Denial audiobook

I am on page 85. I. AM. NOT. ALONE. I have that feeling that this author has been inside my head for about 40 years. I never knew the effects were so patterned for so many survivors. I am so glad this book found me! Thanks GIGI!I finished the book this morning. I am so - celebrative - that Jessica Stern did this hard work and created this book. It couldn't have been easy and she shared that struggle, along with every un-politically correct thought she had as she did it. Her bravery in digging into her own past/trauma/loss/pain is undeniable.I want to carry this book around with me and upon greeting a new person, say: "um, my name is Sher, and if you want to get to know me - read this book first."In so many ways I know myself, and my similiarly damaged relatives so much better. My heart is softened to myself and others. I have said I had PTSD - but I knew only the very little bit about it . . . now I feel I have a grasp for WHY and HOW I became what I am.My favorite quote from the book, might be the fact that we can have "post traumatic growth" - that there is great hope for learning to cope with the triggers and effects. Understanding the issue is a huge step in this direction . . . I feel blessed to have read this book. We are very blessed to have such a brave soul on earth as Jessica Stern.

Jessica Stern was fifteen years old when she was raped. She and her fourteen-year old sister were alone at her step-mother's home in a safe neighborhood where rapes don't happen, doing their homework, when a gun-wielding skinny man with a strong cologne and concord accent walked in and raped them. When they however reported the crime, the police were skeptical.For the next more than thirty years, Jessica denied her pain. She became an expert on terrorism. However, she found herself incapable of feeling fear. Instead, she realized that she was hyper-vigilant when threatened. Eventually, she decides to learn more about her own unsolved rape and her rapist. What she comes to learn is not entirely to her satisfaction, but she ends up seeing her symptoms in some other people loosely connected to her rapist, and also in her own father. She learns to accept that she has been in denial for so long and that she indeed is still exhibiting symptoms of trauma.Denial is a very candid look at Jessica's life and her many trials. We learn what drove her to study terrorism, and why she felt compelled to talk to the "bad guys" terrorists and go to dangerous places in Iraq and Afghanistan; why she barely felt any fear in situations that would normally put most people into panic mode. We also see more of her childhood and how more incidents than the rape were responsible in some way for her trauma. Throughout the book, we see the experiences of several other people as well, through Jessica's eyes. We see how her father grew up as a Jewish during the rise of the Nazis, how he learned to bottle up the past and move forward, and how inadvertently Jessica learns the same tactics. We look at Jessica's rapist's life, not just as a violator, but as a human being who similarly went through several disappointments and tragic circumstances. We are also introduced to the rapist's friends and how they insist that the guy is actually very nice and wouldn't rape anyone. And yet, Jessica sees the cloud hanging around their words each time.Jessica could hardly remember much about the day she was raped. She had forgotten most of the details and continues to forget them even after reading the police reports on the rape, including her own statements. She is understandably angry that much of her life hinged on that one night. Her narration is occasionally venomous, as she contemplates potential scenarios with her rapist. She wants to kill him, and she doesn't mince words confessing that. But in the same vein, she admits her guilt at being plagued by such demonic thoughts.Would I ever heal? No, I would not. I would become someone else.Denial was a very powerful read for me. I struggled to connect during the first 50 pages with the narration but soon I warmed up to it and couldn't put the book down. Jessica introduces us to several stark characters - some endearing, some not, whose actions stay with me long after I closed the book. There is the grandfather who has naked showers with her, the research assistant who knows what Jessica is going through, since he has seen it in his own father, another victim of the same rapist who was ashamed of her own body for many years. Then there is Jessica's troubled childhood. Jessica often tries to postpone the inevitable - meeting with a friend of the rapist or with the police lieutenant who has been helping her get information. At these times, she starts worrying about mundane things and keeps repeating her actions. At other times, she gets increasingly rude even though she doesn't mean to.Some people's lives seem to flow in a narrative; mine had many stops and starts. That's what trauma does. It interrupts the plot. You can't process it because it doesn't fit with what came before or what comes afterward. A friend of mine, a soldier, put it this way. In most of our lives, most of the time, you have a sense of what is to come. There is a steady narrative, a feeling of "lights, camera, action" when big events are imminent. But trauma isn't like that. It just happens, and then life goes on. No one prepares you for it.Denial is more than a memoir of a woman who was raped more than thirty years ago. It talks about the pervasiveness of humiliation and shame - how one life touched by humiliation can pass it on to another life through any despicable manner. This sets in motion a vicious cycle. I wish Jessica had given her sister's side of affairs as well, considering the tragedy happened to both of them together, and also considering that he sister dealt with it differently. In so many ways, Denial is about her connection with several people having some degree of post-traumatic stress disorder - people she knows or people she contacted to learn more about her rapist; it is a confession of the trivial things that bother her when bigger things hardly cause a dent; it is about the trauma that haunted her all her life; it is also, in Jessica's words, a way "to speak out for those who cannot speak".

