Jilya by Tracy Westerman

Jilya by Tracy Westerman

Author:Tracy Westerman
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: University of Queensland Press
Published: 2024-08-02T00:00:00+00:00


As a therapist, I always find it surprising what my client’s most dominant trauma memories are. I refer to this as ‘salient’ imagery – those events, words or stories that are the hardest to process and so dominate and define the trauma narrative. It’s the memory that keeps repeating itself in dreams and in flashbacks in day-to-day interactions with others, as if ruminating over it will eventually enable victims to make sense of it.

But it is not always the most graphic experience that’s most salient. For M, his most traumatic memory took a long time to get at. He kept apologising before eventually telling me what it was.

He had only ‘patches’ of memory from his six years in the mission. He remembers always feeling cold and frightened, until he walked into his classroom one day and a Catholic nun, Sister Mary, who was filling in for a few weeks, changed everything for him.

He was immediately struck by her. She was younger than the other nuns and more modern-looking. She didn’t have the shaved head under her habit that was so frightening to him, and she was joyful – an emotion he had not known in a very long time, although he was only around ten years old by this stage. His memories of childhood are all about sadness, nothing else. I was immediately reminded, yet again, of how so much of our life comes down to luck. I always felt safe as a kid, with a roof over my head and a meal on the table. I thought everyone had that until I became a psychologist. That’s what my parents had insulated my siblings and me from.

For M, meeting Sister Mary reminded him of long-buried feelings and of what he had lost in the blink of an eye. To cope, as any child of that age would, he had escaped through fantasy, creating an alternate world in which little boys got hugs rather than smacks. In this dream, the darkness didn’t terrify him and grown men didn’t force little boys to do unthinkable things. It was a world of imaginary friends, of his parents’ arms around him, of his mum and dad laughing and his siblings playing with him. I have watched many wards of the state and Stolen Generations people do this, constructing stories for the life they should have lived. The pull to fit in and be what is perceived as ‘normal’ is so strong.

There is so much shame in being a victim. And that’s what perpetrators rely on. In M’s childlike innocence, he ‘fell in love’ with Sister Mary. This shows why love, as I have argued in Chapter 6, is often an extremely triggering emotion that survivors struggle to ‘tolerate’. This was his first primary attachment since his forced removal. He was desperate for her love and attention, wanting her to see him as a ‘good’ boy. One day in class he was proudly working on something – he couldn’t recall what – and as Sister



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