A CHRONICLE OF SHAME - CHAPTER 7 - SURVIVAL

 

How can I not remember, when I couldn't remember anything, day after day, the sexual assaults, — my father's sexual attraction to a very young boy, the temptation he had to furtive gestures, the sometimes considerable sexual violence perpetrated by my brother, — how can I not remember how scared I was when I was young, son and younger brother, all the time, every day, for years, until I was in my late teens, and I (finally) left the family home? How much I wished that my father's death and my brother's departure would ensure that I could finally develop normally, have an authentic man's body and be able to fight (to protect myself), give myself a new identity, a new start and happiness at last? And to what extent, however, did I have, as a child and as an adult, the fear of touching and being touched? I was rigid as a statue, cold, distant, haughty, with a clenched jaw, a painful body, violent migraines. I still sometimes jump with a hint of hatred at simple gestures of tenderness, even though I got rid a long time ago of an absurd, immensely macho representation of virility, which was, for a long time, my only sexual reference. Dissociation, Peraldi told me on January 12, 1991, was a painful but essential survival practice; “it allowed you, for example, to go to school and later to work as a teacher. That's what dissociation is, a divide, a barrier that allows you to survive and function, that's what it's for.”

However, I remember often dreaming, as a child or teenager, that I could fly, and that by placing my arms folded along my body like the wings of a bird, I could spread them and climb very high into the sky, then float above the world in complete safety, the ultimate dream of omnipotence, but above all a dream of dissociation and escape. I have often dreamed that I was lost in the Far North, and that I hid a corpse in the snow to preserve it, and probably to wake it up one day, without associating this possibility of resurrection with any specific condition, other than an unconscious fantasy of survival. I was very scared, scared to the point of delaying falling asleep, of remaining paralyzed, my body completely rigid, locked inside myself forever, but conscious, now unable to communicate with the outside world, doomed to last, like that, forever. I dreamt that I asked a nurse to come regularly to my room at night to prevent the stiffness from paralyzing me during my sleep and imprisoning me within myself in the most dreadful of solitudes. During the analysis, again, I dreamed that I was petrified, unable to move or speak. Someone, a man, came into my room and said to me: “So you intend to talk?” I especially dreamt many times that I had been beheaded, a head without a body still alive, but who could see, finally, who could speak, who could smile. I realized with relief that I was not my body, that I had taken refuge in the depths of my head, that I had managed to separate myself from the reflected image of this body. As a child, when no dissociation strategy could calm me down, my final solution was to pray intensely to God to bring about the end of the world, as this would be the most fantastic form of liberation. The reality was overwhelming: my thoughts were monopolized, often full-time, simply to survive and endure, to control and hide the anxiety, to prolong time and existence, to avoid suicide, and to create for myself, through daydreams, a different existence, to take refuge in it, for a long time, at night, numbed by sleep in waiting.

I have never lost the habit of separating myself from myself, of contracting myself out of reality; over time it has become a reflex, annoying when you have to socialize and are judged on your performance, or when you have to find your way when the car you are driving is traveling too fast in an environment without immediately recognizable landmarks. I still tend not to approach people, and above all, not to look at them - or, what amounts to the same thing, to look at them insistently while believing myself to be hidden, protected from the observation of others. This has often caused me to be thought of as strange. In a dating bar, my current boyfriend - my true and genuine spouse - told me, I blended in with the walls, I disappeared.

I wondered about it for a long time, and I asked François Peraldi, and later I asked Thomas Lebeau - a psychotherapist who specialized in the problems of child sexual abuse, whom I consulted a long, long time after Peraldi's death: “How, how can we explain that a little boy, so often raped and so violently abused, could remain silent to such an extent, to the point of not remembering anything, "except the shame of himself, kept silent? It was to ask the troubling and almost unbelievable question of dissociation pushed to the extreme, of complete post-traumatic amnesia, without anything, it seems, having filled the void, leaving room for a gaping, deep hole, always threatening to absorb me... All the answers were possible, of course, and depending on the circumstances, one or other was self-evident: the necessary physical and psychological survival that required “forgetting”, the natural dissociation that abandons the body to the rapist without seeing or feeling anything, the precise threats, effective because they were well targeted, in such a way that they install a senseless terror in place of memories. Peraldi had spoken more than once of terrifying experiences whose memory had been repressed, encapsulated, reinforcing the persistent impression that absolutely nothing was happening, except to the crazy child left to his own devices. When I was a little guy going to and from school, I felt wet, dirty, disgusted with myself, disgusted by saliva and urine, frightened by the slimy, whitish stains that were everywhere and that I avoided - still avoid - touching; I had a very strong feeling of dirt stuck to my skin that I didn't know how to get rid of, that no one could get rid of for me. I was dirty. I was polluted. I had the impression of becoming repulsive, of being a disgrace, of being ignored and marginalized from now on. I was a porous child, sure that I was vicious, sure that I was the object of everyone's hatred, and sure that I was alone in the world of my kind.

