“For ten years of my life, the fact that I had been sexually abused was the principle around which I organized my existence,” writes Laura Davis, coauthor of the phenomenally popular and influential “bible” for abuse survivors, “The Courage to Heal,” in her surprising new book, “I Thought We’d Never Speak Again: The Road From Estrangement to Reconciliation.”
In her 20s, after a tumultuous adolescence, Davis began to remember her grandfather molesting her when she was a child. But when she told her mother about the abuse, her mother refused to believe it, and their previous “rocky” relationship became “a shambles.” For a decade Davis was completely alienated from her mother’s side of the family. “My rule was simple: if you believed me, you were in; if you didn’t, you were out.”
In an e-mail interview, Davis told me that she had to separate herself from her mother because people can’t recover from their experiences of sexual abuse in childhood “when the reality of their experience is constantly being minimized or challenged … I couldn’t afford any kind of reconciliation with my mother until I knew my own truth and had done enough healing to keep my own equilibrium when I was with her. Once I accomplished that, and only then, could I consider the possibility of reconciliation.”
Davis’ experience in finding her way back to her family — even though her mother still will not believe the accusations against Davis’ grandfather — formed the genesis of “I Thought We’d Never Speak Again.” The book encompasses a wide range of injuries and estrangements, and it details many reconciliation strategies, including one that brought together Israeli and Palestinian teenagers. Yet Davis’ prominent role in the notorious fin-de-siècle growth of “recovered memories” of childhood sexual abuse will inevitably draw attention to the parts of “I Thought We’d Never Speak Again” that deal with family reconciliations after accusations of abuse.
Recovered-memory therapy and books that uncritically supported it were all the rage in the late ’80s and early ’90s. In the space of a few years, thousands upon thousands of people — the vast majority of them women — somehow came to believe that their parents hadn’t just failed them in the usual ways, but were in reality incestuous monsters who had covered up a lifetime of unspeakable sexual abuses.
“The Courage to Heal,” first published in 1988, was a catalytic phenomenon in the midst of the madness. It was widely recommended on television, in magazines, by friends, by feminist groups, and by psychotherapists when their patients first entered therapy. It sold like hot cakes, and its influence was incalculable.
No one I talked to about Davis’ books denies that incest and the sexual abuse of children are real and serious problems, and most think that they are far more common than many of us would like to believe. Everyone welcomes the support and understanding that books like “The Courage to Heal” (subtitled “A Guide for Women Survivors of Child Sexual Abuse”) can give to people who have genuinely been sexually abused in childhood.
But “The Courage to Heal” also uncritically accepted — some say actively promoted — the idea that “repressed memories” of childhood sexual abuse could be the cause of many ordinary psychological and emotional dysfunctions in adult life. In the process, say critics, Davis was a major contributor to thousands of family breakups, lawsuits and estrangements that never should have happened. Now many of them find Davis’ new book on reconciliation to be a bitterly ironic follow-up to the damage they feel “The Courage to Heal” has done.
Davis concedes that a very small number of people might have a more or less legitimate beef, but she feels that she and Ellen Bass, her coauthor on “The Courage to Heal,” did far more good than harm. “Whenever you make a strong stand in the world, particularly when you deal with issues that have been hidden, you invite a strong reaction,” she told me. “Ellen Bass and I have been compared to God and to the anti-Christ. Hundreds of thousands of people have told us that we have saved their lives, and a few have said that we ruined their lives.”
The theory that adult psychological dysfunction could be caused by the repressed memories of childhood trauma was first promulgated by Sigmund Freud more than a century ago. It assumes that people can somehow store or imprint complete memories of traumatic events somewhere in their brains but entirely separated from normal consciousness. Memories of early abuse can be buried so deep, the theory goes, that people can live their whole lives thinking they had relatively normal childhoods — or even happy ones.
Yet all along they will manifest the “hidden trauma” in physical symptoms or dysfunctional behavior. Later — even decades later — with the help of psychoanalytic techniques like hypnosis, sodium Amytal (“truth serum”) and “guided imagery” — which also dramatically increase suggestibility and encourage fragmentary states of consciousness — people can recall the repressed events with perfect clarity. The overarching idea is that once people have recovered these hidden traumas and exposed them to their conscious minds, their psychological difficulties will be cured.
In the first edition of “The Courage to Heal,” Bass and Davis actively encouraged women to believe they had been abused, even if the women themselves initially had doubts about it. “So far, no one we’ve talked to thought she might have been abused and then later discovered that she hadn’t been,” they wrote. “The progression always goes the other way, from suspicion to confirmation. If you think you were abused and your life shows the symptoms, then you were.”
By the third edition (1994), however, Bass and Davis began to back away from their reassuring certainties. They still tell their readers that “you don’t need the kind of proof that would stand up in a court of law,” but the blanket validation of all recovered memories is gone. In the revision the authors write (changes in italics): “It is rare that someone thinks she was sexually abused and then later discovers she wasn’t. The progression usually goes the other way, from suspicion to confirmation. If you genuinely think you were abused and your life shows the symptoms, there is a strong likelihood that you were.”
Why the changes? “There were ways information in the first edition was misconstrued,” Davis says, “that we couldn’t have possibly anticipated when we wrote the book.” Misconstrued or not, by the mid-’90s it was impossible even for the most militant believer in repressed memories to ignore the spectacular embarrassments in the field. At their worst, those included now discredited reports of a vast, meticulously organized, multigenerational satanic conspiracy, operating worldwide, that committed thousands of undetected atrocities every year — from child rape to human sacrifice and cannibalism.
The fundamental problem was that there is absolutely no way, theoretically or practically, to separate iatrogenic (treatment induced) fantasies from memories that might have genuinely been uncovered in therapy. So the intractable logical problem for supporters of recovered-memory therapy was — and remains — how to recognize and disavow manifestly untrue or impossible “memories” without calling the entire concept of recovered memory into question.
There’s been a lot of tap-dancing and ground shifting in survivor support communities over the last few years as they’ve grappled with this conundrum. The third edition of “The Courage to Heal” included a 60-page section addressing the “backlash” that arose against recovered-memory therapy during the ’90s. The way Bass and Davis addressed the controversy in that section is representative of the survivor community’s response: First, claim that science has proved the existence of repressed memories and that it therefore completely validates the theoretical basis for recovered-memory therapy. Second, drastically minimize the problem of false memories and throw the blame for them onto a marginal portion of the therapeutic community. Third, accuse those who question recovered-memory therapy of wanting to minimize the seriousness of child sexual abuse or, worse, of actively protecting perpetrators.
Science actually says very little in support of the concept of massive repression/pristine recovery. Some forms of repression do seem to exist, depending on how the word is defined, but they don’t fulfill the criteria needed to support recovered-memory therapy. The theoretical mechanisms of repression — like the systematic forgetting of, or a complete dissociation from, a traumatic experience — also ensure that a memory will be distorted or never encoded at all.
