“Amnesiacs?”
“Well,” Sonia said, “you see, it’s like this. Some people who have been sexually exploited as children don’t remember that they’ve been sexually exploited as children. The experience is so horrible, they just repress it.”
“I think that’s understandable.”
“Of course it is,” Sonia went on. “The problem is, the group I was in—all of Paul Hazzard’s organization, as far as I could tell—well, they used that fact to their own advantage. I can’t put it any other way. Yes, it’s true that there are people walking around out there who were abused as children and don’t remember it, but the group had a twenty-two-point checklist you were supposed to complete if you thought you had been abused but couldn’t remember, and if you came up with yes answers to three or more items on the list, then you were supposed to join a group because you probably had been abused. Let me give you three of the items that were on that list. ‘You always think before you speak.’ ‘You feel a great need to take care of other people and comfort them.’ ‘You often have trouble getting to sleep.’ ”
“But—” Gregor said.
“Exactly.” Sonia moved to the edge of her seat. “Don’t you see? There’s nothing in the least pathological about thinking before you speak. Practically every mother on earth feels the need to take care of her children and comfort them. And as for having trouble going to sleep—” Sonia shrugged. “These are disturbed people we’re dealing with here. There are a million and one reasons they might have trouble getting to sleep, including drinking too much coffee. You could have all three of those ‘symptoms’ and not be disturbed in any way at all. But there was more to it than that. There were the other groups.”
“That’s right,” Gregor said. “Paul Hazzard ran a variety. I heard that.”
“Shopaholics. Compulsive gamblers. Codependents. Love addicts.” Sonia counted off on her fingers. “The groups were held in this big building in downtown Philadelphia, sometimes six or seven different ones on the same night. One night I went around to all the groups and collected their pamphlets. They all had checklists. And guess what?”
“What?”
“The checklists were pretty much identical. Oh, there would be one or two particular items. The compulsive gamblers’ list included things like borrowing money to gamble or play the lottery. But mostly the lists were just repetitions. It didn’t matter if you were a shopaholic or a love addict or a codependent or a compulsive gambler or a survivor of childhood sexual abuse, the symptoms were all the same. The only thing that determined what kind of sick you ended up calling yourself was what group you wandered into. It was a terrible thing, Mr. Demarkian. These were people in terrible pain. They might not have been sexually abused as children, but they were in terrible pain. In the codependents and the shopaholics, you sometimes just got narcissistic jerks, but with us you got very damaged people. And I didn’t see what good it was going to do them to spin them a fantasy about what was supposed to be wrong with them and then keep them locked up in an identity marked ‘sick ’for the rest of their lives. So I came to a decision.”
Gregor Demarkian coughed. “Father Tibor has a great deal of respect for you,” he said carefully. “Why does that make me feel that this decision of yours was probably rather… extreme?”
Sonia giggled. “I don’t know if it was extreme, Mr. Demarkian, but it sure as hell was expensive. This is my senior year in college we’re talking about here, remember, and my people don’t have any money. Paul Hazzard gave workshops that he ran personally, but they cost over a thousand dollars for a weekend. I didn’t have a thousand dollars. So I borrowed it.”
“To go to one of these workshops.”
“To get myself into a position where I could challenge Paul Hazzard in person,” Sonia corrected him. “It took a month and a half to come up with the money, but I did it. It was held in this conference center out on the Main Line. You should have seen this place. It had marble floors in all the bathrooms.”
“Did you get to challenge him?”
“Oh, yes,” Sonia said. “It was a weekend for survivors of childhood sexual abuse. I came with all the pamphlets and the checklists. As soon as any session I was in was open for audience participation, I started asking questions. I asked a lot of questions. I got a lot of people mad at me. The people who attend these groups don’t want to hear that there’s anything wrong with them. Not if they’ve been going for a while. They’ve got too much of their identities wrapped up in the process.”