Faith Born of Seduction. Jennifer L Manlowe
extremes described by patients with multiple personality disorder.73 A well-integrated self based upon a whole, stable experience becomes extremely elusive for a woman who has been sexually assaulted and objectified. Instead, her own viewpoint is splintered. She may see herself from the perpetrator’s perspective. Her “good” self is an innocent memory (herself prior to the trauma). Her “evil” self is the introjected perpetrator. This splintered experience or divided self-construction is inscribed into her sexuality and is central to the psychological “disorders” to which many survivors are prone, including multiple-personality disorder, borderline personality disorder, depression, and eating disorders.74
Broken Narrative
Many survivors have difficulty not only remembering their history but coherently assessing their past. Thus, under the conditions of chronic abuse, fragmentation becomes the central principle of personality organization. Fragmentation in consciousness prevents the ordinary integration of knowledge, memory, emotional states, and bodily experience. Though all the survivors interviewed were able to graduate from college, most felt that their ability to be fully attentive in school was severely hindered by their preoccupation with trying to solve double-binds: “If he loves me, why does he abuse me,” or “My family looks normal from the outside, what’s wrong with me on the inside?”
A pastiche of inner representations of the self prevents the unification of identity. Such a shattered consciousness is discerned through listening to the survivor’s attempt to recall her history. Natalie offers an example of how difficult it is to have full memory regarding an intolerable betrayal by both parents.
One cognitive memory I have—I think this is kind of where my memory is cut—I remember being in bed with my dad, and I think my mom was on the other side of me, I was between my mom and my dad. And—and I’m not sure that my mom was there, but I know that my dad and I were in my dad’s bed, in my dad’s room—[they had separate bedrooms]—and I remember his hand being on my stomach, and it was—it was not right on my tummy, what—I called my tummy then, it was too far down. And I remember thinking, “Oh, my God, he’s just an inch from my vagina,” you know. I remember feeling that, you know, that—that—kind of terror. Then the memory cuts off.
I use the term broken narrative75 to describe this phenomenon. A broken narrative is a sense of being able to summon only parts of a scene from one’s past, like having access to only a single frame or two rather than access to an entire film.
Melinda reveals a kind of psychic amnesia76 when she talks about living with her family: “I don’t have many memories of being with my family. I don’t remember sitting at a table. I don’t remember eating with my family until high school. I have no memory. I was really like a walking skeleton. Our house was like Dickens’ Bleak House. Ironically, that was one of three books we had in our house.” When trust is lost, traumatized people feel that they belong more to the dead than to the living.77 Especially when abuse is chronic, the person may find the notion of death (severing from their lived reality) comforting.
Recurring Trauma
“How did the abuse affect you even when it wasn’t happening in the moment?”
According to Melinda,
At age four, I started having this recurring sort of night trauma. Whenever I would be trying to fall asleep, everything would start flipping and spinning, it was very internal. And it was this terrible thing—and it was uncontrollable. I couldn’t stop it, I couldn’t breathe, I was paralyzed, I couldn’t move.
Melinda described her night terrors and claimed at times she could “hear things.” At other times she told me she could see things: “At that point it felt so real I thought it was the real thing and it was always a man coming into my bedroom. I would feel an intense fear.” Melinda lived with that fear from age four until age forty, at which point she found a medical doctor (and practicing psychologist) who in her words, “understood and was able to help me.” She was able to reexperience memories of her abuse in the presence of an empathic listener. Melinda says, “Since I started seeing her [four years prior to the interview] I rarely have this flipping and spinning stuff.”
Stephanie had dreams of her grandfather trying to kill her. She recalled:
He was an engineer so he had a lot of electrical equipment and blippy things and stuff like that in his little workroom where we slept. To this day I wake up in a cold sweat remembering the terror. I still get panic attacks when I feel those evil eyes staring at me. I can remember the fear—the fear was especially horrible at night. I would imagine monsters coming. I could see—I actually hallucinated almost—monsters.
To this day Stephanie cannot see scary movies, or read scary books because she “becomes disoriented.” She told me, “I lose my sense of who I am. It’s almost like being the same terrified little girl that I was with my grandfather and I have to leave and pull myself together. I have to find a place where I can’t even hear it going on, I can’t hear the music, anything occult just drives me totally back.”
Janine told me of a period in her life when she would wake up in the middle of the night, “because I truly felt a dangerous presence in my room. I could hear my father’s voice say, ‘Shut up you bitch.’ “Such night sounds occurred right around the first year that Janine had started believing that she was an incest survivor. She said, “I felt I was being tyrannized by his spirit to keep quiet . . . and he wasn’t even dead. I rarely slept through the night that year.”
According to Judith Herman, many symptoms of post-traumatic stress disorder fall into three main categories: hyperarousal, intrusion, and constriction,78 Hyperarousal reflects the persistent expectation of danger; intrusion reflects the indelible imprint of the traumatic moment; constriction reflects the numbing response of surrender.79 “People with post-traumatic stress disorder . . . have an elevated baseline of arousal: their bodies are always on the alert for danger . . . they take longer to fall asleep, are more sensitive to noise, and awaken more frequently during the night than ordinary people. Thus traumatic events appear to recondition the human nervous system.”80 PTSD, as noted previously, is a result of more than the sexually abusive events. Such traumatic symptoms are socially sustained as long as a survivor feels unsafe, is watched in a voyeuristic way, or feels vulnerable to further attack. Living in a patriarchal and violent culture where one in three women is raped at least once in her lifetime means a survivor must face a traumatic context daily, simply because she is female.81 Her fears are not without justification. She is not paranoid.
Isolation/Suicidality
“How did you feel carrying around this secret of being abused by a trusted family member?”
For most of Natalie’s childhood she blocked the traumatic experience from her memory. However, she could not avoid the memory of molesting her own brother when she was ten and he was five. Such an experience confirmed Natalie’s (offender inflicted) sense of shame: “This felt like total proof that I was a horrible person that I could do something so awful. I felt like, I’m perverted in some way, that I’m stained, that I’m no good, that I’m horrible, that I’m a bad person, and that I’ve got this gunk inside of me, this like blackness, this rottenness.” Several times Natalie referred to a “rottenness inside of me that I am to blame for.” Clearly, she has internalized the perpetrator’s messages and protects him by identifying with his guilt through acting it out.
Renita also articulates the internalized shame of the perpetrator. Such feelings of guilt and shame are taken in through the abuse itself.
After my brother molested me I felt that something just happened to me that I can’t tell anyone about. And that changed my relationship with everybody, because now I could never be a part of someone, I am always going to be separate or I am not going to be in one [an intimate relationship]. I mean, no one would want