So I played sick. From elementary school on, dozens of times, I would invent a case of heartburn—it always worked, that fear teachers had that the student would vomit in class!—and I would go back home, my mother exasperated by this child who was constantly ill, without her ever wondering what was wrong in his life that he had to complain so often. When you're sick, you lie down in the middle of the day; I calculated the relief gained over time, one less of those days that were so often agonizing. I was really sick, of course, but not from the heartburn I pretended. I was avoiding an imaginary danger, and then, as the years went by, the insecurity materialized in physical education classes, which I hated. A bad memory, but a very real one, that of this program of physical activities imposed and valued by the best specimens of robustness because there were their so perfectly distressing opposites, the clumsy and the not good, nothing to do for them but to make fun of them. Nameless torment of having to demand from my body, the source of all shame, such eminently sexual skill, impossible to manifest because it was blocked in a cot where unspeakable things were happening and, moreover, erased like so many lesions inflicted on my brain. The infernal torment of having to undress and change among others, and having to endure the gaze of the teacher evaluating my performance, a Cro-Magnon, who was just waiting for the opportunity to lash out at someone who was incapable, most of the time favoring a fat person as a victim, a teenager who had nothing to do with being fat, any more than I had anything to do with the hatred I felt for my own body, which had no visible injuries, yet was so deeply scarred, and which did not need, as a bonus, to be insulted gratuitously. “Mens sana in corpore sano,” the primitive had bellowed from the very first lesson, but as it sounded like a threat, almost a fascist diktat, the effect of the Latin wisdom on me was to sequester my body more radically than ever, a fracture that took me years to heal. It's not so easy to put your head back on after decapitation.

I learned to escape, very early on, into fantasies of omnipotence, daydreams in which I restored my health and strength, an existence without fear or reproach - the hackneyed expression is perfectly justified here. I also ran away very, very often, without ever getting caught, even though at the Petit Séminaire, the supervision by the priests was intensive, almost paranoid when it came to the refractory avoiding the compulsory midday mass. (There was a priest, an art teacher, who said mass in barely fifteen minutes, a real joy. I didn't have to run away on those days, freedom came soon enough.) I read a lot, more and more, anything and everything, the dictionary of proper names, for example, which I spent hours poring over. My father had bought a few volumes of Histoires d'amour de l'histoire de France, which he didn't read; I began to devour them passionately, developing a taste for history that would never leave me, discovering the character of Napoleon, rather good-natured, loving his wife and family, fabulously energetic, drawing on countless resources within himself, dominating his siblings, the “Emperor” who knew nothing was impossible, and of whom the author, Guy Breton, said that he was, and this is an essential detail, the greatest man of all time. I literally took refuge in him, probably like many other enthusiasts over the past two centuries, dreaming of a restorative power capable of defying and defeating his death drive several times over. For the rest of my life, Napoleon was to remain an indispensable safe haven, the simplest way to escape and take my revenge.

From secondary school onwards, I realized that I didn't want my surname, that I didn't want a dangerous identity that came from my father, that made me ashamed and forced me to do something if I had to accept it and make it my own. When I introduced myself, I would say two words without a root from memory, Richard Patry, two words without belonging, and which humiliated me - which still embarrass me now. As a teenager, I felt like I was lying when I said my name; it wasn't me who called myself that, it was someone else, and it was that someone else who did bad things; that name was and still is a strange thing when I see it on paper, a name that must be hidden and never spoken, a name that I only used for a long time by putting myself in great danger. It was first of all because of this, because of what I mistakenly called signature phobia, but which was in fact the poignant realization that my surname was alien to me, that I was using it in spite of myself, like a fraud, that the crack had been made in my carapace; it was through this that post-traumatic amnesia and what it was concealing came to light. François Péraldi was right when he told me, kept telling me that the problem was “the name of your father that is also your name”, “your signature is your sex, what else could it be”, “your sex is what you and your father do with it”. Once, he had taken a malicious pleasure, smiling slyly, in looking at my signature for a long time. He forced me to admit my filiation, to really look at my name, my body, and to remember that I had already loved my father, that I had already, as a child, looked at his own signature with excitement.

