Denial Quotes

“Some people's lives seem to flow in a narrative; mine had many stops and starts. That's what trauma does. It interrupts the plot. You can't process it because it doesn't fit with what came before or what comes afterward. A friend of mine, a soldier, put it this way. In most of our lives, most of the time, you have a sense of what is to come. There is a steady narrative, a feeling of "lights, camera, action" when big events are imminent. But trauma isn't like that. It just happens, and then life goes on. No one prepares you for it.”
― Jessica Stern, Denial: A Memoir of Terror

“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.”
― Jessica Stern, Denial: A Memoir of Terror

“I can still bring into my body the joy I felt at seeing the first trillium of spring, which seemed to be telling me, "Never give up hope, spring will come.”
― Jessica Stern, Denial: A Memoir of Terror

“How much of what we think of as an admirable response to trauma - the "stiff upper lip" - is actually dissociation, the mind's attempt to protect us from experiences that are too painful to digest? I can recall the facts, at least some of them. But I don't feel very much. At least, the feelings I have are not kind. They are not sympathetic toward my fifteen-year-old self. It happened. It happens to a lot of women. I survived. Most women do. I am "strong," but in those moments of strength, I don't feel. I will admit that I am very afraid of one thing. Not just afraid. Ashamed. I am afraid that I am incapable of love.”
― Jessica Stern, Denial: A Memoir of Terror

“I have listened and I have been quiet all my life. But now I will speak.”
― Jessica Stern, Denial: A Memoir of Terror

“I often feel like nobody," Skip says. "I ask myself: Why would you want to talk to me? Why would anyone want to talk to me? It comes on me suddenly, this feeling that I'm not anything...a person who has spent a lot of time in bed, who doesn't want to be anything."

I know what he is talking about, and this time, I tell him that. For years, I could not understand why anyone took me seriously. I could not understand how I managed to get into MIT or Harvard, why anyone would offer me a postdoctoral fellowship or a job. I could not understand why people kept turning to me after September 11. I didn't see myself as a person who couldn't get out of bed, but as a salesgirl in a coffee shop - the job I had as a teenager who was afraid to apply to college. My identity was stuck there for year.

"Inside me there is the person who wants to be dead," he says. "I can't advocate for myself. I can advocate very strongly for others, but not for myself...Sometimes I'm not sure that I exist. Is this really me - this person whom people want to consult about clergy sexual abuse? Or am I really the person who can't get out of bed? I've gotten better - I spend more of my time living in the present. But it takes a lot of effort to stay in the present - a lot of yoga and meditation.”
― Jessica Stern, Denial: A Memoir of Terror

“I must have wondered if the police were right, if the entire story was a figment of my imagination. This is the worst impact of severe trauma: the victim loses faith in the evidence of her own senses. And this is the great gift Paul Macone gave to me. He believed what I told the police back then. He believed me enough to try to solve the case, and he did.

Perhaps because I've sought out evil in this world, attempting to understand and tame it, I am particularly moved by goodness. There is a light that animates an act of generosity, when a person is kind - not to call attention to his own goodness, or to make a pact with God, but just because he feels it's right. I see this light in Paul Macone. Still, his kindness is almost too much to bear. I feel shy around him, despite this conversation. I even feel shy writing this down.”
― Jessica Stern, Denial: A Memoir of Terror

“Denial helps the bystander. We don't want to know what the boys we send to Iraq have done to others out of terror, or what others have done to them. We would rather not know about terror or be confronted with evil. This is as true about Abu Ghraib as it is about person assaults and more private crimes, the crimes that occur inside families.

But the victim, too, cannot bear to believe. She may bury or dissociate from or disown her pain...to be raped or abused or threatened with violent death; to be treated as an object in a perpetrator's dream, rather than the subject of your own - these are bad enough. But when observers become complicit in the victim's desire to forget, they become perpetrators, too.

