Denial: A Memoir
of Terror
One of the world’s foremost experts on terrorism and post-traumatic stress disorder investigates her own unsolved adolescent sexual assault at the hands of a serial rapist, and, in so doing, examines the horrors of trauma and denial.
“I have been quiet, and I have listened all my life. But now, I will finally speak.”
Alone in an unlocked house in a safe neighborhood in the suburban town of Concord, MA, two obedient, good girls, Jessica Stern, 15, and her sister, 14, were raped on the night of October 1, 1973. When they reported the crime, the police were skeptical. Their father, away on business, did not return for three more days.
Following the example of her family, Stern—who lost her mother at the age of three—denied her pain and kept striving to achieve. But while her career took off, her success hinged on her symptoms. After her ordeal, she could not feel fear in normally frightening situations. Stern thought she’d disassociated from the trauma altogether, until a request took her back to that night more than 30 years earlier.
The world-class social scientist and expert on terrorism and post-traumatic stress disorder began her own investigation, with the help of a devoted police lieutenant, to find the truth about her rapist, the town of Concord, her own family, and her own mind. The result is DENIAL, a candid and deeply intimate look at a life, a trauma, and its aftermath.
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Praise for
Denial: A Memoir of Terror.
“A disturbing, captivating memoir… Most moving is the author’s contemplation of denial itself, and its effect of re-victimizing the victim…She successfully unearths difficult emotional terrain without sinking into utter subjectivity and maintains an orderly progression without becoming clinical.”
“Stunningly brave book.”
“In this skillfully wrought, powerful study, a terrorism expert, national security adviser, and lecturer at Harvard, returns to a definitive episode of terror in her own early life and traces its grim, damaging ramifications… Stern’s work is a strong, clear-eyed, elucidating study of the profound reverberations of trauma.”
“Hot to the touch in ways that are both memorable and disturbing.”
“Wonderfully compassionate, absorbing reading for anyone.”
“Jessica Stern has always had the gift of disappearing into the lives and minds of terrorists. In this book, she faces the greater challenge of her own. The layers of abuse she has encountered, her tender matter-of-factness, her refusal of self-pity in favor of insatiable curiosity— these are some of her gifts born of trauma. This book will allow people into parts of themselves they did not have access to, or even knew they had. Parts full of rage, of terror, of pride in their own detachment. It will allow their hearts to begin to break. For anyone who has lived at proximity to violence, it is one of the most necessary accounts of our time.”
“What Jessica has accomplished is nothing short of remarkable. Her amazing memoir totally validated the linkage between PTSD and Rape Trauma Syndrome and, with her personal emphasis on “terror,” provided a much-needed answer to any questions of commonality.”
“There’s nothing predictable in this book, which makes it an absorbing read. The underlining message of Jessica’s story is how seductive denial can be. I picked the book up one evening and read the entire thing. I didn’t mind staying up past my normal bedtime to. It was worth it. I recommend this book as an easy and exciting read on a complex subject.”
“Extraordinary. I am speechless. This book is truly important. It will change and help heal lives.”
“Jessica Stern has written a remarkable book, unlike any that I’ve read. This deeply personal and often painful reflection documents the costs of personal, familial, and community silence as well as the liberating effects of truthful testimony.”
“Denial: A Memoir of Terror is one of the most important books I have read in a decade. It’s a stunning blend of personal memoir of surviving a horrific sex crime—and having the courage to reinvestigate it as an adult—and cogent meditation on the links between sexual sadism, humiliation and political terrorism. Jessica Stern, one of the world’s foremost experts on terror, manages to explain, through shining a blazing light on her own pain, one of the most profound hidden whys of contemporary savagery and how it plays out geopolitically.
This is a groundbreaking book, in terms of how it shows that personal experience—especially the “shameful” personal experience of having been victim of a sex crime—can be used to illuminate the most urgent questions of our time. I had been pondering the sexualized nature of much of the torture at Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo, and this book gave me the aha! moment to reveal the true nature of a certain shape that human evil takes.
Brave, life changing and gripping as a thriller, this should be required reading for anyone seeking to understand terrorism and anyone who has survived a trauma of any kind—indeed, this should be read by anyone seeking to understand the nature of evil. A tour de force.”
“Jessica Stern’s harrowing memoir of a girl who trauma has taught to distrust herself and who learns to live with the idea of her helplessness–a girl who once turned away from what she could not understand or accept – examines the violence at the heart of things, with an appeal to compassion and forgiveness, rather than a condemnation of the destructive impulses that haunt each of us.”
“This is an unflinchingly courageous self-examination of the impact of trauma on an individual’s unfolding life. As a young, small, Jewish woman, Jessica Stern traveled alone to Pakistan to interview Islamic terrorists in their mountain lairs. Becoming an expert on nuclear terorism, she consulted to the National Security Administration. It took her years to begin to question her own motivations. But when she did, she opened a panoply of family secrets that lay behind her risky life and brilliant career. Through her riveting and brilliantly told story, Jessica Stern lays out the impact of trauma on an individual’s ways of experiencing the world, how trauma is transmitted across generations, and how severe trauma can be adaptively transformed. The book will be illuminating for victims and survivors of trauma, those who work or live with them, family members with generational histories of trauma, and for those who care about how our histories shape our lives.”
“I have been studying the effects of trauma on mind, brain and human development for the past 30 years and written hundreds of articles about it. As a result of hearing so many trauma stories and seeing so many damaged human beings I like to spend my spare time getting away from it all. I read Jessica Stern’s book after she gave me a copy and after a literary friend told me that it was the most profound account of the subjective experience of trauma, and I could not put it down. The courage with which Jessica unravels her own story and allows herself to know what she knows and feel what she feels is a remarkable human journey from confusion and doubt to clarity and perspective. Stern gives an incisive account of the shape of the imprint of trauma on body and soul, and shows us how honest confrontation with what we already know, but try to forget, is essential in order be liberated from the past.
