Indications: thirteen to fifteen
The traumatized self and the more-or-less-normal self
“The personality of traumatized individuals includes disruptions and discontinuities because the traumatic experience cannot yet be integrated fully as part of the person's own experience. As EP (Emotional Part), individuals typically remember too much too intensely, and as ANP (Apparently Normal Part) they remember too little of the traumatizing event.” -from The Haunted Self: Structural Dissociation and the Treatment of Chronic Traumatization, by Onno van der Hart, Ellert R. S. Nijenhuis, and Kathy Steele
Searching my memory for other signs I was abused in my childhood—abuse hidden by amnesia—I see several indications that something was wrong though nothing that was definitely caused by abuse.
I recall that I wet the bed. I might have been five or six or older. I suspect it happened many times, because I vaguely remember Billie taking me to a doctor for help.
I got headaches frequently, not terrible ones, and when I was around ten I got side aches which were worrisome enough that Billie and Rrg actually sat with me together on the sofa and considered whether or not to call a doctor. (The only memory I have of this care and collaboration.) Could it be appendicitis? No, the pain was on the wrong side.
Bed wetting, headaches, side aches—these are definite signs of stress. Thinking about them as an adult, I decided they were probably due to the stress of my parents fighting with each other before the divorce. Not an unreasonable explanation if you remember the fighting and don’t remember the abuse.
Another indication comes from a picture, a class photo from the end of the eighth grade school year when I was thirteen. (I believe the worst abuse occurred when I was twelve and thirteen.)
One of my very few memories of those years is from shortly before that picture was taken. We’re at graduation rehearsal in the church (I attended a Catholic school), and some boys are goofing off, and I guess I am too, because I say (I remember distinctly) “I feel like a zombie.” The teacher sends us to the principal’s office. The teacher and principal tell us they are doing the graduation ceremony for us, and don’t we appreciate it? They are hurt. It seems like the boys apologize and are sent off, but evidently I don’t--I vaguely remember (I think) that I didn’t believe I had done anything I needed to apologize for. But I don’t remember details, only that I start sobbing, and I cried for a long time.
The other girls and I were told to buy or make a long dress for the graduation ceremony. I picked a pattern for my dress and one of my aunts made it for me. A picture of the entire class was taken. Compared to the other girls, I’m dull and unsmiling. The dress seems to me now like something Mennonite women might wear. Stiff, and not particularly pretty like the other girls’ dresses. Oddly, it has a white pinafore over it. A pinafore is something small children used to wear to protect their clothes, similar to an apron.
And I chose that. The closest thing I could find to armor? Maybe. The unconscious works in symbols and metaphors. Like a message sent down over the years: “I am not interested in attracting anyone. I am interested in protection.”
🔻🔸🔺
When I was fourteen, I began my journal. My ninth grade English teacher had us bring in a spiral notebook and started us on the path of writing about ourselves. Amazingly, I still have that notebook, though I long ago left behind all other school papers and everything from childhood—aside from some pictures and a few gifts from my mother’s mother.
I read it to see what I can find, to see what I revealed, if anything, when I was fourteen and fifteen. It should be easy now, since I’ve read it perhaps as many as a dozen times over the years. So I keep insisting, but actually it never gets easier, it gets more difficult with each pass. I feel ugly sensations. My mind wobbles at times; my extremities tingle; my vision blurs. Sometimes I sneeze. I struggle to keep going as if against a tide or current.
Why? At its beginning, my journal depicts such an ordinary girl. I don’t see any darkness here. The early entries are classroom assignments for ninth grade. The second subject we’re supposed to write about is “School.” Here are some of the first words I wrote and kept:
Sept 4, 1973
School is a necessary requirement for the education of all intelligent morons. Is that not correct? In school we learn quotes:
Always take on more than you possibly can handle or you'll never do all you can. If life hands you a lemon, make lemonade. Most folks are about as happy as they make up their minds to be. There is no heavier burden than a great potential.
Those were just a few of the quotes strung out around the room. There are also a few remarks on a board marked GRAFFITI. My modest nature prevents me from doing a detailed analysis of such obscenities. I'm sure you understand.
At the moment my shifty eyes light on the United States of American flag. I am reminded of saying the pledge of allegiance each morning. I am deeply moved by the out of place thought that the pledge of allegiance is slightly, no, tremendously ridiculous. Now that I have favored you with my opinion I will leave my pen and take up my book "The Elusive Pimpernel" which happens to be the continuation of "The Scarlet Pimpernel". Before I leave you I would like to state another very American quote by J.L.Seagull: "Dream what you dare to dream, Go where you want to go, Be what you want to be, Live." If you are very American a thrill should run up your spine and etc. The End
See? No darkness. Just some naive, all-American positivity battling an emerging cynical awareness. I imagine there are many fourteen-year-olds who find the pledge of allegiance or inspirational writings “tremendously ridiculous.”
Ninth and tenth grade and the summers after are, apparently, good years and I remember more. I worked at a stable close enough to my house to ride my bike to—cleaning tack, feeding the horses, and mucking stalls in exchange for riding lessons. I did that for a year or so, and I loved it. Rgh had remarried and bought a house. His new wife cooked dinner, so I walked over to eat and to watch Star Trek. There was ice cream in their freezer and soda pop.