When authorities disbelieve the victim, when bystanders refute what they cannot bear to know, they rob the victim of normal existence on the earth. Bystander and victim collude in denial or forgetting, and in so doing, repeat the abuse. Life for the victim now begins anew. In this new world, the victim can no longer trust the evidence of her senses. Something seems to have happened, but what? The ground disappears. This is the alchemy of denial: terror, rage, and pain are replaced with free-floating shame. The victim will being to wonder: What did I do? She will being to believe: I must have done something bad. But the sensation of shame is shameful itself, so we dissociate that, too. In the end, a victim who has suffered the denial of others will come to see herself as a liar.”
― Jessica Stern, Denial: A Memoir of Terror

“What is courage?" I ask. "Bearing witness. That is a form of courage.”
― Jessica Stern, Denial: A Memoir of Terror

“After a series of traumas, one can lose the capacity to feel fear appropriately.”
― Jessica Stern, Denial: A Memoir of Terror

“People say that rape is not sex, that it's violence," Lucy says, bitterly. "But it's also sex. You can't get around that," she says. "he didn't run me over with a car. He had sex with me. You're not supposed to do that. You're not supposed to have sex with an eighth-grader. You're not supposed to have sex when you're in eighth grade. It was very intimate. You can't get around it. This part of the body," she says, gesturing from her heart to her lower abdomen, though I understand she means to indicate her vagina. "If you're sitting around with a group of women, talking about various traumas, someone will say, I got beaten by my mother. But if you say, I got raped, it's a different thing."

I wonder if that is true. Is rape really the worst sort of violation? I'm not sure. I often wonder why it matters whether we're penetrated or not. There is the pain, but the pain doesn't last. The shame does.”
― Jessica Stern, Denial: A Memoir of Terror

“I believe the best revenge is to live.”
― Jessica Stern, Denial: A Memoir of Terror

“Here is what I think now, reading what I wrote down for the police at age fifteen, right after I was raped. I was a good girl. Always a good girl, even when I was bad. I did my homework. If I can only be good enough, someone will eventually notice that I am trying so hard, exhausting myself with my effort to be good. This is true even today.”
― Jessica Stern, Denial: A Memoir of Terror

“Why does the threat of violent death alter some of us, even if subtly, forever? Why does it make us unusually numb or calm when we ought to feel terrified? Why do scents or sounds trigger in some of us a feeling of terror or unbearable dread, even in situations where we know, at least, intellectually, that we are perfectly safe?”
― Jessica Stern, Denial: A Memoir of Terror

“My breathe would catch at the sight of violets-so common in the woods at home, so surprising in the mountains. The violet's message was "Keep up your courage, stay true to what you believe in." p264”
― Jessica Stern, Denial: A Memoir of Terror

“That man penetrated me with his shame. Shame, I realize now, is an infectious disease. Shame can be sexually transmitted.”
― Jessica Stern, Denial: A Memoir of Terror

“But in the mountains, I was forgiven. And my dad was forgiven, too.”
― Jessica Stern, Denial: A Memoir of Terror

“When I asked my father whether he thought that it was possible that his mother was raped behind that closed door, he said, "She had washer-woman knees. No one could possibly think of her as a sexual object. Besides," he explained, "she would have told my sisters, and they would have told me." I am not so sure. Maybe someone needed to ask her. Someone needed to want to know, to be able to hear the answer.”
― Jessica Stern, Denial: A Memoir of Terror

“In the moment that a person's life is threatened, the separation of thought and feeling may be necessary to sustain life. But this separation can become a habit, and when it does, we are only half-alive.”
― Jessica Stern, Denial: A Memoir of Terror

“Denial helps the bystander. . . We would rather not know about terror or be confronted with evil. . . But the victim, too, cannot bear to believe. She may bury or dissociate from or disown her pain. She may drink or take drugs, or become unwittingly promiscuous. Compelled to repeat the violation again and again. . . The impact of the violation drips lazily down, like that clock in Dalí's painting, pooling in the form of shame. She may remember the facts that transpired, but the outline is blurry. There is a haze in the brain, and the facts are detached from feeling.

Certain sounds or scents may terrify the victim. But she may not notice her fear. . . For a very long time, I had forgotten or dissociated or forgotten the source of my terrors.