When I asked Davis in e-mail whether her modifications to “The Courage to Heal” acknowledged the concept of false memories, she wrote, “Although I support survivors with all my heart, and believe that most people claiming to have been ‘falsely accused’ are perpetrators in hiding, there have been instances in which people have been mistakenly accused (though this is a far smaller number than the proponents of ‘false memory’ claim).” So although to Davis it’s not a large or important problem, “nevertheless, if even one person is falsely accused of anything, it is a terrible tragedy, and I have great sympathy for anyone in that situation. I pray every day for those families to find healing and peace.”
Some defenders of recovered-memory therapy have defended themselves by arguing that questioning the reality of the memories is also psychologically and socially damaging to “cognizant victims,” people who have always remembered the abuse they suffered as children. They believe, for example, that acknowledging that Cardinal Joseph Bernardin was falsely accused by a young man who recovered — and later recanted — “memories” of his supposed molestation will have a negative impact on the claims of legitimate victims of priestly pedophiles today. In a sense that’s true, because the controversy has intensified the doubt regarding delayed disclosures of childhood sexual abuse. But many of those who didn’t have to “recover” memories of their childhood abuse, like those who are speaking up about Catholic priests today, blame the current climate of doubt on the excesses of the recovered-memory movement itself, and not those who question it.
Charlotte Vale Allen, a cognizant survivor of childhood sexual abuse whose 1977 book “Daddy’s Girl” brought the subject of incest out into the open, wrote to an “accusation survivor” group 20 years later about how “infuriating” she found the recovered-memory movement: “The very notion of assisted ‘recovered memories’ drives me wild … After my father’s death, I took it upon myself to reveal our well-kept secret in the hope that it would help others. For a long time it has done just that. However, I despair of the idea that ‘Daddy’s Girl’ might now become the equivalent of that underground ‘cookbook’ on how to make home-made bombs; that it might be used as a manual on how to appear to be a victim … I fear that this profitable trend of ‘recovering memories’ will serve only to silence genuine victims.”
After their discussion, in the third edition of “The Courage to Heal,” of the many reasons why the “backlash” should not be countenanced, Bass and Davis nevertheless knuckle under to it and admit that “mistakes were made.” They proceed to offer advice to women who might be doubting whether their treatment has really uncovered genuine memories, acknowledging that a “few” bad therapists might have caused a “few” patients to develop mistaken memories.
But irresponsible therapy techniques were only part of the reason for the vast eruption of “recovered memories” in that era. The explosion of accusations and family destruction was nurtured during a decade of an immense, almost hysterical popularization of the idea that many common social and emotional problems were caused by repressed histories of childhood sexual abuse. Books like “The Courage to Heal” fed directly into that zeitgeist and actively encouraged people to assume that if they were in psychological distress, repressed childhood sexual abuse was very likely the cause. Therapists convinced that the problem was widespread used hypnosis and considerable powers of suggestion to persuade doubtful patients that abuse was the source of their troubles.
Once patients believe in their repressed memories and have invested socially and emotionally in their absolute truth, they are often encouraged to “drain the abscess” of the experience by a process called abreaction, pioneered by Freud a hundred years ago. It’s a process by which therapists induce patients to “relive” the painstakingly assembled “memories” as if they were actually happening.
Hypnosis can make the experience of “reliving” dredged-up scenes of childhood abuse particularly vivid and horrifying. As Elaine Westerlund wrote in a 1993 article in the journal Women and Therapy, “Movement in therapy will be much greater if the woman is able to sob like a child, to shake with terror and to scream with rage … Physical responses such as vomiting, incontinence or fainting will sometimes occur.” Some patients can even break out in welts, rashes and stigmata.
There’s only one problem: There’s no scientific evidence — or even consistent descriptive evidence — that memory recovery or abreaction actually works. Not only did it become increasingly clear to Freud that many of his patients’ “memories” couldn’t possibly have happened, but his patients also failed to get better following the big cathartic crises he engineered for them.
In fact, some of them got worse, as countless patients did while undergoing similar therapy a century later. It was common for late 20th century recovered-memory therapists to search “deeper” for more and more hidden memories when the “purging” of the first ones didn’t cure their patients. As a result, the recovered memories often expanded into more and more horrible outrages — with predictable effects on patients whose psychological lives were already fragile.
The practice often initiated or accelerated “flashbacks,” so that patients experienced spontaneous, hallucinatory moments of the recovered abuse scenarios in their waking lives. Christian psychologist Paul Simpson, a one-time promoter of recovered-memory therapy and the author of “Second Thoughts: Understanding the False Memory Crisis and How It Could Affect You,” notes that these supposedly “cathartic” experiences can have devastating effects. “As patients experience more traumatic flashbacks, they begin to decompensate — their personality and ability to function deteriorate dramatically. As decompensation increases, they are told that their psychotic breakdown is proof that what they fantasized is real.”
The emotionally excruciating effects of recovered-memory therapy are addressed reassuringly in “The Courage to Heal.” Bass and Davis describe the “emergency phase” of the process that begins when the memories of abuse have been uncovered and accepted as real: “You may find yourself having flashbacks uncontrollably, crying all day long, or unable to go to work. You may dream about your abuser and be afraid to sleep.”
“I just lost it completely,” one woman told Bass and Davis. “I wasn’t eating, I wasn’t sleeping … I was afraid to stay in the house alone. I would go out in the middle of the night and hide somewhere, behind a Dipsy dumpster or something … Physically, I was a mess. I had crabs. I hadn’t bathed in a month. I was afraid of the shower.” Bass and Davis note that for some survivors, the “emergency phase” can last for years, “with only short breaks in intensity.” But, they say, the good news is that “it won’t last forever.”
Yet sometimes it does “last forever,” if the abuse survivor finds that she can’t take the pain of her awful realizations anymore. “Maria Meyers,” a woman who finally came to believe that the “memories” of abuse that she had developed in therapy were false, wrote a response to the death of a fellow patient in a 1994 edition of the False Memory Syndrome Foundation newsletter. Far from having helped her or her friend, recovered-memory therapy turned them both into basket cases.
“Some therapists justify the worsening condition of their patients by telling them, ‘You have to get worse before you can get better,’” Meyers wrote. For her, the “getting worse” part of her therapy “didn’t mean getting a little more confused or a little more depressed. It meant nearly going insane. It meant retrieving memories so horrid and terrifying I couldn’t eat or drink and ended up on IVs … People are losing families, friends, jobs, and their homes. They are filing for bankruptcy after spending months in hospitals … [S]ome people give up … Some people commit suicide.”
As patients continued in recovered-memory therapy without gaining a cure for the problems that had brought them into therapy, the number of perpetrators in their memories also tended to expand. “The more I worked on the abuse,” said one woman quoted in “The Courage to Heal,” “the more I remembered. First I remembered my brother, and then my grandfather. About six months after that I remembered my father. And then about a year later, I remembered my mother. I remembered the ‘easiest’ first and the ‘hardest’ last. Even though it was traumatic for me to realize that everyone in my family abused me, there was something reassuring about it.”
It’s hard for someone outside this kind of therapeutic environment to know what was reassuring about the belief that one’s entire family was a vile pack of incestuous sexual abusers. But patients often find themselves relieved to know that their emotional problems and social difficulties are not really their own fault, says Richard Ofshe, a social psychologist and the coauthor with Ethan Watters of the landmark 1994 book “Making Monsters: False Memories, Psychotherapy, and Sexual Hysteria.” In therapy, Ofshe says, “The hard questions are not about what choices the patient made and what she might do to change her current circumstances, but rather what was done to her.”
