Unrecovered Memories

Posted on July 29, 2002 in PTSD Reflections

I’ve never been a fan of recovered memories. I don’t believe in them. The idea of going out and buying a tragic life from a willing therapist seems the height of crass commercialism to me and a belittlement of the real pain that I and many of my friends feel. I hate it when some people go rolling out their “past” like a heavily retouched wallet photo. “Recovered memories” seem gruesomely unreal because they are unreal. They are store bought, picked up in shopping malls like copies of Sybil or video tapes of The Three Faces of Eve. They appeal to people who are mental-illness wannabes.

A dear friend of mine who does online peer counseling told me of a young woman who claims that her life has been one unending stream of sexual abuse. The give-a-way is that when she describes each of the incidents she goes into excruciating, pornographic detail. She enjoys talking about it like some people enjoy showing off their baseball card collection or their web sites. Her infatuation with her self-created imaginary life is so intense and garrulous that the local rape crisis hot line hangs up when she calls. This particular woman is also bipolar. Her sickness manifests in the form of these bizarre and intricate stories that she just can’t stop herself from telling.

I do not mean to imply that you must discount abuse stories told by people who suffer from mental illness. The parents of such people often felt frustrated by their child’s “eccentricity” and “madness”. They followed pseudo-Biblical injunctions to apply the rod. By doing so, they managed to spoil the child’s ability to feel anything remotely like happiness and caused them to feel a lot of things very much like fear.

I know that things were done to me in the name of “discipline” and I can almost tell you what they were. One can say, I suppose, that my parents and older brother only did what they thought was best. For the record, I often told them that what they were doing was hurting me too much. I remain uncertain. The best I can honestly do is give them the benefit of the doubt, but not complete exoneration. I suspect too strongly that selfishness ruled their motives. They didn’t entirely and unconditionally love me.

The things that distinguish me and every other real victim of abuse from the tragedy consumers include, first, a lack of pretense about “forgetting” the crap that was done to us. As many a friend has put it to me and as I put it myself “You don’t forget that shit.” I would love to be able to peel off the replays of those times when my father chased me with one of the half-inch thick dowels that we used to use to secure the sliding glass windows against burglars or my mother digging her fingernails into my wrist until the skin flaked up and blood flowed just a little bit. Some turn to alcohol, drugs, or other extreme pleasures in an attempt to erase such horror videos. I hide in my bed. It may be that homosexuality is sometimes a response to having been abused. Such victims of sexual abuse turn to their own sex because they are afraid of the other one or they want assurance that people of their own sex can be kind. There is a safe tenderness about it: soft kisses, hugs, and cuddles. Promiscuity is another behavior that sometimes erupts after abuse, especially sexual abuse. I’ve known a few rape victims, very prim and proper women, who became barflies looking for Mr. Goodbar. I’m not exactly sure of the cognitive dynamic in these cases. It’s not clear whether they are just punishing themselves “for having succumbed” or “allowed it” or if they’ve detected the faint, terrible pleasure of sex and must repeat it in a desperate search for genuine affection from another. Women who have been raped often give off mixed signals: “Love me. Don’t touch me. Love me. Don’t touch me. Love me. Let’s fuck.” After learning the history of just a few of these, the word “slut” no longer appears outside of quotes in my vocabulary. I suspect untold histories in the lives of those who frequent sex chat rooms. I don’t approve, I don’t think the behavior is good for them, but I forgive them. I’m not damning them to hell.

Just to make things perfectly clear, I was never sexually abused. What was done to me by my nuclear family was bad enough, but none of them ever did that to me.

A second mark of distinction that distinguishes real victims of abuse from the psychological supermarket poseurs is that we don’t like to talk about it. And when we do, we stick to the barest facts: “He used to beat me.” “She burned my wrists with her cigarettes.” “He raped me.” You don’t hear the details when the victim “confesses”. The survivor wants to get through it, like people who are sick to their stomach want to get to the toilet and throw up. They see the half digested peas and carrots, but the thing they want most is to get it all out and flush.

Pain from memories never goes away because the memories are always in there and we know it. They might sit like an insignificant snowflake on a hillside, but one good gust of a reminder and they quickly pile up into an avalanche. You don’t forget this crap. It lurks. I’d give anything short of electro-shock treatment (which some must have) and pre-frontal lobotomy to be able to repress the crap I remember.

A third feature is related to the second. Pain erases our ability to talk about it effectively. Literature professor Elaine Scarrey studied Amnesty International eyewitness accounts of torture as literary artifacts and compared them to reports by people who suffered in chronic pain. What she discovered was a point where the only thing the sufferer could say was “Aaaarrrrrrgh!” She concluded that pain destroys language, the ability to speak. I believe that my own fascination with words and books comes from a desire to control my experience, the right to express things that I witnessed that was denied me during my life as a dog. (My father used to call the dog his “only good boy” when he wanted to torment me emotionally. “Look, Bingo,” he’d say. “That’s a baaaaaaaad boy. You’re a good boy.” Some people thought this was funny.) The only way I can even begin to refer to past and present suffering is to factualy describe the triggering incidents. They might make you wince. I’m glad if it does because that communicates something. But the wince and the metaphors I employ cannot firmly describe to you the awful feeling. It’s like the famous altar panel by Mathis Grunewald of St. Anthony being attacked by all those demons the artist seems to have found during his walks in German forests. And it’s nothing like that at all.