In any case, at school, nobody wanted to be like me, to associate with me, to be friends with me, to be contaminated by me. For a long time, I thought that to make friends, I always had to deceive them a little, that I had to betray their trust and abuse their loyalty.

For a while, when I was about 10, I really wished I could be kidnapped and raped - chosen and privileged. I often ran away from my little primary school on rue Saint-Stanislas in Quebec City to go and hang around the Château Frontenac, hoping that a man would notice me and want to use my body to make him come. It was the time of the sordid crimes of Leopold Dion, which had an enormous impact in the Quebec of the time, to the point of wanting to canonize as quickly as possible the four young victims of the rapes and murders that Dion had committed on boys my age, children of about ten years old. At home, my father had bought a copy of the newspaper Allô Police, which gave a lot of scabrous – exciting – details about Dion's sexual acts, but nothing, or almost nothing, about how they had been killed. It was the sex that was interesting. I read the articles in secret, no one was to know that they stimulated me and brought me back to life, and I understood everything, it was incredible, I understood everything about Dion's actions, even though I was otherwise completely ignorant of any sexual practice and what an orgasm was. I was overwhelmed, drawn to the very murder of these boys, terribly challenged by the caresses they had been lucky enough to receive. A little boy kidnapped, seduced, loved, how lucky! Why not me, for once, at last? The fact is that I would have loved, really loved, to be one of the four little boys. An isolated, asocial love that forever fixes the child in childhood and dependence, protected and withdrawn from the world. The Dion affair, and the powerful fantasies it provoked in my child's mind as I slipped into adolescence, served as a formidable substitute for traumatic amnesia; they filled the gaping hole left in my memory and created replacement memories for me for a long time to come. In a way, the dissociation from the real events of my early childhood was now complete.

I already knew from Father T that at puberty my body would change, that there would be “stiffening”, “nocturnal emissions”, spots “like scabs”, that my mother would see this filth and that she would wash the sheets without asking any questions. I didn't worry about it until one morning, when I was 14, I discovered that hair had grown (in a single night?) on my lower abdomen, thick, dark, frizzy, radically transforming what had piqued my curiosity for so long, this child's sex that I had associated with the only possible sexual desire. I was surprised and horrified to see these hairs, and I hastened to cut them, worrying that they would never grow back, and that someone might one day guess what I had done and my reasons for doing it, which were totally unconscious. I was going to become a man, which meant having erections, a beard, hair all over my body. The beard, above all, frightened me, because it grew right in my face, it had to be shaved, I needed my father to teach me how to do it, and it inevitably meant being close to him, half-naked, side by side, in the bathroom. An unbearable prospect, radically unthinkable: my whole body thus surrendered to my father's sexual curiosity, impossible. So I started stuffing my underpants with tissue paper night after night, so that if I had to ejaculate, in spite of myself, at least it wouldn't leave any traces. I hoped I would never have a beard, but I secretly bought myself an electric razor, in case I had to get rid of this stain, discreetly, without anyone knowing. I begged God not to give me a hard-on. I wanted to be a man, but I didn't want anyone to know, to see. How could I maintain the dissociation from this body, when it was becoming more visible than ever, and the terrifying point of contact with reality? My cursed body, that hideous cursed prison that I had to endure, this body too thin, too ugly, and which now revealed itself in all its nakedness as a disappointing male body, a walking skeleton, with ridiculous sexual pretensions, something to laugh at sadly. Peraldi had already told me that it was possible, yes, to considerably delay, and even block, the transformation of the body, to hinder the evolution towards male characteristics – a beard, for example – and to prevent the vital expansion of the body. The fact is that I did not have a beard, visible or perceptible, until I was 22 or 23, and that I never knew how to shave it other than with an electric shaver that requires no learning. “You didn't want to be seen in a situation of sexual arousal,” that's why you oppressed your male body. That was the last thing Péraldi said to me, on Friday, February 26, 1993. It was my last session. The psychoanalysis came to an abrupt end with that realization.

