Traumatic amnesia, scarifications, suicide attempts: the unvarnished account of a victim of incest

“We spent a few years in Mali, and we came back to the United States when I was seven. For the first few months, we lived in the same house as before we left for Africa. C t was probably at this time of my life, in this house, that I was able to forge my most terrifying memories. I remember my brother’s room, I remember the lies he told me to get me to come. I can remember the taste in my mouth, the smell in my nose, the light from his bedside lamp blinding my eyes. I had in my pantyhose. I remember the sadness that began to inhabit me, it’s still there today. Headaches and the smell of turnips cooking in the kitchen.

I don’t remember clearly what happened, my brain denies it. I only have my senses and my emotions to guide me. There is a beginning and an end, but there is no middle to this particular memory, as if my mind decided to leave at some point only agreed to come back later. I think this is traumatic amnesia. I know that these abuses had already started in Mali, maybe even before, but I don’t remember everything. For a long time, it was the fact of not knowing exactly that caused me the most problems. I didn’t feel victimized enough, I didn’t allow myself the right to suffer. There was a little voice in my head that kept whispering to me: “stop your cinema, Julie! “. This voice sounded strangely like my mother’s. Today, I accepted not to remember everything. Although I sometimes still have to fight with myself, I have partly accepted the fact that what I know is enough to feel “victimized” and to have the right to heal.

“At that moment I started hurting myself”

Later, we moved to a bigger house. I believe the abuse stopped at that point, although I can’t say for sure, I do know that’s when I started hurting myself. The first time I hurt myself, I wanted to be seen. I wanted to expose what I felt inside of me because I had hope that someone could help me. I had this idea that maybe I would be heard if I did something extremely shocking. And what could be more shocking – even extreme than trying to end your life? At the same time, I did not bring much importance to my life. Very quickly I came to the conclusion that my life was not worth living if it was to live with this incessant pain that I felt. This undoubtedly psychic pain was felt in an almost physical way. We can feel it when someone we love leaves us, or when we are grieving. It is both electric and haunting. We feel it deep in our hearts and our guts, it makes us want to cry and scream at the same time. Crying out in injustice and anger: “Why me? Why this ? “.

I have the impression of being in this same state, permanently, and always. Our survival instinct makes us understand that it can’t be permanent, that it’s unsustainable to live this way. So I’ve only ever really had two choices: help me get out of this pain, or die to escape it. So why not try to put his life on the line in hopes of finding out if someone will come to my rescue? In this context, coming close to death with each new attempt did not seem to me to be a major challenge. I never had the vocation to live with this pain, and it is still the case today. But today, as an adult and through the therapeutic work that I started, I no longer wait for someone to come and save me. My diagnosis coupled with the discovery of an appropriate therapy gives me hope of getting better and the pain is less noisy. Maybe because through my therapy I finally find what I’ve always been looking for: to be heard..

“All I wanted was to speak, to be understood”

The first time I hurt myself I tied a belt around my neck and squeezed really hard. My brother who was there went to get my mother. She punished me by slapping me. This is the first and the last time that I hurt myself without hiding. In the evening in my room, I regularly overdosed my medication just to see. As a child, I didn’t really know what was going to kill me or not. If I emptied my bottle of Ventolin in my mouth, would I still wake up tomorrow? I was taking risks, and I was ready to accept the consequences at the cost of my life. I was aware that something was wrong. I often implored my mother to take me to a psychologist. All I wanted was to speak, to be understood, to be heard, to be seen, well, for once. But that has always been out of the question; problems are solved in the family! At that time, it was impossible for me to verbalize the source of my suffering. Surely in a surge of protection, my brain had blocked all memories of abuse. It wasn’t until much later that my memory came back to me. I was an angry and very unhappy child, but maybe that didn’t show much…

(At this point in her story, Isabelle takes a break, Editor’s note)

… I continued to grow, and I arrived in adolescence. Around the age of 15, I started having extremely violent dreams in which I was being sexually abused by my father. It was also from this moment that I started to remember the abuse by my brother, but in a rather confused way. I did not understand why I dreamed of my father if it was my brother who had abused me. In reality, I have always suffered from a very cold relationship with my father. He wasn’t affectionate or demonstrative, he just wasn’t interested in me. I grew up with the idea that my father didn’t want me and that he didn’t love me. I understand today that we can speak of emotional abuse. Contrary to this, with my brother, thanks to my traumatic amnesia, we had developed an affectionate brotherly relationship. I don’t think I was able to accept my brother as my real abuser. I have long looked for extenuating circumstances for her, or I have long diminished what had happened at my expense in order to be able to continue to love her. It was infinitely simpler to tell myself that the monster in my life was my father. Maybe my brother molested me because he was molested by my father back, maybe my brother and I were both molested by my father. Or maybe none of this really happened. Maybe I was looking for reasons to go wrong to get attention. Maybe I was still making movies.

“I fell asleep thinking I would never wake up again”

It was also at this time that I started to scarify myself with razor blades, and that I made my first real suicide attempt in the literal sense of the term, that is to say with a real desire to end my life. I swallowed a good dose of medicine, I took whatever I found on hand. I did not go to the hospital because, in a moment of panic, I called a friend who helped me to make me vomit. Following this incident, I decided to flee to a friend whose mother agreed to take me in. I refused to go home until my mother agreed to let me see a psychologist. So I did a few sessions with a therapist who had been recommended to me by the mother of my friend with whom I was staying temporarily. I never really felt comfortable with this person, I felt like they were judging me or at least not taking me seriously. But I wanted so much to be able to confide, I had been waiting for this moment all my life. I wanted so badly to be able to trust him. After a few sessions I told him about the abuse I had suffered. I will always remember his answer saying in an almost contemptuous tone: “these are completely normal games between brothers and sisters, you have no reason to be traumatized”. These words resonated in my body like a shock. They awakened all the voices I had heard since my childhood. The voice of others, my own voice: stop complaining, stop finding problems, stop your cinema. It took me years to deconstruct them.

I continued to scarify myself and make suicide attempts. I remember once, I swallowed a whole box of anxiolytics that had been prescribed to me to fight against my insomnia. I fell asleep thinking I would never wake up again. I cried the next day when I opened my eyes. And then there was that other time, when I was in the middle of a meltdown and again contemplating a drug overdose, I called my best friend who was able to calm me down. She answered me “if one day you manage to end your life, I will never recover, my life will never be the same again”. There was something in his voice, in his tears. I felt that my life was important to him. I managed to live the years that followed without attempting suicide and without scarification.