BURSTA kidnapping victim talked about how trauma causes lasting physical and emotional pain, at the Salvation Army Ridge Meadows Ministry’s annual Dignity Breakfast on Nov. 26.
Speaker Lenore Rattray told how she was taken at gunpoint from the Vancouver store where she worked, and held captive in the woods in North Vancouver for nine days, until she was rescued from convicted murderer David Snow.
That was the summer of 1992, and she still deals with it.
“That experience is embedded in my soul,” she told the audience at the South Bonson Community Centre.
She said nine years ago she got sick due to untreated PTSD. Telling her story has helped her heal.
“How do you live with carrying something? Because you will never erase it,” she said.
In 2015-16 she was in extreme physical pain in her back and shoulders, going for treatment a couple of times each week. She also had abdominal pain, and severe eczema. “My hands looked like they were inside out.”
Finally she got some relief, after a health provider asked her when she remembered first feeling the pain in her shoulders.
“Just that one question took me back to the woods, 20 years ago, and being … hogtied. When you’re backwards, and you’re tied, and it’s not humane, and it had an impact on me then,” said Rattray.
“But my body remembered that when my stress levels hit their maximum 20 years later.”
Understanding that helped her cope with the pain, by “just having a mental understanding of its source.”
She talked about dealing with trauma.
“What if you, or someone you know, is carrying a tough story? And you don’t own it. Is that okay? Do you just leave it, and let it be?” she asked. “Maybe I’m stretching, but I feel like we’re all surviving something.”
She remembers a bad time in her life, when a publication about Canada’s worst serial killers included a paragraph about her, naming her despite breaching court orders meant to protect her privacy.
“I felt stripped, vulnerable,” she said. “The 21-year-old that was hogtied in the dirt was there for everyone to see.”
Despite these feelings, she continued going to work and caring for her daughter.
“That’s what we do in life, which is keep going. We think somehow it’s going to get better.”
“We don’t face our story, even when it is a published book, exposing you,” she said.
“I wasn’t owning my story, and I had no strength. I was letting my stories own me,” she said.
She was sick, until she started talking about her story.
“You don’t have to be the survivor of a violent crime to be living a tough life,” she said. “Our stories at the core, I feel are the same. I don’t think it’s okay to keep them untold. I think there’s ways we can tell them, and it doesn’t have to involve a podium.”
Rattray’s call to action is to pay attention to others, to pay attention to yourself, and ask questions.
Julie Gilfillan, executive director of the Salvation Army in Maple Ridge, said Rattray’s story shows how we may be unaware of the hardships others face.
“A lot of people are suffering in silence, invisibly,” she said. “The point we wanted to make today, is this could be anybody. It could be your neighbour who doesn’t have enough money to buy school supplies, or give their child a lunch. You don’t know what’s going on with other people, and they hide their trauma, and they hide their suffering. We wanted to showcase the invisible need.”