The role of victim is seductive, and not just because it explains otherwise inexplicable missteps and failures. In the heady, angry heyday of the recovered-memory movement, it offered the opportunity to “start over” in life with a whole new identity and system of relationships.
The “chosen” family of the abuse-survivor community, unlike your original family, would never question or doubt you, and would always be accepting and supportive. You wouldn’t be told to “straighten up and fly right,” and you wouldn’t be expected to put up with any people or behavior you found too distressing or challenging. No one would know of your failures in life unless you chose to tell them — in your own way and from your own point of view. Your pain would be celebrated, your social and emotional dysfunctions forgiven as symptomatology beyond your control. There would be a sense of living through a period of high and necessary drama, and of bravely facing and dealing with something truly important. Best of all, you would not need to feel guilty for breaking away from a family that remembered your whole dismal history and had never given you what you felt you needed. A routinely bad childhood may not be enough to justify a clean and complete break, but an incestuously abusive one is.
Abuse survivors, perhaps understandably, tend to idealize the importance of family and overestimate the amount of unconditional love and affirmation people have a right to expect from each other. Many survivors’ “pre-discovery” stories betray a disquieting undercurrent of disappointment with their families’ emotional support and responsiveness, and the abuse diagnosis seems to validate and justify that discontent.
In “The Courage to Heal” Laura Davis inadvertently illustrates this concept with a dramatic rendering of the separation from her mother. “I’ve built this wall between us with careful, conscious precision,” she writes in an elegiac tone. “I know I’m not the daughter you wanted, Momma. I’ve always known that. But with my wall close around me, I can see that you’re not the mother I wanted, either, all-knowing, all-giving, all-protective.”
In a later section, Davis composes a letter she wishes she could receive from her mother after six months of their estrangement. It is not just a letter of total acceptance and apology, but of virtual self-abasement, and it ends by congratulating Davis for her courage.
“I must step past my own denial and support you,” Davis has her mother say. “As your mother, I want to give you whatever love and nurturing I can to help you get through this thing … Laurie, I think you are incredibly brave to do this work. I am proud of you. Your willingness to face the truth of your life is an inspiration to me. I only hope I can face my own life with as much grit and determination.” Davis reports with regret that her mother’s reaction to the proposed letter was not a happy one, and that was when Davis realized that reconciliation was impossible: “I was not going to get what I wanted from my mother.”
In the same section another woman writes of her mother, “Her love is not the kind of love I can believe in. She doesn’t have the instincts of a lioness for her cubs, and that’s the kind of primal love I need.” Bass and Davis note in reply, without a trace of irony: “This fierce, clear love isn’t available to many survivors from their families.”
Perfect, “fierce, clear” love is not available from most families, period. And no parent can be “all-knowing, all-giving, all-protective.” But recovering a memory of horrible abuse means not having to acknowledge the ordinary limitations of family love. As a victim of abuse, the survivor no longer has to make any concessions to the needs or feelings of others in her family.
She has suffered, and she is therefore the center of the family’s emotional and moral universe. She must have all the power and control in her relationships with her family, and her family must, according to another checklist in “The Courage to Heal,” accept the truth of the accusations without reservation, apologize, conform to the survivor’s wishes, say only the right things, and let the survivor direct the relationship.
In “I Thought We’d Never Speak Again” Davis acknowledges the seductive power of the victim’s role. It can be paradoxically wonderful at first to feel injured or “owed” or morally superior. But, Davis says, “while it is often empowering to identify as ‘a battered wife,’ ‘an abandoned husband’ or ‘the mother of a drug addict,’ in order to claim our legacy and heal from it, aligning ourselves with our injuries only benefits us for so long. Ultimately, a label that initially brought strength, solidarity and understanding can become a prison from which we must free ourselves.”
Davis claims that the estranged abuse survivors she’s met have welcomed this new emphasis on reconciliation: “There have been many survivors coming to my events,” she says (she maintains a list of workshops and personal appearances on her Web site), “many of whom say their progress and evolution on these issues is tracking my own and that they feel like it’s ‘time’ for this perspective to come out.”
But there have also been wary and angry reactions to Davis’ new philosophical focus on reconciliation, among both her abuse-survivor constituency and from people who feel “The Courage to Heal” was instrumental in inducing some women to believe they had been abused when they hadn’t been, destroying families and relationships as a result. “Well, isn’t that nice?” one woman snapped sarcastically when I told her about Davis’ new book. “She cashes in on the train wreck and now she’ll make another wad cleaning it up.”
According to the penultimate chapter of Davis’ new book, forgiveness is the major way to free ourselves from the prison of victimhood, but, she cautions, that forgiveness has to be genuine. “We live in a ‘feel good’ culture that encourages us to search for easy answers, speedy solutions and the immediate cessation of pain,” she writes. “As a result, what passes for forgiveness in our culture today is often a kind of pseudo-forgiveness in which people gloss over their grief, anger and pain in order to generate a false sense of magnanimity.”
Genuine forgiveness often requires an accounting, she notes, approvingly quoting Richard Hoffman, author of “Half the House,” a book outlining how he came to terms with his childhood: “There’s this weird Hollywood idea that all relationships should have a happy ending — that everyone should forgive everyone in the final scene. But if a man burns down my house, I don’t owe him forgiveness, he owes me a house … Real forgiveness restores the moral fabric of a community and a family. It says, ‘We are all accountable to each other.’”
Justice requires truth and the acknowledgment of responsibility. The perpetrators of sexual abuse have to acknowledge that what they did was wrong, stop making excuses, and apologize for the damage they have done to their victims. Out-of-control recovered-memory therapists, accusers who broke up their families on the strength of “developed” memories that are more likely than not untrue, and, above all, those who supported and encouraged the recovered-memory movement also need to face up to the mistakes they made. Otherwise, our forgiveness can be rightly withheld.
Given all the agony caused by mistaken “recovered memories” and their consequent family estrangements, it’s understandable that Davis would want to play down her own role in them. She’ll admit that, back in the ’90s, a therapist here and there made mistakes, of course, and perhaps a few people need to apologize. But Davis herself doesn’t. As in the reconciliation she has achieved with her mother, any question of truth or guilt or accountability can be set aside. No one needs to apologize for anything; no one needs to admit being wrong. Never mind justice or truth. We can just go on from here.
Lucie Blackman, 21, went out for the afternoon in 2000, phoning her roommate and best friend Louise to arrange a meeting later that night. Lucie never showed up, and within a few days she’d become one of those vanished blondes whose fates fuel headlines and hours of speculative media coverage. She was British, a former flight attendant, and she and Louise were living in Tokyo. They were also bar hostesses, a profession with a very specific meaning in Japan, difficult to explain to foreigners and not entirely clear to the Japanese themselves. Lucie both did and didn’t match the classic Missing Blonde profile, and for a while the mystery of what happened to her threatened to lapse into permanent obscurity.
