What happens to them? Well, when Sara came to us in 1993, Linda and I had no idea that torture happened in families. What we learned is that they survive by disassociation. Sara did not know she was a human being. When we said to her, “Sara, you're a human being,” she said that nobody ever told her that. She thought she was an “it”. That's how she explained herself as a human being: as an “it”.
When trying to heal, some women, Sara included, would often want to hold our hands. Sara would say that she could not feel any sensation. This is because, in order to survive, they have to cut off their senses. They cut off their sense of smell. They cut off their physical sense, and they cut off their visual sense. I was sitting outdoors with Sara one day in the fall, and all of a sudden she said, “Look at the trees; they're turning colour.” She said that she had only seen in black and white. We see that over and over again.
When you reference the issue to get out, it was the fact that the torture memories were so heavy. If they're not listened to, they don't know what else to do. As other people have said here, they start cutting, and they're self-drugging. They have difficulty with the food they eat. Sara was also taught by her parents to, if you will, die by suicide. When she was a little girl, they used to put her—and this is her telling—in the hallway and teach her how to cut her wrists if she ever told.
When we met her, she was almost 30 years old. She was a professional, had a professional job and was still living two lives. People seem to not understand that. However, we know that, in domestic violence, women go to work and then go home and get beaten. She was a professional. She went to work. She went home and even at almost 30 was still being tortured, was still being trafficked and still did not understand that what she was living was violence.
What we have to understand is that it takes time for them to understand what they've been going through. She was a baby, and the torture started then.