When I became very “sick”, when I fell to pieces, and when I had to painfully and talentlessly play a crumbling character with very blurred contours, I needed to write and talk, incessantly, always picking up the thread of past events, trying to give them a credible, emancipating meaning. It was not an easy thing to do, because I was stumbling over the amnesia - the dissociation, the decapitation - that had emptied my brain and deprived it of what my own body could have taught it through memories that would otherwise have been lost. My eye, above all, became disconnected. It became a rudimentary, insensitive, automatic organ, an organ that captured inert or insignificant things, programmed so that, in the face of danger, it blinded itself and no longer saw anything but blackness or chaos, its essential reference points. Hence my astonishment, when I began the analysis, at the emergence of visually magnificent dreams, full of a flamboyant imagination that I had absolutely no knowledge of, dreams of incredible inventiveness; the buried memories began to emerge and to tell their story in a series of short films of great beauty and talent. Unconsciously, I knew how to tell a story by transposing it, which was quite extraordinary! One day, when I was 16 or 17, the psychologist at the Petit Séminaire de Québec, where I was studying at college, told me, based on a test he had given me: “There is an immense creative power within you that has not found its way of expression.” But to be able to conceive and create, you have to feel free to see, and to integrate what you see, with as little censorship as possible. Otherwise the desire to create atrophies through self-doubt; self-image dissolves at the same time. It becomes impossible to imagine, and it takes time to simply learn to associate, or to see what should emerge with the technique known as EMDR, which I tried with Thomas Lebeau long after psychoanalysis. Dreams remain: they certainly caused the eruption of a lot of anxiety, but at the same time, they gave shape to an astonishing capacity to create.

To survive, I also learned to avoid. The child discovers the method for himself and since it works, he hastens to generalize it, all the time, to all aspects of his life, if necessary. I quickly realized what had to be done, so that no one would talk to each other, and above all, so that no one would talk about me from one place to another, typically from school to home. I learned to isolate all the time, to separate all the time, and to lie, often; it was common knowledge, of course, I was just a child who was easily decipherable on these things, and a lady who didn't care for me had nicknamed me in this regard “the little liar of Rue Cartier. ” It didn't correct me. I lie less now - still a little, all the same, because it so easily masks fear, inhibition, embarrassment - but I still avoid those situations where I feel in danger as much as I can, and I condemn myself to loneliness. That's how I've always survived, but of course it hurts a lot. If I find myself cornered, obliged, judged or threatened (threatened, for example, with losing my job if I don't show enough enthusiasm for an outing, and it's happened to me at the college where I taught) so I force myself to go there, I force my body to go there, and I withdraw into the deepest part of myself, I watch, terrified, these men and women who talk, who laugh, who get close to each other, who brave life, and I anticipate the worst, without believing it, of course, and yet I imagine, despite everything, that they are planning a binge, and then a crime, extreme pleasure in committing a robbery, a murder, a rape, an act of gratuitous and vicious violence, deliberately immoral, which hurts, which crushes, which draws its energy from everything that is exciting. I see without seeing and without it being known, I hear without hearing and without it being suspected, I remain inert, a stupid smile on my face, I don't move, I pretend nothing is happening, I detach myself from my body, I am aware of it, as if I were abandoning it in order to survive, simply surrendering without interest. I watch and listen as if everything were very far from me, as if I were tiny, hidden, invisible, letting my body react like an automaton, emptying itself of all living substance, desexualizing itself, neither man nor woman, neutral, peaceful and worthless, protected from blows, insults, annihilation. Avoiding is also, and singularly dissociating oneself - cutting one's own throat - and it took me a long time to understand that all this had real sexual foundations, and that I was thereby prolonging infantile defense techniques that I had developed in another era, often a very distant one, to protect myself from aggression, to avoid seeing or feeling it.

For a long time, I was afraid of having my wallet stolen, that small bundle of papers essential to everyday survival. This fear was all the more distressing because I had absolutely no way of spontaneously distinguishing crime from guilt. The absurd thing is that the fear of being robbed, when it did arise, became the fear of appearing to be a thief - which would alert the police, who would ask questions, and I knew that it was strictly forbidden to answer them... I was behaving like a child who knows he is desirable, but who avoids the other person's desire by hiding (and I hid a lot, a lot), sometimes with the fantasy of burrowing down, completely, to avoid being attacked or killed - robbed, raped. However, there was very little money in my modest wallet, and no credit cards. I deliberately provoked nothing at all. Despite everything, it seemed to me that the object remained desirable, and that it had to be hidden at home and not carried on my person unless absolutely necessary. A compulsion whose motivation was also totally unconscious. Beau Garçon had told me, when he had observed this strange habit with amazement, that he found it strange: “You hide your wallet? But you don't need to hide your wallet! ” I hid it. I couldn't help it. I had to be made to laugh at before I could break the habit.

