For about ten days now, the trial against Gisèle Pélicot’s attackers has been going on. 50 men who raped her for 10 years, 50 men recruited by her husband. At the time of the events, Gisèle was under chemical submission, her husband making her take sleeping pills without her knowledge. Gisèle Pélicot claims that she discovered everything when she saw the videos and images.
Traumatic memory and traumatic amnesia
“Traumatic memory is everything that has been recorded in this cerebral amygdala and which is trapped and not integrated and which will come back to haunt the victim and completely colonize them. Traumatic amnesia has to do with traumatic dissociation, the fact of being dissociated: when the brain has disconnected and there are no more emotions, there is no more emotional feeling, there is no more pain. The pain is there, but we do not feel it emotionally. The victim has the impression of being completely disinhabited, devitalized. We will also have a very active memory in relation to the events that were very strong emotionally. The victims, because of this dissociative traumatic amnesia, no longer have access to their memory. They are in a dissociative state, that is to say that they have the suffering, but it is not expressed. It gives the impression of being in a fourth dimension. We are no longer There, we are like a puppet, we are like a zombie. And suddenly, it allows the aggressor to do what he wants with the victim. Traumatic dissociation is what allows us to survive extreme stress that would otherwise be fatal.”
The victims therefore have no memories of these facts in themselves, but there may be physical suffering linked to the rape. Indeed, for Muriel Salmona: “There are also all these sensations, these emotions, these feelings, everything that has been. We talk a lot about smells, noises. All of this is recorded in a structure that is not at all the usual structure that records memory, which is the hippocampus. There is a memory operating system, but here it is a system that is not conscious, so where everything will be recorded in an undifferentiated way, like magma.”
How do these women “survive”?
For Muriel Salmona, there are only two possible survival strategies: “If we are not taken care of, the person puts in place control and avoidance behaviors because we are in a minefield where things could explode.” And the other technique is to: “increasing stress through a whole range of behaviors, putting people in danger to make the brain go crazy. The victims find themselves disconnected, dissociated and suddenly things seem to get better. It can also be self-mutilation, it can be taking drugs. We are never drug addicts, we are never alcoholics for nothing. We are because we suffered serious violence in childhood most often.”
How do memories resurface? Is it useful?
According to Muriel Salmona “It could be a film where you see something, it could be a feeling, a pain, a health problem, a medical examination, childbirth, suffering another form of violence. Suddenly, it comes back with images, memories, sensations, nightmares. It’s a tsunami. And then, you have to be supported very quickly.”… “When you’re like that, assailed by lots of things that are incomprehensible, that put you in a state of terrible unease, you think you have psychiatric problems, you’re lost, you have a continual feeling of being outside your life or that everything is hell. And suddenly everything makes sense, everything starts to be deciphered. And this deciphering allows you to regain control of all these events and it’s all this traumatic memory that will light up as soon as something recalls the event. That’s what will allow you to gradually defuse this traumatic memory and integrate it into autobiographical memory. They come back to life for real, so to speak. As long as they were dissociated, they had disconnected from themselves. And there, finally, they get back on their feet with them.”
