I used to see John at inopportune moments. This was most likely to happen in an unfamiliar city, where it seemed semilogical that I might run into him. He also appeared when I was close to home, including one night at a bar where I was supposed to be celebrating someone’s birthday. Instead I spent the entire night staring at, and then following, a man who to my mind so closely resembled John that I couldn’t look away. This doppelgänger was with a woman, and he laughed with his arm around her, a glass of brown liquor in one hand. I escaped the bar and stood on the sidewalk, shaking, but continued to watch him through the open door.
The incident at the bar occurred in 2006. John was my boyfriend in high school, a bit less than a decade prior. I had broken off communication with him in 2003.
This sort of mirage is not uncommon among abuse and rape survivors. There are online forums for rape survivors where people say things like “So i sit in my apartment where i was almost kiled [sic] 2 years ago. I still see the blood stains,” and “Its [sic] weird but sometimes i can still smell him … im [sic] scared to go to sleep.” Both women state, as if in chorus, “I see his face everywhere.” There are the films where a woman is walking home from work, milling through a swarm, and there he is. She panics, looks again—it’s a kid who can’t be more than twelve, or a CEO-in-training who looks nothing like the shark-eyed predator from her cinematic flashbacks. The phenomenon indicates preoccupation. It’s the reason Chris de Burgh croons about seeing his (purported) lover’s face everywhere. I’m not thinking about him, but I’m thinking about him. He’s waiting at a broken-down, torn-up gas station in the shittiest, most deserted part of my mental geography: roll up your windows, lock the doors. John’s the reason that I’ll suddenly and repeatedly smooth down my husband’s hair while looking up at him in bed: because his face has mutated, and adjusting his hair is the only thing that can stop the visual disturbance.
In Jen Percy’s book Demon Camp, her chronicle of a soldier’s life after war, an unnamed neuropsychologist tells her about the neurological consequences of trauma: “Sometimes the amygdala enlarges, the hippocampus shrinks. Trauma can cause inflammation, atrophy, neuron death, and shrinkage. Parts of the brain can wither, rearrange, and die.” It’s also commonly believed that the brain suffers physiological damage because of schizophrenia; according to one 2013 study, the highest tissue loss occurs in the first two years after the initial episode, and though it may slow after that, the loss does continue. One might then suppose that the combination of trauma and schizoaffective disorder could cause a potent neurological time bomb.
I developed post-traumatic stress disorder in the spring of 2014. My understanding of PTSD was limited to anecdotes from a friend who’d been attacked in a war zone, and to the experiences of fictional characters; I thought my nightly chills and sweats, acute sensitivity to sound and smell, and other such physical torments were due to complications from chronic illness. But I began to have nightmares. I’d sit up in bed, shot through with terror, hyperventilating in the dark. Some nights, I could startle from anything—a dog barking down the block; the pronunciation of the word “elegant” in an audiobook. I usually startled up to twenty times a night, the hypervigilance increasing with each jolt until every inch of my body was reduced to raw nerve. I began to sleep sitting upright against the headboard, because being supine made my symptoms exponentially worse. I sent my psychiatrist an email. It began, I think that I may live with some form of PTSD.
Dr. M replied with an explanation of possible treatments, calling my experience “chronic PTSD”: Your case is much more complex because of the schizoaffective disorder, which I don’t believe is secondary to the PTSD but is its own additional factor. I’d been living with medication-resistant schizoaffective disorder prior to the new diagnosis, and PTSD, while uniquely excruciating, was not—unlike schizoaffective disorder—considered to be incurable. Dr. M encouraged me to seek trauma-specific therapy; because my symptoms were causing sleep deprivation, she also prescribed Intuniv, which is marketed as a nonstimulant treatment for attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder, but also has an off-label use for hypervigilance and nightmares. I was grateful for these things—these new pills and new forms of therapy—and I was grateful for the hope of a condition I could eliminate.
My literary tastes changed. I began to read Jo Nesbø’s thrillers, beginning with The Snowman. This novel, in which the titular serial killer tortures, mutilates, and kills women to build them into “snowmen,” was the first I’d read of Nesbø’s Detective Harry Hole series. I read the entire series. I listened to the audiobooks, lulling myself to sleep with descriptions of torture. I propped my phone on the sink so that I could hear autopsy scenes as I showered. The victims in these books, particularly the ones who endure the most grotesque violence, are almost always women.