From My Blog...[return][return]Denial: A Memoir of Terror by Jessica Stern is a deeply personal, raw, and profound look at the effects trauma has on an individual, the lengths one's brain will go to, to protect itself, and the damages stemming from denial. As my reader's know, I am a fan of memoirs, it is one of my most favourite genres and I have read my fair share of memoirs and this is the first memoir that is so honestly fresh, raw and written in a flawed manner that one gets the impression the reader is personally hearing Jessica talk about her life.[return]In 1973 two sisters, 15-year-old Jessica and 14-year-old Sara were raped at gunpoint by an unknown assailant, the search for the rapist was dropped after 4 months. Each sister responded differently and Jessica believed it helped to make her focused and strong, skills that make her excel at her job investigating terrorists. Jessica learns many of her behaviours are most likely results of post-traumatic stress disorder, at the very least trauma. In 1996, Jessica was contacted by Lt. Macone to notify her he was reopening the case and could use her help if she was able. Stern writes about the process and her desire to interrogate her rapist, she wants to understand her rapist. In the process she learns the strong father she idolised was a terrorised child in Nazi Germany who has lived with his fears his whole life, even after escaping Germany.[return]The further she investigates the more she remembers and the more she learns about the processes of disassociation as well as how to begin to feel again. Denial is a work of love, healing, and tremendous strength and courage. Stern brings to the public what it is like first hand to be a victim and how one's life can be forever changed. The writing is at times cold and detached as one may expect and it is through Stern's honest account that her raw writing style makes Denial the most astonishingly profound memoir I have read to date. Without reservation I recommend Denial by Jessica Stern to any adult reader

Superbly written. This is an extremely personal account of the author's rape and the denial and shame that followed. There are so many useful insights in this book that I often had to put it down just to process what I had just read. For me, this was a 5 star book.

Although it is written in sparse readable prose and is highly intelligent and insightful, this is neither a pleasant nor a brutal read. Ms. Stern, an expert in terrorism, uncovers the source of her own terror - her childhood rape and its consequences. With the help of police, FBI contacts, and friends, Ms. Stern dares to delve into the life of her rapist - that unknown person who so affected her life. In doing so she is forced to consider how wide-ranging the after effects, how much of what she is good at and what she chooses to research is related to these effects, and ultimately to begin to confront her own anger and damage.The thing I liked most about this book was its rawness. Ms. Stern is at the very beginning of understanding and facing what happened and is unafraid to display the raw anger that churns inside of her. I respected her refusal to be a stereotypical victim - trembling and cowed, always broken never to be repaired. Instead she takes hold of the event and its inherent complications, learns as much as she can, and honestly displays her emotions - rage, sadness, fear, bewilderment, compassion, and more rage. So often women deny themselves the full range of emotions, squishing themselves into the accepted. Ms. Stern isn't interested in the acceptable.As Faulkner said, "The past is never dead. It's not even past." This is a terrible thing to face head on. All the happenings in our lives, even the most horrible, are still right there, just under the surface, waiting to re-emerge. Ms. Stern accomplishes this with grace and an eye toward facing it all down, no matter how frightening. There are places in this book that are strangely detached in that dissociative way so familiar to anyone who has experienced trauma. I can think of no better way to express the way PTSD moves through the brain and manifests itself to the external world. Even better is Ms. Stern's acknowledgment of this dissociative feeling and the way it made it possible for her to do the work she has done - interviewing thousands of terrorists in dangerous places all over the world to better understand what drives them. Her willingness to explore the ways she has coped and turned certain aspects of PTSD to her professional advantage is particularly insightful and brave. We should learn from bad things, but so often the positive learnings are never expressed.Altogether a remarkable book and worthwhile read.

