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Editor’s note: The following is part of a series called Untold Stories of Resilience: Stories of recovery from sexual assault and eating disorders, a photojournalism project by Deryne Keretic.
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Q: Tell me about the first time you were aware of your body’s shape, size, or appearance.
Sensho: My first and most painful awareness was walking down the street on the Upper West Side. It must have been the late 1950′s. All of a sudden I felt the motion of my body and the harshness of my own footsteps on the pavement. It was sort of jarring and I felt my face and my cheeks move with every step. It’s a very specific memory. What I interpreted that to mean was that there was something wrong with me that I felt that and I was ugly – it meant my cheeks were too big or something. I was ten or twelve.
Q: What about more recently (maybe within the last year). When was the last time you remember being aware of your body’s shape, size, composition?
Sensho: I’ve been aware my whole life that I felt too big, too wrong, too funny looking, too ugly etc. Nothing ever felt right in my body. When I was 14 or 15 in the summer I started dieting. I remember this very clearly. The way I dieted was almost starvation. I’d have a couple of hard boiled eggs a day and a piece of fruit or something. I was wearing a cotton skirt and I looked down and saw my hip bone sticking through the skirt and thought: “Oh no, there’s something wrong with this.” So I stopped dieting that way. I quit doing it that time but I always came back to that. Even the way I’ve recently looked at my size showed me that this was very disordered eating and I had a disordered body image and self-image.
Q: What do you think about when you think about your body now?
Sensho: I have a number of thoughts about it. I’ve become aware of the direction for me in terms of not feeling right about my body and not being able to be realistic when I look at myself in what I’m seeing. I’m trying to be really really careful about judging myself and am trying to hold that skewed awareness in me. Maybe that’ll stay with me. The thing that has always confused me is the way our culture generally sees (especially white) women – unless you’re size three you’re fat and fat is bad. It’s very painful. That’s what’s disordered in our culture. Healthy and thin is great, but there’s so much that doesn’t make sense. That’s confused me because I have to separate what my own difficulty dealing with my own history is apart from the cultural judgment. It’s very difficult, almost impossible. I think the reason those thoughts and that first memory started happening at ten was because my father started raping me then. So I don’t think it came from the culture then but it became so entangled later. Here’s another thing: I lost all my memories until I was 50. I’m 69 now and it’s been 19 years since I’ve had memories of my abuse to parse through them and deal with them. I’ve confirmed with people for my own benefit that these memories aren’t something I’ve made up. Then I decided it was enough and I didn’t need any more. If more memories come up I’ll deal with them. It’ll be painful but I’ve got enough for now.
Q: Tell me about a time you were proud of your body.
Sensho: I worked really hard to get my karate black belt. I was working out every day and I was eating good food but I was probably doing that starvation thing. My body felt great and I felt like I could do anything – stuff I had always dreamed about doing. I taught karate for a few years. When I’ve been athletic like that I felt proud. I regret sitting here right now not being able to just fully own whatever shape I’m in and feel good about it because I’m alive and I’m human and I’m a woman and to appreciate myself. I am working on it.
Q: How has your relationship with your body been impacted by surviving your trauma?
Sensho: There’s really no separating the two. I cannot tease out what in my life hasn’t been affected by my abuse. Everything has been affected by it. When my memories came to me I had actually started living at a Zen Buddhist Monastery and left my family. Something wasn’t right and I needed to get away from my husband. Eventually we divorced and I regretted leaving my kids but they were older so it wasn’t like I was leaving little children. I think what happened at the monastery was that it was the first time I actually felt safe in my life. There was a monastic there who had been a psychiatrist and had worked with women who had lost their memories of abuse. Looking back on it, he started to hear out of our conversations and questions I asked that likely I had been raped by my dad and experienced other abuse at home but that I didn’t remember it. Anyway, when the memories started coming back it was like I finally could put together what the heck had been going on in my life. I always felt insane, I felt wrong, I felt every negative thing you can think of, but I didn’t have an answer. I didn’t know why. I didn’t know why I was confused. I didn’t know why I hated my father so much. I experienced Stockholm Syndrome because of what happened when I was young. My sister did too but I was lucky and made it out alive. She killed herself when she was 29 having experienced (as I started to remember) the same things I did. Neither of us realized back then. She was four years older than me.
Q: So before you went to the monastery no one thought to ask or figure out why you had missing memories?
Sensho: That’s an interesting question because it presupposes that I knew I was missing memories. If you’re missing memories, you don’t necessarily know. It also presupposes that anybody concerned would want me to have had the memories, which my abusers wouldn’t want. My stepmother didn’t have any idea. I talked to her after my memories came back and she had no idea and wouldn’t have believed me at the time anyway. This was in the 1950′s and 1960′s and the laws were quite different then. It was illegal to do what was done to me, but it was easy for my father to make it appear as if there was something wrong with me.
Q: Did you have other memories of growing up?
Sensho: Oh yes, it felt like I had complete memories. I didn’t have amnesia, I had selective amnesia. There were times when I would dissociate from an experience that was too painful. Nobody would’ve even called it that then. There weren’t any words for what happened to me back then and my father was quite creative about how to keep me from spilling the beans.