But there were only so many of his books out there, and I needed to fill almost every waking moment with violence. I binge-watched The Killing and Hannibal and The Fall, which also meant rewatching particularly torturous episodes of The Killing and Hannibal; I listened to more audiobooks in the same genre, some written in such lousy prose that I believed I was killing off brain cells faster than either schizoaffective disorder or trauma could; I read Stieg Larsson’s Millennium trilogy, and then I watched the movies in Swedish. It is impressive, and horrifying, how many authors choose to employ the trope of discovering a woman’s body in pieces, scattered, or in garbage bags, unrecognizable. I wondered if bookstores, instead of having sections for Mysteries or African American Literature, ought to cordon off a section for Girls in Trouble.
Why was I doing this? Some PTSD sufferers consciously or unconsciously put themselves in danger to “fix” the original trauma. I decided that I was, in vicariously living through these girls and women, doing the same thing. Perhaps it was a kind of exposure therapy. If I could only experience enough violence, if I could only hear enough descriptions of women’s bodies being found in pieces, I could convince my sympathetic nervous system to calm the hell down.
I experienced psychotic symptoms for the first time when I was a senior at Stanford. I experienced a series of repeated hallucination of girls screaming for help outside my window. The first time it happened, I called the police, who came, and who, after searching, told me that there was no one there. The second time, I called my mother, who told me not to call the police again. She didn’t say that the girls in trouble weren’t real, but it’s what she meant. They once appeared to me unbidden, demanding that I pay attention. Now I hunt them down. Now I seek them out.
Thought Disorder
EMDR, or Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing, is one therapy frequently used to treat the psychological consequences of trauma. For a client to receive “true” EMDR treatment, as developed by Dr. Francine Shapiro, the clinician must adhere to the training guidelines and standards of either the EMDR International Association or EMDR Europe. Such training guidelines and standards may be found in Dr. Shapiro’s textbook, Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing (EMDR): Basic Principles, Protocols, and Procedures, which is presently fifty-nine dollars when purchased from emdr.com; Getting Past Your Past: Take Control of Your Life with Self-Help Techniques from EMDR Therapy, also by Dr. Shapiro, is a mere seventeen dollars on the same website.
The therapist who performed an ad hoc version of EMDR on me when I was in my early twenties had done so after telling me that I was “stuck.” I didn’t deny it then, and I won’t deny it now. My relationship with John had ended years ago, and the capital-T Trauma of being raped and abused by him had happened years before that, and yet I was talking about him in almost every therapy session, repeating over and over variations of the same stories, unable to move past the topic to speak of present-day concerns. She suggested that we try EMDR. She wasn’t trained in EMDR, she admitted, but she could learn for the sake of my therapy. I was willing to try almost anything.
The framework of EMDR is this: through eight phases of treatment, as outlined by Shapiro, the client will learn to process their trauma via assessing a target event and its concurrent pictures or scenes, exploring the cognitions behind the target, and performing eye movements as led by the therapist until their SUDS, or Subjective Units of Distress Scale, rating decreases to zero or near zero. In a Q&A conducted by the New York Times, Shapiro explains that “the goal is to let the brain’s information processing system make new internal connections as the client focuses on the thoughts, emotions, memories, and other associations.” In other words, thinking about other things while moving your eyes in a prescribed way rewires the brain. According to the therapy’s origin story, Shapiro noticed while on a walk in the woods that her negative emotions decreased in severity when her eyes darted from side to side.
It is possible, according to the EMDR Institute, that clients may feel relief almost immediately.
I told a few people after my EMDR sessions that my “stuck-ness” about John had evaporated. It was as though, I said, parroting something I’d read about EMDR results, a photograph of him had gone from color to black and white; he was still there, but the saturation had gone down. In hindsight, I might have saved hundreds of dollars, and been equally affected, by purchasing Getting Past Your Past and trying EMDR on myself.
SUDS is a framework developed by psychologist Joseph Wolpe, but what are our experiences of disturbance if not subjective?
