Person on the Page

When I was growing up in my mother’s large, tightly-knit extended family, I was subjected to sexual abuse. Mother warned me not to tell anyone what was happening to me. Instead, she made up a story — a tale of a child nurtured and cared for by a kind, loving family — that she 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 Stern’s 2010 book Denial: A Memoir of Terror. Reading it allowed me to understand that my experience is not unique among survivors of childhood sexual abuse. Stern, too, was encouraged to tell a story that masked the truth about her trauma.

A Harvard graduate with a Ph.D. in public policy, Stern devoted her career to studying international terrorism and delving into the minds of terrorists by interviewing them. Her memoir recounts her experience at age 15 of being raped by a home intruder in her prosperous and presumably safe neighborhood in Concord, Massachusetts. She relates her teenage experience from her current perspective as a highly educated professional adult, a position that allows her to reflect upon the responses of those surrounding her to the rape and to her own efforts to cope in its aftermath.

Stern’s rapist was never apprehended, partly because the local police seemed to doubt her claim that he was a stranger who broke into the house. Officers told her father they believed that his daughter knew the assailant. The case grew cold, partly because 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 a child, Stern was told a story about the trauma she had endured that conflicted with her own memory of the incident. The police questioned her memories, and her father encouraged her to be strong and forget that the rape had happened.

When I think of the sexual abuse I endured as a child, my memories seem unreal. Though I know with certainty what I experienced, the memories themselves seem untrustworthy, as if I imagined them. They are eclipsed by what my mother told me to say about my experience, which became for me the more convincing story.

Stern’s book shines a light on the way survivors’ memories of trauma may be called into question, even by themselves. The author describes the memories she has of her rape in ways that I recognize. She writes,

I know that I was raped. But here is the odd thing. The memory feels a bit like a dream. It has hazy edges. Are there aspects of what I think I recall that I might have made up?

Just as Stern was influenced by authority figures to relegate her memory of the rape to the realm of dreams, I was led by my mother’s instructions that I remain silent, pretend that what was happening to me was not happening, and present to the world her made-up story of a good, wholesome family that had only my welfare at heart. Stern and I were both pushed to doubt the truth and deny its effects on us.

Stern’s book showed me that I am not alone in my effort to cope with the past. Others also struggle with their memories of childhood trauma. Reading Denial opened my eyes to three ways in particular that trauma survivors’ memories may be challenged by others, sometimes leading us to question them ourselves.

1. We may be taught to distrust our own senses.

The reactions of others to our reports of traumatic experiences may cause us to question the reliability of our own senses. Stern explains how this denigration of the survivors’ senses occurs.

When authorities disbelieve the victim, when bystanders refute what they cannot bear to know, they rob the victim of normal existence on earth. Bystander and victim collude in denial and forgetting, and in so doing, repeat the abuse. In this new world, the victim can no longer trust the evidence of her senses.

Survivors know we are not lying about what happened to us, but we may feel as if we are. We may feel that by telling our story, we are doing something shameful.

2. We may be pressured to deny that the trauma occurred.

That’s what happened to me. That’s what happened to Stern as well. She explains that her father encouraged her to exert her strength to overcome the trauma by denying to herself that she was raped. He directed her to become “stern and hard” in response to her experience. He told her that by doing so she would exercise “a kind of good breeding, a kind of moral fiber.” She was, according to her father, morally obligated to push the memories of the rape out of her mind.

Stern recalls, “I grew up in Concord — where drunks 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 an emblem of our moral character. We are pushed to project an ideal image of ourselves and our families to the world.

3. We may feel driven to view the victimized part of ourselves as an other, thus placing what happened to us outside the realm of our experience.

Stern writes about the effects of her efforts to extricate herself from her memories of the rape and assume an identity separate from them.

Talking about my rape would bring back to life a shameful side of myself that I had tried to deaden, that I had pronounced not me. I’m not just talking about the different roles one plays in life — parent, spouse, professional — and the way different parts of one’s character emerge in different roles. I am talking about the part of the self that is almost wholly other, a victimized and now despised Siamese twin that survived despite my effort to extrude it.

This separation of ourselves from our experience fractures our identity. When that happens, we may recognize our need for healing.

But Stern did not continue to live in her fractured state. She probed her memory and accepted the reality of what happened to her. She then worked with the FBI to identify the man who was likely her rapist, and made an effort to locate him in the hopes of questioning him in the same way she had interviewed terrorists during her career. She discovered, however, that he had died a few years before her search began, so she was unable to confront her rapist and gain, at least, confirmation of her memories. The point is, though, that she made the effort.

Ultimately, by writing her story, she defied her father’s imperative to deny what happened to her. And that is perhaps the most important message she sends to trauma survivors. We have a right to acknowledge the truth of what happened to us, no matter how much pressure we feel to remain silent. No matter how much others may want us to conceal or deny our experience. No matter how much we are 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.

Cover Image by Aimee Vogelsang on Unsplash