from the editor's desk
Review of ‘Reclaim: understanding complex trauma and those who abuse’ by Dr Ahona Guha and ‘Trust: a fractured fable’ by Jeanne Ryckmans
Guha, Ahona. Reclaim: understanding complex trauma and those who abuse. Scribe, 2023. RRP: $32.99, 256pp, ISBN: 9781922585684.
Ryckmans, Jeanne. Trust: a fractured fable. Upswell, 2023. RRP $29.99, 119pp, ISBN: 9780645536911.
Jenny Hedley
As opposed to an easy-to-diagnose event of physical assault, relational trauma often involves an accumulation of near misses, situations that would reveal a perpetrator’s true character if only their coyote magic weren’t at work weaving spells of manufactured excuses and false promises. Without context or pattern recognition, problematic situations appear coincidental, a result of carelessness or bad luck. A full accounting requires a reporter’s attention to detail, forensic insight into abusive tactics and steadfast persistence in chasing leads until guilt emerges through an accretion of evidence.
I’ve turned to two works of nonfiction that differ in form and purpose, whose overlapping thematics provide insight into the repercussions of complex trauma. Reclaim’s Dr Ahona Guha works with clients in clinical settings and ‘in those in-between spaces where legal systems intersect with mental health systems’ as a forensic psychologist (6). While there are brilliant authors in the fields of domestic violence (e.g. Jess Hill, Jacqueline Rose, Rachel Louise Snyder) and trauma recovery (e.g. Bessel van der Kolk, Peter Levine, Gabor Maté), Dr Guha synthesises the fields so that they’re easy to navigate, offering a compassionate way forward—in gender-neutral language—for both victim and perpetrator. Dr Guha asks us to resist the public discourse that portrays abusers as monsters—men who choose to inflict violence upon women—and to consider instead that ‘harmful behaviour arises due to a confluence of factors, and many of us, in certain circumstances, would behave in problematic ways’ (11). In her forensic practice her benchmark is ‘to at least have unconditional neutral regard for every client’ (45).
The ‘complex’ in ‘complex trauma’ refers not to the survivor but to the ‘cumulative and multiple nature of the trauma, as well to its wide-ranging impacts’ (7). Dr Guha uses evidence-based psychological frameworks to plot a path to recovery, including finding a safe therapist, understanding fight-flight-freeze-fawn responses, schema therapy, working on core beliefs and disrupting unhelpful neural patterns. We are reminded that not all victims internalise harmful impulses, that ‘certain types of harms can result in a survivor developing a personality structure and psychosocial difficulties that lead to harm being caused to others’ (129). Some of the more ‘difficult’ victims end up in prisons that fail to adhere to the Optional Protocol to the United Nations Convention Against Torture.
All trauma arises from external traumatogenic, or trauma-causing, events, the nature of which is distressing beyond the usual scope of human experience; these might be ‘Big T’ (life-threatening) traumas or ‘Little t’ traumas, which ‘are subtler and often go unrecognised by the victims or people around them’ (27). Dr Guha notes the paradox of human relationships, through which ‘people both experience relational trauma and can heal from it’, and how a survivor’s terror can ‘lead to feedback loops of bad relationships→unmet needs→frantic attempts to form relationships to meet those needs→bad relationships→compounded trauma’ (88). While Dr Guha makes a conscious decision to allow only so much of her personal experience into Reclaim, her self-reflection offers insight into the cycle:
I can see how attempting to satisfy some deep, unmet needs and a lack of boundaries or radar for the psychologically unsafe led me into these situations. None of them were my fault—I couldn’t have been expected to protect myself from that which I could not see (80)
In both Dr Guha’s Reclaim and Jeanne Ryckmans’ Trust, the authorial ‘I’ is only present insofar as it advances each book’s thesis. We see what Ryckmans sees, or we learn what she learns second-hand, and we are not allowed inside her anguish until the last third of Trust. Ryckmans’ use of temporal dislocation to titrate between collaged scenes evokes the fragmentation of traumatic memory. Initially, Ryckmans is whisked away to the Island of the White Cow by a man she calls the ‘Irish Professor’. The Professor’s voice dominates with lengthy soliloquies that illustrate his love of his own voice, the unctuous way he ingratiates himself with anyone who can feed his narcissistic supply, his obsession with luxury-brand items. We come to recognise his affectations: photos of an oversized Paddington Bear, recitations of Yeats from memory, requests for Van Morrison, throwaway lines practiced for every occasion: ‘Trust is an essential component of social capital, the glue that facilitates cooperation and coordination for material mutual benefit’ (17), or ‘One cannot write about integrity and not live by those measures of probity’ (95).