How the fourth characteristic is expressed depends on your answer to this question: “Can anyone else possibly understand this pain?” Some of us have had abusers who neatly condition us not to talk about it. The silence is reinforced by their ability to hide their second life and the complicity of relatives who may suspect, but do nothing, or deny any evil. These include people who tell you how hard a life the abuser had and how things are so much better for you. They also include many people who, like members of my family, who have partisan explanations for your suffering: my dad’s family liked to blame me on my mother, my mother’s family on my father. Relatives can begin to look like co-conspirators in the abuse or thieves who steal the niceness that your parent is capable of, leaving you with the meanness. You come under a lot of pressure, most of it well-intentioned, to keep family secrets. So you don’t talk to anyone. You don’t pick up that you’re not alone.

You may begin to talk about it anyways. Then you must face a new hurdle that comes when you discover that others suffer, too. You may choose to believe that none of these people who have been through the pain machine — not your buddy in a peer support group, not your fellow family members, not even Sybil — had it as bad as you did. Or you meet people who are very fond of telling you stories that they feel trumps yours entirely in an effort to make you feel uncertain about your right to feel badly at all.

These behaviors and experiences define what I call an “ignorant state”. You feel them because you haven’t understood your feelings yet. You live in the belief that with recreational drugs, alcohol, estatic religious behavior, compulsive Internet chatting, sheer power of will, etc., you can control the Beast. You tell yourself that you don’t have to put up with these invading feelings. You remain unhappy because the Beast keeps chewing at you anyways, dominant until you face the fact that while you can tame it slightly, you can’t cage it or make it leave forever. You have to learn to live with it.

Just as Scarrey found parallels between torture victims and cancer victims, I, too, have noted parallels within myself, between the depressive and the fellow with serious dental problems. I’ve had eighteen root canals. The first happened when I was sixteen years old. FIve years ago, I underwent deep cleaning. That’s when they sedate you, slice open your gums so that the roots are exposed, and scrape away all the plaque that has worked its way deep into your mouth. A lot of things came together to bring me to this state: my depression was one; my learned feelings of worthlessness another; my fear of spending money and not having it for things that gave me more pleasure; my belief that I had to show that I was tough; my other belief that I was being punished by God for sins that I had not yet recognized; the fatalism I acquired from my mother’s stories of my grandmother’s terrible teeth; and the idea that my mouth wasn’t worth saving anyways because my permanent teeth had been yellowed by tetracycline, something that other kids discovered and picked on me about after the full set grew in.

My sister-in-law has had more root canals than I have. Her problem is more direct and understandable for some people: she fell on her face and damaged the nerves. She’s been through all kinds of dental and neuro-surgery to correct her problem. None has succeeded. She lives on Percodan, because for her there is no other relief. She is one of the very few people I know whose doctor has told them not to quit smoking: the added stress would just be too much. Some close to me will point to Jessie and say, in an attempt to make me feel better, “See. It could be worse.” Or they suggest that maybe I have invented much of my personal pain.

Jessie doesn’t do that. We believe in each other’s pain. Everyone who I know who admits that he or she is sick — whether it is a superficially subtle mental illness like depression or bipolar disorder; or acute and viral like Lyme Disease; or something that regards rigorous treatment like breast cancer; or something that it is utterly impossible to cure like fibromyalgia or arthritis — trusts most reports of pain they hear from others. We’re members of a select group, you see. None of us wants it to grow. We don’t wish what we have on you. We like you healthy, though sometimes we pity you because you don’t know how heroic an effort each of us must make to just stay active with what we have. We fear for those who have never suffered but will suffer, because you really have no idea of what it is like to feel debilitated. We are powerless over our pain. More than anything else, we have to stop ashamed for having it.

I have learned not to feel guilty about my hurts when I meet a quadriplegic. I don’t discount the fear of a child who howls because he has scraped his knee. I am constantly learning new things about the etiology of my pain. Many things pull at the loose ends of the suffocating tourniquet I seem to have around my neck. My pain is personal. You can’t see mine and I can’t see yours. There is no need for us to try to out hurt others. Often the physical symptoms aren’t very spectacular or even evident at all except as ugly little things like our failure on some days to bathe or comb our hair. To my fellow victims and my fellow sufferers of pain, I have this to say: I believe that you hurt. I know it won’t just go away, especially if it is mental or otherwise chronic. I know that the best you can do, much of the time, is not make it worse. And that there are plenty of people who will make it worse for you. Avoid them. Be good to yourself. You won’t forget the things these pseudo-Samaritans do in the name of helping you. When it does cause you grief, just quietly say these two words to yourself: It hurts.

The best way to handle the life that gets thrust upon you by biology and society is to tell the truth to yourself about the ache to yourself, to your therapist, and to those you love. It’s important to understand that some things that seem very unimpressive to others can make you scream in the night. Let no one invent memories for you because the ones you have don’t seem good enough to justify the expense of the medications and the therapy. Even if your parents didn’t sexually molest you; even if they did not subject you to bizarre and extreme tortures; even if they didn’t make you watch as your best friend was sacrificed to Satan; even if they didn’t use drugs or drink like a fish: there are still many ways that they could have been cruel. There is no need to buy a numbing memory from a therapist who is all too eager to write a best seller or make a name in the field for her or himself. Look at yourself as calmly as you can. In this stillness, you will be able to tell the truth. And that’s the first step to living with yourself and the suffering you accrue as you go through life.