Left for Dead
After philosophy professor Susan Brison was brutally attacked and nearly murdered, life became a tentative existence among the shattered pieces of a world she once knew. Her thoughtful journey through the ruins has brought her to a new place of healing.
While on sabbatical in France in July of 1990, I went for a walk along a peaceful-looking country road in a village outside Grenoble, France. I sang to myself as I set out, stopping to pet a goat and pick a few wild strawberries along the way. About an hour and a half later, I was lying face down in a muddy creek bed at the bottom of a dark ravine, struggling to stay alive.
I was grabbed from behind, pulled into the bushes, beaten and sexually assaulted. As the sexual assault began, I instinctively fought back, enraging my attacker, who strangled me until I lost consciousness. When I awoke, I was being dragged by my feet down into the ravine. After ordering me to get on my hands and knees, my assailant strangled me again. This time I was sure I was dying. But I revived, just in time to see him lunge toward me with a rock. He smashed it into my forehead, and after another strangulation attempt, left me for dead.
Aftermath
I spent the next 11 days in the hospital, where I was told repeatedly how "lucky" I was to be alive. I did not yet know how the trauma would haunt me, remaining in each of my senses – in a heart that would race, and skin that would crawl whenever something resurrected my buried terror. I didn't know that the worst – the unimaginably painful aftermath of violence – was yet to come.
For the first several months after my attack, I led a spectral existence, not quite sure whether I had died and the world was going on without me, or whether I was alive but in a totally alien world. These feelings were heightened by the massive denial of those around me – people tried to explain the assault in ways that left their beliefs about the world unscathed. Facing my nightmare meant denying their own illusions about safety and control.
| "My view of the world had changed: I felt that I had no control, and at times it seemed that the only way to regain control over my life was to end it." |
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One victims' assistance coordinator told me that she had never been a victim. She suggested I learn not to be so trusting of people and to take basic safety precautions, like not going out alone late at night. She didn't pause long enough for me to point out that I was attacked suddenly, from behind, in broad daylight.
My view of the world had changed: I felt that I had no control, and at times it seemed that the only way to regain control over my life was to end it. A few months after my assault, I drove by myself for several hours to visit a friend. I worried throughout the journey that my car would break down, leaving me at the mercy of potentially murderous passers-by. I wished I'd had a gun so that I could shoot myself rather than be forced to live through another assault. Later in my recovery process, depression gave way to rage, and my suicidal thoughts were quickly quelled by a stubborn refusal to finish my assailant's job for him.
Finding a Voice
From the beginning I had been reluctant to tell people that I was raped. I still wonder why I wanted the sexual aspect of the assault – so salient to me – kept secret. I was motivated, in part, by shame, but I was also concerned about my academic career. I did not want the writing I had already done on pornography and violence against women to be dismissed as the ravings of a "hysterical rape victim."
But I did sit down at my computer to write about it, and all I could come up with was a list of paradoxes. Just about everything had stopped making sense, and along with the loss to explain it logically, came the literal loss of my voice. For about a year after the assault, even after my fractured trachea had healed, I rarely, if ever, spoke in smoothly flowing sentences. I was never entirely mute, but I often had bouts of what a friend labeled "fractured speech," during which I stuttered and stammered, unable to string together a simple sentence without the words scattering like a broken string of pearls.
The voiceless incidents became less frequent, but they have recurred in times of overwhelming stress. It took me nearly nine years to acknowledge that the assault left me neurologically disabled, very minimally and in a way for which I can easily compensate by avoiding extremely stressful situations.
When I resumed teaching at Dartmouth, the first student who came to my office told me that she had been raped. By then I had already spoken publicly about my assault, so I knew I would be in contact with other survivors. I just didn't realize there would be so many – not only students, but also female colleagues and friends, who had never told me before that they had been raped. While I continued to teach my usual philosophy courses, in some ways philosophy struck me as a luxury when I knew that people were being brutally attacked and killed – all the time.
So I began to integrate my work on trauma with my academic interests by teaching a course on global violence against women. I was still somewhat afraid of what would happen if I wrote about my assault, but I was much more afraid of what would continue to happen if I, and others with similar experiences, didn't.
What Recovery Means
People ask me if I'm recovered now, and I reply that it depends on what that means. If it means being back to where I was before the attack, the answer is: No. I am not the same person who set off, singing, on that sunny July 4th in the French countryside. I left her in a rocky creek bed at the bottom of a ravine. The trauma has changed me forever, and if I insist too often that my friends and family acknowledge it, that's because I'm afraid they don't know who I am.
But if recovery means being able to incorporate the awful knowledge of trauma and its aftermath into my life, then, I'm recovered. I don't wake each day with a start, thinking: "This can't have happened to me!"
Later, after martial arts training, I learned that I was morally as well as physically capable of killing in self-defense – an option that made the possibility of another life-threatening attack one I could live with. This newfound ability to defend myself enabled me to move among others, free of debilitating fears. It gave me the courage to bring a child into the world. I have remade myself by finding meaning in a life of caring for and being sustained by others.
While I used to have to will myself out of bed each day, I now wake gladly to feed my son, whose birth gave me new reason to live. Having him has forced me to try to believe that the world is a good enough place in which to raise him. He is so trusting – before he learned to walk he would stand with outstretched arms, wobbling forwards and backwards, certain the universe would catch him. So far, it has, and when I tell myself it always will, a small but growing part of me believes it.
Susan J. Brison is an associate professor of philosophy at Dartmouth College and a visiting associate professor of philosophy at Princeton University. She is the author of "Aftermath: Violence and the Remaking of a Self," (Princeton University Press, 2002).
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