Читать книгу Faith Born of Seduction - Jennifer L Manlowe - Страница 28

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.