Chapter 16 — Making Connections

The return of memory was only the beginning. The harder work was learning how to test the connections between people, places, physical injuries, institutional actions and records created many years apart.

For much of my life, events existed as separate pieces. I could know one part without being able to reach the others. A person might belong to one memory, an injury to another and a place to something I could feel but not yet describe.

As those pieces became more accessible, they began to connect. That did not mean that every connection was automatically correct. It meant that I could begin asking questions which had previously been impossible to form.

Who was present in more than one part of the story? Which institutions kept reappearing? Did a physical response point towards a particular event? Was there a document, letter, recording or independent witness which placed something outside memory alone?

Making connections became a discipline. It required me to take my own experience seriously without turning every association into proof.

Places as Anchors

Places were often more accessible than chronology. The convent bedroom, the woodshed, the old school in the churchyard and the presbytery did not return as points on a neat timeline. They returned as separate environments, each carrying its own sensations, people and dangers.

The names Ursula, Vincent, Germaine and Genevieve became connected with those places in different ways. The distinctions mattered. If I allowed one setting or one person's actions to slide into another, I risked repeating the very confusion I was trying to resolve.

The Yea Chronicle belonged to a later period, but it was not disconnected from the earlier world. It was another local institution in which religious allegiance, secrecy and influence operated behind an ordinary public face. The printing office, the church, the convent and the presbytery were different places, yet some of the same structures of authority passed between them.

Once place became an anchor, I could ask a more precise question: what belonged here, and what had I attached to it later? That question helped separate recollection from interpretation.

People Across Different Layers

Bill Allison was one of the clearest examples of a person appearing across layers which had once seemed separate. I remembered him as the uniformed policeman who entered the Chronicle, knelt beside the Linotype and addressed Tom Dignam as his liege or lord. I also connected him with the response after I was shot by my brother, when the inquiry treated me as the problem rather than the injured child.

At the Chronicle, I heard him speak about complaints of rape and sexual abuse by the priest. When I stood up and asked whether my sister was included in the number he had given, I remember being dragged out, placed in a chokehold and driven against the wall. My nose and teeth were broken. I left and did not return.

For years, the shooting, the Chronicle assault, the Knights of the Southern Cross and the protection of Catholic authority did not exist for me as one usable account. Bringing them together did not create the events. It allowed me to see that the same people and loyalties may have influenced how more than one event was handled.

That is a connection I make from my recollection and the material available to me. It remains important to state it in that form. A connection can be powerful without pretending that every part has already been independently proved.

The Body as a Lead

My body often reacted before I could describe why. At times a name, movement, sound or clinical question produced gasping, pain, a change in posture or a reenactment which seemed to bypass deliberate speech.

The experience with Dr Georgiana Antoce, when I silently operated a door latch and found myself outside the room, became especially important. I had moved through an action connected in my mind with escaping after abuse before I consciously understood what I was doing. When the latch clicked, I recognised where I was and walked towards safety.

That moment helped me recognise dissociation as it was occurring. Recognition did not mean mastery. It took much longer to notice the beginning of a dissociative response, and longer again to retain enough awareness to record what had triggered it.

Physical reactions could provide a lead, but they could not by themselves identify a person or prove an event. They told me that something required attention. The next task was to compare the reaction with earlier writings, medical findings, recordings, locations and any independent material that survived.

Injuries and Their Histories

Some injuries had histories which were clearer than others. I remembered the assault at the Chronicle, where my nose and teeth were broken. Separately, I remembered being pushed backwards through plate glass. Many years later, glass fragments remained an issue in my neck, shoulders, scalp, face and upper body. In Canada, a doctor's removal of numerous fragments made the physical problem visible to people around me even though the larger history was not discussed.

Other bodily experiences connected with childhood events: the gunshot, the damage from falls and assaults, the broken elbow and the frightening response to anaesthetic. Each needed to be kept distinct. A present symptom was not automatically proof of whichever remembered event seemed nearest to it.

The responsible question was narrower: is there a documented injury, scar, image, clinical observation or retained foreign body consistent with some part of the history? Where the answer was uncertain, uncertainty had to remain in the account.

This was difficult when professionals treated uncertainty as a reason to dismiss the whole history. For me, uncertainty was the reason to investigate carefully.

The Same Question Repeated

One connection ran through many periods of my life: the danger attached to telling.

During the early exorcism experiences, the questioning was strongly concerned with whom I had spoken to and what I had said. My inability to retrieve names and faces protected information from the people trying to force it from me. The safe or altered stories I constructed did not change the central experience held within me. They made some form of speech possible where direct disclosure could bring dismissal or violence.

At the Chronicle, asking whether my sister was among those who had complained was followed by violence. Much later, attempts to speak about institutional abuse could still be answered by disbelief, psychiatric interpretation, legal avoidance or demands that material be removed from my website.

The form of the response changed, but the lesson delivered to me was familiar: telling could threaten safety, work, relationships, credibility and access to justice.

Connections Are Not Chronology

The emerging relationships did not arrive in the order in which the events occurred. Something remembered in 2007 could connect with a document written in 2005, an injury from adolescence, a conversation decades later and a childhood place which had only recently become accessible.

This made ordinary narrative difficult. A reader expects childhood to be followed by youth and then adulthood. Dissociative amnesia did not return my life to me in that order.

I therefore needed two structures at once. One was the approximate chronology of what happened. The other was the chronology of discovery: when a memory returned, when a name became available, when a document was found and when a later event revealed the relationship between earlier ones.

Those two chronologies should not be confused. The date on which I could finally describe something is not necessarily the date on which it happened, and late access does not make the underlying event new.

Testing Rather Than Forcing

I began to separate the material into categories. There was what I remembered directly; what I had written or recorded at a particular time; what another person had told me; what an institution had recorded; what a physical examination showed; and what I later inferred from the relationship between those things.

An inference was not allowed to silently become a memory. An institutional record was not treated as true merely because it had been written by a professional. A physical finding was not made to carry more meaning than it could support. A change in my account had to be examined rather than automatically defended or condemned.

Some proposed connections weakened when tested. Others became stronger because names, dates, locations and independent records converged. Preserving both outcomes was necessary if the work was to remain evidence rather than advocacy alone.

This method also gave me a way to correct myself. Correction did not erase credibility. It demonstrated that I was willing to distinguish what the evidence supported from what I had once believed it might support.

A Map Began to Form

Gradually, the fragments began to form a map. It was not a map of certainty. It showed relationships, gaps, disputed accounts and places where another record might exist.

The map connected childhood institutions with later responses; bodily memories with injuries; disclosures with the reactions they produced; and private recollection with documents created by counsellors, doctors, lawyers, police, hospitals and religious organisations.

It also showed why no single professional file could be allowed to define my life. Each file was made for a particular purpose, at a particular time, by somebody who saw only what I could disclose and what they were prepared to recognise.

Making connections did not produce a simple story. It produced something more useful: questions that could be traced, claims that could be qualified, and a structure within which evidence from different periods could finally be compared.

The next step was to follow the records themselves—and to examine not only what they contained, but what had been omitted, altered or carried forward without proper testing.