Trauma and Memory

People who are in therapy -- and a lot of people who aren’t -- often question the value of discussing traumatic events in their past. It happened, goes the argument. You can’t change it,so why talk about it? What’s the point? Well, a new book by a woman who spent years blocking out memories of her own trauma, then threw herself into an in-depth investigation of it, makes a convincing case for how helpful it can be to examine troubling events from one’s past.

Denial: a Memoir of Terror, by Jessica Stern, is the author’s account of her and her sister’s rape at gunpoint in 1973 and the aftermath of that crime. For years Stern -- who was 15 when she and her sister were attacked by a stranger -- didn’t talk about the event, nor did members of her family. And, judging from her achievements, she did not appear to suffer lasting psychological harm; she earned a doctorate in public policy from Harvard, wrote noteworthy books on the subject of international terrorism, and became a respected academic in her field.

But in fact, Stern was suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder, a condition most people associate with wartime experiences and battlefield violence. At times, she was nervous -- frightened by crowds or upset by the sound of a ticking clock. At other times, when as an adult she faced real danger (such as when she was the victim of an armed robbery) her reaction was to go into a trancelike state. She had difficulty maintaining relationships with the loved ones in her life.

At some point in her life, however, Stern decided to address her past head-on. She started by requesting the police file on her rape, for which no one had ever been arrested. She ended up researching the rape and its circumstances as thoroughly and as professionally as any of her books or articles. When a police officer subsequently re-investigated the rape and identified the likely perpetrator -- he was a serial rapist who had since committed suicide -- Stern researched the rapist’s life, speaking to his friends and interviewing another of his victims. She interviewed her father, too, whose emotionless response to the rape colored her experience of it; traveling at the time of his daughters’ assault, he didn’t cut his trip short to come home but waited three days until his previously scheduled return date.

Stern’s dissection of her traumatic experience -- via both this research project and psychotherapy -- ultimately made her life more satisfying, in several ways. She found she had a greater capacity to be in a romantic relationship. She was able to understand her father, a Holocaust survivor, in a way she never had before. And she was more conscious of how her ordeal had shaped her -- how she had developed the skill of functioning coolly under great pressure, such as when, as an adult, she was interviewing terrorists in the field.

In other words, Stern’s self-examination -- this dredging-up of a long-ignored nightmare from her past -- has enabled a richer life in the present. As she writes in her book (in the context of her relationship with her father), “I do not believe in ‘forgive and forget.’ To forgive in the truest sense, we must remember first and then forgive....”