Q: What do you wish the public knew about sexual violence and eating disorders?
Sensho: They seem to be inextricably bound together. I can talk to somebody and because of my experience and because I’ve trained my intuition to expand itself, I can pretty much tell when someone has been abused. It would be helpful if other people could understand that abuse and self-image and anything belonging to either category is so endemic and has nothing to do with socio-economic issues. Sexual abuse is done by anybody to anybody. I’m convinced that it has to do with a kind of historical (Buddhists would call it karmic) thing from one person to the next generation and so forth. It can be stopped. When I learned about this in my own life when my memories came back, I vowed that it was going to go no further and it hasn’t. My father had been raped when he grew up in Philadelphia in an orphanage and I think assault was in my mother’s family as well, so it was there and it was going from generation to generation. That doesn’t have to be but it’s really hard to stop.
The metaphor I give is one a plumber friend of mine once said: “Water is really hard to stop. Water will find any way to get through and keep going until something really dramatic is done.” Really really amazing. It’s the same way with the issues we’re talking about. Some awareness has to get outed in somebody’s life so they go: “Whoa, I cannot keep this going. I’ve got to do something about it.” They just continue in everybody’s family and it gets passed down. I tried to do a really quick arithmetic percentage projection of how many people in the world at all times have been sexually abused. It’s got to be well over half of the world’s population at any given moment. That’s wrong and it can be stopped and it will be stopped. We’ve got to do it.
Q: What would you like to communicate to someone who might be experiencing something similar? Do you have any advice?
Sensho: I’m careful when I’m with people if I get the sense that it’s happening for them at the time. It’s rare that I’m aware of it. I’m very careful because the subject is loaded and our emotions are in our whole body and in every cell. If somebody indicated that they were going through stuff at the time or that they were having difficulty with aftermath in whatever way (that can be really huge), the first thing I would want to tell that person and what I do tell people is to get to some place to be safe. It’s important to do something that assures them it’s going to stop or that they can get help with their memories and what they’re going through. Luckily there are organizations like RAINN or Safe Horizon etc. who can deal with that, so the safety issue is primary. You can’t heal until you’re in a safe place, otherwise it’s just an open wound. Once you have the space to be able to heal it takes a lot of patience and a lot of love and it’s very very difficult. To find the right people is important. My favorite kinds of mental health professionals are social workers because they have a down-to-earth caring for people in the way they work that is phenomenal. Some people might need psychiatrists or counselors or coaches – whatever modality works. Whoever it is that we ask for help, that person should be completely familiar and trained on how to work with someone who has experienced this. Otherwise it can reverse the healing process and waste a lot of time and emotional pain when it doesn’t necessarily have to be that way.
Q: Is there anything else you want to share? There’s room to share your story or any other points you’d like to discuss.
Sensho: I always want to encourage people. Since I went until I was 50 without being aware that I was dealing with rapes and emotional abuse at the hands of my father, I got into a lot of emotional and psychological trouble because I couldn’t deal. Nothing was straightforward, there was no apparent reason why I was afraid, why I was angry, why I hated my parents, why things happened with them that I do remember. I just couldn’t figure it out. If I can go through all of that and come out the other end of the tunnel alive, so can you. If I have to be a one-woman band, so be it. I want to express to people that whatever they experienced was not their fault, they didn’t do anything to make it happen regardless of what their memory is. It’s not a person’s fault to be sexually abused, abused or emotionally abused. That is the responsibility of the other party or parties. With that as a bedrock, the other thing I would say is to keep looking at the problem in your life until you find a place where you can be at peace. It’s there.
We can turn PTSD around. If I feel PTSD symptoms, I know what they are. That’s turning it around already. If a truck backfires next to me and I jump, I go: “Oh, that’s the PTSD again”, and that diffuses it. I don’t live in a life full of fear anymore. I would say just keep going and going and don’t give up. There’s help around but you have to ask for it and you have to reach out. I’m working to have sexual abuse and emotional abuse be discussed in the open everywhere so that we can assure people all over the world that they are safe. The way to do that is to start educating even the abusers so they can start seeing what they’re doing, even if they can’t do anything about it. Everyone needs to be educated and that’s a tall order but it’s what’s required. I’m not denigrating the fact that men are also abused, but for the most part it’s historically been women who have been abused and we deserve to be safe. Women finally get to be safe.
Q: What are your views on the difficulties of reporting abuse, especially interfamilial assault? To have a child report on a family member seems almost impossible.
Sensho: If other people who are friends, neighbors, or distant relatives notice something, they have to act. For instance, only my sister and I knew what was going on in my family and yet we both had this amnesia about our abuse. We didn’t discuss it with each other. We really had to shut it off because it was so bad. About two years ago I came out at a family reunion with mostly cousins and they had absolutely no idea. I’m not saying that this should’ve happened because I don’t blame anybody, but if they had been around and been educated they would have been able to see the symptoms. I had another experience that was a semi precursor to my memories coming back.
