“What do you mean, fell apart?”
“Just what I said,” Sonia said impassively. “I couldn’t sleep. I couldn’t eat. I couldn’t work. I couldn’t think. I failed three courses and pulled Ds in the other two.”
“And?”
“And I got lucky. This was, what, at least ten years ago now. It was well before there was all this interest in the sexual abuse of children and adolescents. Nobody knew anything and nobody was doing much of anything except a few people in the self-help field like Paul Hazzard. But my adviser liked me and knew me and he was convinced that I couldn’t have had such a terrible semester without something equally terrible happening to me, so he took me out and grilled me until I just started talking about it. And talking about it and talking about it.” Sonia laughed. “You’d be amazed what you forget. And the emotions. You know, I honestly thought I didn’t feel anything at all about it anymore. And there I was, sitting in this beer bar with peanut shells and sawdust on the floor, getting completely hysterical.”
“I hope your adviser kept his head,” Gregor said.
“He was cool. He still is. We write. Anyway, at that point we had a problem, because I didn’t want to go to individual counseling. The idea of sitting in a little room with just one other person made my skin crawl. Also the campus mental health center at the time was stocked full of Freudians, and you know what that means. You tell them you’ve been molested as a child, and they tell you it’s all in your head.”
“So what did you do?”
“Nothing, for a while,” Sonia said. “I was a little better just because I’d talked about it and it was out in the open. I was still falling apart, but at least I knew why. Then my adviser came across an article in The New York Times—it must have been the Sunday edition, he got the Times only on Sunday—about the self-help movement. It had a lot of stuff about Paul Hazzard, and it also had a paragraph about how people like Hazzard were approaching reports of childhood molestation differently from traditional therapists. And it had a phone number.”
“So you called,” Gregor said.
“I called. There wasn’t anything down in State College I could hook up with at the time. Five years later, that town was the state capital of self-help workshops, but not then. There was a group in Philadelphia. I arranged to attend that.”
“Father Tibor told me it helped and it didn’t.”
“It helped in the beginning.” Sonia was emphatic. “It helped a lot in the beginning. Look, Mr. Demarkian. People come out of cases like this in all sorts of shape. My own case was relatively easy. The incidents happened, but they weren’t of very long duration. Some children suffer through years. My mother was on my side and she took direct and unambiguous action. Some children live through their mothers’ deliberate blindness or accusations that the abuse was all their fault or I don’t know what else. So you see, all I really needed was a chance to talk about it for a while and work it out of my system and to feel bad and not have to apologize for it. The worst part about being the way I was then is that you want to talk about it and talk about it and talk about it and eventually people just get bored. Even if you don’t.”
“I can see that,” Gregor said. “So what went wrong?”
“It’s not so much that anything went wrong, as that nothing really happened. I went to Group every week, and I talked and listened to other people talk, and I began to feel better. I began to feel a lot better. My grades went back to normal. I was sleeping. I had a boyfriend that I’d told all about everything and relations between us were good. And nothing changed.”
“In the group, you mean,” Gregor said.
“That’s right. The thing was, nothing was supposed to change. I hadn’t paid much attention to psychological theories when I signed up. I was going crazy. But as I began to get better, I began to notice things. Such as the fact that you weren’t supposed to get better. Not really.”
“I don’t understand.”
Sonia made a wry little face. “The theory was, once something like this happened to you, it would be with you the rest of your life. You’d never be free of it. You’d need Group all the time and forever, for as long as you lived. It made me angry. It seemed to me to be saying that the son of a bitch had won. He set out to destroy you and he did destroy you, because you’d never really be you again. You’d always be sick.”
“I take it there was more.”
“Oh, yeah.” Sonia nodded vigorously. “If it had been just that, I would have quit and that would have been the end of it. What kept me in and fighting were the amnesiacs.”