Not long before I finally stopped talking to John, a friend told me that a mutual acquaintance had claimed that she didn’t believe I’d been raped.
“If she’d really been raped,” the mutual acquaintance had said, “there’s no way she’d still be talking to him.”
SUD = eight: the beginning of alienation, approaching loss of control.
In 2006, post-EMDR, I believed in the success of my treatment; the trauma had not been eliminated, but the wound was now scarred over. Eight years later, I came across the search for John Doe 28 via a tweet:
The FBI is seeking the public’s help to stop a child predator.
pic.twitter.com/w3GzJ77Fya
fbi.gov/news/st
The first time I saw this message, shared by a feminist blogger, I ignored it. But she retweeted the missive the next day, and the repetition was enough to cause me to click on the link. The article showed three grainy pictures combined into one JPEG: a close-up of a man’s profile; another close-up of a man from the front, with a small figure in blue directly in front of him; finally, a close-up of the man’s burgundy shirt, which had either a shark or a fish decorating the breast.
And then I said, “Fuck.” Or perhaps I simply thought it while reading the FBI article about John Doe 28, whose whereabouts were unknown, and who was understood to be in his thirties or forties, with wire-rimmed glasses and a receding hairline. He was believed to be American because he utters a single word, “careful,” in the child porn that bears his face. The John Doe 28 video was found during a raid on a home in San Francisco, which is where I live. The article was written by FBI San Diego, which is the city where, as of less than six months before I saw the tweet in question, I knew John lived.
Was it John in the video? I couldn’t be sure. The image was grainy; the face wasn’t quite right. I consulted with a friend about whether to act. I kept checking the image to see if it triggered gut-level familiarity or fear. I wondered if John would be the kind of person who would wear that kind of burgundy shirt. Would he own a shirt with a shark on the breast? I’d once gifted him a pair of hot-pink pants, which he wore until, according to him, his mother threw them away.
I called the FBI. It was similar to calling my cable internet provider: the Muzak was cheery; a recorded female voice told me that they valued my call and appreciated my patience. When someone did pick up, I told her what I knew, which was that an ex-boyfriend and registered sex offender resembled John Doe 28. She took my information. “We’ll call you if we need anything,” she said.
These days, I still check to see if John Doe 28 has been identified. I wonder how insane it is that I thought the two men looked similar enough to call the FBI, but there’s no one that I can ask to make the comparison for me. When I suspect that I’m experiencing a hallucination, I might ask a friend, “Do you hear that?” Reality checks are a common tool for people with a psychotic disorder. Yet no one who remains in my life knows, or has ever known, what John looks like. I have wiped him out of my life in almost every way I can.
Catatonia
For years, I wanted to talk to my partner, C., about what had happened to me. He didn’t want to hear about what had happened to me. I wanted to buttonhole people on the street and tell them my story. This was impossible to do, and inadvisable.
When I did talk about what happened, I found that I did so flatly, sometimes nonchalantly. I dated someone in high school. That person abused and raped me. Later he was arrested and jailed for possessing child pornography and attempting to seduce a minor, who was actually an officer of the law, causing him to become a registered Megan’s Law sex offender. Finally, in 2003, I told him to leave me alone. But parts of the story are left out. I loved him, but he didn’t love me at all. He took something from me, but I could have walked away. A fictional narrative is considered nuanced when it includes contradictions, but a narrative of trauma is ill-advised to do the same.
These days, I hesitate to say much about what exactly happened between John Doe and me. I have been told by people that I’ve made a fuss about nothing, thus compounding the trauma of hurt with the trauma of feeling like a crybaby. I don’t chronicle the rape, because to do so feels like testifying before the reader, who is judge and jury, and I have had enough nightmares about inept and poorly received testimony to try. No one has to believe me when I say that it was bad, but I refuse to give the public that kind of ammunition in the first place. I keep it to myself now: the shine of the streetlight, the look in his eyes.
Impairments in Social Cognition
Once, John said, “I know what’s wrong with me. I don’t need to see a shrink to find that out.” He pulled a small bottle of something liquid and herbal-looking out of his bag. “I’m taking this for it.”