In 1973 15 year old Jessica Stern and her 14 year old sister encounter a man in their step-mother's house. he is armed with a gun. He rapes them both threatening to kill them if they don't comply or if they say anthing. Fast forward several years and we find Jessica is now a successful expert on terrorists and terrorism. She finds that the things that should terrify her don't and simple things do. She makes a decision to find out why. It is during this exploration she goes back to the files on her rape. The case is re-opened and she faces many people she has trusted in her life to help her find the answers. She discovers things about her father that may explain why he did not return immediately from a trip to Europe after finding out about his daughters. He completed his business and then returned. For me this was a tough book to read. In her chapter called Denial she talks about being victimized over and over by those who are skeptical about events. I don't believe people willingly do this but it causes further damage none the less. The victim is then force to react in a way where they shut down emotions, pretend events never happened or they themselves re-victimize themselves by the choices they make. I think anyone who has ever suffered any type of trauma, whether it is the loss of a family member, a form of abuse or whatever should read this book. I thought of my cousins daughter who was involved in a terrible accident with her family. Her baby was killed, the oldest suffered permanent brain damage. Her husband wanted her to just wanted her to get over the accident and move on. They weren't his children. His ex-wife didn't understand "what the big-deal was the kid was dead just move on", yet told her what she would have done if her kids had been in the car and been injured. Her ex-husband stole money the community was raising for the oldest kids hospital bills. One person after another took the opportunity to kick her when she was down and then when she finally fell apart and became suicidal they said they couldn't understand what happened. We all find ways to deal with our trauma. Some of us try to handle it ourselves or seek counseling. Others take it out on themselves or those around. Maybe if this book had been around they would have handled things differently.

Naomi Wolf has already called Denial "one of the most important books I have read in a decade," and it's easy to see why. At the age of 15, Jessica Stern (and her sister, 14) were raped in the safe suburban town of Concord, Massachusetts. Decades later, Stern embarks on the emotionally harrowing journey to uncover the truth about her rapist. Writing with deep honesty and unflinching prose, she discovers that her trauma--and the terror her rape invokes--is also enmeshed with the death of her young mother; her womanizing grandfather, a doctor who was indirectly involved in her mother's death; her twice-divorced father (who narrowly escaped the Holocaust as a child, and who, upon hearing of his daughters' rapes while on a business trip in Norway, did not return home for three days); and the shame and trauma of the people who knew her rapist--who themselves were victims of other crimes and abuses.The brilliant turn in Denial is that Stern, one of the world's foremost experts on terrorism, telescopes out from her own memories to reveal a critical link between sexual humiliation (and trauma at large) and the terror that is born out of such trauma. The violence of terrorism, she believes, grows from the seeds of shame and humiliation that are planted after an traumatic act; the individual undergoes "lasting, haunting changes in the body and the mind." (Stern herself has witnessed this, from her hundreds of interviews with terrorists.) While terrorists--or rapists--should never be shown sympathy or excused for their acts, Stern argues that it's critical to understand the psychological roots of their violence. Otherwise, in the long run, our own denial of these truths will "corrode integrity--both of individuals and of society."

This is a powerful and important book. Stern is a Harvard PhD, an internationally recognized expert on terrorism and the minds and motives of terrorists, and the daughter of a distinguished professor who, as a boy, suffered various humiliations under the Nazis in his native Germany. Stern herself was raped at age fifteen, as was her fourteen year old sister. Her memoir is a harrowing investigation of her humiliation, terror, and denial. The book is centered on a three-fold quest, first to find her own motives for pursuing a study of the minds of terrorists(seemingly so obvious, but buried deeply in denial) toinvestigate the mind and motives of her rapist, whose identity she discovered only after he'd committed suicide, and thirdly to learn about her father, to penetrate his own "coldness" and denial. She concludes by talking to a veteran of the Iraq was whose head was nearly blown off. She, her father, the soldier, and perhaps her rapist as well, suffer from PTSD, she concludes, and denial in such cases can be debilitating and sometimes fatal.

loved this book . Written by the victim herself. I highly recommend.

the most influential book i’ve read. recommend to anyone who has suffered any traumas or anyone looking to be a better ally to those suffering with ptsd.

