At the beginning of my healing process I visualised the weight of torture memories as being stored in many separate heavy black boxes suspended in space. As each box opened with flashbacks and body talk, a memory from my childhood was released.
I decided to make an art installation of these boxes to illustrate my survival responses of dissociating the memories.
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I had grown up from when I was an infant in an environment of torture. Many ordeals from my childhood got frozen-in-time. They didn’t get processed like ordinary memories do; like either remembered clearly, or vaguely, or forgotten naturally. My ordeals were too horrific to tell or to process. Also, I had been repeatedly and violently threatened that I would die if I told and that no one would believe me.
I’d always had flashbacks and triggers. I had post traumatic stress responses and overwhelming physical and emotional issues from surviving a childhood of torture and trafficking.
As Jeanne Sarson says, “When people talk about Post Traumatic Stress Disorder, we say no, we disagree, you might have traumatic stress responses, but we are unwilling to say you have a disorder. What are people expecting of someone who withstands torture, to come out of it laughing? That’s the insanity of calling these responses a disorder.”
When I was a young adult no one believed that parents, or networks of men trafficked children, teenagers and women to buyers, and no one believed about the ritualised torture of children. No one spoke about children in our towns and cities raped and tortured in child crime scene photos and films. No one spoke about torture violence that happens in your home. So there was no way to tell, no one was listening.
Eventually the weight of not telling became too much. Flashbacks and body talk came flooding in. The impact of this on my everyday life was overwhelming. I struggled to exist in the present with the past torture completely overwhelming me. It was physically like living through the torture all over again, only in some ways worse because I was not able to dissociate like I had originally, I was no longer flying up to the ceiling to escape in dissociation, and no longer drugged by the perpetrators; so no longer was the pain numbed, no longer was I semi-conscious or lost to my-Self in unconsciousness. I was feeling the torture I suffered as a child, through my adult mind, body and spirit.
Hours and hours, days, months and years of healing; telling, working the memories through physically, emotionally and spiritually. Dedicated very hard work for me and my supporters.
I drew to help my-Self face what had happened to me. I drew what emerged when each memory ordeal box opened and I continued drawing each childhood emerging memory.
I was seeing and feeling what had taken place through the eyes and words of myself as the child I was. As the frozen memories melted, my body told me the truth of what had happened … the truth of the drugging … the truth of their torture harms … the truth of what the perpetrators said and did..how many perpetrators there were at an ordeal … the truth of the environment. I discovered many details of what happened to me from when I was a child until I was a young adult.
Slowly one after another ordeal released. I found I would temporarily forget each ordeal after I had drawn it, spoken it and the torture pain had subsided. This was because I was processing it while recovering and healing the past pain and trying to understand what my body was telling me and challenging old beliefs like that I was evil and it was all my fault and that I should die if I ever told.
As more of the traumatic memories released, I began to notice something new happening, I noticed I could talk more about my life going backwards and forwards in time so my reflective memory was improving as I was healing.
It also helped that I was safe to let go gradually, of believing the indoctrination the perpetrators had instilled in me years ago, that I would die if I told. This had been very deeply felt and believed and reinforced with physical and verbal threats.
artprintspace.net 
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