At 15, she thought it was a ‘regular’ relationship. Today, the word ‘grooming’ springs to mind

This story is part of the February 15 editon of Good Weekend.See all 13 stories.

It started at an appointment, just after my dad died, with an old therapist I’d seen during my 20s. I’d tracked her down, far on the other side of town, because she knew about the difficult ­relationship I’d had with my dad. I didn’t want to have to get bogged down in childhood guff with someone new while dealing with the grief of losing someone whom I’d loved but was simultaneously relieved was gone. I needed a safe place, and this woman was someone I trusted and who I felt liked and cared about me.

It was during our fourth appointment; we were beginning to wrap things up. It was clear I just needed to go home now and ride this grief thing out. But we had another 10 minutes left, so I brought up something new – something that had been on my mind for as long as I could remember and that I suspected may have been somehow related to my father and my relationship with him. I’d always felt too awkward, too ashamed to talk about it, even with a counsellor. Now, wrung dry as one is after the death of a parent, I thought, what the hell?

“Sometimes I’m in bed with my husband and he’ll touch me,” I said. “He might just put his arm around me, and something happens. I freeze. I panic.”

She leaned in. “Do you know why you’re panicking?”

“I don’t think so. I mean, I love my husband. But it’s weird. It’s like it’s not even him.”

“How do you mean?”

“He’s never done anything to threaten or scare me in any way. It’s as if … as if it’s a stranger. It’s like I’m being attacked.”

“And what do you feel?”

“I feel terrified. And angry, furious. But I can’t move.” Her face darkened as she listened.

“I hate him, and I want him to leave me alone, but I can’t tell him.” I started crying. “I’m frozen. And at the same time, I feel incredible guilt because I love my ­husband and wouldn’t want to hurt him or let him know what I’m feeling. I feel he’d want to leave me if he knew these things.”

“Sonia.” She spoke gravely. “Can you tell me your first experience of sex?”

I laughed, not expecting this at all.

“Well, I can’t actually remember it, but it was fine. It was with my boyfriend.” I felt the need to justify my lack of memory, assure her that this was the wrong angle. “We were together for a year.”

“How old were you? Who was he?”

“I was 15. And, um … he was 26.”

When the author first met S as a teenager, finding out each other’s age became “a flirtatious ­guessing game”.Credit: Courtesy of Sonia Orchard

“Twenty-six?” Her head jutted back.

“Yeah, but it was fine, it was a regular relationship. We loved each other.”

“Did your mother know?”

“Some bits. I told her he was 18 because he looked really young. I’d tell her I was staying at friends’ houses every weekend and sometimes during the week when I stayed with him. But she met him. They got along ­really well.”

She looked at me sternly. “Sonia. You were violated.”

“No, I wasn’t!” I laughed and shook my head. How prudish. Violated!

“You were sexually abused.”

I kept shaking my head, laughing.

“Sonia, you have three daughters. I want you to ­imagine for a moment that one of them is 15 and in this relationship.”

That was all she said, all that was needed to extinguish my laughter, morph it into something horribly different. Almost immediately, I started trembling, then shaking violently all over. My head felt dizzy; I was nauseous, I was going to vomit, I was going to faint. I lowered my head into my lap.

“Sonia. Sonia. Are you OK? Can you hear me?”

“I’m shivering, freezing,” I said, head on my knees.

“This is trauma,” she said plainly. Trauma? I didn’t understand. I still couldn’t pinpoint anything that was wrong, let alone traumatic, about this relationship. But something was undeniably very wrong now. And there were no connected thoughts, anyway, just confusion over what was happening as I surrendered to this ­violent shuddering.

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If you’re wondering what this looks like, you can look at wildlife videos of “trauma shaking” on YouTube: there’s one of an impala that escapes the jaws of a cheetah, another of a polar bear that wakes after being shot with a tranquilliser dart. As they emerge from their traumatic experience, they lie on the ground jerking all over – it’s a strange thing to watch – then they take some deep breaths. Soon, they are able to get up and return to what they were doing, having ­physically “released” the trauma from their bodies. While the mechanism isn’t entirely clear, what the body appears to be doing is returning to a state of equili­brium after a state of hyper-arousal caused by extreme fear. This is a common mammalian response to extreme trauma.

But I didn’t deep-breathe, then get up and walk away. At the end of my appointment, my therapist wrote down the name and phone number for my nearest Centre Against Sexual Assault (CASA). I put the piece of paper in my pocket, then, still shaking – more mildly now – got in the car to drive home.

I was beginning to realise that this thing – whatever it was that was happening – was not going to be disappearing any time soon.

It was early December, a hot late-afternoon, as I sat, stuck in traffic, on Melbourne’s Punt Road. The light reflecting off car bonnets was searing my eyes; ­everything looked bleached out. The air was thick and sticky, my car thermometer read 33 degrees, but I was freezing. I turned on the car heating and I could hear it, there was the pressure of the air on my bare arms, but I couldn’t feel the warmth.

