Defining safety is a relative notion. Some of us look within ourselves and search for peace of mind, others look to a a loved one for a warm hug, while others still, are searching for the right definition. In my world, safety is a cocktail blended with equal parts of all three, and depending on the moment, I reach out and grab the one I know will fulfill the immediate need.

For Actress Pamela Sinha (‘Street Legal’ and ‘ER’), safety came from her stoic trust in God and from the belief that doing the right thing, would garner the expected results. What happened, then, when on one fateful night, she screamed RAPE and there was no answer.

In an exclusive conversation with Sinha, we talk about the harrowing rape and feeling of utter powerlessness, which led, in her later years to a complete and utter mental and emotional breakdown. Diagnosed with Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder, Pamela wrote about her ordeal in the critically acclaimed anthology of stories we aren’t told, Dropped Threads 2.

You’ve been the victim of a brutal rape.

Yes.

Describe the lead up to the ordeal.

I had just moved into my apartment in a high security building in Montreal, where I had been accepted into theatre school. I guess the boiler room door was unlocked. It was late at night, and I was unpacking my boxes and trying on all my dance costumes. I was trying to imagine what it would be like to be in acting school full-time. I was really happy. Then, I got really homesick, so I called my parents and told them that it didn’t feel like I could set up my mandir until they came to Montreal to set it up with me, but they told me that I could because God lived inside of me, so we just went through how I would do it. Then, I hung up the phone, and sat there and said every prayer, from “Now I lay me down to sleep…” to Saraswati Vandana – i.e., everything I could think of to make that mandir alive, and then I went to sleep. Some time later, I heard a door being kicked in, and I woke up. It was the door to my apartment. Later, I realized that the door had been broken down with a crowbar, as it was in shattered pieces.

No one heard this?

They heard, but nobody called. The last thing I did before I went to sleep was pray with a full heart, and the first thing I woke up to was the assault. I went to bed believing in my safety, and it was taken away from me. I felt that my world, as I knew it, had been ripped away from me as a response to my prayer. (Pause) I pulled the covers up over my head.

What happened then?

He pulled out a butcher’s knife from the kitchen and ran across the hardwood floor. I heard the sound of boots and thought I was being robbed, so I pulled my covers over my head and held my breath. I was very thin at that time, so I thought that if I lie flat and still, it would look like an empty bed. But he kicked open the door to my bedroom, jumped on the bed, ripped the covers off of me, pulled the pillow out from under my head and covered my face with it, so I never saw him.

What were you thinking at this time?

That he wasn’t here to take my stuff, and that something bad was going to happen to me. He said repeatedly, ”Don’t say anything or else I’ll kill you.” At some level, you believe it.

At this point, did you have any idea who it could be?

Seven years later, when I had a breakdown and was in a hospital in a foreign country, it came back to me—it was the taxi man who had helped me up with my luggage when I was moving in a couple of days earlier.

Are you sure that’s who it was?

A. I know it was him, because when I came back from the hospital, I went back to Montreal, and we re-opened the file. The police said that he was a very well known multiple offender who knew what he was doing. After dropping me off at my new apartment, he probably didn’t exit from the front door. He exited through the courtyard and jarred the boiler room door open, so that he could come back later. He came back that night. But I didn’t remember him—I had blocked out the memory, which didn’t come back to me until seven years later.

Did you remember what he looked like then ?

No. Let me explain: I quit my job—I was working on ‘Street Legal’ then —and decided to move back home and start the hypnotherapy. After about eight months of it, my therapist asked me a really good question: “If not knowing his face makes you want to die, what will knowing his face do to you?” There are huge parts of the rape that I don’t remember because I blacked out, but hypnotherapy was taking me there, and I was becoming increasingly suicidal. Finally, my therapist said that maybe it’s time to let go, to let his face go. So, I called up the police and told them that I don’t remember his face and I don’t want to.

In your narrative that recounts the ordeal in the book, Dropped Threads 2, you said that there was a moment when you detached your being from your body. What lead to that moment?

It was the moment when I realized that there was nothing I could do to stop what was happening to me. Until that moment, I was talking to him to try and get him to calm down.

What were you saying to him?

“My boyfriend is going to come home soon…” “Someone is going to hear you, so you’d better leave…” “Stop! Stop!”

And what was his reaction?

He didn’t care. He had made so much noise breaking into the place, but nobody had called the police. So, he wasn’t going to stop because I told him someone was going to come home. He was determined. When I realized that there was nothing I could do to stop what was happening, that fear, that moment …If anyone tells you to take defense courses, I would say absolutely, empower yourself to the best of your ability. But the moment when you are truly helpless, which is beyond anybody’s comprehension until you’re there, you don’t know how you’re going to react. You just don’t. And I know what you’re thinking— you’re thinking that you would have scratched his eyes out, jumped out of the window, killed yourself before you would have let him do what he did. All those things, they don’t mean anything in that moment, when you realize, “My God! I’m at his mercy. I am powerless.” That moment of powerlessness was the moment when I left my body, because it was too much to comprehend. It was so frightening. And that moment when I realized that I was powerless was even more frightening than the actual rape.