I was too cowed to ask what he was taking it for, and what he thought was wrong with him. My guess at the time was bipolar disorder, due to his moods—he had, for example, stopped during a walk, picked up a brick, and hurled it into a nearby window, then kept walking as though nothing had happened—but who knows what was, or is, the problem as he claimed it to be? What was it that caused him to do the terrible things he did? A letter I received toward the end of our communications included the line I’m sorry for raping you. In that letter, he blamed most of his behavior on drugs. After we stopped talking, I learned from a mutual acquaintance that he finally went to rehab. Later, after his access to the internet was restored, I’d find him on his public Facebook page, where John wrote an expletive-filled rant about people who, to his mind, blindly trust the police and the judicial system, and use information from those sources to judge him and his life.
I was one of those unwanted people, of course, who paid attention to detail in his life.
He was sorry. He was not sorry. He was still angry, but now he was specifically angry at a community that could, if they Googled him, encounter a first hit that has the sub-headline, “Sex Offender Registry Information for [John Doe],” because Megan’s Law has allowed the public to view such information online since 2004. His criminal record is immortalized and viewable to anyone with access to a computer. I have wondered at the justice of permanently marking a man who committed certain crimes in his early twenties. The Megan’s Law website states, “The law is not intended to punish the registrant and specifically prohibits using the information to harass or commit any crime against a registrant.”
I, on the other hand, was not angry, despite years during which a variety of therapists attempted to bring me to that point at which they believed I could begin to heal. Instead, I forgave John, believing that forgiveness would bring me peace. In late 2013, I emailed him after over a decade of silence. I told him that I was all right, and that I hoped that he was okay too. I told him that I believed we’d both been doing the best that we could with what we both had at the time.
John wrote back. He said that he was glad to hear from me. He’d wanted to apologize, he said, but he’d lost my contact information. He said that he truly wanted to stay in touch.
I asked a friend what she thought of this. “He may deserve to have a good life,” Miriam said, “but he doesn’t deserve to have a good life with you in it.”
This exchange of forgiveness was before the PTSD began—before the nightmares and the unending waves of terror, and before I saw someone who looked like him in a notice from the FBI. Forgiveness, as it turns out, is not a linear prospect. Neither is healing. Both flare up and die down; so do my symptoms of schizoaffective disorder. I have tried to control these “oscillations,” as my psychiatrist calls them, but what, if anything, can truly be controlled?
There are still nights when I feel myself on a knife-edge, when the terror of PTSD mingles with the trickiness of unreality. It spreads through me like ink-blotting paper, and then I am unpredictably vulnerable to all kinds of stimuli—movie trailers that both rub up against where I am raw, shocking me with adrenaline, and pull fiction into my sense of what is real. At this point I can sometimes do a decent job of keeping myself safe from these perilous circumstances. Watching The Great British Bake Off has been one way to both calm my terror and keep me grounded in what is real. C. is good at knowing when to suggest that we watch old episodes; we curl into one another on the sofa with our dog nestled against or between us, and we learn about how to make a stiff enough crème patisserie. I’ve learned about how difficult it is to integrate passionfruit or rosewater into a recipe without bollocksing up the whole bloody thing. Slowly, the world coheres into something more closely resembling reality. The possibility of terror remains nearby, but does not spike at the slightest provocation. At this point, I kiss him. I go to bed.
Half a year after I called the FBI, I was at the dining room table, reading, while C. fried eggs at the stove. Then he was shouting, cursing at an injury caused by what I later learned was spattering oil:a simple mishap. Without thinking, I jumped up and ran. I opened the bathroom door. I shut myself inside, huddling by the toilet, half-aware of what I was doing and what was happening. He came in to tend to his burn; as the door opened, I scrambled on all fours past him toward the bedroom. I opened the bedroom closet, which was lightless and carpeted with unwashed clothes, and shut that door behind me too.
I had my phone with me there, in the pitch-black bedroom closet where I was hiding and beginning to cry, and with my phone I searched for John’s email, which I read and reread: “Please, can we talk more? Thank you. Love, John.” I didn’t know why I was holding his message in my hand. I was searching for something that I’d lost, something taken. I was hoping to find safety, or something like it. He was somewhere else. I was, allegedly, free of him, and I was safe, but I’d lost faith in that delusion a long time ago.