One thing made a difference: The actions of Lucie’s father, Tim Blackman, who arrived in Tokyo to join his other daughter, Sophie, in publicizing the search and prodding the police. Richard Lloyd Parry, Tokyo bureau chief for the Times of London, covered the case as it unfolded, first over the course of several months while Lucie’s whereabouts and abductor remained unknown, and finally for the six years it took to try the man accused of killing her, Joji Obara. The book Parry wrote about the case, “People Who Eat Darkness,” is an exceptionally perceptive and nuanced look at a terrible crime, one that put nations, institutions and family members at odds, and often into bitter and toxic conflict.
Unlike Truman Capote, author of “In Cold Blood,” the most celebrated true crime narrative of all, Parry is in essence a reporter; this is no “nonfiction novel.” But like Capote, he’s less interested in dishing the eerie or lurid details than he is in exploring the penumbra of the crime, the complex factors that fed into it and the unpredictable effects it had on an ever-spreading network of people. The true crime genre has a (mostly well-earned) reputation for trashiness, but it fascinates for legitimate reasons, as well. Transgression, justice and punishment speak to the very heart of what a society is, how it holds its people together and how they decide who lies beyond the pale.
Because Lucie Blackman was a foreigner, and one employed in an industry that the Japanese view as disreputable, the Tokyo police were inclined to dismiss her disappearance. Bar hostesses get paid to talk to and flirt with customers, and they are expected to go on (paid) dinner dates with them outside the clubs where they work, but it’s an arrangement that usually stops short of actual sex. Nevertheless, the Japanese think of most foreign hostesses as irresponsible, drug-loving backpackers who might well run off without telling anyone or get mixed up with dangerous people. Whether or not a Westerner would call what bar hostesses do a part of the sex industry, for the Japanese, these women belong to that category of “bad” girl who can expect little help or concern from authorities should she get into serious trouble.
Crime is not what it was in Capote’s day. In addition to finding and building a case against the perpetrator — jobs for law enforcement authorities — there’s handling the media, a task usually left to the victim and his or her relatives. Lucie’s father proved, initially at least, to be a master at this. Tim could detach himself emotionally from the horror of his situation and strategize. He was able to capitalize on a G-8 summit meeting being held in Japan around the same time Lucie vanished and parlay it into the intervention of British Prime Minister Tony Blair. Blair publicly asked Japan’s prime minister to front-burner the investigation, and met with Tim and his younger daughter Sophie while he was in Tokyo.
The police, who had been dragging their heels on Lucie’s disappearance, found this development (which made perfect sense in the political context of Britain) flabbergasting. Still, it worked: Lucie, who might have been written off as one of those “disposable” women of dubious virtue, was conclusively cast as an innocent girl, “naive perhaps, out of her depth,” but an adventurous daughter rather than a reckless slut. Tim was driving the narrative, as an electoral campaign manager might put it, and he was good at it. He liked talking to the press, even the tabloid press, and they liked him.
But if Tim was good at telling Lucie’s story, he was less successful at telling his own. Some of the most penetrating passages in “People Who Eat Darkness” concern what Parry refers to as the “script” expected from bereaved parents. Years later, Parry covered a press conference given by the father of another murdered girl and recognized in him “everything the world expected of a man in his situation: broken, helpless, turned inside out by loss.”
Tim, however, was composed, which aroused a formless popular suspicion regarding his sincerity. In similar cases, this uneasiness frequently takes the form of outside observers suddenly deciding that the parents might be implicated in their child’s disappearance or death. Tim, halfway around the world when Lucie vanished, was immune to that, but when he quarreled with the rich businessman funding the private search for his daughter, accusations of self-interest and even exploitation surfaced.
Lucie’s mother, Jane, on the other hand, behaved exactly as a grief-stricken mother is supposed to. In some respects, the truth about her parents’ failed marriage is as unknowable as the events of Lucie’s final hours. Unamicably divorced, Tim and Jane avoided even being in the same room together throughout the crisis. Was Jane, who seems to fall for every kind of supernatural hokum that crosses her path, pathologically vindictive, or was Tim as big a shit as she claimed? Just when you think you’ve made up your mind on that question, a new development comes along to knock you into the other camp.
As for the perpetrator himself, he remains something of a cipher to Parry, who was never able to interview him. Obsessively camera shy, Obara deftly avoided being properly photographed even after his arrest. He was clearly demented, as a long, self-justifying self-published book (disguised as the work of concerned supporters) amply demonstrates. Resolutely confident and unrepentant, Obara was also utterly unlike the vast majority of Japanese criminal defendants. (Parry explains that the justice system there depends almost completely on the ability of police investigators to shame suspects into confessing.) They simply didn’t know what to do with him. The Japanese blamed Obara’s recalcitrant behavior on his Korean ethnicity.
The Blackmans and Obara, Western-style players, descended on a criminal justice system unprepared to cope with them. “The inadequacy of its police force is one of the mysterious taboos of Japanese society,” Parry writes, “a subject that the media and politicians strain to avoid confronting, or even acknowledging.” The blunders of the police were many, but they could also be dogged investigators. Their real problem, according to Parry, is that they are good at dealing with “conventional Japanese criminals,” but when faced with the unexpected, they’re “sclerotic, unimaginative, prejudiced and procedure-bound.”
Obara behaved like a British or American criminal — taking charge of his defense, actively contesting the prosecutors, formulating a counternarrative to account for Lucie’s death. Watching how Japanese institutions responded to him, as well as to the Blackmans’ efforts to influence the investigation, proves fascinating. Since true crime, at its best, serves as a window on what a society cares about — how it constitutes not only what’s right and wrong but what’s sympathetic, reasonable, acceptable and important — the Obara trial was a most illuminating culture clash.
Parry doesn’t, however, forget what lies at the root of this drama: the death of a young woman who, whatever her doubts or flaws, had every reason to hope for a wonderful life. As the investigation would eventually reveal, this tragedy was eminently preventable. The people who tried to tip off the police about Obara were dismissed as not worth listening to. Let’s hope they’re not the only ones to learn from that mistake.
“Inside Job,” Charles Ferguson’s Oscar-winning documentary film on how government, Wall Street and academia colluded to deliver us the worst financial crisis since the Great Depression, made a powerful case that something was very very rotten at the heart of the American political/economic nexus. His follow-up book, “Predator Nation: Corporate Criminals, Political Corruption, and the Hijacking of America,” can be considered the legal brief that dots every “i” and crosses every “t” in his argument. A tightly argued, profusely footnoted and deeply enraged castigation of everyone involved, “Predator Nation” isn’t just a factually unchallengeable account of how Wall Street blew up the global economy. It’s a denunciation, a call for justice and a warning: After getting away with the crime of the century, Wall Street still isn’t satisfied.
“If you have already got 96 percent of what you want,” Ferguson told Salon, “why not take the remaining 4? That’s where the culture of American finance is right now, and I think it’s really dangerous for the country.”
For at least 30 years the United States has been headed on the wrong track, handing over more power and wealth to a tiny percent of the American population at the expense of everyone else. But Ferguson’s story isn’t just focused on the greed and recklessness of the elite. It’s also about their criminality. The bankers who wrecked the financial system broke the law. And yet, amazingly, not only have the vast majority of responsible parties not been convicted of any crime — they haven’t even been charged. There have been a few settlements of fraud allegations with the Securities and Exchange Commission and other regulatory bodies and a smattering of slap-on-the-wrist fines, but nothing that comes close to a proper reckoning for the massive hardship and economic destruction that they caused.