You explained that you left your body to walk over to the altar where God lived in your home, and repeatedly pleaded with Him to help you, but to no avail. Clearly, up to this point, you believed that He existed, and that He could help you, but the torture didn’t stop. So, do you feel that He could have helped you but chose not to?

Before the rape, I believed in Him absolutely, so much so that when I reached that moment of realization of being absolutely powerless, I had the outer body experience that I wrote about in the book. Whatever small part of me believes that praying to God was redundant was explained to me by my mother, who believes that God was in that bed with me, crying at the potential for human cruelty. That God was also being raped with me, so how could He help me? There’s some part of me that believes that. That small part of me would answer ‘yes’ to your question, because he was armed and he could have killed me. There was nothing stopping him from killing me.

Do you believe in God now?

I believe in God, because I think I cannot not believe in Him. I was raised that way, and in my moment of ultimate crisis, I went there because I assumed a miracle would happen for me. It has happened for others, so why not me when I needed Him? I do believe in God, but do I believe in a God that loves me? I don’t know yet.

You wrote: “A woman I call my sister, Tina, still believes in her Creator. She believes that God was raped with me that night; that he couldn’t answer. I want to believe that, but I don’t. But I want to.” Do you still believe that God had forsaken you during that time?

I’m not sure yet. Some days, I really do believe that God was crying with me, because I believe that God doesn’t do these things to us or make bad things happen to us. I believe that mankind is subject to free will, and mankind chooses to do these things. Every man has the potential to rape because he is armed with the weaponry involved. But not every man chooses to wield that kind of power. In that respect, how could God have forsaken me? But miracles happen, so why didn’t I get one? (Pause) I really did need one. But I didn’t get it, and in that moment, I really felt utterly and absolutely abandoned by God because it kept on going on and on, getting worse without intervention. Utter abandonment, coupled with utter powerlessness, is beyond belief. That’s what, until today, I have a real hard time reconciling with.

What’s your relationship like with Him today?

I believe in love, and I believe that God is love.

You tell us in your narrative that ‘Hiding’ is the only one who could tell you what happened next, but she won’t. Am I right in presuming that your choice to detach your being from your body, which you refer to as ‘Hiding’, was so much more than your visit to God and that it was your way of surviving the ordeal?

Absolutely! Your mind cannot cope with the horrors that are being inflicted on your body, so you have to exit. Incest victims do it all the time. It is the only way you can survive and move on. I think that as much as ‘Hiding’ resents the fact that she had to suffer what my conscious mind exited from, she protects me. Because I think that if I knew all the details and experienced everything she did, I could not have survived mentally. Not knowing had taken me so long to get to where I am today, so can you imagine what knowing would have done to me?.

Who is ‘Hiding’?

A. ‘Hiding’ is me. She’s another part of me. She’s my checkpoint. If I wake up utterly exhausted one day, I know I have to just stay home, in my bed, and do nothing, because if I don’t, it gets worse. As a human being, when you’ve been broken, you can never be put back together the same way again. I’ve learned to recognize when to pursue and when to let it be.

Does ‘Hiding’ still exist?

Yes! In my ‘blacks’ (the emotional and physical episodes Pamela experiences periodically as a result of the rape), I experience her rage. The rage isn’t there because I haven’t dealt with it. It’s there because it happened at all. The torture that I suffered is totally beyond your imagination of what could be done to the human body and the human mind. I had no idea that these things existed.

What things?

You can read about them in the book.

Care to talk about them now?

No

OK. What were the after effects of this ordeal?

Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) is an illness where the mind blocks out incidents that your mind cannot comprehend. You simply don’t remember what ordeal you had to endure, but you act out and don’t know why. I suffer from this disorder. It might take up to 35 years after you have endured the trauma for you to feel the direct impact. This is usually something rape and incest victims, war veterans, etc., suffer from. It wasn’t until about 10 years ago that the illness was even identified. The stats reveal that around 80 percent of women between the ages of 18-35, who have suffered a violent crime, experience PTSD. Basically, you can react to a violent crime chronically, acutely or posttraumatically, and I suffered post-traumatically. This form is very common amongst high-achieving women from solid backgrounds, who become high-achieving depressives because breaking down is foreign to them. This led me to become extremely perfectionistic about all aspects of my life. I needed to maintain control over something because I couldn’t control the pain. However, everything was great in my life, until seven years later, when, one day, I suddenly woke up incontinent and suicidal, and I didn’t know why. The explanation that I was given was that my body could no longer cope with what my mind had had to cope with. So, seven years to the day after the ordeal, both my mind and body shut down, and I was hospitalized.

You speak also of your perpetrator breaking your spirit by making you believe that if you did as you were told, you would no longer have to be punished. But he lied: “He punishes me for doing it right.” Has this had an effect on trust, in general, for you?

Absolutely! You cannot assume that doing something right is going to lead to something positive. The only thing positive is that you live by what you believe in. The result or consequence is completely irrelevant for me now. I was always a goal-oriented person, and success for me was always defined by externals. But now, I don’t believe that success is derived from doing things right or wrong. Today, success for me is the journey, not the destination.