The author with her husband, James, and their daughters in 2017. Now reading the diaries she wrote as a teen, “all I could think … as the mother of three girls, was how young this girl seemed.”Credit: Courtesy of Sonia Orchard

I picked up my children from their friends’ houses and went through the motions of playing with them, cooking dinner. When James, my husband, got home and I finally got a chance to speak with him alone about what the therapist had said, he was as flummoxed as me.

The shivering continued for days, even though there was a heatwave in Melbourne. It was about 35 degrees each day, but I couldn’t get warm. I wore jumpers and walked about with blankets wrapped around me, trying to heat up. After a few more days, the shivering became sporadic. When it came on, I felt confused and distressed; then it would subside.

I went to my GP and told him I’d been shivering ever since a challenging session with my therapist in the wake of my father’s death, and he prescribed me diazepam. This helped calm me, but I didn’t like the feeling of “reaching for my pills” each time things got on top of me. So he moved me onto a more long-term daily anti-anxiety medication. I was beginning to realise that this thing – whatever it was that was happening – was not going to be disappearing any time soon.

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What do I remember of my “relationship”? Not much, actually. I have some images, snatches of memory. I don’t know how much of a teenage relationship is normal to remember several decades later, but I clearly remember meeting S at a nightclub. It was a hot summer evening during school holidays in December 1985 and I was staying the night at my friend Laura’s house. Laura was one of my best friends and had parents who allowed us to roam freely at night, so we had started visiting pubs and nightclubs, as did many other teenagers we knew at the time.

It became a flirtatious ­guessing game. We didn’t believe they were as old as they said they were, and they marvelled at how young we were.

That night we arrived at Swelter – a dark basement nightclub in Melbourne’s CBD – and within a few minutes, Laura and I were chatting with S and his friend at the bar. S was wearing a white cut-off T-shirt and denim jeans, and he had a rose tattoo on his upper arm. His hair was bleached blond, tied in a ponytail; he wore sleepers in his ears. He was leaning back, his elbow on the bar, a beer in the other hand, and the best way I can describe his expression is to call it “amused”. I didn’t see that then – I just saw enjoyment, flirtatiousness – but I absolutely see it now. And, of course, why wouldn’t he be amused? We were two children, getting our pocket money out – me from the top pocket of my denim jacket, Laura from a small purse – trying our hardest to look grown-up, legal, as we leaned across the bar and ordered vodkas, preparing ourselves for the request for ID, praying we wouldn’t be rumbled. But no ID was requested, two vodka tonics were placed on the bar and Laura and I tried not to look too thrilled with ourselves.

I can’t remember who started the conversation; I’ll guess it was him, but Laura, a fellow extrovert, would have quickly responded. And almost immediately, the conversation turned to the most glaringly obvious topic: our ages and theirs. It became a flirtatious ­guessing game. We didn’t believe they were as old as they said they were, and they marvelled at how young we were. They produced their licences as proof, and we laughed at them for being so old. But they treated us as equals, so it seemed to me. We were just a regular bunch of people, hanging out at a club, drinking alcohol, playing a game.

The author as an “innocent, idealistic, blathering, emotional kid” in the 80s. Credit: Courtesy of Sonia Orchard

The next clear memory I have is from several months later: S and I are having a picnic at the Botanic Gardens, drinking champagne out of plastic cups, smoking joints, eating a barbecue chicken bought from the supermarket and lying back on a picnic rug, feeling terribly civilised. I have no clear memories of events in between the night we met at Swelter and this one; however, I have semantic memory of that period – I ­remember that Bob Hawke was prime minister of Australia, Margaret Thatcher was prime minister of Great Britain and S was my boyfriend.

In general, people don’t hang on to an awful lot of ­episodic memories (these are memories of personally experienced events – episodes – including details from the event and its time and place); this selective housekeeping serves a great purpose, as we don’t have space in our brains to be able to store and recall every time we’ve brushed our teeth or put on a pair of socks. So we forget things that are ­unremarkable. But we also bury things that are painful or traumatic. It’s not just that the filing system of our brains chooses to hide away things we don’t want to think about: ­traumatic memories are encoded differently in the brain due to the emotional state a person was in when the experience took place. When a person experiences a ­regular event, their brain processes the information by putting it in context and relating it to similar experiences or knowledge it already possesses. It then records the information as a story, with a beginning, middle and end, and files it near similar experiences.

When a person experiences something that’s not a regular event, but rather something that feels life-threatening, they move into a heightened emotional state and the brain goes into “defence mode”. While this is happening, a person’s heart rate increases; their arteries constrict, directing more blood to their muscles; their senses may sharpen; they may experience numbness, shortness of breath, chest pain and dizziness. Thoughts might be racing, or the opposite can happen: they may feel detached from what is happening, feeling they’ve left their body.

When the brain is in defence mode, it is focused on survival, not creating memories, so memory processes are highly compromised. Parts of an experience may be encoded differently or not at all, so a clear narrative memory of the event is unlikely. However, scraps of thought that had high emotional significance at the time or seemed pertinent to survival – the pulling of hair, the sound of a key in a door, the smell of kerosene – often get stored in long-term memory. But these vivid, loaded memories may be remembered in an unusual way, missing any real narrative detail and all context.