The abuse that I remember started maybe before I was ten, but I was between ten and twelve when I know I was raped for the first time. I think. Later, I was 20 years old having dinner with a family that was friends with my parents and in the course of the dinner we were talking. It was just me and nobody else from my immediate family and somebody looked at me from my host’s family and said: “You’re so normal. You’re just like everybody else. I mean, your father is such a monster.” When that word came up I was shocked. Couple that with alcoholism and abuse because my father was verbally abusive to everyone he knew and everyone who ever worked for him. All of the family’s friends had witnessed this, so if all of those people had been educated they might have been able to put two and two together and at least start questioning. Back then in the 1950′s and 1960′s the whole “mental health legal child protection thing” wasn’t nearly as advanced as it is now, and even now it’s not great. There was nobody watching back then but we can be the eyes and ears now.
Q: Do you have any memories at all of you and your sister talking about the abuse?
Sensho: No, we didn’t. But I have a very vivid memory of us being together one day. I remember where we were and all of that. We were agreeing that our father was always right – this is part of the Stockholm Syndrome we had. We couldn’t understand it. We were both teenagers so it wasn’t like we were little children talking about this. We couldn’t understand why he was always right. We were so brainwashed that anything he said was right. In fact, the first memory I have of my abuse that opened everything up for me was this vivid memory of his face less than five inches from mine saying: “I will kill you if you tell”. He must have said the same thing to my sister. But that discussion with her was the closest we got. One of my more recent memories of abuse that came back to me was of being really small and seeing him rape my sister. There was nothing I could do, I was just a little kid.
Q: You mentioned your stepmother – who did you live with?
Sensho: I grew up on West 80th Street on the Upper West Side in Manhattan. When my father divorced my mother he got remarried to my stepmother. I never lived with the two of them, but I did socialize with them and I hated it. It was very painful and I didn’t even know why. Maybe ten years ago after my memories came back, she was the only one left alive since my mother had passed away, my father had passed away, and my sister had been gone for many years. I never had contact with any members of my immediate family after my memories came back. I thought: “Wow, this is the one chance I have to tell my stepmother some truth”. She believed me and that was huge. She said: “Back then I wouldn’t have believed you”. But I had maintained enough of a relationship with her so she could see I was stable.
My sister and I were just grown when they divorced so we lived with my mother then, but I was in high school or early college already. That conversation with my stepmother was one helpful thing. Her son (my step-brother) confirmed back to me – even though I didn’t discuss it with him, which was kind of weird because this is a private subject but obviously my stepmother had discussed it with him. In an email he said: “Now I understand what happened and she’s right, I wouldn’t have believed you back then either.” My stepmother was not blind as a person. She was highly intelligent, very sophisticated and why she didn’t see the signs back then I don’t know. I suspect that it was so endemic in people’s lives that feeling those cues was almost meaningless because half the population was experiencing it. Maybe that had happened in her family so she wasn’t getting the cue. She actually told me: “If I had known that, I wouldn’t have married your father” and I thought: “Wow, somebody from my family actually validating me!” That was the only validation I’ve ever had from my family.
The family friends calling him a monster was huge as well. But I had no idea what they even meant because I didn’t know how to discuss that. When she said that I was mute. I don’t remember saying anything because I was under threat of death. My father also said something else. He said: “I’ll kill you if you tell but I know you’re going to tell, so therefore eventually I will have to kill you.” It was this double bind. I understood that his IQ was 160 and he had it all figured out and it’s true; he got away with it. I’m not angry at him because I understand what he came from and yet; these things don’t have to happen. That family who saw him being a monster – if they had been educated and we were all educated to look out for things, that would be helpful. Not that I want people to be jailed on suspicion, but looking out for stuff to protect children is really really really important. How can a person grow up and be the most they can be and experience their most creative fulfilled life if they’ve had to (like I’ve had to) spend a lot of time healing and understanding?
On the other hand, it puts me in a unique position to be able to have this self-knowledge and have a sense of what’s happening that’s similar to many people in the world and in our culture to start to do something about it. That’s why I want to un-taboo these subjects and finally do what we need to do to make women and other people safe. It takes a lot of energy and time to heal. I’m a prime example of how many years I spent not even realizing and trying to fight my way out of a paper bag with only Q-tips. I was really blind. I was blind and I was really unhappy most of the time. I just didn’t understand what was wrong.
My understanding of who I was was wrong because I didn’t have the memories. Somebody who understands or doesn’t understand who they are but has the memories is on a different path because they can say what it is they need. Starting at the time when my memories came back, I started to be able to say what I needed and begin the right search for what I needed. My knowledge of what’s important in my own life and in everybody else’s life and in human rights and rights for women and rights of safety and rights for children has expanded. It’s a gift that I’ve given myself because of all the work I’ve done on myself. Now that I have some of this background and I’ve trained myself to work with people, I get to be happy and enjoy my life and love my life. I’m passing that along to other people.
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This post was originally published on UntoldStoriesOfResilience.com and is republished here with the author’s permission.
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Photo credit: Getty Images