Survivors' Voices: Memories, Part 2
A few more reflections on the topic of memories, from those who have experienced abuse by a Catholic leader:
There were definitely things I didn't remember in the immediate aftermath of the abuse. I remembered the more recent things from my last two months in religious life, which were more obviously wrong on the surface, but I couldn't really remember the first ten months. The memories were fuzzy and imprecise. It wasn't until four years later that - all of the sudden - memories started flooding back. I'd been helping my friend and roommate process her own PTSD as a result of sexual assault by a seminarian; I'd held up for a while, but eventually my own traumatic memories started surfacing in specific, excruciating detail and I was a wreck. I started having panic attacks and dissociating. Up until that point, I'd thought those first ten months in religious life were okay - good, even - but then suddenly I was realizing they were really bad. The layers of abuse and betrayal of trust I'd experienced during that time... The whole experience of memory flooding shook me up really badly. If I can't trust myself to remember things accurately, then how can I trust I know what's real and what's not? It's incredibly disorienting and distressing to have to question your whole reality.
Although my memories are still upsetting to me, my reaction to them has softened. It is much easier to talk about them. I have close friends who continue to support me through this, as my abuse case is active. I am, however, very guarded when it comes to who I share my past with. I have found out who my support people are and most importantly, who they are not. It's not something you can just "get over.” It takes time and more time. I have a close friend who doubts my abuse... I haven't talked to her since she shared her opinion.
During the first few months after I left the abusive situation I was in, I was working with a new therapist (“L”). I'd been convinced by my abusers that I had an eating disorder, so I wanted L - who was vehement that I didn't have an eating disorder - to talk to the previous therapist (one of my abusers, although I didn't recognize that yet) so she could understand better what the previous therapist had been seeing. When L expressed concern to the previous therapist about some of the things I'd said about my experience while I was in the abusive situation, my old therapist said "I don't think that's what happened." After that conversation (which L told me about), I felt that L no longer believed me the way she had before. Heck, *I* didn't believe me. I felt like I couldn't trust my reality and felt that I'd made everything up, like I didn't remember things accurately - and L didn't help. A while later, when I asked her for a letter stating that I didn't have an eating disorder - because a canon lawyer had encouraged me to submit a complaint to Rome - L backed off her initial vehemence and hedged. "Well, there were no signs you had an eating disorder at the time I saw you, but I can't speak to whether you had one before." It was devastating.
My memories are brutally honest and very cruel. I wrote everything down to process and help me understand the depth of my trauma. My poetry describes the horror I experienced as a 9 and 10 year old, and it is very dark, yet I needed to write to survive. For me, I needed to see the words on paper to realize the level of trauma inflicted on my innocent body. I had many, many months of body memories also, and there was a lot of emotional and physical pain that went along with them. My therapist and spiritual director were with me during much of this difficult work. I am so grateful to them for their guidance.
It's really shocking how much context matters with memories of abuse. You can think something is excusable or normal until you hear someone else tell their experience or until you come across a similar situation in different context, and truly realize how messed up it was. Case in point, I never realized how cruel the campus minister was at my university until my husband became an administrator at a school-- he would be fired, or be justly facing a lawsuit, if he did any one of a number of things this guy had pulled (not even touching on the sexual exploitation that eventually happened).
I remember. Every day, I remember. Year after year now, I remember. That’s the whole thing. It’s a dark weight attached to me: even after a lot of therapy and healing, the memories remain. People around me don’t know, or haven’t thought of it in a long time, or are choosing not to remember. This is a luxury I do not have. When I visited another church recently, I thought the priest seemed to have an empathetic take on the scandal of the church abuse crisis–until he finished his sentence with the phrase “a long time ago.” In his view, the bad time was a thing of the past, a sad but distinct era. But my memory won’t let me tell these easy lies, nor accept them from others.
Thank you for listening to these stories. I will be back with the November Reading Roundup in a week - or as soon as I actually get caught up on on the news. :)
In the meantime, I wish you a Thanksgiving holiday full of love and gratitude.
Peace,
Sara