Billed as a ‘hybrid memoir and a personal detective story’, each dated, geolocated fragment of Trust exists like an entertaining series of legal exhibits written from a distance, detailed and unsentimental. Facts are juxtaposed in order to substantiate conclusions (e.g. she finds an amber vial and spoon under the Professor’s bed; she reads about a Craigslist drug bust in Fitzroy North; she sees the Professor’s accidental CC to a Craigslist email). For most of the book we are not privy to Ryckmans’s heartache, nor to the sensual or romantic sides of the fractured fairy tale—only the flashy cars, five-star hotels, business-class flights and recycled pick-up gambits. Ryckmans does not pathologise the Professor even as his patterns of abuse escalate to suicide threats, break-ins and criminal assault. Only after presenting us with all of the evidence does she make a victim impact statement: ‘I understood that many months of his constant chiselling away had left me broken. I felt the sting of shame. The mounting tension and threat of explosion had had its desired effect’ (99).
I turned to Trust and Reclaim for insight on what motivates the coercive controller to play their games as well as what makes the love-bombed victim stay. Dr Guha writes that physical and psychological harm are fundamentally underpinned by attitudes that privilege one’s needs over another’s, and assume an ‘entitlement to the bodily choices and space of another’ (135). Abuses arise from the mundane: secrets, fears, repression, a need for control, difficulties communicating. If we want to love, reasons Dr Guha, we might refuse to see the abusive partner as they are, perhaps due to ‘a deep-seated sense of anxiety and inferiority, and the ferocious bully feeds right into these vulnerabilities’ (158).
A fable is a work of fiction that conveys a moral, but Ryckmans interrogates the universities who covered for the Irish Professor to save face, thus fracturing our trust in their hallowed walls, which serve as pathways for the nation’s future leaders and sites for government-funded research. The Financial Review’s Michael Roddan outed Ryckmans’ Professor as Justin O’Brien, a former Monash academic who lectured to the theme of ‘Rebuilding trust’ at a Deloitte banking summit in 2018 and was party to $2.5 million worth of Australian Research Council–funded projects.
The books j’accuse element is reminiscent of Vanessa Springora’s Consent, in which the author points a finger at ‘G’, aka Gabriel Matzneff, a lauded author and known paedophile who groomed and exploited her. Matzneff was meanwhile celebrated by the French literati and awarded an illustrious writing stipend. Structural complicity has a way of perpetuating trauma: when an entire community looks the other way, denying culpability or arguing that they lack the agency to effect change, it trivialises a victim’s experience. Gaslighting at an institutional level is evidenced in Consent and Trust.
The New York Times’ Norimitsu Onishi reported that Springora’s book was the tipping point that caused authorities to finally prosecute Matzneff and for the government to strip him of his writing stipend. When Ryckmans confronted the university who sponsored O’Brien’s second PhD, she quoted their code of conduct—that students ‘[a]ct honestly and ethically in all dealings with the university and its community’—and the university replied that ‘a student’s personal history is not a barrier to admission to a degree program’ (110). One can hope that the new National Anti-Corruption Commission will dissuade the crackpots and succubi who leech off public funds, fuelling Gatsby-style expenses while failing to deliver promised outcomes.
Works Cited
Onishi, Norimitsu. ‘Gabriel Matzneff, Who Wrote for Years About Pedophilia, Is Charged.’ The New York Times, 12 Feb. 2020. NYTimes.com, https://www.nytimes.com/2020/02/12/world/europe/gabriel-matzneff-pedophilia-charge.html.
Roddan, Michael. ‘Ethics Professor Justin O’Brien Sorry for Collapse in Trust.’ Australian Financial Review, 16 Mar. 2021, https://www.afr.com/companies/financial-services/ethics-professor-sorry-for-collapse-in-trust-20210225-p575xh.
Springora, Vanessa. Consent: A Memoir. Translated by Natasha Lehrer, HarperVia, 2020.
Jenny Hedley’s writing appears in Overland, Archer Magazine, Cordite Poetry Review, Diagram, Mascara Literary Review, Verity La, Admissions: voices within mental health and elsewhere. She lives on unceded Boon Wurrung land with her son. Website: jennyhedley.github.io/
