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"It's over. Just get on with your life."

"That may work for a while, and it might be the right choice in any given circumstance, but there comes a time eventually where if the story isn't told it festers. So one mistake is suppressing it, which comes back to the silencing we spoke of earlier. These are horrible things and nobody really wants to hear or think about them. The victim doesn't, the bystander doesn't, the perpetrator certainly doesn't. So there's a very natural tendency on everyone's part to say, 'Let's forget the whole thing.'

"The other mistake is to try to push people into talking about it prematurely, or when the circumstances aren't right, or when it isn't the person's choice. If the timing, pacing, and setting isn't right, all you're going to have is another reenactment. You're not going to have the integrative experience of putting the story into a context that makes meaning out of it and gives a sense of resolution, which is what you're really aiming for. You don't want just a simple recitation of facts, you want the person to be able to talk about how it felt, how she feels about it now, what it meant to her then, what it means to her now, how she made sense of it then, how she's trying to make sense of it now. It's in that kind of processing that people reestablish their sense of continuity with their own lives and connection with others."

"This seems to be tied to mourning what was lost."

"Part of the motivation for the idea of 'Let's not talk about it' is the belief that you can go back to the way you were before the trauma, and what people find is that's just not possible. Once you've seen up close the evil human beings are capable of, you're not going to see the world the same way, you're not going to see other people the same way, and you're not going to see yourself the same way. We can all fantasize about how brave or cowardly we would be in extreme situations, but people who've been exposed know what they did, and what they didn't do. And almost inevitably they failed to live up to some kind of expectation of themselves. There has to be a sense of grieving what was lost. It's only after that mourning process that people can come through it and say, 'That was a hard lesson, and I wouldn't wish it on my worst enemy, but I am stronger or wiser.' There is a way that people learn from adversity. People will say, 'I had a crisis of faith and I found out what's important, what I really believe in.'"

"How especially does an abused child mourn what he's never known?" (I was, of course, asking about myself.)

"It's what you've never had that is the hardest to grieve. It's unfair. You only get one childhood, and you were cheated out of the one that every child is entitled to."

There was a long silence between us. I thought now not just of myself, but of all of us who have never seen the sky darkened by passenger pigeons or a vast plain covered with bison, who have never experienced a healthy and "good" community, who have never experienced the world as whole, who have never known the joy of walking alone through a night with no fear of attackers. And who never will. Finally, I asked, "What comes next?"

She said, "The recovery doesn't end with the telling and hearing of the story. There is another step after that, which has to do with people reforming their connections, moving from a preoccupation with the past to feeling more hopeful for the future, feeling that they have a future, that it's not just a matter of enduring and going through life as a member of the walking dead. Instead there is an ability to knowingly affirm life even after surviving the worst other people have to dish out. And I do think that what renews people is the hope and belief that their own capacity to love has not been destroyed. When people feel damned and doomed, and feel they can't go on living, the fear often has to do with the feeling that they have been so contaminated with the perpetrator's hate, and taken so much of it into themselves, that there is nothing left