In the spring the teacher asks us to write about Favorites. I list my favorite movies, books, and activities and add this:
Mar 9, 1974
Favorites: Romeo and Juliet is one of those things that seems to put me apart from others. Most people my age went to the movie and loved it (some of them crying through the whole thing). As for me - I thought it was hilarious.
The next year, I chose to leave the Catholic school I had attended from first to ninth grade to go to the public high school.
🔸🔸🔸
In fact, for two years, one could read this journal and have no sense that there was and never had been anything traumatic in my life, or even anything difficult or unusual. At first, I have a minor crisis. The knowledge that I have with such difficulty unearthed, begins to crumble once again. Once again, it becomes unbelievable. How to square this cheerful, active girl who has friends and loves horses and books and movies with what I know about the previous years, the abuse which may still have been occurring at fourteen?
Rapes? Beatings? It doesn’t seem possible. At fourteen I’m just a normal kid having a normal middle-class life.
The thing is, this is exactly complex/developmental trauma. PTSD is, by definition, “post” traumatic, and there is usually a lapse—sometimes only weeks, but often years—where there are no obvious symptoms. That doesn’t mean there are no problems, just nothing obvious. It’s possible to seem normal and be productive even after the most horrible experiences if you’re good at dissociation. There is a terrible split in your self—a terrible injury. The more-or-less-normal self—what The Haunted Self calls the ANP (Apparently Normal Part)—is not aware of the traumatized self, and blithely moves forward.
🔸🔸🔸
But if I look closer, I see there are actually indications of hidden trauma.
Look at how I change high schools, leaving behind the classmates I’d known so long—many of them since first grade—without caring, apparently.
Also, look at what I write about Romeo and Juliet—not just that I thought that this depiction of a love of looks was shallow or unrealistic, but that I thought it was “hilarious.” Which suggests that it made me extremely uncomfortable—inappropriate hilarity, like boredom, is an indication of discomfort and avoidance.
Which might mean nothing until I realize that there is nothing in my journal or my memory about boys anywhere in my high school years. I never dated or wanted to date or imagined dating or even liked any boy. Nor did I have any fantasies about girls. And I wasn’t asexual; I know I masturbated. I didn’t wear makeup, was barely interested in clothes and my appearance. Really just despised all those things. I didn’t fantasize about marriage. The month I turned sixteen, I consider my future, what career I should pursue, what education I will need. I consider the possibility of marriage and having children, but I dismiss them both. I write:
August, 1975
Anyway, I don't think I could take the drudgery of raising children although I'm sure it's very rewarding.
. . . But since one doesn't - or at least shouldn't - plan on marrying just for the sake of being married I suppose we can put that idea aside for now and think of some different ways of life.
I don’t mean to say that my lack of normal interest in friends, boys, romantic love, marriage, and having children is proof of chronic sexual trauma. No, not proof, but taken all together they constitute strong evidence.
Looking again at that first journal entry in September, 1973, I wonder anew at my cynicism. It may be normal enough in itself to write: “the pledge of allegiance is slightly, no, tremendously ridiculous.” Or to mock inspirational writings. But I have continued throughout my life to be this way. I have never belonged to any group or believed in any religion or felt any allegiance to any place or organization. I have heard zillions of times about “the human need to belong’ and I have wondered what on earth people were talking about. What was this thing called belonging? Why did people like to hang out together? I read Oliver Sacks writing about the autistic Temple Grandin who said she felt like “an anthropologist on Mars.” I felt immediate recognition. (And considered whether I might be autistic, but I didn’t have other indications of autism.)
I read Sacks in my forties, in my quest to understand myself. In my teens I didn’t try to understand my differences. I just called myself a loner and assumed that was the way I was, that I was innately different. Even that this “unconventionality” of mine was superior to the conformity or boy-craziness or shallowness of others.
But now I see that there were, at fourteen and fifteen, indications. I understand now that when I was very young I was affectionate and longed to love and belong as much as any human being. Only after repeated hurt did I learn—perhaps irrevocably—to fear people, all people. I put up a defensive shield which I still carry today. I feel it even at this moment as a nearly constant painful tension in my body.
🔸🔸🔸
It may go without saying, but I’ll point out that each child takes a different route in their reactions to abuse—branching into different lives, different dysfunctions, different achievements. Some become much more dysfunctional than I did, perhaps because they haven’t dissociated as thoroughly. And some who are sexually abused are still able to form close relationships, desire and nurture children, and succeed at careers. It astonishes me how well some people do after being hurt and betrayed so badly. If we go back to Sylvia Fraser (author of the memoir of incest and amnesia, My Father’s House), she didn’t have children, but she tells how the first decade of her adult life (after rocky teen years) was idyllic.
I loved my husband. I enjoyed my job. We had a marriage brightly woven out of affection, mutual respect, some material wealth, shared memories, good friends. For a dozen years, life was everything I dreamt it could be. I devoured it.
So phenomenally lucky! I can only imagine. But then, she writes:
Depression begins seeping like poisonous fog through the cracks in my life. In the past when I was down, I was able to look to specific causes. Now the sun is shining, but I am slipping into the shadows. Increasingly, all I want to do is weep.
🔸🦎🔸
See my Resources page for links to more information about dissociative amnesia.