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Denial: A Memoir of Terror

Book by Jessica Stern · 4 quotes · Trauma, Denial, Fear

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Denial: A Memoir of Terror Quotes

“In the moment a person is broken by terror, she is more easily seduced into muffling others. You will move up in the world if you only follow orders. If you sell out your sister. If you muzzle her. . . This is what most rape victims do. They muffle themselves. . . This time, I will not be muffled. I will lacerate the ear of God. I will wail wildly: 'How could You let this happen?!”

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“— he said don't call police. I promised I wouldn't. — it would make us in more trouble. — he left. We heard car. I remember this part, too. I told Sara he was right; we shouldn't call the police. Somehow, even then, I felt him as a victim. I told her that they would put him in prison, that prison would not reform him: It would make him worse. Was this a kind of Stockholm syndrome? Does it happen that fast, in the space of an hour? Sara was more afraid than I, but also more alive. She picked up the phone. No dial tone. He had cut the wires. How would a rapist have time to cut the phone wires or know where to find them in the dark, dank basement? How long had he been in the house? How long had he been plotting this crime? "He kept saying he wouldn't hurt us. He kept saying to listen, to be quiet." I was quiet. I listened. I'm still listening now. I hear a rush, in my mind's inner ear, of insistence. A kind of aural premonition, but a kind of premonition that goes both backward and forward, the soundless protest of all the raped, shamed, and silenced women from the beginning to the end of time. 'He hurt you, he altered you forever,' the chorus soundlessly insists, grating on my inner ear — the ear that wishes not to be reminded of feeling. I respond to that chorus: 'Hurt' is not the right word for what that man did to me. I feel a void. Something got cut out of me in that hour — my capacity for pain and fear were removed. There is no more tender flesh. It's quite liberating to have feeling removed, the fear and pain of life now dulled. Nabokov once said, 'Life is pain.' Buddhists, too, believe that to live is to crave and to crave is to feel pain. Had I not been catapulted, in that one hour, halfway to death, and therefore closer to enlightenment? Later, of course, I would come to reject this understanding of what happened to me that day. Yes, I was partly released from the pain of being alive. But my spirit had traveled, not toward the infinite divinity of enlightenment, but toward the infinite nothingness of indifference. Instead of fear, I felt numb. Instead of sadness, I experienced a complete absence of hope. Indifference is a dangerous disease. 'He kept saying to listen, to be quiet.' I have listened, and I have been quiet all my life. But now I will speak.”

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“This book is a memoir - not of specific life events, but of the processes of dissociation, and of re-enlivening emotions that are shameful to admit or even to feel. It is an account of the altered states that trauma induces, which make it possible to survive a life-threatening event but impair the capacity to feel fear, and worse still, impair the ability to love.”

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