Ferguson’s glowering rage spares neither political party. Clinton gets the blame for completing the process of financial sector deregulation, and George W. Bush is lacerated for his general incompetence. But Barack Obama is showered with a particularly aggrieved contempt. Obama, writes Ferguson, came into office with more hope invested in him than in any recent leader, and then proceeded to “betray” and “screw” his supporters by declining to bring Wall Street to account for its misdeeds.
“Predator Nation” hits bookstores on Monday, just in time to cash in on the headlines generated by the latest banking atrocity — JPMorgan Chase’s massively failed derivatives bet.
“Predator Nation” is an angry book. Were you this angry before you started making the film “Inside Job”?
No, I absolutely was not. I remember the first time I got any kind of inkling of what was to come was in August or September 2007, when Charley Morris sent me a copy of a galley proof of his book, “The Trillion Dollar Meltdown.” It was scary and powerful, but I couldn’t bring myself to believe it. I remember calling Charley and saying, “You lay out a very convincing case but really, these people aren’t that crazy, they aren’t that stupid. They are regulated. Can it really be this bad?”
And he said: “You just wait.” And boy, he was right.
It’s not that I thought that investment bankers were like Mother Teresa. I knew that they weren’t. But the degree of nakedness and extremity of the dishonesty and its pervasiveness was a huge shock to me. It turned out that many banks, on a very large scale, and without any disclosure, had created and sold securities with the intent of betting on their failure. And this was done with the knowledge and approval of senior management of all these banks, including the oldest and most traditional.
How do you explain this behavior? How did we get to a point where it was routine for Wall Street bankers to behave in ways that most Americans would consider frankly immoral?
I think this has its roots all the way back in the 1970s and the beginning of the era of deregulation. But there was a kind of inflection point during the five-year period between 1997 and 2003 — the late Clinton and/or early Bush administration — when all the rules just went away. You went from a period, a regime, where people did have at least some concern about going to jail, to a point where everything is legal, and derivatives couldn’t be regulated at all and nobody went to jail for anything. And looking back I would say that this period definitely started under Clinton. You absolutely cannot blame this on George W. Bush.
You say that everything is now legal, but in your book you dismiss Obama’s argument that he could not prosecute Wall Street bankers for criminal behavior because what they did was technically not illegal as “complete horseshit.”
I should be more precise. I should have said, “where everything was perceived as being legal.” There was no perception that, even when you were in fact violating the law, that there would be any legal jeopardy or legal consequence to what you were doing. And that was part of my surprise when I was making “Inside Job.” I really was surprised that people would so overtly and explicitly do things that 20 years previously probably would have gotten them landed in prison.
One can certainly argue that the penalties and prosecutions following the S&L [Savings and Loan] and insider scandals of the 1980s were vastly insufficient. No doubt about that. But there still were consequences. I don’t know whether [junk bond king] Michael Milken would have still done everything he did, if he knew that he was going to spend two years in prison and have about half of his wealth confiscated. Maybe he still would have made that bet, but still, clearly he had a few unpleasant days. And now, nothing, just nothing.
In your book, you have a laundry list of things you believe the bankers could be prosecuted for, everything from securities fraud to perjury to RICO Act violations. And then you point out, more than once, that during the Obama administration there have been no arrests or indictments of any firms or senior executives “related to causing the bubble or the crisis.” What’s your explanation for this? Is it as simple as the Obama administration being captured by the financial sector?
I’m not President Obama’s psychoanalyst, so I can’t speak to what goes on inside his head. But that is what I would say of the Obama administration generally. In the book I go through the list of his personnel appointments and it’s pretty clear.
But how do we square that with the negative Wall Street reaction to bank reform? You devote only one sentence in your entire book to Dodd-Frank, calling it “weak and ridiculously complicated.” But even so, House Republicans have introduced nine bills trying to repeal parts or all of it, Romney is campaigning on repealing the whole thing, and Wall Street hates it and has tried to kill every last part of it. There is clearly antipathy against Obama from the financial sector now, from Jamie Dimon on down, that wasn’t there when he got elected. If he was truly captured, why the antipathy?
Well, there is some antipathy. But he just held a very successful fundraiser at the home of the president of private equity group Blackstone. So the antipathy is not universal.
But you know, when I was in academia and also when I was running a software company I had a fair amount of contact with portions of the financial sector, investment banking industry, and the venture capital sector. And certainly they were already pretty rapacious and pretty politically conservative. But they would never then have said and done the things that they say and do now. I recently was at a dinner in New York City and one of the people there was a very, very successful man who is on the borderline between venture capital and private equity. And this guy went into an extended rant about how he was at a disadvantage because he had to pay 15 percent capital gains taxes. When I was first dealing with venture capitalists in a significant way, the capital gains tax rate was 28 percent, and nobody was complaining. Then they got them reduced to 20 under Clinton, and then later 15 under Bush. Plus, they got a rollover provision so if they took the proceeds of a venture capital investment and rolled it over into a new venture capital investment it was tax-free. At that point, we’ve reached nirvana, what more could there be?
But now we’re in this environment where this guy was loudly and aggressively complaining that he has to pay 15 percent to the government. And if that’s where you’re at, then of course you are going to complain about Dodd-Frank. You are going to complain about everything. If you have already got 96 percent of what you want, why not take the remaining 4? That’s where the culture of American finance is right now, and I think it’s really dangerous for the country.
Do you find it alarming that even after this huge crisis and even with a lot of populist anger on both the right and the left focused on Wall Street, Mitt Romney is running for president while promising to further deregulate Wall Street and repeal Dodd-Frank, and the polls show him neck and neck with Obama?
That is true, but I don’t think that Romney is going to get votes primarily or even secondarily for that. Most of the votes he is going to get will be because he’s religious, he’s against gay marriage, et cetera, all of these allegedly “values” issues — things like that and wanting to reduce taxes. That’s why he is going to get a substantial fraction of the popular vote. The reason he says he wants to roll back Dodd-Frank is not to get votes, it is to get money.
Ninety-nine percent of your book tells a story of how we’ve gotten ourselves into a bigger and bigger mess, and then you’ve got about a page and a half discussing what could be done to fix it. But your solutions — a legitimate third-party alternative, controlling the influence of money in politics, real tax reform, fixing education — it’s just really hard to see how we get from our current problems to those bullet points.
Yes. And we’re not. Not right now. I think it’s going to take things getting worse, either slowly or fast. Either we continue to melt away for another 25 years and then finally people wake up, or there might be another crisis. And maybe that will be sufficient. We’ll see. I don’t know. I’d be interested in your own view of this. I’ve had debates with several of my friends on this question. If Obama had really had the balls to try to do the various kind of things that he’d promised to do, or kinda sorta almost promised to do during his campaign, if he really made an effort, how far do you think he could have gotten in 2009?