Because traumatic memories aren’t simply regular memories of painful events but rather a different type of memory filed in a different place in the brain, they often can’t be recalled in a narrative fashion, with a beginning, middle and end. They may just be fragments, and when these slivers of memory do return, due to the ineffective way they’ve been processed and stored, they can feel as if they’re happening in the present moment. These are the involuntary memories of post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) “flashbacks”, which are completely different to remembering an upsetting memory; they are shards of experience that have never been turned into an episodic memory. These flashes of recall might be triggered by something that vaguely replicates the original event in your brain – your husband touching your arm.

Nowadays, psychiatrists refer to the inability to ­recall extremely traumatic events as dissociative amnesia. Unfortunately, laws around abuse haven’t changed to accommodate this knowledge. From a legal perspective, memories of a crime must be independent and clear to be used as evidence. Jim Hopper, an expert on psychological trauma, including sexual assault, says: “Ignorance of how memory works is a major reason why sexual assault is the ­easiest violent crime to get away with, across [the US] and around the world.”

Police and the judiciary want “rational” accounts from “reliable” witnesses who present clear narratives – with a beginning, middle and end – recalled with certainty. Neat and clean. But who remembers traumatic events like this? The abuse may be locked away in a hidden box. This not only creates difficulties for those who want to report their crime, it also makes it hard for people to heal from their abuse. This is part of the ­reason that many, like me, go to therapy: they want to know what happened. So, imagine if that box of memories could be found?

I was a writer. I’d always been a writer, even as a kid. I kept diaries, each page dated in my careful child’s hand. It’s as if, even then, a part of me sensed the ­gravity of this act. I scrupulously logged each entry – “Dear Diary” – as if it was the most important news in the world. In my world, it was. And then I locked my diaries away in a steel fireproof box, and when I was 16, I lost the key. The box was buried in storage and forgotten about for decades. Well, almost forgotten about.

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It must have been about six o’clock in the morning. The honeyeaters, magpies and currawongs ­outside were singing and warbling; light was beginning to beam in through the eucalypts from over the ranges. I’d been awake the entire night, but I wasn’t tired at all. I’d made a decision, but I wouldn’t tell anyone straight away. It was a big decision and I hadn’t slept, so I’d let it sit with me a day or two, but at this point it felt good. I was going to the police.

I didn’t do much that first day, just Googled to find out how one goes about reporting a sex crime, then found a phone number for the Sexual Offences and Child Abuse Investigation Team (SOCIT) for the City of Melbourne. I also called CASA, to see if they were able to give me any advice on making a report.

The following day, once my daughters had left for school, I dug out my dusty steel deed box from the ­garage and took it to the locksmith. It was heavy and felt full. When I shook it, there was barely any movement inside. I handed it over the counter and half ­expected the locksmith to say that I needed permission to open a box for which I didn’t have a key. But he picked it up indifferently, squinted at the key wheel, then said, “It might take 10 minutes”.

As if 10 minutes might be a dealbreaker for me. After 35 years, did I not have 10 minutes to wait? “That’s fine,” I said, and I walked out towards the shops.
When I returned, he handed me the deed box, the latch on the lid sprung open. I expected him to show some excitement, to acknowledge how momentous it was to have unearthed and opened such a time capsule – a box that could possibly be filled with incriminating evidence.

“Here you go,” he said as he handed it over. “That’ll be five bucks.” Ten minutes and $5. What a flimsy membrane that had kept these memories at bay.

At home, I made a cup of tea, then opened the box on the bedroom floor and lifted out wads of papers. I ­immediately felt weighed down by sadness, entering the world of this 16-year-old girl, wondering what she’d been thinking when she’d last turned the key. She had her whole adult life ahead of her at that point. Imagine if she’d known then that her future self – a middle-aged woman with three daughters – would be unlocking this box, rifling through her life, decades later, looking for evidence to take to the police.

The box was full of letters, ticket stubs, photos, school record books – and diaries, starting from age seven. I opened and started reading. I didn’t recognise any of the details, but at the same time, I knew this person so well. The relationships were all ones I knew and understood. I read from diary to diary, witnessing this person grow up, from primary school to high school. Before long, this girl was 15, and all I could think as I read – as a mother of three girls – was how incredibly young this girl seemed, even younger than my own 14-year-old, who to me still seemed like a baby. How yearning, how excited, how eager to please she was. There were lists of her favourite bands, vinyl records she was saving up for, sketches of haircuts she liked, names of boys she had crushes on.

And then, come December, she meets S, on a night at Swelter nightclub during what was supposed to be a sleepover at Laura’s house. I kept reading and – my god – it was all there. And I couldn’t quite believe what I was reading. I wanted to shout and high-five and hug this innocent, idealistic, blathering, emotional kid. You little champion. It was all there.

The next day, a Thursday, I sat with it all. I had the Melbourne SOCIT phone number; I had my diaries. My head was spinning. I still hadn’t told James or any of my friends.

Then, on the Friday morning – the 19th – James went to work, the kids went to school. I made myself a cup of tea, sat on the day bed in the sun in the front yard and called Melbourne SOCIT.

This is an edited extract from Groomed, by Sonia Orchard (Affirm Press, $35), out now.

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