Remembering Trauma
Content Warning: suicide, drugs, childhood sexual abuse
I honestly don’t know if I am a survivor. I mean, I am a survivor of at least one trauma; at age 13, my father took his own life, and my childhood both. Naturally, my tween world fell apart. But the scary thing is, in a very literal way, it never really got put together again. From pretty much any time before my 15th birthday, when I believe my subconscious mind deemed that I was safe again, I have no memory. None at all. The fragments I do have I can almost always link to photographs or stories, a sort of second-hand concocted memory without the first-person grit of it all. As someone fairly knowledgeable about psychology, I know this is all that any memories ever are - recollections of recollections, mirrors reflecting mirrors. But the blank space I find when I reach into my past doesn’t fit what other people tell me is normal. I have no past, simply, my childhood was obliterated by my father’s final act. It’s a protective mechanism, of course, but as a safe and mature adult I’ve often wondered: brain, why are you still trying to protect me?
I began to have flashbacks when I was around 20. I was living overseas at the time, smoking some disgustingly low-quality weed, and generally having a great time. The first incident I remember happened just as Trump was elected, perhaps even the night of. I was walking home, obviously distraught, and I began to shake all over. My whole body rattled, getting worse with every step. I could barely walk, and almost fell down the extremely steep stairs that led to my flat. I was pretty seriously intoxicated, so don’t remember panicking, but as I lay in my bed and tried to sleep, an image washed over me.
A pathway, a wood, my father.
My mind balked and recoiled from the scene, but for whatever reason my psychic eye remained fixed. The emotional content was terrifying, a combination of fear and sadness and disgust, blended and huge. I was seven or eight in the memory, and I had no idea what was going on. That was the first time I considered that I might have been abused as a child, and that my memory blackout well predated, and was perhaps not even connected to, my father’s latter-day suicide.
The thought of the woods still frightens me, and I’ve never been able to get the image out of my head. The memory, if that’s what it is, turns my stomach even now as I write about it from the comfort of my room. There’s a montage of sensations when I think about that day, and they sometimes crash over me with irresistible force. But there’s always a point where they stop, at the crucial moment when I would be able to confirm or deny abuse, and I cannot progress past it. It is the great unanswered question of my life to date, but don’t think for a second I haven’t tried to find out. I have used therapy, meditation, word association, even psychedelic drugs to try and unlock the box that is my past; all to no avail.
There is a fundamental problem when it comes to recovered memories: how can you possibly know what’s real? My father is dead, anything that might have been done to me would have been done in complete secrecy, so I have no outside path to verification. Examples abound of therapists mistakenly implanting false memories, or more mundanely, of people recalling events that can be shown never to have occurred. The mind, as I conceive it, is not a static data recorder, but a strange kind of interpretive artist who cannot be trusted with the inputs it receives. Why this memory in particular, brain? Out of all of the countless moments of my lost years, this is what you present me with. Whilst my Dad was, ultimately, not a good man, there’s a general consensus that this isn’t the kind of thing he would’ve done. My mum certainly thinks so, and I believe her.
Why then, this image? Would later trauma inspire me to imagine earlier tragedy? Is my scarred brain concocting a worst-case scenario in order to save me from it (classic trauma)? Or, maybe, did something actually happen? I could be in denial; I just don’t know.
Honestly, I don’t believe I’ll ever know.
This essay started with me wondering if I was a survivor, but I suppose that wasn’t the right way to look at it. I am a survivor, regardless. Surviving the trauma of my father’s death was tough, but it was something final and controllable. It was an underlining, a full stop, whereas this flickering half-image leaves me with nothing but ellipses, brackets within brackets. Since that first flashback, and through its repetitions in years since, I have learned a new kind of survival. Before, I owned the narrative, made it part of me. I fought to weld it to my character in a way that made me stronger, more empathetic. I have often thought I would not change that event, as it has become so definitive of the person I am today. But this? I cannot own a narrative when I cannot even confirm or deny its existence, can’t square it with my worldview when it is so ineffable it’s hard to even describe. Through this, I have learned another kind of survival: acceptance. For me, and I want to stress this is just for me, I have found that continuing day to day requires a kind of inner work that has forced me to unlearn everything I used to know.
Surviving before meant control. Now, it means letting go.
I don’t know if this essay will be useful to anyone, but it has been useful to me. Writing about my experiences and making them public, oddly, always has been. But this time, I have made no effort to tell you exactly what happened, or how you should respond to it. Gladly, I’m past caring.
When I think about surviving, I’m often reminded of the serenity prayer. I won’t condescend to write it out, but I think it perfectly encapsulates the two ways that I have found to survive, and the dialectical relationship between them. Replace god with whomsoever you trust in the most. For me, it is myself.
I will never know what happened in those woods, I think, if anything at all. But it does not worry me anymore. We’re all survivors, in our own ways, and the more I grow the more I realise that no one walks without a weight upon their back. I hope everyone can find peace with theirs, if that’s what they want to do.
One day at a time eh? We will abide.