At this point, I’m in the camp that believes that American government is completely broken. And we didn’t really find out how broken it was until Obama came in. In your book, you talk about Obama coming in withoverwhelming majorities, but he really only had 60 votes in the Senate from July 2009, when Al Franken was finally sworn in, to January 2010, when Scott Brown took over Ted Kennedy’s seat. And even the things that Obama did get through had to pass muster with a handful of very conservative Democrats. Nebraska’s Ben Nelson had control over the entire government. It’s a completely dysfunctional system. I think Obama severely underestimated what he was facing when he came in, and picked the wrong strategy of trying to go bipartisan, but it’s not as if he had the freedom to do what he wanted that Roosevelt enjoyed when he became president in 1932.
But there are an awful lot of things that the president can do even without the Congress. He didn’t have to choose the people he chose. He didn’t have to choose the attorney general he chose or the head of the criminal division of the Justice Department that he chose. I think that if he had said, I’m going to allocate $500 million to a special prosecutor’s office, and we’re going to find out what the fuck happened here, he could have done that.
There’s some talk now that JPMorgan’s disastrous bet on credit default swaps might lead to tighter regulation. I have to say, it was bizarre to be speed-reading your book while the Morgan news was causing post-traumatic stress flashbacks to the worst days of the financial crisis. Does what happened there fit into the narrative of “Predator Nation”?
I rather think so, yes. Mr. Dimon has long been largely correctly regarded as the best, most judicious, most careful steward of a major global bank. That he and his bank could make a mistake like this does not bode well. One thing that has actually not been widely discussed, somewhat to my surprise, in the commentary about all of this, is that this mistake — which it appears will cost them between $2 billion and $5 billion — this occurred in a very forgiving economic environment. If they made a mistake like this in September 2008, then things could look really quite different.
Does it qualify as criminal behavior?
There is some suggestion of criminality in the lack of honesty on disclosure of the positions and their potential implications. I can’t say; we don’t know enough yet. It certainly is the case that JPMorgan, although more prudent than many other banks over the last decade, has frequently been just as dishonest. It has done a number of extremely unethical things, some of which I mention in the book. So it wouldn’t be a surprise if they had not been forthcoming about this.
Do you think it will make any difference in how banks are regulated?
I fear not. Honestly. I’m sure that Mr. Dimon is momentarily chastised, and that JPMorgan will not be making any similar bets in the next couple of years. But is it going to change the overall posture of bankers and banking and is it going to change the regulatory environment in any significant way? I tend to doubt that. Unfortunately.
So where does this leave us? Your book is filled with a strong sense of personal outrage. How do you personally feel about the prospect that the only thing that could get us out of the mess we’re in is yet another crisis, perhaps even worse than the one we just lived through?
Personally, I am very fortunate. I have a very blessed life. I made some money earlier, I’m basically pretty financially secure. I can’t have private jets and private islands but I don’t have to worry about having a roof over my head or being able to eat well, unlike many people in this country going forward. And I do work that I love. I love making movies, I love writing books. Personally I’m fine.
But the country is not. But this happens to countries. This is not the first country it’s happened to. It’s not even the first time it happened to the United States. We’ll see whether we come out of it. Last time it happened we came out of it, eventually. It took a long time and it was very painful but eventually we came out of it. Will that happen again or not, I don’t know, I honestly don’t.
An ancient and priceless book, a murky history of evasions and coverups, an underground of sinister and possibly violent dealers, a former spy who drops tantalizing hints and a wily 84-year-old millionaire who says stuff like, “The problem with this story is that it could damage your health”: Are these the ingredients for a cheesy, improbable historical thriller? Yet “The Aleppo Codex,” Matti Friedman’s account of his attempts to learn the history of one of the world’s most precious books, sports all of these assets, and it’s nonfiction. If reporting this story damaged Friedman’s health, it probably happened when he realized what he’d stumbled into and his reporter’s heart started beating in doubletime.
The Aleppo Codex is the most authoritative version of the Hebrew Bible, produced in the 10th century by the great rabbi Aaron Ben-Asher and the scribe Shlomo ben Buya. Friedman, who lives in Israel and has covered the Mideast and the Caucasus for the Associated Press and other publications, explains that the codex’s significance to Jewish faith and identity is more than symbolic. As a people scattered across the globe, “instead of being bound by a king, a temple, or geography, [Jews] needed to be bound by something else, something portable. What emerged was the idea that a people could be held together by words.” Yet in the centuries before printing, when words were transmitted orally and by copyists, it was all too easy for mistakes and variations to creep in, and “Jews could not be held together by a book if they were not reading precisely the same one.”
The codex was the perfect version of the Bible, a sort of atomic clock of Judaism, and intended to be the model for all subsequent copies. Its early history was fraught: captured by Crusaders in the fall of Jerusalem, ransomed by the Jewish community in Cairo and consulted by the fabled sage Maimonides, it was eventually taken to the Syrian city of Aleppo. There, it resided for half a century. Although it was well-cared-for by Aleppo’s Jewish community, it had come to be revered as a relic or treasure; few were allowed to see it and no one was allowed to copy it.
All that changed in 1947, when the establishment of the state of Israel by a United Nations resolution led to unrest in the Arab world and the harassment and persecution of Jewish communities in Muslim nations. In Aleppo, this took the form of riots and the sacking of the synagogue. The codex — commonly referred to as the Crown — was supposed to have been consumed in a fire set by the mob.
It was not, and in 1958, the Crown was smuggled into Jerusalem by a cheese merchant who was one of the few Syrian Jews to receive official permission to emigrate to Israel. Friedman became interested in this “lonely treasure and millennium-old traveler” in 2008, when he decided to write an article about it. He imagined the piece would be “an uplifting and uncomplicated account of the rescue of a cultural artifact,” but what he discovered instead was a thicket of conflicting reports, missing records, puzzling omissions, stonewalling officials and obsessed amateur sleuths.
The mysteries surround not the ancient history of the book, but what happened to it between 1947 and the mid-1970s, although even establishing where things got dodgy proved to be a challenge. Friedman relates each piece of the story as he untangled it himself, and part of the pleasure of “The Aleppo Codex” is getting to tag along on the heels of a real-life investigative journalist as he does his detective work. Those years spent writing wire copy have not eroded the author’s eloquence, either, as the book’s headier touches attest: “Down in those streets, the stores now shuttered, the women of the manzul were receiving clients, and the men were submerged in cafe smoke like deep-sea divers, tubes between their lips, inhaling the rose-scented oxygen of water pipes.”
While the official story simply states that the Crown was presented to the president of Israel, Itzhak Ben-Zvi, upon its arrival in Jerusalem in 1958, Friedman unearthed evidence that this was no simple handoff. Most of the Jewish community of Aleppo had immigrated to Israel, and their rabbis insisted that the Crown was supposed to have been delivered to them. The cheese merchant maintained that the rabbis still living in Aleppo, the ones who had passed him the book, told him no more than to give it to “a religious man.” (The Syrian government prevented communication with the Jews in Aleppo, so his story could not be confirmed or disproved.) The Aleppo rabbis decided to take their complaint to court.