Is this why you refer, in you narrative, to the fact that you purposely lured men from bars into isolated situations with you, so as to tempt them into wanting to take from you what you didn’t want to give?

Yes

On these occasions, you had a knife with you?

Yes.

What or who was it that you were trying to kill? Was it the perpetrator that these guys symbolized for you, or was it to kill ‘Hiding’ ?

I hated myself. The suicidal attempts were the result of the loathing, and the hate that I felt for myself because in my mind, I did nothing to fight him. I know that by doing what I did, I saved my life, because there was no reason why he shouldn’t have killed me; he did everything else, and more. Because I didn’t fight him or try to jump out of the window or lose a leg or something, I felt that I had participated in the rape. I look in the mirror and don’t see the scars of anything noble.

So, getting killed would have given you that sense of nobility?

Yes.

But a part of you did die that night?

My innocence died.

How have you dealt with your self-loathing?

The only way that I could stop the hate was to do something that would make me love myself, which was, to fight him the way I had not.

Do you still hate yourself?

Not generally, but in my blacks, I do. But that’s the most important part of talking about this. PTSD sufferers are normal, productive participants of society. We don’t walk around in burlap sacks; we don’t open our doors a crack of an inch; we don’t stand up in a court of law, like in ‘Law & Order’, and say, “He did it” and feel better.

Has he ever been brought to justice?

When we reopened the police file, they paid for a year of hypnotherapy so that I could recall his face. He had a very specific DNA, like one in a billion or something. The blood and semen type could have identified him if I could remember who he was, but I didn’t remember the details until it was, according to the statute of limitations in Canada, four years too late. They dissolved the records after three years. I knew the details, but I was three years too late. Because my breakdown was five years past what the Manitoba legal system considers to be as a result of rape, they would not pay for the hospitalization and treatment needed to save my life. My parents had to pay $800 US every day for two months. Even the statute of limitations on the taxi company runs out after three years. So, even though I remembered the date, time and the taxi company, it didn’t matter, because no records are kept after three years. So, in one word, NO!

Am I right in assuming that if he were to be brought to justice and put away for, say 20 years, it wouldn’t make a bit of difference?

It’ll never make a difference to the way I feel or what I’ve gone through. But what really hurts from the outside is that people assume that there is a cure or because you happen to look particularly lovely that day, you must be over it.

Why do you have a need for everyone to understand? Is it not enough that the people who love you and who you love should understand? Why do you need validation from the world?

Because it’s not about me. I’m a survivor of a crime that is little understood, and people need to understand that this is happening every 20 seconds in North America, where a woman is getting raped and/or killed. There is not a single in-patient care facility in Canada for that. Compare this to chemical dependency places, where they pay you to become drug free. But there’s nothing for us, and that is a crime.

It’s clear from reading your story that writing it did not make you feel indicated or cathartic in anyway.

That’s right.

Then why write it?

Because now, if you’re ever faced with it in your own life, you won’t judge yourself as harshly as I did. In this sense, it does matter, but by no means is it cathartic.

Have there been any physical effects that you may still be suffering from?

My legs shake at night off and on. I’m constantly in motion, and I think that’s to make sure that I’m not bound and my legs are free. I cannot have weight on me. I can’t feel physically trapped.

Can you have children?

Yes, I can have children, but the emotional trauma has caused a stress level in my body, which prevents me from getting pregnant. My body may never be relaxed to the point where I can conceive. Time will tell.

You’ve clearly survived.

I’m surviving.

What do you attribute this to?

My loved ones.

Since ‘Hiding’  will probably always be a part of you, bearing in mind that you have stepchildren, one of which is a girl, do you have any fears, first of all, in your ability to be a mother, and secondly, in the safety of your daughter as she grows into a woman?

I have no doubts about my ability to love and care for this child, but I don’t fool myself into believing that I’m going to do everything right. As far as her growing up is concerned, as long as there are men, I will fear for our daughters. What I mean is that as long as there is human will, there is the capacity for evil. The only thing I can do as her step-mom to prepare her for womanhood is to ensure that she knows that she can rely on me. Anything else, I cannot lie that I can do.

What advice would you give to other individuals who may have suffered a similar trauma and are not willing to seek help?

You can’t, by any means, recover by yourself. I’m not here today because I did it on my own. I’m here, in part, because I had parents who loved and supported me. But none of us were equipped to deal with this, so the other part was therapy. There are no quick fixes – therapy is a slow and gradual process, but it works. Without the help of my therapist, Jule, we could not have survived. Together with Jule, my parents and I have learned about the illness, its consequences, and how to cope with it. The best advice I can give is that it is imperative that you go to a therapist who specializes in PTSD. The difference between effective vs. non-effective therapists is when you can trust that success for them is when you don’t have to go see them anymore, not when dependency is engendered. Above all, you’ve got to want to get better.

Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder: An anxiety disorder associated with serious traumatic events and characterized by such symptoms as survivor guilt, reliving the trauma in dreams, numbness and lack of involvement with reality, or recurrent thoughts and images.

First Published in Winter 2005 Issue, www.AnokhiMagazine.com.

Photo Credit:
Photography by George Lue
Makeup/hair: Sangeeta Chana

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