“Nothing fixes a thing so intensely in the memory as the wish to forget it.” Michel de Montaigne
I heard this quote tonight at the end of my favorite show, “Criminal Minds.” The episode was about a young boy who had been abducted and abused for years. He was so emotionally damaged that when he was first discovered, he was afraid of touch and had been conditioned to want to be in the dark in a very small space, this as a result of being chained underground in a tiny space. Morgan, one of the main FBI characters, had been abused by a childhood coach and was able to connect to the child, now nearly 16, because of a shared understanding of abuse and trauma. Not just the mechanics of it, but the experience of it.
I found the whole show intriguing because of my own experiences with abuse over the years. There are varieties of abuse but any kind of abuse also includes a component of emotional or mental abuse. I have found this type to be the most lasting and devastating. Physical wounds heal though they often leave scars. Emotional wounds heal too, but I’ve found their scars to be more difficult to overlook.
Scars on the body can often be masked or covered or just ignored. Scars of the mind and heart are not so easily dismissed. They can be triggered suddenly by seemingly insignificant things and lead to PTSD-like responses.
One example of this might be a person who smells something that triggers an automatic response. Perhaps the smell of hazelnut coffee. Smelling it could cause a person’s heart to beat faster, palms to sweat and generally lead to a panic response because of the connection the smell has to the past. Perhaps the smell is connected to some repeated verbal assault. This is a far more complex scar than an old lash mark on one’s back.
Now, I’m not suggesting that the physical scar isn’t significant, but I feel the emotional scar connected to it, the one in the mind, is more difficult to treat.
In one of my favorite P!NK songs, the lyric reads,
“You’re so mean, when you talk, about yourself you were wrong
Change the voices in your head, make them like you instead."
Emotional abuse often leads to a person believing lies that get repeated over and over in her head. Pink isn’t talking about literally hearing voices. She’s talking about these voices that tell us we aren’t good enough. That we’re stupid or fat or ugly or too much work or not good enough.
And changing those voices is no easy thing.
It’s hard enough to make those changes when they come as a result of a normal life. Of natural insecurities. Of every day events that make us feel fear or worry or doubt. But when those voices have been hammered into your brain by the pounding voice of another person. By looks. Jokes. Humiliation. Mockery. Insults. Those voices, are far more difficult to eradicate.
Those voices, those memories, are fixed far more intensely because of the very powerful desire to forget them.
“Voices,” which I posted some time ago, is about this very thing. I think what I’ve written above might cause it to make more sense to some.
P.S. Sometimes people will go ahead and start drinking hazelnut coffee all of the time in order to push past and walk into the fear, changing the voice.
