With trauma, your brain and body remember different things. Your brain is told lies–it didn’t happen, it wasn’t that bad, you are just seeking attention. But bodies remember.
Imagine your brain, for 30 years, telling you that you got away with raping women. You think it so much that you believe you’re innocent. You create the stories you need to prove your innocence. You believe the stories you tell to yourself, forgetting that you invented them.
Then someone breaks open the truth, someone whose bravery shows what a coward you’ve been your whole adult life. And while your brain may have told the stories of your innocence over and over, your body recognizes the truth of her words.
Brett Kavanaugh knows his sins. Somewhere, he’s always known them, but now he sees that the world knows them, too. What we’re seeing now–the entitlement, the arrogance, the rage, the victim-playing, the blaming, the incoherence, the insistence–is a all of that leaking of him. It’s demonic in a way. We’re seeing an unwilling exorcism.