Reviewing a book about rape is difficult. Being raped is a woman's greatest fear and can be the source of a woman's greatest shame. How does a reader critically analyze a story so personal, so damaging, and so removed from her own life?This separation between myself and the author was consistently apparent, and not just regarding the rape. The relationships Stern had with her family horrified me. While Stern acknowledges her father, her grandmother, and her grandfather's flaws, she continually professes love and respect for them. I, on the other hand, found them deplorable and had difficulty relating to the woman who forgave them their transgressions and idiosyncrasies. While Stern expresses disgust at the abuse of others - and their acceptance of it - it's as if she barely recognizes the abuse inflicted on her by her own family. I will say, however, that this separation of reader and author/protagonist did not distract me from the story. Oddly enough, the absolute disparity between us is a large part of what kept me reading. I wanted to know her mind; try to puzzle out how she thought, how she justified and rationalized, how she coped.While I struggled a bit with the first half of the book - I think in part due to my distance from Stern - I flew through the second half of the book. Perhaps it just took some time for me to be comfortable with a narrator I could not relate to and with the subject matter which is so painful in so many ways. This is not an easy story to read. There is so much violence, so much terror, and so much of it is mishandled by those involved.

Although this was an incredibly harsh book to read, disturbing and I can't say, "Ya - I ENJOYED that book!" - it was phenomenally thought provoking. Although, yes, it is about this woman's rape and the police reopening the case to track down the rapist 30 years later, it is her exploration into the rapist's past and trying to figure out what caused him to be the way he was. She also explores trauma in a variety of forms and how it affects each person. This woman actually worked for National Defense and Homeland Security under the Clinton Administration and is an expert on terrorism having interviewed many terroists in Pakistan and other places in the Middle East. She also explores trauma experienced by soldiers of the Iraq war and though that is not a major part of the book, I feel it is important to understand the effects the war is having on people. She also explores the effects of trauma on her father (he was a Jewish refugee from Nazi Germany) and how that played a serious role in their family attitudes, how she was raised, and how she was expected to deal with problems. I don't regret reading this book and felt I learned something from it, but don't read it if you're simply trying to pick up a book to decompress at the end of the day - this won't do it for ya!

I had dinner with Jessica Stern one night a few years ago. Cyril Taylor invited us to dinner with a Harvard professor and it turned out it was Jessica Stern. She's one of the countries foremost experts on terrorists and has published at least one book and several articles on the subject. Her approach was unusual - she went out and actually spent time interviewing them (in the same vein as Daniel Pearl was doing when he was caught and executed). When I asked about if she was fearful doing this type of work she said she had a preternatural calmness in the face of potential threat. In the course of our conversation as I tried to understand where that came from, she said it came from when she was a young teenager. She and her sister were at a relative's house doing homework, waiting for their babysitter to pick them up when a man broke in and raped them both at gun point. This book is her story of the rape and how it shaped her and her relationships and her work in her adult life. It is disturbing on the one hand, and hopeful on the other. Terrible acts of violence are committed upon people and still the resiliency of the human spirit compels them to live. Extremely well written.

Denial: A Memoir of Terror by Jessica Stern details the author's journey of self-discovery via the investigation of the rape of the author and her sister in 1973 and a discovery of the man who perpetrated the crime against the two young teenage girls. Stern suffers from Post Traumatic Stress Disorder as a result of her rape and earlier childhood abuse at the hands of her step-grandmother, and throughout finds it difficult to connect to and identify the emotions tied to her experiences that summer night.As the best friend of a rape survivor, I find this book compelling. Stern's honesty is breath-taking as she approaches her experiences in what can only be described as a "verbal-vomit" style of writing. While the proof I received is an uncorrected proof, I find no flaw in Stern's writing, and find that the style in which she approaches the memoir has a realism that borders on childlike. Stern pulls no punches and describes the circumstances of her self-discovery exactly how she feels and sees them. Five stars.

Tense, compelling, disturbing, sometimes poetic. I've never experienced PTSD, but from my outsider's perspective, I felt like Stern did an excellent, unflinching job of portraying her own emotional conditions (and her reluctance to feel emotion). A few times she says "I'll feel about this later," describing the way she compartmentalizes her reactions while interviewing friends of the man who raped her. I don't think I'll forget about that any time soon.I could have done without some of the repetition of details, particularly near the beginning of the book. It seems intentional, to mimic the strange states Stern finds herself in, but sometimes it's hard to tell, and I don't think that ambiguity adds anything.