This dispute embodied major tensions within the newly formed state. The Aleppo rabbis had presided over what was, as Friedman writes, “an old community by the time Roman legions destroyed the Jewish temple in Jerusalem in AD 70.” The Israeli leadership, “largely secular European socialists,” did not strike the Aleppo Jews as “representing the entire Jewish people.” Why should these interlopers be allowed to appropriate a book that had been the focal point of Aleppo’s venerable Jewish community for half a millennium?
The codex lawsuit was also a dramatic example of what Friedman describes as a “largely untold story” concerning the migration of the Jewish Diaspora to Israel after the formation of the state. Along with the movement of people, there was also a “great migration of books.” Jews from all over the Muslim world were forced to leave neighborhoods their families had inhabited for centuries. Not only did distinctive local cultures vanish overnight, but so did many of their treasured texts, left at docks and airstrips with the promise that they would be forwarded on to their owners in Israel, and then never seen again. Well, not exactly never: Some of these books and scrolls turned up later in state archives and even in booksellers’ shops.
If that were all there was to the story of the Aleppo Codex, it would be fascinating (and dismaying) enough, but after wrestling with the shadowy story of how the Crown got to Jerusalem, Friedman turns to a second and even more disturbing question: Where is the rest of it? About 200 pages, some 40 percent of the Crown, are missing. These are the most important parts of all: the first five books of the Bible, also known as the Pentateuch and the Torah. Again, the official story holds that portions of the Crown were burned in the 1947 fire, but this has since been disproved. A couple of single pages have been found in places as far-flung as Brooklyn, N.Y., where they were carried around by Aleppo old-timers as good-luck charms. The bulk of the Torah, however, remains MIA.
This is where Friedman’s investigation gets especially lively, as he consults with a former Mossad case officer and secretly records an impromptu interview with one of the dozen or so men rich enough to have bought the missing pages. Supposedly, this collector and his daughter were approached by two dealers with a briefcase at a Jerusalem book fair in the 1980s. They were shown an old codex identified as part of the Crown, but the collector says he refused to buy it because the price was too high. One of the dealers later turned up dead in a Tel Aviv hotel room registered to a man who didn’t exist.
Friedman has his suspicions about the collector’s story: Would this man really consider $1 million too much to pay for a supposedly priceless text? He devotes most of his energy, however, to getting to the bottom of who is responsible for ripping out the heart of the Crown and selling it on the black market. As he settles on three likely culprits, “The Aleppo Codex” builds to a moral crescendo more impressive than the climactic fight scene in any thriller. “A volume that survived one thousand years of turbulent history was betrayed in our times by the people charged with guarding it,” Friedman writes. “We might file this tale between Cain and Abel and the golden calf, parables about the many ways we fail.”
Excerpted from
"This Is How" by Augusten Burroughs. Copyright © 2012 by the author and reprinted by permission of St. Martin’s Press, LLC.
Many people continue to feel influenced and even controlled by the things that happened to them a long time ago. Sometimes, people harbor dark, traumatic memories from childhood. Or fragments of memories — incomplete scenes, uncomfortable feelings, perhaps even a sense of certainty that something specific and terrible happened to them, but little more than this.
Others experienced something traumatic in adulthood that continues to affect them day to day many years later. Maybe an assault has left a person afraid to leave their home or enter a particular neighborhood.
For a certain kind of person this will be the end of the story. What ever experience they endured essentially continues to this day, ever present in the background, shaping the choices made on a daily basis, affecting the quality and range of their life. This kind of person might be angry all the time or feel guilty or afraid. They just accept these states as a part of themselves.
Then there are people who are keenly aware of their experiences, who are psychologically ambitious; they wish to “get over” these historical traumas and might see a therapist to help them.
The therapeutic process takes time, commitment, and funding. Then, insight leads to understanding, which leads to choice. At last, they are free to move on.
It’s such a clean, well-defined structure for the process of healing. Almost like a paint-by-numbers portrait where all those black outlines are confusing at first, but in time, as you apply the correct colors in the right areas, the tangle of lines resolves into a perfectly clear image.
Unfortunately, our brains tend to color outside the line. First, there is the matter of understanding our past and the events that transpired.
Understanding what happened in the past is rarely truly possible. Because true understanding must incorporate context. Not merely what we experienced, but why. And the why requires knowing the motivations of the other people involved. Without the perspective of this context, our understanding will always be biased; it will be from a single perspective: Ours. And therefore, not necessarily accurate or true.
If you are on a highway and you drive past a car accident so severe that the hood of the car has been crushed up against the windshield, you may very well assume the occupants are dead. And perhaps this will haunt you because as you passed by the car, you glimpsed a little girl’s doll on the shelf behind the backseat. One look at that accident was all anybody would need to know what “unsurvivable” looked like. And you have never been able to forget that doll or the little girl who must have loved it and who died in such a terrible crumple of steel and glass. Let’s imagine that you are haunted by dreams where you come upon the accident and you see the doll and you do nothing.
Let’s say that what was unknown to you was that the car was a high-end Mercedes that featured crumple zones designed to absorb the impact of a crash while protecting the occupants within a safety cage. And let’s say that the two occupants inside the car were sitting there as you drove by and the man in the driver’s seat was on his cell phone.
“No, I mean totally like, trashed, totaled. We’re waiting; they’re supposed to send a tow truck. She’s good except she has to pee so she’s—”
“Oh my God, did you just tell Jason that I have to pee? Now he’s going to imagine me peeing. Don’t forget to tell him we found the doll at a tag sale but we need to buy wrapping paper. At least we think it’s the doll.”
“You hear that? Yeah, don’t think about her peeing. And we’re pretty sure it’s the right doll; we had to spend like three hours on Craigslist to find one.”
Imagine that after the tow truck arrives and our couple has been safely installed into a rental vehicle, they don’t really ever think about that crash again except both are pleased with the new car’s color. Neither liked the wrecked Mercedes’ particular shade of red.
In this example, you can see how your entire perception of what happened — and you were a witness — is completely distorted by your point of view.
So, if you were to enter therapy over being disturbed by this wreck, you could spend years discussing why the sight of the doll was so upsetting, and how impotent you felt being unable to stop and help but even if you could stop, what could you have done?
Possibly, the therapist would have you write letters to the dead little girl.
What this really accomplishes is the creation of a sort of personal myth. A series of well-remembered events with finely honed details. As accurate as they may be, they are accurate from only one perspective.
For many years, I believed that one’s past had to be fully understood in order to move through and beyond it. I see now that I was wrong about this. I know now that scrutinizing one’s past and trying to gain understanding and “make peace” with it is a kind of addiction that keeps one focused on the past and not on the present.
As with any addiction, the first step to overcoming it is to see it.
And once you see it, you have to stop it.
- – - – - – - – - – - – - -
Once the current moment moves into the past, it is entirely gone. It ceases to exist except in documents, photographs, and an impression left in a sofa cushion. The past — and all the moments it contained — are no longer sharing this world with us.
They are no more real than Cinderella.
To spend time — year after year — in therapy or on your own thinking about your past and forming conclusions and stitching the elements into a narrative that you can name, “the truth,” in order to be “free” of it, is not how you become free from your past.
The past does not need to be reconsidered in the present and given a structure. The events of the past cannot be understood when you are the only element of the past actively engaged in reliving it.
