Culture of Denigration

For myself in the United States, I felt a cultural environment of people who not only iso­lated and silenced me, but who responded in a negative manner to the rape attack and the following investigation—not directed at me so much as at the issue of rape.

Slowly my eyes opened, but I continued to hug the remnants of my dream. This was Wednesday, the first morning after the attack. My dream vision was one of paradise, a paradise filled with multiple colors of flowers that were blooming everywhere. Surrounding me were bright, cheery pallets of vivid and striking arrays and tones of flowers. It was more than a visionary splendor. The luscious and titillating smells of gardenias, a flower that is a special favorite of mine plus roses, lilacs, and other aromas awakened my senses and hugged me with a comfort of peace and contentment, alerting my senses to the gusto of life.

As I slowly opened my eyes—not wanting to lose that delightful display, the first rays of sunlight peeked into my room, almost blending into the paradise vision of my dream. That dream occurred after the best sleep in my life, and the morning brought the most fantastic dream imaginable. Both of these I experienced with relish. My place of sleep was a vacation spot of rest and relaxation. My body was soothed by the gentle breeze that eased into the attic haven. If viewers had seen my first facial response, I’m sure they would have seen a smile of contentment. Then I walked downstairs to breakfast.

But no one let me speak while focusing on their own dreams. “Nightmares haunted my dreams,” wearily responded Susan as we exchanged greetings that first morning.

Linda popped out of her bedroom, hugged me, and was ready with a response for me: “Oh, Cathy.

People assumed that their experiences must be the same as mine and they repeated tales of nightmares to me. The truth of my paradise dream did not fit in with their cultur­ally over-determined experiences.

The negative environment continued with people wanting me to mimic their pain as noted by “Alecia”:

I felt that you were academizing your pain. I understood that as I did the same thing myself. You kept intellectualizing it. How long did it take you to cry? Sometimes I felt like screaming at you, “Cry, God damn it; admit that it hurts, really feel the pain,” let it all out. You were so stoic, so obsessed with and determined to demonstrate that “no one was being sympathetic to your attack or to your pain.”

While Alecia noted that I reacted in the same manner as she had reacted after the rapist had attacked her, she did not want to accept my similar behavior. She felt that she should have cried immediately and she felt that I should cry on command and with her. For me, I was in a state of numbness that lasted months. There is no one set pattern for how a per­son reacts after an attack: the forms of trauma are multiple and varied.

More unsuspected turmoil from others was awaiting me when I returned to work. I had informed the departmental chair that due to the nervous reactions which the mem­bers of the department were feeling—all the women, both faculty and staff and a wife of a male faculty member, had their own memories of past assaults—and because they di­rected their tension at me, I would not be in the office for a few days and would only at­tend my classes. She had my home phone number. No call came those days. The next week back at work, I opened the office department door and stared at a dozen dead and faded yellow roses that my sister had sent me the previous Thursday. Those dead roses were not the result of aging: there was no water in that 12" deep vase. How could 12" of water dry up in three days! The secretary had dumped out the water, and the rest of the members of the department watched the roses die.

The people in our culture, perhaps because we do not know how to treat each other after a crisis of rape, do not provide a supportive and comforting environment for vic­tims. In part because many of them, tortured in the past, still live with unresolved trauma, and in some cases, they have anger at current victim-survivors who receive some sup­port. All people need support: past and present victim-survivors.