To be raped or abused or threatened with violent death, to be treated as an object in a perpetrator's dream, rather than the subject of your own – these are bad enough. But when observers become complicit in the victim's desire to forget, they become perpetrators, too.

This is why traumatized groups sometimes fare better than traumatized individuals. When the feeling of terror is shared, victims have a harder time forgetting what occurred or denying their terror. In the camps, what mattered most. . .was whether there were witnesses willing to share the burden of overwhelming emotion. Talking about what occurred with other survivors or witnesses was an essential part of recovery. . .

When authorities disbelieve the victim, when bystanders refute what they cannot bear to know, they rob the victim of normal existence on the earth. Bystander and victim collude in denial or forgetting, and in so doing, repeat the abuse. . .

In this new world, the victim can no longer trust the evidence of her senses. Something seems to have happened, but what? The ground disappears. This is the alchemy of denial. Terror, rage, and pain are replaced with free floating shame. The victim will begin to wonder, 'what did I do?' She will begin to believe 'I must have done something bad.' But the sensation of shame is shameful itself. So we dissociate that, too. In the end, a victim who has suffered the denial of others will come to see herself as a liar.

The terrible truth is that once a person has been raped or abused, she seems to acquire a scent or a frequency that makes her an irresistible target for abusers. She may be haunted by a feeling of ungroundedness, by periods of hypervigilance. If she is lucky, as I was, she may find or fall into a career where hypervigilance is useful. Though, it is unlikely to be useful in her personal life. . .

The dizziness brought on by the denial of others is often worse than the original crime. When I think about what denial does, I can understand why some victims, thank God a small number, take out a gun and find someone to shoot or maul or rape, sometimes in their own homes.”
― Jessica Stern, Denial: A Memoir of Terror

“I have listened and I have been quiet all my life. But now I will speak.”
― Jessica Stern, Denial: A Memoir of Terror – A Terrorism Expert's Brave and Frank Examination of Rape and Evil

“— 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.”
― Jessica Stern, Denial: A Memoir of Terror

“My goal in writing this book is to help not only the millions of women and men who have been raped or tortured, but the soldiers who risk their lives on our behalf, returning with psychic wounds so excruciating that both they and we cannot bear to admit that these wounds exist. Denial is almost irresistibly seductive. Not only for victims who seek to forget the traumatic event, but also for those who observe the pain of others and find it easier to ignore, or forget. In the long run, denial corrodes integrity -- both of individuals and of society. We impose a terrible cost on the psychically wounded by colluding in their denial.”
― Jessica Stern, Denial: A Memoir of Terror

“Survivors are sometimes able to contemplate painful truths that other people prefer to deny, such as hidden malevolence or dangers. This, too, can be an advantage -- although it can be annoying to people who prefer to look away.”
― Jessica Stern, Denial: A Memoir of Terror

“The process of writing this book has taught me a great deal about the lingering effects of severe trauma. . . No two victims of trauma will have precisely the same symptoms. . . But some symptoms are common among people suffering from PTSD. One is difficulty accepting love or trusting others to take care of you. Another is the sensation of numbness. Another is difficulty recognizing the feeling of fear. . .”
― Jessica Stern, Denial: A Memoir of Terror

“Now I begin to feel something new. A foggy nausea takes hold, leaving no room for thoughts or action. Why didn't I bite hard? Would it have been worth it to hurt this man, even if he killed me? Did I have the strength in my jaw to bite? I think not. I was in a sea of nothingness.”
― Jessica Stern, Denial: A Memoir of Terror

“Reading these words, I feel something quite hard and harsh forming in my veins, as if my blood has turned to shards. This is a familiar feeling. I become a soldier if I am truly threatened. If the plane goes down, you want me at the controls.”
― Jessica Stern, Denial: A Memoir of Terror

“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?!”
― Jessica Stern, Denial: A Memoir of Terror

“Other flowers came at the end of the summer, but by then the winter sadness had already dissipated, and the effect of the blooms was not the same.”
― Jessica Stern, Denial: A Memoir of Terror

“— 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.”
― Jessica Stern, Denial: A Memoir of Terror