When somebody says, “Therapy has been really helpful to me in terms of resolving some of my issues from the past,” what does this actually, in practical terms, mean?
Or somebody is “haunted” or controlled by their past. How is this possible?
When I first moved to New York, I became friends with a guy who seemed to be exactly the guy I wanted to be. He was very outgoing and had lots of friends and they probably all felt as I did: Like his best and closest friend.
After we’d been friends for almost a year, one night we were out drinking and he told me he had a confession to make, something he wanted me to know about himself.
I nodded and tried to look very sincere and open, while inside my mind it was the Kentucky Derby, with most of the money being placed on female-to-male transsexual. That wasn’t it.
He proceeded to tell me in great detail about the utterly atrocious physical abuse he’d experienced at the hands of his father and mother during his childhood. It was well beyond anything I myself had ever come close to experiencing.
After this evening, my friend spoke of his past abuse frequently. And I realized that all the time we’d been friends, all those moments prior to his revelation had probably been, in his mind, moments leading up to The Telling.
Only after The Telling could he be fully himself with me. His story of his past abuse was a large part of his identity. It was a protected secret that was kept out of view for acquaintances and coworkers. Only after a measure of trust and intimacy had been formed would there be almost a ceremony in which he detailed his abuse. Rather like unwrapping, slowly, an extravagant gift one knows is going to blow the mind of the recipient.
When we first became friends it had amazed me that he was single. I now understood that he was single because of
how guys reacted when my friend finally revealed his history. It was like encountering a new person. And my friend’s abuse was now like a third person with us wherever we went.
Who could blame him? It was a wonder he was still alive.
Today, I see it differently.
My friend is a dramatic example of somebody who is haunted by their past. But because the past is gone, how does it haunt? Of course, it does not. The past does not haunt us. We haunt the past. We allow our minds to focus in that direction. We open memories and examine them. We re-experience emotions we felt during the painful events we experienced because we are recalling them in as much detail as we can.
We enter therapy and discuss our past. We formulate opinions about what happened. We create a rich, detailed world. In therapy or on our own, we focus our attention on something that no longer exists in order to understand or have perspective or acknowledge or own what has happened. And only after we decide this understanding or recognition has taken place do we stop worrying that particular tooth with our tongue.
For years, I believed this was how to live.
I was wrong. It’s how to stagnate.
I know now how to get over the past. It has worked for me in a deeper, more enduring way than any therapy I have ever had.
Writing six autobiographical books is what freed me from my past.
If the books had been cookbooks I expect I would feel just exactly as free. That I wrote six books about my past is the red herring; nothing I have written has in any way altered the past or healed me clean, so no scar remains.
Perhaps the process of writing — being fully in the moment, while I write letter by letter — has soothed me because it’s kept me busy. When you’re busy, you lack the time to fondle your emotional baggage. And if that sounds too reductive, remember we crawled from the swamp. Simple isn’t such a terrible thing to be in this respect.
For the same reason, being out of a job and just hanging around is depressing in a thousand different ways. All you have is time. Sooner or later, you end up wandering around bad neighborhoods inside your head. Neighborhoods like, “They never should have fired me, those assholes.” Which may be true or it may be untrue but it’s irrelevant to everything. It is through work that challenged me and required continuous freshness that I began to occupy not the past but this, right now. My advertising career had not been challenging. Being busy is not the same as being focused. Being focused means being here.
And this, here, this line, that comma.
That’s what freed me from the past. The present kidnapped me. I climbed into its car when it held up its hand and showed me the candy. I hopped right in.
When something from my past upsets me here in my present, it’s because I let my mind think back to the past and grab hold of something.
This is how the past haunts us. We think about it.
Therapy could be of tremendous benefit to “getting over” one’s past if the therapy is focused on specific ways to stop submitting to the temptation to obsess.
Many people with difficult histories carry these histories with them, burnishing the past with each retelling. Sometimes, a particular trauma may be the largest thing we have ever experienced. So we kind of move into it, make it our home. Because there’s nothing in our lives on the scale of that loss or that trauma.
So, you need a larger life. Something that can successfully compete with your past.
To live with your mind in the past — in the name of healing or understanding or overcoming — is to live in a fantasy world where nothing new or original is created. To “understand” one’s past is to handle clay that no longer exists and shape it into a bowl nobody can ever see or touch.
Denial of the painful events in one’s past is the same as obsessing over one’s past. To actively refuse to discuss or think about, if need be, what happened is to imbue it with power. Recycling the past into a new business, a not-for-profit to help others, a workshop, a painting, a book, a song — these are ways to explore the past in the context of the present. These are things people who are actively alive do.
You must never allow something that happened to you to become a morbidly treasured heirloom that you carry around, show people occasionally, put back in its black velvet pouch, and then tuck back into your jacket where you can keep it close to your heart.
Then, when asked to join the pole vaulting club, pull the coach aside and whisper, “I can’t. See” — and remove your gem from your pocket — “this is my terrible thing and as I expected, showing it to you has taken your breath away and made you sympathetic. So I will be excused, I assume?”
Other people will allow you — they will never blame you or challenge you — to use your past as an excuse to not face the normal fears everybody has when facing their future. Even if you were brutally physically assaulted, you must not withdraw because you are afraid it will happen again. This is not a valid exit.
Your fears that it might happen again are perfectly reasonable and justified: It might happen again.
Many people believe that if something really bad happens to them, they have paid their dues and nothing else really bad can happen again. But on the day you attend your mother’s funeral or declare personal bankruptcy, there is no law in the universe that prevents you from also getting a speeding ticket and your first grey hair.
When multiple bad things happen, it can feel like “life is out to get you.” It’s not. And it’s not a sign, either. What you do is, you keep going. You stop waiting for fairness.
- – - – - – - – - – - – -
You do not need to work through your past so you can heal. You need to move forward and then you’re as healed as you’re likely to be.
Unless.
Unless you experienced something so unspeakably terrible, something so out of scale in magnitude that it simply doesn’t fit into the past. It is too large to be contained by time or space. And if this is you, the thing you can do for the duration of your existence is to tell your story over and over. So that other people can hear you tell it and they can be moved, changed by it. This can help others.
Which is the single comfort for people who will always remain locked in their history, inside something that is really a different species of awful.
I met somebody whose grandfather had survived the death camps in Germany.
He told me that his grandfather was a very quiet, broken man. He rarely spoke and when he did, he told the same stories about how he survived.
I told him, “Do you listen, every time he tells you?”
He said, “No, I just kind of let him talk and do my thing; I’ve heard it all a thousand times.”
I wondered if he had ever truly heard it once. I suggested he listen, hang on every word and try to see visuals in his mind of the story his grandfather was telling him.
Some stories must be carved into the present and the future by telling and telling again and then again until the story is part of us.
From “This Is How” by Augusten Burroughs. Copyright © 2012 by the author and reprinted by permission of St. Martin’s Press, LLC.
Joji Obara and Lucie Blackman (Credit: Estate of Lucie Jane Blackman) 
A detail from the cover of "Predator Nation" 
(Credit: Shutterstock/Salon) 
Matti Friedman 
Augusten Burroughs 