The fear of being stripped of my wallet was also, and very much, the transposed fear of being dispossessed of my identity, of losing my memory again, and of being deprived of essential markers. It was the fear of being lost, disoriented, uprooted again - without being able to name myself, to tell my story, to identify myself by my own means. It was admitting, which was absolutely dramatic, that there was no one to recognize me, and that I was completely alone in having to invent a life that would ensure my survival. Someone had already stolen my memory, I knew that from experience, and I never stopped protecting my substitute memory, which was built day after day on what remained of my still viable foundations.

And then there is, in this fantasy threatening theft, a more complex, even more paradoxical matter. Peraldi had once pointed out to me that the literal meaning of the expression: “I dreamed of being robbed” could become: “I (ardently) wished to be robbed”, and in fact be rid of a wallet that bothered me - and which represented, that's right, the body, desire, power, sex itself, as it was, moreover, for the signature, the one I had imitated, of my father, of my brother, in evasion, and which was camouflaged there, precisely, in my wallet. If I dreamed of being robbed, of being relieved of the wallet, it was because I knew there was a vice in me, and I knew full well that I had a considerable one, worse than all the rest, absolutely perverse - in me, but not necessarily the link, moreover. In fact, I dreamed of not having a wallet, just as I dreamed of not having a car, of not being sexual, of not having an erection or ejaculating, because I wanted to avoid any connection with my father, and any link with his body, his desire and his sex. Peraldi had pointed out to me several times that there was, for every dream, as for every photograph, a negative that was also very revealing, and that while the fear of being stolen from was very real, the desire to be stolen from, as a powerful instrument of survival, was just as indicative of an unconscious necessity - and a very real one too.

I'm not sure whether to generalize the idea that for a young boy who has suffered sexual violence from a very young age, castration (since we have to use that word) is always dreamed of as a magical escape from anxiety. But I'm sure that I dreamed of stealing my wallet as an easy solution, the only one that comes to a child's mind, to the necessary healing of his wounded, retracted, guilty, symbolically impotent sex. Yet sexual confusion and shame, extreme shame, persist, and it is absolutely necessary to escape from them if one wants to survive, at least a little, at least for a while.

(I now have a well-stocked wallet - and that goes for all kinds of things - and a big car, a beautiful, very expensive car that I bought very recently. And I am only reasonably afraid of being robbed. In fact, I never think about it anymore.)

The worst thing for a sexually abused boy is the devastating, murderous, obstinately daily shame. It is essentially to survive the shame. I was terribly ashamed. I was ashamed of myself, of my body, of the way I spoke, of my gestures, of my wounded and atrophied intelligence, of my lack of courage, to tell the truth, of my cowardice, I was ashamed of my faltering virility, I was ashamed of being afraid of everything, of everything that requires skill, mastery, control, talent, know-how, strength; I was ashamed of feeling anxiety where other children feel pleasure, I was ashamed of being afraid of gangs of boys, baseball or hockey games, I was ashamed of being mediocre and of having been perceived as such, I was ashamed of being unworthy and of having to hide my true identity, my privacy, my secrets, my sexual desires, my vital needs, in order to survive and to maintain a minimum of social integration. I was ashamed of being afraid to laugh, to let my hair down, to disobey, to challenge; I was ashamed of being submissive to the point of alienation; I was ashamed of having fled so often, and of having run away alone; I was ashamed of having so few friends, and of having been alone so often. That is what unhappiness is like for a child who has been abused, who has been raped. It brings something concrete, a lot of concreteness to the perfectly insignificant and extremely vague statement that “my life has been stolen”. Sexual abuse is an appallingly tangible devastation that can be described and that leaves its mark for a long time.

If there is one thing that I still regret, it is that this disaster, because it is told in the first person and speaks of “me”, has so often been equated with narcissism, when it is precisely a reaction to the egotism of someone who believed, a long time ago, that they had every right, including the right to get rid of me, abandoning me after the rape and the fake love. In a way, which seems undeniable to me, Dr. B, and others too, attacked me and locked me into the initial aggression, making me guilty not only of Oedipal desire, but above all of its supposed consequence, homosexuality, as the blatant, degrading result of the fear of the vengeful father and the consequent narcissism. Neither Peraldi nor Thomas Lebeau ever gave in to this. They respected the right to the truth.

Surviving also means talking and writing a lot. I went from one therapy to another, starting at the age of 17 with the first, an urgent request for help, as I was caught in a dead end that had become suicidal. And I wrote, throughout these decades, thousands of pages. The subconscious has no time and makes great demands: it does not tire as long as it still has something to explain.

 

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