to tell anyone what was happening to me. Instead, he created a story—the story of a child raised and cared for by a kind, loving family—that he instructed me to tell the world. I told her story to myself and others so many times that I almost believed it was true.
Recently, I discovered Jessica Stern2010 book Denial: Memoirs of Terror. Reading this made me realize that my experience is not unique among survivors of childhood sexual abuse. Stern was also encouraged to tell a story that masked the truth about her trauma.
A Harvard graduate with a PhD in public policy, Stern devoted his career to studying international terrorism and delving into the minds of terrorists by interviewing them. Her memoir recounts her experience of being raped by an intruder at age 15 in her affluent and presumably safe neighborhood in Concord, Massachusetts. She relates her adolescent experiences from her current perspective as a highly educated professional adult, a position that allows her to reflect on the reactions of those around her to the rape and her own efforts to cope with its aftermath.
Stern’s abuser was never arrested, in part because local police seemed to doubt his claim that he was a stranger who had broken into the home. Officers told her father they believed his daughter knew the assailant. The case went cold, as her father reported to the police that his daughter had fully recovered from the incident and seemed to have forgotten that it had happened.
Like me when I was young, Stern was told a story about the trauma he had endured that conflicted with his own recollection of the event. The police questioned her memory, and her father encouraged her to be strong and forget that the rape happened.
When I think about the sexual abuse I endured as a child, my memories seem unreal. Although I know for sure what I felt, the memories themselves seem incredible, as if I imagined them. They accepted what my mother told me about my experience, which became a more believable story for me.
Stern’s book sheds light on the way survivors’ memories of trauma can be called into question, even by themselves. The author describes her rape memories in a way that I recognized. He writes,
I know I was raped. But here’s the weird thing. The memory seems a bit like a dream. It has fuzzy edges. I think that there are aspects that I think that I can make?
Just as Stern was influenced by authority figures to relegate her rape memories to a dream state, I was guided by my mother’s instructions that I keep quiet, pretend that what was happening to me wasn’t happening, and present to the world the story of a good, healthy family she had created that had only my welfare at heart. Both Stern and I were pressed to doubt the truth and deny its influence on us.
Stern’s book showed me that I am not alone in my attempts to come to terms with the past. Others struggle with memories of their childhood trauma. Reading denial Three in particular opened my eyes to the ways that trauma survivors’ memories can be challenged by others, sometimes leading us to question our own.
1. We may be taught to distrust our own senses.
Others’ reactions to our reports of traumatic experiences can make us question the reliability of our own senses. Stern explains how this denigration of the senses of survivors occurs.
When authorities disbelieve the victim, when eyewitnesses deny what they cannot know, they rob the victim of a normal existence in the world. Bystanders and victims combine in denial and forgetting, and in doing so, repeat the abuse. In this new world, the victim can no longer trust the evidence of his senses.
Survivors know that we are not lying about what happened to us, but we can feel that we are. We may feel like we are doing something shameful by telling our stories.
2. We may be pressured to deny that trauma has occurred.
Same happened to me. So did Stern. She explains that her father encouraged her to use her strength to overcome trauma by denying that she had been raped. He instructs her to be “tougher and tougher” in response to his experience. He told her that by doing so she would exercise “a kind of good breeding, a kind of moral fiber”. According to her father, she was morally obligated to erase the memory of the rape from her mind.
Stern recalls, “I grew up in Concord—where drunkards and pedophiles are well-bred and secretive, where good girls learn the fine art of denial.” Like her, other survivors may be led to believe that denying what happened to us is a sign of strength and a symbol of our moral character. We strive to project an ideal image of ourselves and our families to the world.
3. We may feel driven to see the victimized part of ourselves as other, thus putting what has happened to us outside the realm of our experience.
Stern writes about the effects of her attempt to distance herself from the memories of her rape and assume an identity separate from them.
Talking about my rape would bring back a shameful side of myself that I had tried to kill, that I hadn’t told me. I’m not just talking about one’s different roles in life — parent, wife, professional — and the way different parts of one’s character emerge in different roles. I’m talking about the part of myself that is almost entirely another, a victim and now hated Siamese twin that survived despite attempts to extract it.
This separation of ourselves from our experience breaks down our identity. When this happens, we can recognize our need for healing.
But Stern did not continue to live in his broken state. He examined his memory and accepted the reality of what had happened to him. He then worked with the FBI to identify the man who was possibly his rapist, and during his career interviewed terrorists as he tried to identify him in hopes of interrogating him. However, he discovered that she had died years before his search began, so he was unable to confront his abuser and at least gain confirmation of his memory. The point is, though, he made the effort.
Ultimately, by writing her story, she defies her father’s compulsion to deny what happened to her. And that is perhaps the most important message he sends to trauma survivors. We have a right to admit the truth of what happened to us, no matter how much pressure we feel to keep quiet. We hide or deny our experiences no matter how much others want us to. Why are we led to question our memories?
Stern’s book teaches us that we have a right, and perhaps an obligation to ourselves, to tell our stories.
Previously published Georgia Kreiger’s blog
iStock Image