The way Stern writes about how trauma has affected her relationships with her loved ones, and how an honest and compassionate confrontation led to true and deep human connections made me weep.
Thank you for writing such a beautiful book!!”
Denial
An Interview.
As a follow-up to the above video, Jessica answered more questions about Denial, reaction from friends, advice for someone who has gone through a traumatic experience, and more.
You said that you feared that writing a book about your own rape might destroy your career. Why?
I usually write about events in the political world. I am a witness. I do my best to report what I observe, objectively; and I often rely, at least in part, on other scholars’ previous work. People might disagree with my conclusions, but at least they can follow the trail of evidence and the logic of what I say. But here I am writing about what goes on in my own head. I am the sole expert. I cannot hide behind footnotes referring the reader to other scholars’ work. Nor can I share observations or test my conclusions against those of other experts. I play both roles: observer and observed. I have only myself to blame if I get it wrong or if I don’t push deep enough, past the layers of shame, toward a truth.
I was worried that writing about myself – not as an expert but as a victim – would make it harder for people to see me as an objective authority on terrorism. I find that when an “expert” reveals his biases and experiences to make clear to the reader that he knows the limits of his own objectivity, I trust him more, not less; but I’m not sure that all readers feel that way.
None of us is truly objective, of course. All “experts” are influenced by their life experiences; but most of us try to stay behind the curtain of objectivity, or at least attempted objectivity, most of the time. I have pulled that curtain away, at least in this book, exposing how my experiences drew me to the work I did, and also made it possible for me to do it. I’ll want to pull that curtain back, in part to hide behind the mantle of “expertise.” Will it be possible?
What has been the reaction from your family, friends, and colleagues who have read DENIAL?
The biggest surprise has been the way the book has seemed to unleash something in readers, made them want to rip away some aspect of their own denial. A colleague confessed to me that he realized, looking back on his experience in Viet Nam, that he had developed a habit of killing, that he had killed people he didn’t need to kill. Not all of those killings could be described as necessary to defend the nation. Now that he has admitted these terrible truths to himself, I hope he can find a way to put his experience into a context that includes his own youth and confusion and terror, but not denial. It may sound glib, but it is nonetheless true: Every soldier is a victim, even the ones that pull the trigger.
One of my fellow victims, raped by the same man, decided to tell her children what had happened to her. She knew that their perception that she was excessively fearful in regard to their safety was in fact correct; that this terrible secret – her rape at gunpoint – had made her overprotective of them. When she told her kids about the crime, she felt as if a huge weight had been lifted from her heart, she told me. Another reader, who was reviewing the book, had spent years traveling in and out of war zones. She wanted to talk to me about the strange altered states she was experiencing, and also the puzzling behaviors she noticed in her fiance, who is a soldier recently returned from Afghanistan. After reading the book, it occurred to her that she might be experiencing symptoms of post-traumatic stress disorder.
Somehow, witnessing – at least on the page — my effort to tear away a few layers of my own dissociation and denial, seems to be making it possible for others to do the same. If my book helps people in this way, I am grateful.
What advice do you have for someone who has gone through a traumatic experience?
This question is too broad. Everyone is different, and I cannot provide a recipe. Trauma that occurs early in childhood may have different effects from trauma that occurs in adulthood. It took me thirty-five years to be able to face what actually occurred when I was raped at gunpoint, and what happened in my family, both before and after the rape, to make me react the way I did. I hope that reading about this experience will give other readers’ courage, but I do not mean to suggest that tracking down and investigating your own perpetrator is a way to heal trauma. For many victims of violent assault, it could be psychologically dangerous.
It is important to realize that to be alive is to experience trauma. Not all trauma leads to shock or acute stress response. And even fewer victims of traumatic events develop post-traumatic stress disorder, which is an anxiety disorder involving persistent and intrusive memories of the ordeal, feelings of numbness or hypervigilance, and other symptoms. (See http://www.nimh.nih.gov/.) How a person fares appears to depend on many factors — including the extremity of the assault to the psyche, the response of bystanders and caretakers, and the victim’s history and biology.
There is a long list of additional resources on my website. But I cannot endorse any particular treatment, because what helps one person cope with the aftereffects of trauma could harm another.
Now that you’ve confronted your past, have your feelings about interrogating terrorists and putting yourself in dangerous situations changed?
Yes, very much so. I have no desire to be in dangerous situations now. I feel as if I exposed myself to too much – like an overdose of a drug. The idea of deliberately exposing myself to danger repels me now.
DENIAL is a multi-faceted book and touches upon many thought-provoking topics. What is the one thing you want readers to take away from your memoir?
In the moment that a person’s life is threatened, denial and dissociation are life-preserving. This not-feeling and not-knowing holds the psyche together in the face of mind-breaking terror. But problems arise when denial persists. Over time, denial degrades relationships. It is immensely seductive, both for victims and bystanders. But over the long term, it is also dangerous.
To be raped or abused or threatened with violent death; to be treated as an object in a perpetrator’s dream, rather than the subject of your own—these are bad enough. But when observers become complicit in the victim’s desire to forget, they become perpetrators, too. When authorities disbelieve the victim, bystander and victim collude in denial or forgetting, and in so doing, repeat the abuse.
I hope that my book will make people aware of the seductive appeal, but also the societal costs, of denial – whether it relates to victims of clergy sexual abuse, sexual assault, or the after-effects of war.
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